We humans would not be the intelligent creatures we are if we were unable to change our minds on an issue, when confronted with later evidence that our previous beliefs were either mistaken, bad or damaging. This is especially so when it comes to science and medicine, where some ideas may seem good at the time, but later turn out to be wrong or even dangerous. There are many examples of how later knowledge has overturned previous erroneous views and entrenched dogma. The Earth-centric universe model, the idea that atoms could not be split and the belief that hacking away at a person’s frontal brain lobe in leucotomy, known in the USA as lobotomy, procedures would cure depression, were all at one time believed to be true. However today we laugh or shudder or look on with horror at the idea that the Earth is the centre of the universe or that atoms were indivisible or that ice picks have any place in treating mental illness.
Like anyone else, I have the right to change my mind about things and a duty to do so when my previous belief has been shown to be erroneous, immoral or even plain daft. One of the things that I’ve had to change my mind about is the issue of medical and surgical treatment for gender dysphoria. I’ve come to the conclusion that it may not be the best way of dealing with people who have a serious self image problem or a delusion that they are ‘trapped’ in the wrong gender. ‘Talking cures’ such as psychotherapy or even drug treatment may be a less destructive way of helping people deal with issues related to gender self image than is the current fashion for surgical mutilation and the prescription of massive levels of cross sex hormones. Although I concede that there may be one or two people per million who may be able to be helped by gender reassignment, I don’t believe that it is suitable for the vast majority of people for whom gender identity problems may well be but a symptom of some more deep seated mental illness unrelated to gender dysphoria. The transgender ideology should also not on any account be pushed on the vulnerable such as the troubled or the insane or onto minors. These groups should be excluded from any and all gender identity treatment on the grounds that the outcomes for post op trans people really doesn’t appear to be that good and they do not have the capacity to consent to treatment that may create the simulacrum of the chosen gender, but will probably shorten their lives due to the effects of the medications needed to create the physical impression of the opposite gender .
Now before people get the wrong idea and tell me that I’ve never had any contact with trans people or are unsympathetic about their mental illness, then let me disabuse you of that assumption. Over many years I’ve had lots of friends who were trans and have also had a lovely and intelligent girlfriend who was post-op trans and who is a person I would still embrace as a friend if she knocked on my door. I’ve seen the trans world much more ‘up close and personal’ than many people may have done and have stood up for trans people and have followed the path of affirmation of those who believe that they are the ‘wrong’ gender, but this is a policy about which I now believe I was mistaken.
Unfortunately, having encountered more recent knowledge about the outcomes of gender reassignment and seeing trans friends not be cured of their depression or other mental illnesses by transitioning, I have to acknowledge that I was mistaken in my previous views. I was utterly wrong to affirm the delusions of those professing that they were the ‘wrong’ gender and that surgery and drugs were needed to deal with their problems. Although thankfully I never ever encouraged people to go down the route of gender transition, I still feel some guilt that I didn’t do all in my power to prevent friends from taking this path. I can at least go to my Maker secure in the knowledge that my only sins I have committed regarding transgenderism was silence when I should have spoken up and of placing the feelings of the deluded over scientific reality. I thank the Eternal One that I did not encourage distressed people to embark on a course of action that could have been disastrous for them and for their families.
My view of gender transitioning today is that it is impossible to fully change one’s gender. We cannot change our DNA, the molecule that contains the instructions as to whether a foetus will be born male or female. Whatever else we can change, we cannot change our chemical make up. Skilled surgeons can create a simulacrum of the outward appearance of the opposite sex, and cross sex hormones can create feminine or masculine secondary sex characteristics, but we cannot change our essential being which is chemically encoded in every cell of our bodies.
What I’ve read in recent years about the negative effects of transitioning truly horrifies me. A Swedish study carried out on trans people who had transitioned between 1973 and 2003 shows a very high morbidity rate, especially death from suicide. It appears that although the transitioning procedures may have sorted out the gender identity problems, they may not have tackled underlying psychiatric issues that may even be the root of the patient’s gender identity concerns. In 2004 according to a report in the Guardian newspaper, another study by researchers found that there was ‘no conclusive evidence that sex change operations improve the lives of transsexuals, with many people remaining severely distressed and even suicidal after the operation’.
To some extent this backs up my own anecdotal evidence. I’ve seen people go through traumatic surgical and chemical procedures that individuals truly believed would solve their problems and ease their pain, only to find that whatever pained them is still there, even though the ‘offending’ genitalia had been removed or transformed into something more pleasing for the patient. I have also encountered those who bitterly regretted transitioning and lived a sort of ‘half life’ in the shadows, not able to go back to their birth gender and not feeling at all comfortable with living their lives as the opposite one. Is it any wonder that such people commit suicide in the sort of levels that one would expect to see in a war zone?
