Heyer observes that while people who suffer from gender confusion were formerly considered to have a mental disorder, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has been politicized to treat it as “dysphoria” rather than a disorder. Dysphoria is a state of unease or dissatisfaction with life—the opposite of euphoria57—and, as such, is not viewed as something to overcome. Heyer contends that gender “confusion” is not biological but psychological. He disputes the claim that “transgenders are born that way,” saying that “not a smidgeon of abnormality can be found in the genetic makeup of transgenders, so, no, transgenders are not born that way. They are normal males and females.”
“What researchers have found,” however, “is that transgenders attempt suicide at an alarming rate” and that a majority of them have at least one psychiatric co-existing (co-morbid) disorder, the most common of which are major depressive disorder, specific phobia, and adjustment disorder. Researchers, Heyer says, have found that 30 percent of gender dysphoria patients have a lifetime diagnosis of dissociative disorder, which used to be known as multiple personality disorder. Heyer says he was diagnosed with gender dysphoria by the most highly regarded gender specialist in America, who recommended surgery to transition from male to female. The doctor said “all my discomfort would go away after surgery.… He was wrong.”58 Heyer says he lived eight years successfully as a transgender female, but after the euphoria wore off he was confused and even more depressed. Later, when he received the proper diagnosis and treatment of his dissociative disorder, he no longer needed to play the role of a woman and felt betrayed by “the redefinition madness.… The surgery can’t define who I am,” he said. “The idea of 56 different genders is repugnant to this former transgender. I am a man, not some nonsense name contrived by the LGBT.”59
“People who pursue a cross-sex identity aren’t born that way, and children should not be encouraged to ‘transition’ to the opposite sex, according to a reference work endorsed by the American Psychological Association,” says Heyer. Many parents tell him their children’s therapist recommends the child change his or her name or personal pronouns, live as the opposite sex, and begin “irreversible medical interventions”—after only a few appointments.60
Based on studies of transgender children, the APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology finds that gender dysphoria persists to adulthood in no more than 25 percent of children; most of the boys and about half of the girls later identify as gay, not transgender. Early social transition (change of gender role) should be approached with caution, as the stress involved with a later reversal is substantial. Heyer says that despite these findings, sex-change advocates claim the opposite—that the science is settled that those who identify as the opposite sex will never change their minds—and so they are adamant that the transition must be made as early as possible.61 This is further proof that the tendency to declare something as settled science is a recurring practice for leftists.
Heyer had a “sex change” in 1983, unaware that evidence was surfacing against the notion that people are “born that way.” In 1979 Dr. Charles L. Ihlenfeld, an endocrinologist, warned against using hormones and surgery on the transgender population, based on his own experimentation. Ihlenfeld flatly said that 80 percent of the people who want to change their sex shouldn’t do it—that this strong desire most likely arises from powerful psychological factors they experienced in the first eighteen months of their lives. Heyer says Ihlenfeld’s conclusions foreshadowed the findings of the APA handbook, including that identifying as the opposite sex is “most likely the result of a complex interaction between biological and environmental factors.”
