‘Non-Binary’ Birth Certificates and the WPATH Fraud: Stella O’Malley

[FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW] “It’s a very beguiling, alluring thought … You hate yourself and you’re 14. And you could be a different person with a different name and a different pronoun and a different body. And nobody will ever be able to refer to the old you. So these kids fall for it.”

As a young girl, Stella O’Malley believed for years she should have been born a boy.

“I would definitely easily have met the criteria that would now be called a diagnosis of childhood onset gender dysphoria … horrible experience, but I came through it and ultimately became comfortable in my own skin, and ultimately became a mother, which is the thing I’m most proud of and most connected to in my life,” says Ms. O’Malley.

“Those teenagers who still want medical transition, they don’t know the fever of wanting a baby that hits people in their 30s, and I wouldn’t underestimate it. And these children, because we’re only about ten years into this kind-of sharp rise in the numbers of people seeking medical transition, we won’t hear about that infertility crisis that’s going to hit those for some years now.”

Today, she is a practicing psychotherapist and the founder of Genspect, which promotes a non-medicalized approach to gender distress. She’s the author of many books, including most recently “When Kids Say They’re Trans: A Guide for Parents.”

“Something extraordinary has happened within psychology [and] psychotherapy. We’ve lost our way,” says Ms. O’Malley. “In those years since 1979 when WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health] formed, [there] is a growing, extraordinary kind-of cultural revolution, where you can identify as you wish. And when you identify as you wish, doctors, lawyers, schools, [and] hospitals need to fall into your identity. It’s an extraordinary kind of new way of being.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Stella O’Malley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Stella O’Malley:
Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Many people that are fighting gender ideology have spoken of you in a very favorable light. Your organization, Genspect, has provided quite a bit of guidance to people. You’ve written some fascinating books including, “When Kids Say They’re Trans.” Before we jump into the details, please tell us your story.

Ms. O’Malley:
Yes, little did I know I would be thinking about my childhood so much when I was a fully grown adult. When I was a three-year-old child, I thought I should be a boy, and I was very good at being a boy. I don’t remember my thought process that came to that conclusion, but I was very assertive, and I was very consistent, persistent, and insistent, which is the criteria people usually use to diagnose what they now call as trans kids. In the 1980s, in Dublin, Ireland, nobody was diagnosing me.

They thought of me as an odd kid, an eccentric kid, and let me do whatever I wanted. It was a serious tomboy kind of thing. Nearly every girl says, “Oh, I was a tomboy. I climbed trees and stuff.” I was at a whole other level of intensity about it. I was furious that I wasn’t a boy, because to me, it was blindingly obvious I should be a boy. I can still see that in me now.

It doesn’t stun me that I came to the conclusion, “What the hell am I doing being a girl?” Looking back, I was actually a real misogynist because I used to really disdain girls. Girlish was like the worst insult you could give me or give anybody. I was like that for many years.

For example, in Ireland, you would have school uniforms and the girls wore dresses and the boys wore trousers. I wore non-school trousers and a school jumper. There were lots of little things that were very odd and eccentric about me, but they let me be. It was very much benign neglect at the time. They just let me do whatever I wanted without making policies around me, and without making a massive amount of attention about me.

Eventually, I went into puberty at the usual time. It was a really harrowing and horrible experience. Puberty went on and I was lonely and isolated. I really did not want to become a woman. It was the worst thing, but ultimately, I got through it. It was really hard and I’m not saying it was easy.

I would have easily met the criteria that would now be diagnosed as childhood onset gender dysphoria. It was a horrible experience, but I came through it and ultimately became comfortable in my own skin. I eventually became a mother, which is the thing I’m most proud of and most connected to in my life. I’m incredibly glad I didn’t get the diagnosis that children of my ilk would get today.

These days I probably would have been invited to change my pronouns as a child. I would have certainly been brought to doctors for a diagnosis. Puberty blockers would certainly have been spoken about. Had I gone online, I would have heard a lot about puberty blockers.

I would have sailed the seven seas to take puberty blockers as a kid. That’s exactly what I wanted. Anything to stop this would have been my attitude, but I didn’t have those opportunities. I ended up becoming comfortable, which is arguably the human journey. You have your challenges and you come to accept the cards you’re given in life and work with them, and that’s what I did.

