Who Told Thee That Thou Wast Transgender?
How social contagion and "affirming" led an innocent girl into sex slavery, twice
The story of Sage
To those who are paying attention, the deeply troubling story of a young teenager named Sage has been in the news a lot lately. Sage (full name withheld for privacy reasons) was a girl in Virginia living with her grandparents, who had legally adopted her after her father died when she was only two years old. As you might imagine, this left her with some lingering trauma, and her loving grandparents were very supportive of the necessary care. Her grandmother, Michele, had even made her career working with troubled kids as a Virginia Court-Appointed Child Advocate (CASA).
Everything was going… well, not exactly great, but about as well as you could hope for with a young girl dealing with such issues, right up until eighth grade. At the age when puberty, with all its attendant trials, is beginning to first take hold of young children’s bodies and minds, Sage found out that, as she later put it, “all the girls” around her were identifying as bi, lesbian, or trans. In an attempt to fit in, she started pretending to be a boy too. Unfortunately, it backfired on her horrifically.
School councilors discovered her new “identity” and immediately began doing two of the worst possible things they could have done in this situation: “affirming” the new transgender version of Sage, and hiding the whole thing from her grandparents. Sage was being bullied at school for pretending to be a boy when she clearly was not one. Meanwhile, the pro-trans websites that school employees introduced her to ended up linking her to online spaces where she met a sexual predator who understood just how vulnerable girls in her position are. Things eventually came to a head when, afraid of further bullying, she ran away to what she thought was the comforting embrace of a fellow teen friend in Maryland, who turned out to be a sex trafficker instead.
This day marked the first time her grandparents, her legal guardians, ever learned of her “transgender” status.
What happened next sounds like a true-crime drama. I’m not going to recount the whole thing because this article isn’t about that, but she was found, held in Maryland state custody in violation of federal child-protection laws, abused further, ran away again, ended up trafficked again, this time in Texas, and finally found and returned home after a whole year of horrors, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and drugs. A central figure in the horrors perpetrated against Sage was her court-appointed lawyer, an ideological crusader trying to manufacture a tale of child abuse and “misgendering” against her where none existed (remember, her grandparents never even knew any of this was going on!) in order to set a legal precedent. Sage was lied to by the lawyer, told her grandparents didn’t love her anymore, and coached to tell lies to a judge about nonexistent abuse at home. She was even almost coerced into having her breasts surgically removed! (Thankfully that last one ended up not happening.) Virtually nothing at all that the state of Maryland did in her case was done with the best interests of the child at heart; it was all to advance the cause of pro-transgender ideology.
After returning home, she summed up her experience with the heart-wrenching words, “I never was a boy. Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to have friends.”
In the beginning
This may seem like a digression, but bear with me for a moment.
We’re all familiar with the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden. God created Adam and Eve and put them in the garden, brand new human beings, innocent as little children, running around naked and entirely unashamed of it. (Anyone who’s been around toddlers for any length of time will know what that’s like.) The serpent, traditionally identified with Satan, tempted them to eat the forbidden fruit, which stripped them of their childlike innocence. They gained a knowledge of good and evil, and upon realizing they were naked, felt shame for it and hid themselves from God until they could build themselves some rudimentary, improvised clothing out of tree leaves.
When God confronts them on this, upon hearing of their shame at their own nakedness, he immediately asks a very interesting question: “Who told thee that thou wast naked?”
Picture the scene. They’ve been left in a paradisiacal garden, with all the beasts of the Earth to keep them company. Every last one of them is running around with all their bits hanging out, just like Adam and Eve, so to them this is a perfectly normal state of affairs. Then suddenly they’re acting like something is wrong with it. God sees in this clear evidence of wrongdoing, and the very first thing he asks is who they got this new idea from, that they clearly could not have devised on their own. (While the Biblical text does not explicitly say this, it’s reasonable to infer from God’s use of “who” rather than “what” that the idea that they should be ashamed of their nakedness and hide it from God came from Satan and not from eating the fruit.) This leads to a chain of questions and confessions that ends up with the serpent being cursed by God for his involvement in the whole affair.
All the girls in school
So here we are, back with poor Sage, whose gateway to an entire year plus of bullying, abuse, and trauma that will be with her for the rest of her life, lay in the discovery that “all of” the girls she knew were openly identifying as something other than normal heterosexual girls. This aspect of the story is something that hasn’t gotten much attention, outweighed by the sheer shock value of Sage’s personal story, but it seems to me that this is a far bigger problem. “Everybody was doing it,” Sage said.
It’s about time that someone starts following the precedent set by God in Genesis chapter 3. Even accounting for typical levels of youthful exaggeration, (I don’t believe for a minute that 100% of the girls in Sage’s class were doing this, or even most of them,) it’s clear that this was a serious, widespread problem at her school. There are some very hard questions that need to be asked, and chief among them is “Who told thee that thou wast transgender?” Because it sure seems like the school officials were far too eager to start turning little girls into little boys at the slightest pretense! When psychological issues that have historically affected around 1% of the population begin to look ubiquitous, there is a pressing need to start looking into root causes. Where are 8th-grade children who ought to still be largely innocent and unaware of sexuality getting these ideas from, and why are the people entrusted with their care actively making the problem worse by affirming them?
Sage’s Law
In response to this horrifying turn of events, Virginia Republican lawmakers are working on House Bill 2342, aka “Sage’s Law,” to prevent schools from hiding transgender issues from parents and legal guardians, among other helpful interventions. Democrats in the Virginia legislature, of course, have lined up in united opposition to it, even though they’re familiar with the story of where it came from.
Remember this the next time the Left tries to tell you how much they’re motivated by “caring about” people. The truth is, we’re in dire need of an entire quarry’s worth of millstones.
If you live in Virginia, please contact your state representatives in support of Sage’s Law. And if you don’t, please contact your state representatives in support of bringing Sage’s Law to your own state. As author Erin Brewer noted in one of the articles I linked above, “It is unconscionable that we need Sage’s Law” in the first place, but the evil that’s manifest itself in her life shows that it is indeed necessary.