Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson told Newsmax on Thursday that adults discussing gender transitioning with children are actually committing "child abuse" because children lack the maturity to make such decisions.
In a Monday night PBS "NewsHour" segment, Dr. Michelle Forcier, a professor of pediatrics at Brown University, compared giving hormones to children to treatment for an earache.
"If I had a 10-year-old or an 8-year-old who told me their ear hurt, I wouldn't look at them and say, 'You're only 8 or 10. You don't know if your ear hurts,' right?" Forcier said. "It's important that we listen to kids. It doesn't mean that a kid says, 'I'm trans,' and two hours later they get hormones. It means that we respect kids as individuals."
During an appearance on Newsmax's "The Chris Salcedo Show," Carson called Forcier's comparison "absurd."
"To compare an earache or ear infection to a complex issue like gender assignment is, frankly, absurd," the renowned neurosurgeon said. "What's happening is children are naturally very curious and children are very suggestible, so to take somebody whose brain isn't even fully developed until they're in their 20s and to make these suggestions to them is actually child abuse, and that's what we really should be railing against.
"These children, the reason they need parents and the reason they need guardians is because they're not fully mature enough to make those kinds of decisions," he continued. "It's really quite absurd, and I'm hoping that soon we wake up from this nightmare of irrational thought processing."
Carson has spoken out against gender-transition care for minors before. In November, Carson told Newsmax that the push to transition children without their parents' knowledge was part of a "cultural war" that seeks to "destroy" the United States.
"If you look at some of the writings of many of the Marxists, and they talk about how strong the United States is and how to bring it down, they talk about our faith and our families," Carson said at the time. "Of course, if you can destroy family relationships by causing children not to have trust in their parents and hiding things from their parents, you go a long way towards destroying one of the strongest pillars of strength that we've had as a nation."
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