Many years later, I became a psychotherapist in my 30s and started writing about different issues. I wrote a lot about parenting and about bullying. Then I noticed that gender was always in the news. I saw an extraordinary story in Canada about Kori Doty and Searyl Doty. This is a non-binary parent who had fought the Canadian courts for the right to raise
their perfectly healthy child as non-binary and not to put the male or female sex designation on their birth certificate.

I read that article and said, “What? This is a perfectly healthy baby.” I didn’t know whether it was a girl or a boy, but there was no question that it was either a girl or a boy. The non-binary parent who had given birth to the child won, and so “U” was put on this perfectly healthy baby’s birth certificate.

There was something about the imposition of the politics of the parent on the child that made me think, “I need to add my voice to this extraordinary discussion that’s going on. What about kids like me who had very strange experiences and came through it?” I often wrote for the national media, so I wrote an article about my experiences. Then I was invited to do a film about trans kids. That was in 2018 and since then I’ve been immersed in this issue.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a huge push these days to get back parental rights in this country.
It’s almost like the state should take precedence over parents. The parents that don’t agree with the gender-affirming care model are viewed as enemies. But with this birth certificate issue, shouldn’t it be the parent’s choice? What would the rule be here?

Ms. O’Malley:
That’s a very good point that you raise and I’ll address it. When a child is born, it’s almost like a Venn diagram. There’s the child, there’s the parents, and there’s the state. If neglect is taking place, that is where we figure out when it is parenting and when it is time for the state to step in. These are the questions of the day, “When is it time? How many rights does the parent have? How many rights does the child have? How many rights does the state have?”

Gender ideology has brought about an awareness of this issue, specifically the parental rights vs. state rights vs. child’s rights. A birth certificate should be information about the child and not about the parent. Who owns the birth certificate, really? Arguably, it should be information about the child; when they were born, their parents, and whether they were male or female. Anything that the parent wants should be a parent’s certificate.

Mr. Jekielek:
The likelihood that this child will not grow up to become a boy or a girl, a man or a woman is infinitesimally low. Clearly, the parent is imposing an incredibly large concept and essentially determining the future of this child.

Ms. O’Malley:
We’ve done this already, because we all have birth certificates. We also have baptismal certificates in Ireland, and if you’re Catholic, you have your religious certificate as well. That’s fine. They can go and get a gender ideology certificate if that’s what the parent wants. But the birth cert should be safeguarded as factual information about the child.

Mr. Jekielek:
Some people would argue that imposing the label non-binary on a child is abuse.

Ms. O’Malley:
One way or another, it’s imposing on them a new idea that isn’t even 10-years-old. We don’t know if it will even last another 10 years. There is that lovely phrase, “Radical thoughts need radical defenses.” But if you’re going to propose these ideas, you need to have some serious evidence.

Mr. Jekielek:
Right. The standards of care which have been developed around gender by WPATH [World Professional Association for Transgender Health], fall apart very quickly under the most basic levels of scrutiny. In fact, your organization has done that quite directly.

Ms. O’Malley:
I founded Genspect where we promote a healthy approach to sex and gender, and WPATH has become the self-identified world authority of transgender rights and transgender health care. They started in 1979, so they’re decades ahead of most people who are interested in gender. They started very much as a fringe organization. It was kind of a loose affiliation of trans people, doctors who worked in trans care, and trans lawyers. It was a loose, motley crew and not very many people were interested in it, so they kind of did their own thing.

Quietly, they had their own conferences, and they brought out what they called standards of care. Now, standards of care isn’t just a moniker. You can’t just throw standards of care onto a document and say they are standards of care, although that’s what they did. Standards of care have to go through certain criteria.

Mr. Jekielek:
It has to have an evidence base.

Ms. O’Malley:
Yes, and there isn’t an evidence base. There’s no quality long-term evidence base to show that medical transition is the healthier option. It doesn’t exist. In those years since 1979 when WPATH formed, there has been a growing, extraordinary cultural revolution where you can identify your gender as you wish. When you identify as you wish, doctors, lawyers, schools, and hospitals need to fall in with your identity. It’s an extraordinary kind of new way of being.

Mr. Jekielek:
As a child you are very susceptible to these ideas.

Ms. O’Malley:
Yes. WPATH says that it’s child-led. However, it’s not child-centered. I’m a psychotherapist and we talk a lot about child-centered education and child-centered health. But child-led is a whole new frontier where the child is leading the way.