Although these ‘buyers’ remorse’ trans people consented to their own mutilation and to a large extent their predicament is their own fault, they were helped on the way to their destruction by well-meaning doctors and the enthusiastic encouragement of trans activists, who have no other policy but to continually affirm the delusions of the individual presenting as trans, no matter how much damage it does to the person, their family or the wider society. I have also seen some lucky escapes from the gender reassignment treadmill of dangerous drugs and surgery that is the lot of the transsexual. For example, in one case an acquaintance who was embarking on transitioning from female to male, decided at the last minute to abandon testosterone treatment and become more comfortable with her birth gender. She is now, as far as I can ascertain, a happy mother of a baby. Whatever was bothering her was in the end nothing or very little to do with her gender identity and everything to do with the gender delusions that were the symptom of whatever underlying mental illness she had.
There are of course a very small number of people who are born as ‘intersex’ and possess some form of ambiguous genitalia or congenital hormonal imbalance, which is approximately 1 in every 1500 to 2000 births (to put this number in context of other congenital conditions, the Spina Bifida rates in the US are approximately 3 per 10,000 live births although this number may be lower than intersex levels because some mothers of Spina bifida foetuses may elect to terminate the pregnancy). Those who have unusual sex characteristics may require corrective surgery either shortly after birth or later on in order to correct an obvious physical wrong. But, when you look at the issue of how many transsexuals there are, you end up with an even smaller number of people than that of those who are intersex. Those who can be said genuinely to have gender dysphoria and have and express a consistent wish to change their gender appearance and exhibit long term gender non conformity is a really really tiny number. For transexuality the percentage of the population who can be diagnosed as genuine transsexuals is, according to the American psychiatric manual DSM-V, 0.005% – 0.014%. This is such a small number that it makes one question whether the vast majority of people who present to doctors with some form of gender identity issue are being properly and ethically treated by a medical profession which seems to be in the grip of a current fad for the surgical and chemical mutilation of the mentally ill? It’s notable that the only way that trans activists can get the figures for gender identity disorder above 1% is to include all those who are playing with gender identity through some form of transvestitism, the ‘third gender’ and ‘genderqueer’ attention seekers and those whose public persona is androgynous. Trans activists are not only being highly disingenuous when they claim that 3% or more of a given population is transgender, they are also dangerous as they are normalising something, Gender Identity Disorder, that is an extremely rare but serious mental health condition.
As I’ve learned more about the pitfalls and drawbacks of the transsexual path, seen friends go through appalling and maybe unnecessary surgery and observed how people are not cured of what ails them, I’ve come to the view that the current surgical and chemical treatments for this condition are not helping people as much as they should be. These procedures, because they are so damaging and lacking in efficacy, are in my view something akin to a Leucotomy (Lobotomy in the USA) and may one day be viewed with a similar sense of horror and disgust as we today view that brutal and dangerous operation.
Now for those who do not know, Leucotomies were once as much of a medical fad as gender reassignment surgery is today. Leucotomies were considered as a wonder cure for schizophrenia and depression and thousands of these procedures were carried out in both the United States and Great Britain. At the height of the Leucotomy craze in the late 1940’s and early 1950′s thousands of these procedures were carried out. The operation, to give its most basic description, involved poking a tool into the brain either via the eye sockets or holes drilled in the skull and stirring the brain around a bit. The results of such a treatment were, as we in the modern world can now see, utterly appalling. At worst the patient would die from the severing of a cranial blood vessel or would be reduced to a personality-free incontinent vegetable and at best the patient would be a biddable automaton able to undertake basic housework or menial employment. Those tiny minority of people who were helped by this procedure do not counterbalance the massive number of ruined lives, minds and dead bodies that the promoters and practitioners of Leucotomy left in their wake.
Over time and with the increase in knowledge about brain chemistry and more effective psychiatric medications along with the results of long term studies of leucotomy patients, this brutal procedure fell out of fashion. Neurosurgery for mental illness is still carried out but to a very much lesser extent than it used to be and it is done on a more scientific basis than just stirring the brain around a bit. Under the British Mental Health Act of 1983 Leucotomies were restricted to those for whom no other course of treatment was effective, where the patient fully consented to the operation and then only for certain resistant conditions. According to the mental health charity MIND, there were only four psychiatric neurosurgery procedures carried out in the years 2012 – 2013
I’m fully in favour of sane adult people over the age of 21 doing whatever they want with their body, even if it is stupid, whether that is taking bathtub amphetamines or having tattoos or even having themselves mutilated to resemble the opposite gender, as I still possess somewhat of a libertarian streak about these issues. But we should not pander to those with dangerous delusions or those who engage in highly destructive behaviours and we should certainly not promote their views or opinions as being in any way normal. We should also not be promoting gender ideology to children, they are in no fit and developed mental state to understand either the risks or the outcomes of a path that trans activists and others who promote the gender ideology are pushing them to take.
