Abigail Olsson The Washington Stand

Paul Stanley, co-founder and frontman of the iconic hard rock band KISS, recently stepped outside of the musical lane and gave his two cents about a social issue: gender transition surgery on minors. In his tweet posted Sunday that he titled “My Thoughts On What I’m Seeing,” the musician deemed parents normalizing sex changes for children “a sad and dangerous fad.” His “thoughts” raised an array of rather controversial responses across several social media platforms.

“There is a BIG difference between teaching acceptance and normalizing and even encouraging participation in a lifestyle that confuses young children into questioning their sexual identification as though some sort of game and then parents in some cases allow it,” he boldly claimed in his post. “There ARE individuals who as adults may decide reassignment is their needed choice but turning this into a game or parents normalizing it as some sort of natural alternative or believing that because a little boy likes to play dress up in his sister’s clothes or a girl in her brother’s, we should lead them steps further down a path that’s far from the innocence of what they are doing.”

Although Stanley did not explicitly condemn all gender transitions in his statement, he made the case that children have no real sense of sexuality or sexual experiences, and therefore responsibility falls to adults. He advocated for the safety of children by calling out adults who “mistakenly confuse teaching acceptance” with normalizing reaffirming surgeries “that has been a struggle for those truly affected.”