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(LifeSiteNews) — Athletic apparel brand Nike is commemorating LGBT “Pride” Month this year by hosting an event with a child “transition” practitioner, according to an email obtained by conservative news outlet The Daily Wire

The Wire reports that the Nike email declares its solidarity with the “LGBTQIA+ community” as it “continues to fight for equality – their fight to be themselves,” and to that end has a host of events planned for the month of June, the most notable of which being a panel discussion with Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) surgeon Dr. Blair Peters “to discuss policies impacting the transgender community.” 

Also participating in the event are the LGBT pressure group Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and Kaig Lightner, left-wing activist and founder of the Portland Community Football Club.

But the most significant participant is Peters, a self-described “queer” physician who has touted having committed “gender affirming mastectomies” – i.e., the removal of healthy breasts for the purpose of resembling a male – on “young adults and adolescents.”

Despite Peters’s positive framing of the practice, evidence shows that “affirming” a child’s confusion about his or her sex carries severe harms, especially when such affirmation takes the form of permanently and unnecessarily transforming a child’s body before he or she is capable of fully considering the magnitude of doing so – and when children and parents are encouraged to make the decision by physicians. 

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

The issue is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.

Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject.

Nike’s “Pride” Month agenda is the latest case of major U.S. corporations getting involved in left-wing social causes at the behest of media and activist pressure, as well as business trends such as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), which is pervasive shorthand across the corporate and academic worlds for a litany of identity-based grievances and causes, and Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG), essentially a scoring system that incentivizes investment not on the basis of companies’ performance for customers and shareholders but rather on their fealty to so-called “social justice” principles such as diversity and environmentalism.

Such activities are currently the subject of public and private backlashes, as consumer boycotts have contributed to losses for companies like Disney, Target, and Anheuser-Busch, while policymakers adopt new measures to curb corporations’ incentives to “go woke.”

Nineteen states – Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming – have formed a coalition to collectively agree to resist ESG standards in a variety of ways, such as banning their use in state pension-fund investment decisions, banning the use of “social credit scores” in banking and lending practices, and banning ideological discrimination against customers by financial institutions.

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