My view of transsexual surgery and chemotherapy is now very much similar to my view of abortion. This is that both transgender medical procedures and abortion are things that we as a society should not be encouraging but which also need to be allowed for those hopefully very rare situations when they are necessary. The 0.14% of the population who can be helped by transsexual surgery should be so assisted if that is possible just as the 1% of women in ther United States who are pregnant as a result of rape or incest, or the 3% of women who terminate pregnancies because of severe foetal abnormality, should be allowed access to abortion. As we would quite rightly baulk at the idea of abortion becoming just another form of contraception, so also should we baulk at the idea that people being mutilated and sterilised because of a mental illness is in any way acceptable or a course of action that should be widely promoted.
Humanity garners more knowledge with each generation and bad science gets pushed out by good science. In twenty years time we may know much more about why a minuscule proportion of the population is convinced that they are the ‘wrong’ gender and we may have better and more humane ways of treating this condition. Now we feel disgust and horror that 75 years ago it was thought acceptable and helpful to stir people’s brains about because they were suffering from depression. Maybe future generations will feel similarly when told that in the early part of the 21st century, Western societies sterilised and mutilated their children merely because they did not conform to gender norms or because they were suffering from some form of personal or social delusion. To be ethical, all medical practises should be based around the concept of ‘first do no harm’ and the precautionary principle should reign supreme. It is possible that greater knowledge of how the brain works will render paediatric gender transition not just unnecessary but it will be seen for what many of us now see such procedures as, which is a form of child abuse.
If we want to save future generations from the sort of severe psychological harm that seems to accompany gender transition, especially in cases where childhood gender transition has been encouraged by parents, then we need to ensure that gender reassignments are as rare as modern day leucotomies. Gender reassignment should not be banned, but it most certainly should be discouraged and restricted.
Restricting access to gender treatments to those adults of sound mind and pricking the delusion bubble of the third gender attention seekers, will without doubt attract loud howls of protest from trans activists but these protests should be ignored. If we ignore and resist the protests of those trans activists with vested interests in promoting this dangerous gender ideology to both society and its young people, then we may be providing a better and more happier future for our children. If on the other hand we listen to the junk science of the trans activists and their lies such as ‘puberty blockers don’t cause harm‘ to children who may well grow out of their trans identification, then we may well be creating a generation which is dominated by feelings of sadness, anger and resentfulness about what has been done to them, all in the name of a fashion called transgenderism. Those of us who are parents want to protect our children from those who are so damaged and malignant as personalities that they want to inflict their malignancy and damage onto others. But we can only do that if we equip our children with sound moral and ethical guidance, along with teaching them that feelings, no matter how strongly held or articulated by some people, are distinct from actual facts. Teaching children that gender is fixed not fluid and that they should accept who and what they are, is a key way which we can arm children to resist the blandishments and the lies of the trans ideologues who are influencing our governments, our public services and our children’s schools.
Transgender treatments are modern day leucotomies and nobody cognisant of the terrible tragedies caused by this ill thought out and badly practised procedure should fail to continually point this fact out. We as the vast majority of the population must not allow this subject to be dominated by a minority of damaged and sometimes malicious people who make up considerably less than 1% of the population of Western nations. At the end of the day if you want eggs you buy hens not roosters and no amount of screaming, threats and abuse by deluded and aggressive trans activists will change that fact one little bit.
Links
Long term follow up study of post op transsexuals
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885
Guardian article on how gender transition may not be the best answer for gender identity disorder
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/jul/30/health.mentalhealth
Information on testosterone treatment for female to male transsexuals from a pro trans website. Even on this sort of site that is trans affirming, the listed side effects seem gruesome and that’s not including the almost inevitable sterilisation that will occur when a woman takes excessive testosterone for a long period of time.
https://transcare.ucsf.edu/article/information-testosterone-hormone-therapy
Frequency of intersex births from the Intersex Society of North America
http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency
Number of Spina Bifida births in the USA
https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/spinabifida/data.html
Reasons for termination of pregnancy in the USA survey 2004 and 1987
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/abreasons.html
BBC article on the rise and fall of leucotomies
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15629160
Size of the transsexual population from Woman Means Something blog
http://womanmeanssomething.com/size-of-the-transgender-population-and-why-it-matters/
MIND on psychiatric neurosurgery
For those interested in the views of parents who are battling with the current fad for transsexuality and the pushing of this ideology onto vulnerable young people, I can heartily recommend the ‘Fourth Wave Now’ website which is linked below:
A blog by those medical professionals critical of current gender ideologues.
