The Obama administration has directed schools, including “all public schools and most colleges and universities that receive federal funds” to—as the Washington Post put it—“provide transgender students with access to suitable facilities—including bathrooms and locker rooms—that match their gender identity.”

The directive, which came from the assistant secretary of education for civil rights and the head of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, means that schools which fail to comply will be in violation of Title IX. Non-compliance means risking the loss of federal funds. It’s not a matter of breaking the law. Rather it’s a kind of ideological extortion: submit or have your money taken away.

And just to be absolutely clear, the letter spells out that schools should accept a student’s transgender self-identification without requiring a “medical diagnosis or treatment.” If a male student says he’s female, he/she should be allowed to use the girls’/women’s bathroom and locker room. If schools have single-sex dormitories, that male student who self-identifies as a female must be allowed to sleep with the girls.

Let’s say for the moment that the administration is doing all this with the best of intentions. Let’s say the president and his colleagues believe not allowing boys who think they’re girls (or want to be girls) to use the girls’ restroom would be psychologically or emotionally damaging to them. Does it help those children to impose what amounts to an “Emperor’s New Clothes” injunction on the rest of the world? If we all just go along and pretend that a boy is really a girl—that the Emperor isn’t really naked—will all be well?

Dr. Paul McHugh doesn’t think so. McHugh is the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was a pioneer of sex-change surgery, but stopped the practice when he and his colleagues determined that it provided no real benefits. McHugh wrote about the issue of transgenderism for The Public Discourse. He cites a thirty-year follow-up study of sex-reassigned people in Sweden where, he points out, the culture is “strongly supportive of the transgendered.” The study found evidence of “lifelong mental unrest,” and suicide rates up to twenty times higher than for comparable peers. In other words, sex reassignment wasn’t the answer.

Walt Heyer underwent surgery and lived as a female for eight years before returning to living as a male. He wrote about the bathroom directive for The Daily Signal. “I know firsthand what it’s like to be a transgender person—and how misguided it is to think one can change gender through hormones and surgery.” Like the boy in the fairy tale, Heyer didn’t hesitate to call the Emperor naked. “One fact will remain, no matter how deep in the tank Obama goes for the gender nonconformists: genetics and God’s design of male and female, no matter how repugnant that is to some, cannot be changed.”

Gender dysphoria is the official psychiatric term for “feeling oneself to be of the opposite sex,” McHugh writes. “The treatment,” he says, “should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it. With youngsters, this is best done in family therapy.” As someone who performed sex reassignment surgery, McHugh puts it bluntly: “Transgendered men do not become women, not do transgendered women become men. All…become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify.’ In that lies their problematic future.”

In other words, when a boy believes he’s a girl, it means that something is wrong. True compassion means acknowledging that and offering help, not directions to the girls’ room.