If the child says they want a new name, they get a new name. If they want a new pronoun, they get a new pronoun. They can make up their own new pronoun that nobody’s ever heard of. It’s child-led, no matter what age.

Diane Ehrensaft is considered a real representative of WPATH and of gender-affirming healthcare. She would talk about how a child was opening their onesie at 18-months-old and making a skirt of it, and this was gendered communication, which it’s farcical. That’s all it is, it’s just farcical.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s farcical, except that the ramifications are not farcical.

Ms. O’Malley:
They are not. They have been devastating. As I said, WPATH was busy organizing itself in a very culturally driven way so that healthcare became, “Buyer beware,’ as opposed to, “Do no harm.” A child goes into the doctor and says, “I want to be non-binary. I want to remove my breasts. I’m 14-years-old and I’m the expert in this room. You’re my server. You just facilitate what I want. You’re the doctor, but your job is to affirm everything I say, no matter what my age.”

This an extraordinary dismissal of years of practice and the role of the doctor to offer guidance. They’ve turned it into, “You’re the shopkeeper. Provide me with my service.” As a result, we will have people who are vulnerable. They won’t benefit from the guidance of somebody who has gone through medical school, who says, “What you want today might not be good for you.”

A lot of us want lots of things but it’s not necessarily the best way forward. There are other ways. Could we just go cautiously? Usually, if a doctor said that back in the day, you would listen and you would think, “They have this position for a reason. They have years and years of training.”

But today, it’s kind of an individualistic idea where everybody is an expert. Even if you’re age 12, age 14, or age 24 and highly vulnerable with huge mental health issues, it’s irrelevant, because you’re the expert and you direct your own health care, even when you’re in your most vulnerable state. It feels liberating, but it’s actually very dangerous.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’re a psychotherapist. I’ve talked to others who have told me about these radical changes in your profession.

Ms. O’Malley:
Something extraordinary has happened within psychology and psychotherapy. We’ve lost our way. Once it was very paternalistic and Freudian, with the expert that sat behind you and analyzed your thoughts. I would have my issues with that and it was disempowering for the person in many ways. But you know the phrase, too far east is west.

There is such a thing as the therapeutic process. If you came to me, we would begin a process. I would explain, “There’s going to be ups and downs and sometimes you’re going to be very angry with me. We’re going to work together, because you have come to me for a reason and you have an issue. We’re going to work together to get beyond it and it could make you very uncomfortable. But the plan is it will be good for you in the long term.’ This is how we would work together.

The therapeutic process has segued into therapeutic support, which is a completely different concept. You hear the phrase therapeutic support, meaning, “Are you supported?” That is a different idea, because therapeutic support means I’m going to support you in whatever you do. I don’t think that’s as valuable.

Because if you came to me and you said, “I want to leave my wife. I want to move to Alaska. I want to start hunting bears and I’m going to live on fish,” we would have a process around that. As a psychotherapist I would think, “There’s a lot driving this, and it could be work pressure.” I would have my thoughts and say, “Listen, could we give this time? Let’s give this some time and let’s go through a process.” The idea would be to check out everything and pressure test everything.

I would suggest, “If you were to take these moves, you’d feel you had fully tested it and you would be stronger in yourself. You could apply the same process to medical transition. They might say, “I’m going to leave my wife, leave my children and go to medically transition. I would say, “Could we just look at all this to make sure that when you have a dark night of the soul, that you have thought about this fully and are ready to go forth?”

Therapeutic support would seem like a good and loving thing to do. It’s certainly very pleasant for everybody involved. But when you have a dark night of the soul in years to come, you would just think, “Nobody challenged me. I never second guessed myself. I never thought about this. I never thought about that. I never thought about it going wrong.” This is when this type of support actually doesn’t help them.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s worse than that because it had the blessing of authority.

Ms. O’Malley:
It seems as if I have given you my blessing and my benediction, but I haven’t because it’s within that therapeutic support system. The diktat is that I just nod along. That’s why I take such an issue with the gender affirmative care approach, which is what WPATH and many pro-gender medical transition lobby groups would talk about. They would say gender affirming is the only way forward for any therapist.

