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Hospital Video Series Features Adults Talking To Young Kids About Transgenderism, ‘Exploring’ Their Bodies Before Sex

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• Lurie Children’s Hospital created a series of videos in which adults talk to children about transgenderism, pronouns, sexual orientation and other sexual subjects.
• Several of the children in these videos identify as transgender and, upon prompting from adult interviewers, recite activist talking points such as denying that transgenderism is caused by social contagion or saying their transgender identity developed in very early childhood. 
• “My birth parents said that I was a girl but they made a mistake … I wasn’t a girl or a boy,” one young child said, noting that she was “at least five or six” before realizing she was non-binary.

The Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago created a video series in which adults discussed transgenderism and sexual topics with children as young as nine, some of whom identified as transgender themselves.

The “Never Fear” video series on Lurie’s website includes videos of one-on-one talks between adults and children about touching oneself, “exploring” other people’s bodies, same-sex relationships and coming out as transgender. The hospital was previously subject to blowback over its partnerships with local schools, through which it promoted chest binders, LGBT-oriented sex toys and sex tips for “queer” people.

The series features a video of an 11-year-old discussing “exploring” one’s own body before having sexual encounters with other people. One clip shows a young girl explaining what sexual orientation means, and other videos in the series feature older adolescents and young adults discussing topics such as abortion, AIDS and birth control.

Lurie’s Children’s Hospital did not respond to a for comment, but the hospital’s video series has since been made private, meaning they’re inaccessible to the general public. The Daily Caller News Foundation, however, has archived versions of the videos mentioned in this story.

In some of the videos featuring young children who identify as transgender, adults prompt them to say things that closely align with the talking points of transgender activists: that their transgender identity developed in early childhood, for example, or that it wasn’t caused by peer influence.

In one “Never Fear” video, a 13-year-old who goes by “they/them” pronouns said that spending time around transgender people was good for young people because it could help them discover that they’re transgender too.

“A lot of parents think that if their kids are around gender diverse people that they’re going to somehow turn trans,” the child said. “You don’t turn trans, you just discover that you are trans.”

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One video featured a young child who identified as non-binary.

“My birth parents said that I was a girl but they made a mistake … I wasn’t a girl or a boy,” the child said, noting that she was “at least five or six” before realizing she was non-binary. A woman who appeared in the video insisted that the child’s non-binary identity emerged even earlier.

“But it started before that. You kept sending us signals. You’d say ‘Sometimes I want to be a boy, sometimes I want to be a girl,” she said. “Your mom and I have tried our best to support you and make that something that’s celebrated in our household.”

The hospital doesn’t say what services are offered through its Gender Development Program on its website, though an archived version from 2019 says the institution offered puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones; those mentions have since been scrubbed from the website.

In another video, a seventh-grade student discussed switching schools after a teacher shared information with colleagues about the student’s gender identity.

“I told a teacher and the teacher didn’t necessarily understand how to handle it and ended up outing me to the school, to the other teachers,” the child said. “I couldn’t go back to school after that happened because it broke my trust with the teachers.”

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In a separate video, a school employee asks the same child how it feels “doing this interview and really outing yourself,” and praises the child for the “important work” of educating the public about transgender youth.

The National Institutes of Health have poured more than $5 million into transgender-related research projects at Lurie’s on subjects including AIDS, pubertal suppression and fertility decision-making in youth.