“The best studies of gender dysphoria (studies that even transgender activists cite) show that between 80 and 95 percent of children who express a discordant gender identity will come to identify with their bodily sex if natural development is allowed to proceed.”
– When Harry Became Sally
“First, do no harm”, was a symbolic oath previously made by doctors as they graduated from medical schools. But woke ideology has driven millennials to abandon these vows in support of a patient’s desire. Over the years, the oath has been revised and/or replaced in schools around the world. In Minnesota in 2022, at the University of Minnesota’s white coat ceremony, the vow looked more like a progressive propaganda recital, as would-be doctors promised to fight white supremacy, heal the planet, and then affirmed their sins of land confiscation from Native Americans. In the area of transgender-affirming care, medical and psychiatric providers have begun cooperating with mental illness to fulfill their patients’ demands while increasing their bottom line. But medical ethics is not only about healing patients and returning them to a place of wholeness, but it is also enshrined in legal statutes. And it is here where bad medicine may finally be meeting its match.
Despite decades of gender dysphoric treatments and studies, ideology, not science, is driving not only care but public policy. Now, transgenderism, which accounts for 0.6 percent of the population aged 13 and over, is demanding a complete reboot of biology, gender, and even culture’s understanding of what a woman truly is. Gender was previously identified as a social manifestation of bodily sex, determined in the womb. Now gender is being redefined as a social construct where a gender reveal party may be met with “It’s a them! with glitter shooting from confetti cannons. Yet, for children who for decades were given therapy to deal with their dissociation, 80-95 percent would enter adulthood without the need for gender-affirming treatments.
Today, gender dysphoria has become a social contagion targeting our most impressionable populace. Its dangerous message is not only creating irreversible treatments for confused and lonely children but has negligently provided female-only spaces for men with Autogynephilia, a propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as a female, to play out their disturbing illness.
In Ryan T. Anderson’s 2019 book, “When Harry Became Sally”, Anderson shows how transgender activism, along with a compliant media, is misrepresenting gender confusion to children and the public at large. In their race to advance LGBTQ+, they have delinked gender from biology and biology from science. Long-term research, rather than their typically cited snapshot studies, reveals no improvement following gender-affirming procedures with suicide rates remaining high both before and after transitions.
Title IX was passed in 1972 to add sex as a protected class under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, giving women equal rights to all educational programs that receive federal funding. It was the Obama administration that first opened up this can of worms when in 2016, definitions and classifications were altered to add transgenders to the mix, allowing them access to female spaces, from bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers, based on their perceived gender at any given time. It also led the way for the admittance of trans-women into competitive sports, using their biological advantage to rid women of their achievements.
Detransitioners, who have come to realize that their discordant feelings were not what they thought, are changing both policy and accountability, here and around the world. Twenty-one states now ban gender reassignment surgeries for children in the United States. A growing list of countries is also intervening in gender care for children, including the UK, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands, to name just a few. Most transgenders who come to regret their transitions agree that the push into irreversible treatments, rather than psychological therapies, is causing great harm. Rather than being given access to alternative treatments, like therapy for past trauma and psychological problems, they were all sent down the same path of life-altering transformations. Detransitioners are therefore advocating that each individual should be treated with the least invasive option, with sex reassignment as a last choice, available for adults only.
The capitalism that for-hire doctors hoped to exploit is becoming a two-edged sword. With the increase of lawsuits from detransitioners against medical doctors and hospitals, it appears the money trail is leading to ruin. With no new scientific changes to support the reintroduction of sex reassignment procedures, it is clear that its resurgence was borne of ideological and political pressures. Transgender reassignment surgeries do not make a man a woman, or a woman a man. They are simply political affirmations that are merely cosmetic.
To achieve wholeness and well-being for people with discordant gender identity issues or gender dysphoria, the medical and psychiatric communities should help patients tether their thoughts back to their physical reality until their gender realigns with their biological sex. Healing is the central goal of medicine. We must reject ideologies' troubling influence on the practice of medicine, and once again vow to do no harm.
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