I would say it’s anti-therapeutic and anti-psychological because anybody who comes for therapy knows we talk about all the ways to improve, we meet all the challenges, and we explore everything. I say, “I’m going to offer some questions that you should think about, but ultimately there’s only one person that can do this and that is you.”

If they say, “Yes, great idea,” they’ll think they are solid and charge off. That’s what has happened with so many young people who’ve medically transitioned too early. They thought the therapist was on their side. They thought the therapist was giving them their blessing but actually in the years to come, they were on their own.

They have an awful lot of medical complications. They’re finding it very difficult because it’s a very heavy burden on the body. They might be infertile. They very often have a lot of sexual functioning problems and difficulty in orgasm. They say, “Where is that therapist?” But they’re gone.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s almost like we’ve forgotten the costs involved in focusing on just one thing. With the gender affirming care model, there are huge physical and psychological costs to the medicalization, so the bar for doing all that should be very high.

Ms. O’Malley:
Yes. We’re trying to put forward the concept of a non-medicalized approach to gender distress. There are lots of ways to be distressed. As a psychotherapist, I’m never going to be pro-medicalizing. While the psychiatrist might dispense medication and they’re free to do it, Genspect is putting forward a non-medicalized approach to gender distress.

It’s like all other distress. Acting as if it’s the most unusual distress in the world is not accurate. There’s lots of ways to be distressed in life. There’s lots of things that the human mind goes to and clings on to.

Some people might get OCD [Obsessive-compulsive disorder]. Some people might get anorexia. Some people might get gender dysphoria. Each condition needs a lot of support. They might need a therapeutic process, and they would certainly need a way to move forward.

We don’t subscribe to the idea that it has to be medicalized and that they need to change their whole body. We think that there’s ways and means to cope with your distress and then to move along. A lot of people move out of gender dysphoria and I am one of them.

I am utterly biased, but I am also experienced. I had gender dysphoria. I’ve been there. It was horrible and it lasted for many, many years. Now, I have been completely comfortable in my own skin for years and it never came back.

Mr. Jekielek:
It sounds like you are grateful to be a mom.

Ms. O’Malley:
I never would have thought it would happen. I was told I was infertile because I had endometriosis when I was age 25. I thought it was kind of funny and I didn’t give a damn. I was so dismissive and just didn’t care. Seven years later, I was like this breastfeeding earth mother. I had completely changed in those years.

These teenagers who say, “I’m going to medically transition,” don’t know the fever of wanting a baby that hits people in their 30s. I wouldn’t underestimate it. We’re only about 10 years into this sharp rise in the numbers of people seeking medical transition.

We won’t hear for some years about that infertility crisis that’s going to hit in the future. Let’s say 10 years ago they were age 12, so they’re age 22 now. I know a detransitioner who had a baby recently, so some of them can get through it and end up keeping their fertility. But a lot of them won’t have babies. They kind of flippantly say, “Surrogacy,” or “Adoption,” but both are really tricky and really difficult.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a lot of misleading rhetoric from people that are supposed to be helping, like saying that puberty blockers are reversible.

Ms. O’Malley:
It’s perfectly legitimate for WPATH to say they are promoting transgender health care and that’s their abiding principle. It’s not perfectly okay to suggest to young or vulnerable people that taking certain medication doesn’t come with huge risks, and puberty blockers would be a big risk. Medicating children to stop their puberty is a big risk. It is a very heavy, radical intervention.

All sexual development will stop at that point. From that day forth, they will be out of sync with their peers. Their genitals won’t grow, their breasts won’t grow, and their hair won’t grow from that day forth once you stop the puberty blockers. When you go through puberty and adolescence, the sexual yearning for a mate begins. You might really get into love songs or you might have crushes on people and you might fall really hard.

You’re practicing for future adulthood and marriage and you’re going through those motions in quite a deep way. You’re going through quite a significant developmental stage. You’re also realizing things socially, as I certainly did.

With a child that’s pre-10-years-old, it’s always about me, me, and me. They say, “I want chocolate. I want toys.”They want a certain friend. Then between age 10 and 20 you are going through puberty and adolescence and realize you have to be reciprocal here. You have to have social skills because you want a mate. You want somebody to fall for you.

There’s a huge amount of social development happening right along with your physical development. If that is just stopped, and there’s no sexual yearning and no crushes, they are left in that childlike state of me, me, me. All their peers are falling for people left, right and center. They’re falling for boys, they’re falling for girls, they’re having boyfriends, and they’re having girlfriends.

