Claire Chretien |
June 8, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – The U.S. federal government has awarded a pro-transgender activist $1 million to study transgenderism in kids in a study critics say is already fundamentally biased.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) gave the University of Washington’s pro-LGBT Kristina Olsen the five-year grant.
“In 2013, [Olsen] organized and began leading a 20-year longitudinal research study of early childhood gender development,” the NSF announced in April. “The study currently follows more than 1,000 children aged 3-12 from 45 U.S. states. The project will enable researchers to track social and behavioral influences on health, and evaluate the importance of childhood identity and the support children receive to lifelong health and well-being.”
The taxpayer money will support Olsen running the TransYouth Project (TYP), a “large-scale, national longitudinal study of more than 300 socially-transitioned transgender children that started in 2013. These children were recruited when they were 3-12 years of age and we are hoping to follow them for 20 years.”
“The first red flag concerning TYP is the orientation of the lead researcher, Olson, who is firmly on the side of affirming the child’s mistaken gender identity,” Jane Robbins and Erin Tuttle wrote at The Federalist.
And, “through TYP, Olson is focusing only on a particular type of child with a particular type of family,” they explained. “Participant children had to impersonate the opposite sex in all facets of their everyday life, and their parents had to agree and play along with the impersonation. Participants were recruited from transgender clinics, conferences, and support groups, further ensuring that only families that already accept the concepts Olson and her colleagues embrace would be studied.”
Robbins and Tuttle continued:
…the results will be evaluated based primarily on self-reporting of parents. Probably with no training in assessing anxiety and depression, parents will report how well their children are doing in those areas. The likelihood that parents will admit that what they’re doing to their children is having an adverse effect is pretty small. Olson even admits that this reporting mechanism may reflect “a desire to have their children appear healthier than they are.” But not to worry: “we have no reasons to believe this was an issue.”
The Free Beacon recently broke the news that National Institutes of Health is spending almost $350,000 to study the contraceptive habits of lesbians. That study aims to help women “fully realize the social, economic, and health benefits” of not having children.
