Why Does Lyle Shelton Want To Torture Your Kids?

By Jessica Merritt

Imagine, for a second, that you suddenly fell ill. Imagine the culmination of symptoms, the aches and pains, the nausea, fatigue, all the tell tale signs that something is just wrong in your body. Something is off. You don’t know exactly what, but every cell in your body is screaming “wrong” at you.

So, unable to stand the internal noise, you head off to the doctor. Looking at you solemnly, she sighs and says that dreaded 6 letter word – “Cancer”. Your heart stops. Then starts again, trembling and pulsing as all sorts of worst case scenarios go through your mind. The doctor is talking, saying something about “treatment”, but you aren’t paying attention. You are scared. Scared and alone.

Desperate for this to be untrue, you dash out of the room, sweating and panicking. Denial sets in. You go see another doctor, another specialist. Blood, urine samples are sucked out of you and subjected to a battery of tests. “Cancer” it all says. You see still more doctors, more experts. You speak to literally hundreds of experts, established and respected professionals in their individual fields, and they all unanimously agree. “Cancer”.

Accepting the inevitable, you begin to settle in on a treatment plan. You start taking drugs, medicines to alleviate the symptons, and plot out how the hell you are going to afford the many thousands your life saving surgery is going to take.

Then, from nowhere, you see a guy on TV. “Cancer’s not real”, he says, with a smug, condescending grin on his face. “Its not real, and it cannot be ‘cured’ by medication or surgery”. “How do you know this?” the interviewer asks. “Well,” he says, patronisingly. “We have medical research that proves it.”

Devastated, you turn the TV off, and go to bed. How can this guy, this asshole, know what it is like to have cancer? He isn’t even a doctor, he is just claiming he has ‘proof’ that your very real illness, which is ruining your life, isn’t real.

The next day, you wake to a newspaper article that says “CANCER IS FAKE”. Followed by a short article, something along the lines of “In a new study released today, experts have found that cancer does not actually exist, and we should immediately cease all treatment of it”. This is followed by a horrified editorial about the “evils” of convincing people they have cancer, and that based on this ‘evidence’ all treatment should desist.

Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Well, that is what Lyle Shelton and the ACL are trying to do with gender dysphoria. Despite it being a recognized condition by literally hundreds of thousands of people in medical and therapeutic fields. Despite mounting evidence and testimonials from tens of thousands of medical specialists, therapists, psychologists, social workers, psychiatrists and even some school chaplains, the ACL claims their cherry picked tiny minority of ‘experts’ is the real deal, and everyone else is wrong.

Yes, everyone else. While Lyle Shelton and the ACL claim to have experts, what they really have is a trivial proportion of impossibly close minded and bigoted doctors, who use the seemingly innocuous monkiker of the “American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds)” who number fewer than 200, and rely heavily on outdated and disproved research. This is in direct opposition to the actual American Academy of Pediatricians (AAP), who number over 60,000 members. That is 60,000 qualified medical specialists and recognized experts in their fields.

Don’t believe me? Have a read.

The Southern Poverty Law Association recognize them as a hate group. Like the KKK.

The AAP, the authentic body, strongly supports transitioning as an effective treatment for gender dysphoria. They support the rights of every child to live in a way that matches their identity to their body as much as possible, which is the only proven and effective means of treating gender dysphoria.

The ACPeds school, which is broadly espoused by Lyle Shelton and the ACL, want to torture your kids. They want you to beat them (they provide guidelines for disciplinary beatings on their website, easily accessible), they deny the impact of physical abuse on mental health (same website) to exclude them from social activities, to punish them for deviation from archaic social norms, and to force them to spend a lifetime trapped in a cycle of self hate and guilt which over 60,000 doctors think is wrong.

The American Psychiatric Association and even the greater American Medical Association both agree in their official mission statements that transgender kids deserve respect and compassion, and the right to live authentic lives. That is nearly half a million qualified professionals.

Against 200. And that is being generous.

Think back to your cancer. How is that looking now? Who would you trust your kids to? The valuable opinions of 99% of all medical specialists, or the incoherent ramblings of a religious fanatic and his deluded band of bigots who advocate torture and child abuse.

Lyle Shelton and the ACL want to hurt your kids, make no bones about it. They provide scant evidence for this line, outside of what I am sure are sincerely held religious beliefs. Religious beliefs that will hurt your kids.

To deny trans children access to life saving treatment is the same as denying our cancer patient access to life saving drugs and therapy, and has no justification or basis that is acknowledged by any of the many mainstream medical professional organisations either here or abroad.