To any child who’s confronted with sex before they are sexual, it’s icky, it’s creepy, and it’s disgusting. It should be, because they’re pre-sexual. But for these kids who have had their puberty blocked, sex is icky and disgusting for them while all their friends are fancying people. They’re completely out of sync and they’re out of the tribe.

They were suspended in a glass bubble for all those years while everybody else was developing sexually. Then when they hit age 18 they release the puberty blocker and give them cross-sex hormones and that means they become the opposite sex. It is an extraordinary intervention.

The little boy’s penis will have stayed prepubescent and so of course he’ll feel completely out of sync with all the boys who are developing. The same with the girls’ genitals. It’s such a shocking intervention. People don’t like anybody speaking about it because it feels really inappropriate to talk to children about anything to do with their genitals, which it is.

But it’s more inappropriate not to intervene and interfere than to talk about it. We need to talk about it because puberty blockers are interfering with their sexual development and their healthy physical development. They’re interfering with it with a body of evidence that does not stand up to scrutiny. They have very shoddy literature for a small number of children, and one of them died as a result of cross-sex hormones.

This all started in the Netherlands. This clinic in the Netherlands decided to give children puberty blockers. They said, “They’re not happy when they transition as adults, so maybe if we transition them as children there will be better results.” It was a very radical, extraordinary experiment, but they decided to go ahead with it. They didn’t have a control group, so they couldn’t follow a group of children that didn’t have these interventions.

They took about 70 children, gave them puberty blockers, and stopped their puberty. Of that 70, 15 backed out of the study. Of those 15, some of them developed diabetes, heart complaints, and all sorts of issues where you’d want to say, “What happened here?” Of the 55 that were left, they went on and continued their study.

Then one of those children died when they were getting cross-sex surgery. I would say, “One out of 70 died, so end of study, end of research. This doesn’t work. The dangers are way too high. The risks are way too high. These are children we’re working with. This is inappropriate.”

But they didn’t think that. They thought this was a great success. Doctors came over from America to the Netherlands in 2008 and brought back this highly experimental treatment. From there, if you track it, the gender identity clinics grew exponentially. There was an extraordinary growth in gender identity clinics. They asked kids who were having a horrible puberty, “Would you like to stop your puberty?” They said, “Yes, sure.”

Mr. Jekielek:
In that study, they also excluded kids that had serious psychiatric comorbidities. But in our current scenario most of these kids actually have serious issues that have nothing to do with gender dysphoria.

Ms. O’Malley:
Yes, that is a very good point. They had very strict criteria for these 70 kids. One of them was that they had to have childhood onset from a very young age, and they also had to be mentally robust other than their gender issues. These days the vast majority of children who are going to these clinics did not have childhood onset. They didn’t have it at ages three to six, they had it later on. Usually, it was puberty onset and they’re a completely different type of child. They weren’t in the study, and they’re very loud in what they want.

Mr. Jekielek:
There is also infantilization going on in our society. Of course there’s a huge surge in gender non-conforming kids. There are compelling arguments that this is a social phenomenon and social contagion, especially among girls. This is all in the context of a broader picture where it’s almost like we want to slow the process to adulthood. Do you see anything like this?

Ms. O’Malley:
Yes, I do. I’ve studied this in great detail and it’s tragic, because we have shortened childhood. Childhood is shorter, but adolescence has been elongated until the mid-20s. Once they get their smartphone, their childhood and unselfconsciousness is kind of gone, but then they are infantilized in adolescence. Some writers have written very well about it like Jean Twenge and John Haidt. Jean Twenge and John Haidt have written very well about the infantilization of these adolescents. They are in this prolonged adolescence where everything is mommy and daddy’s fault, and they really don’t take personal responsibility.

For example, getting a job now as an adolescent is much harder than it would have been in other generations. They’ve learned to be quite babyish in their adolescence. They don’t go out as much as they used to in other generations. They don’t meet their friends as much and they’re not breaking away from their family very much.

It’s unbelievable the amount of expectation on parents when kids go to college these days. They’re in this prolonged adolescence until deep into their 20s. Sadly, their childhood was taken from them quite early, and then they have a prolonged adolescence. It’s the worst of all worlds, and who wants that?

