An anti-LGBTQ hate group’s secret files reveal marketing “pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder,” and files detailing methods to indoctrinate pre-teens into a culture of “sexual purity” and opposing same-sex relationships.
The august-sounding American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is not the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The American Academy of Pediatrics is the highly-respected and largest group of pediatricians in America. The American College of Pediatricians, classified as an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is one of several groups behind the lawsuit attempting a nationwide ban of mifepristone, better-known as the abortion pill.
“The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a fringe anti-LGBTQ hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBTQ junk science, primarily via far-right conservative media and filing amicus briefs in cases related to gay adoption and marriage equality,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
WIRED on Tuesday published a bombshell report revealing that the American College of Pediatricians “has suffered a significant data breach.”
“A link to an unsecured Google Drive published on the group’s website pointed users last week to a large cache of sensitive documents, including financial and tax records, membership rolls, and email exchanges spanning over a decade. The more than 10,000 documents lay bare the outsize influence of a small conservative organization working to lend a veneer of medical science to evangelical beliefs on parenting, sex, procreation, and gender.”
Indeed, ACPeds has a very small membership, reportedly just 700 people, whereas the American Academy of Pediatrics boasts 67,000 members.
WIRED found records going back to the group’s inception, which include files on how it tried to recruit members, which apparently has been a challenge during its 21 years.
Its primary directive was literally to target Christian physicians.
“One document outlining recruitment efforts states in bold, red letters: ‘TARGET CHRISTIAN MDs,” WIRED reports. “The ongoing recruitment of doctors and medical school students seen as holding Christian views has long been its top priority.”
Other files reveal a far more sinister focus: attacking transgender children.
WIRED found “volumes of literature crafted specifically to influence relationships between practicing pediatricians, parents, and their children. It includes reams of marketing material the College aims to distribute widely among public school officials. This includes pushing schools to adopt junk science painting transgender youth as carriers of a pathological disorder, one that’s capable of spontaneously causing others–à la the dancing plague–to adopt similar thoughts and behaviors.”
That marketing material apparently was based on a dubious research paper that hypothesized about something it called “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which has been debunked, including in a recent study, according to Fenway Health.
Also found were files detailing ACPeds’s other efforts at indoctrination, including coaching parents on how to ply their children with a day of shopping and gifts, take them on an overnight trip, all with the intent of getting the children to embrace abstinence and oppose same-sex relationships.
“While the material is not expressly religious, it is clearly aimed at painting same-sex marriage as aberrant and immoral behavior,” WIRED reveals. “Physicians lobbied by the group are also told to urge patients to purchase Christian-based parenting guides, including one designed to help parents broach the topic of sex with their 11- and 12-year-old kids. The College suggests telling parents to plan a ‘special overnight trip,’ a pretext for instilling in their children sexual norms in line with evangelical practice. The group suggests telling parents to buy a tool called a ‘getaway kit,’ a series of workbooks that run around $54 online. The workbooks methodically walk the parents through the process of springing the topic, but only after a day-long charade of impromptu gift-giving and play.”
“These books are full of games and puzzles for the parent and child to cooperatively take on,” WIRED adds. “Throughout the process, the child slowly digests a concept of ‘sexual purity,’ lessons aided by oversimplified scripture and well-trodden Bible school parables.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s report on the American College of Pediatricians includes over a dozen comments by ACPeds officials and official statements from its publications. One likens LGBTQ people to pedophiles, one claims so-called trans activists “groom” children, and another dangerously states the “transgender movement is an opening for a totalitarian government.”
In a recent video, the American College of Pediatricians’ founders freely admit the group was created in response to the American Academy of Pediatrics’ support for same-sex marriage and parenting.
“The tipping point for me and my co-founding colleagues came when the AAP endorsed same-sex adoption, claiming that children reared by homosexual parents fared as well as those reared by their own biological heterosexual parents,” says co-founder and past ACPeds president Den Trumbull, MD, FCP.
Numerous studies prove that children raised by same-sex parents in fact fare as well as those raised by different-sex parents.
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