Editor’s note: Alaska Senate Majority Leader Cathy Geissel has introduced Senate Bill 90, which seeks to lower the age (from 18 to 16) at which minors can agree to undergo mental and behavioral health services without parental consent. The following letter by Lucas Smith was submitted earlier this month to members of the Senate Health and Social Services Committee, where the bill is currently under consideration.

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I write to oppose SB90.

SB90, sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Cathy Giessel, seeks to establish the age of consent for mental heal care in Alaska as sixteen years old.

Proponents of SB90 will be happy to provide you with volumes of information about how mental health care is urgently needed as a service to support education, in particular, public school students. What those proponents will go to great lengths to hide is the fact that recent provisions – made possible in large part by pandemic related emergency funding – supports an obscure network intent on sustaining and fostering the growth of the transgender youth care industry.

Existing state law, established at a time when the sexual mutilation of children was not a trending fad, facilitates the role of mental health counselors in public schools placing confused children on the pathway to predatory counseling and genital mutilation.

Gender dysphoria is a mental illness. Every effort in conjunction with the support of parents should be made to help children feel comfortable in the bodies they were born with. Instead, the counseling network SB90 proposes to legitimize leads children into secret sexual discussions with mental health care professionals. While unimaginable, such discussions may enable those professionals to justify prescriptions for puberty blockers. These confused children, who are, for all practical purposes, abducted from their parents by the transgender medical industry, are subsequently groomed, manipulated, physically assaulted by puberty blockers, and sexually mutilated by a medical sector professing to offer “care” to children.

In August of 2020, before the Anchorage School District had finalized its unofficial policy entitled, Administrative Guidelines: Working with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Students and Employees, the Anchorage School District maintained no budget or staff for mental health care professionals. Under the guise of COVID and a flood of federal funding, the Anchorage School District swiftly moved to establish a substantial mental health element to its administrative support services. Page 92 of the Anchorage School District’s FY26 proposed budget reveals how ASD’s investment in mental health exploded from $0 in FY22 (the 2021-2022 school year) to more than $2.5M in FY25. Should this session’s education bill offer ASD the BSA increase it seeks, ASD’s budget habits suggest it will increase spending for mental health services within ASD schools far beyond the $2.5M level.

ASD’s extreme focus on mental health care is prominently featured within ASD’s published 2023-28 goals and guardrails in association with its commitment to develop a “culturally responsive workforce,” – a goal that can be easily associated with the extreme ideology of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Citing privacy concerns, ASD remains non-transparent – even to the parents of those students – about the level of success it has attained towards feeding the transgender medical industry with a steady supply of its students.

In an article published on February 21, 2024 by the Alaska Beacon, Giessel was quoted, “’As a nurse practitioner, I volunteer in school-based clinics in [Anchorage School District]. I provide physical health services but screen for mental health issues and refer for services if indicated. Kids are facing many challenges today in this realm,’ she said by email.”

ASD’s mental health care investment may seem small in comparison to ASD’s overall budget, but the recent growth of this investment points to something more stomach-turning. The youth transgender health service industry has become extremely lucrative and influential. School districts like ASD would likely not be making such substantial investments in mental health to this degree if it did not serve the mutual interests of both the trans care industry and the sinister social agenda of the public education system.

Should SB90 pass and be enacted, far too many families and children will unknowingly be submitted to increased vulnerability by a sexually predatory medical industry and the public school system that conspires with it.

It is my belief SB90’s true intent is to benefit the transgender youth care industry to the detriment of public education, and definitely not to the benefit of public school students or their families.

Please do not pass SB90.

The views expressed here are those of the author.

TAKING ACTION

— Click here to contact members of the Alaska Senate Health and Social Services Committee.

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