Mr. Jekielek:
How does this whole gender phenomenon fit into this?

Ms. O’Malley:
It very much fits into it because the adolescent has been brought up by society, not just by the parents, but by an entire culture to say, “If you’re not happy, look to the nearest adult to make you happy.” I wrote a book called “Bully-Proof Kids” in 2017. I realized we’ve got to watch for immediately saying to kids, “This is bullying,” and then having the adults come right in. We have to build resilience so that going to the adult is step two.

Step one is seeing if you can handle this tricky situation. Let’s bring in the concept of tricky people rather than bullies. Some people are tricky, some people are bullies. Put a buffer between straight to the bullying and straight to the adults, so we learn how to deal with tricky people and learn how to deal with difficult people. But that has been wiped away in many cultures.

These days the emphasis is looking to the adult for help and saying, “I’m not happy, help me,” When the child is going through the storms and stresses of adolescence and when the child is going through puberty and is feeling insecure and all going through all those things that will make you an adult, they will think, “I’m not happy something must be wrong,” so they go to their parents and they go online looking for a solution rather than being honestly told, “Life is difficult. You’re going to feel like this many times until you die. It’s still beautiful, but it can be really difficult.”

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a decrease in resiliency because of how we’ve been raising our kids and educating them. A big part of this woke ideology complex, including gender ideology, involves bullying people into agreeing to things that don’t make a lot of sense. People are much less resilient in Western societies because they’ve always had to go to an adult, but there’s no adult taking care of this.

Ms. O’Malley:
Resilience as a word has become one of those problematic words, because it’s like we’re reducing the person’s pain by asking them to build resilience. But it’s actually a fundamental need for the human to acquire if they are to have some well-being in life. Now, you could skip it and you could not learn resilience, but then you will end up deeply unhappy.

Mr. Jekielek:
Suffering is needed in the process.

Ms. O’Malley:
Sadly, life is really difficult. There is homelessness. There’s dreadful, mental health problems in all our families. We have to learn to live with the tragedy of life. Children will run across the road today and get knocked over by a car.

Tragedies happen. We still have to manage our lives, and fall in love, and enjoy the beauty of nature, and be happy if we can. This is the only life we’re being offered. It’s a tragic life, but it’s a beautiful life.

As I work as a psychotherapist, very often with teenagers, I’m teaching them that their feelings are absolutely justifiable and also very common. It’s very common to feel very lonely. It’s very common to feel like you’re utterly screwed up and that you’re a clown. But you can still manage to be happy, even having all these ups and downs.

You shouldn’t just say, “Oh, that’s their fault.” You shouldn’t just think, “Where’s my diagnosis? I feel really lost and alienated. Something’s wrong and I need to be fixed.” We need to say, “No, that’s the human condition you’re dealing with. That’s the human, you can get a diagnosis, they’re out there, but it is the human condition that none of us have mastered.

Mr. Jekielek:
Stella, from this conversation, I know that you’re a fantastic psychotherapist. Your latest book, “When Kids Say They’re Trans,”
Is coming out. What can people learn from this book?

Ms. O’Malley:
Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano, and I wrote this book and all three of us are therapists. Sasha and Lisa are based in the U.S. and I’m based in Ireland. We met each other online because so many parents were coming to us in devastation over their children identifying as trans. All we were offering was how to help parents help their children. Many of these children were really vulnerable, very often autistic, very often neurodivergent in some way, and socially awkward. They had parents who were often vulnerable and socially awkward themselves.

They were absolutely isolated by a culture that fast tracked them to medicalization and said, “This will help your child.” It’s a very beguiling, alluring solution when you are lost. You hate your body. You hate yourself and you’re 14 and suddenly you could be a different person with a different name and a different pronoun and a different body. Nobody will ever be able to refer to the old you.These kids fall for it and they think, “I want to be that person.

We wrote the book, “When Kids Say They’re Trans,” to support parents who say, “Fast track medicalization is not for my kid. I just want to explore.

How can I help my kid?” They want to slow down and explore other options, such as a non-medicalized approach. When they’re adults, these kids can do whatever they want. But at least the parent has protected them from something that they won’t be able to come back from, like a mastectomy. That’s why we wrote the book.

Mr. Jekielek:
Stella O’Malley, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. O’Malley:
Thank you very much.

Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Stella O’Malley and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.