Heyer says the evidence does not demonstrate the effectiveness of using cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgery to treat gender dysphoria. He is troubled that the medical and psychological communities ignore their own research and continue to experiment with real lives, including the lives of children. He strongly rejects the battle cry of the “sex-change cheerleaders” who “falsely claim, ‘Affirmation is the only solution.’… We must wake up and use the evidence provided in the APA handbook to counter those who say transgender people are born that way.”62
Feminist author and professor Camille Paglia maintains that “the transgender propagandists make wildly inflated claims about the multiplicity of gender.” Regardless of how you define your gender or even if you have sex reassignment surgery, says Paglia, “ultimately, the DNA in that cell, remains coded for your biological birth. So there are a lot of lies being propagated… which… is not in anyone’s best interest.… Parents are now encouraged to subject the child to procedures that I think are a form of child abuse.… People should not be doing this to their children, and I think that even in the teenage years is too soon to be making this leap. People change, people grow, and people adapt.”63 Paglia describes assisting children to undergo sex reassignment surgery as a “crime against humanity.”64
A 2016 study by Johns Hopkins University scientists Dr. Lawrence S. Mayer and Dr. Paul R. McHugh corroborates Heyer’s and Paglia’s claims. Its findings include: scientific evidence does not support the claim that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed property (that people are “born that way”); some 80 percent of male adolescents who report same-sex attractions do not do so as adults; non-heterosexuals are two to three times more likely to have been sexually abused in childhood; gay people have an increased risk of adverse health and mental health outcomes; gay-identified people have a nearly two-and-a-half times greater risk of suicide; the notion that gender identity is fixed (that a man might be trapped in a woman’s body or a woman in a man’s body) is unsupported by scientific evidence; studies of brain structures show no evidence for a neurological basis for cross-gender identification; sex-reassigned people are five times more likely to attempt suicide and nineteen times more likely to die by suicide; the rate of lifetime suicide attempts by transgenders is 41 percent compared to 5 percent among the entire U.S. population; and only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.65
THE SUDDEN BLOOMING OF TRANSGENDER CLINICS
But Heyer’s and Paglia’s view is not prevailing. In April 2017 the New York Times featured an op-ed by Yale School of Medicine research fellow Jack Turban, who lectures on the treatment of transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. Turban criticized President Trump for eliminating supportive policies for transgender students at public schools and opposing laws allowing transgenders to use bathrooms not corresponding with their birth genders. “Politicians could learn something from the doctors who treat these patients,” says Turban. “If we support these children in their transgender identities instead of trying to change them, they thrive instead of struggling with anxiety and depression.” It’s noteworthy that Turban views treating a person as a member of his biological gender as trying to change him, leading to anxiety and depression. Turban describes Hannah, a fourteen-year old girl who was born a boy.66 He says that Hannah is using a puberty-blocking implant as she prepares to develop a female body by starting estrogen hormone therapy. “Ten years ago most doctors would have called this malpractice,” he writes. “New data has now made it the protocol for thousands of American children.”
Turban argues that transforming kids’ bodies at a younger age would prevent societal stigma, which leads to higher rates of suicide and depression now associated with gender dysphoria. “But there’s no hard data to support that notion,” writes columnist Ben Shapiro. “A study from professors at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, for example, found that 46 percent of transgender men and 42 percent of transgender women had attempted suicide.… Surgery doesn’t militate against suicide either.”67 Shapiro notes that this is “science with an agenda.” It’s one thing for adults to make decisions about their sexualities and their bodies, but these decisions should not be imposed on
children, especially since 80 percent of children with gender confusion outgrow it.68
Social conservatives warned that the left would not be satisfied with “equal rights” for homosexuals or even with the legalization of same-sex marriage. Just a few years ago, activists were focused on “gay rights.” But once they triumphed, they moved on to their new obsession, “transgender rights.” There has been a concerted effort to increase the previously minuscule population of people with “gender dysphoria” and prioritize their demands above all others. There is an all-out push for dysphoric children to be given medical treatment to enable their bodies to simulate those of the opposite sex, often with the use of puberty blockers that disrupt the body’s natural maturation processes. Other treatments include cross-sex hormones—flooding the body with hormones of the opposite sex—and invasive surgery to remove healthy reproductive organs and sometimes implant fake organs of the opposite sex. Even some homosexuals are troubled by research showing that the large majority of children with this dysphoria will outgrow it without potentially dangerous and irreversible treatments.
Sadly, many physicians succumb to the PC pressure and support “gender-affirming treatment” or cower in silence before the thought police. As early as 2008, the American Medical Association officially supported increased access to hormonal and surgical treatment for patients with gender identity disorder, which the condition used to be called until 2013, when the American Psychiatric Association changed it to gender dysphoria, as noted. In The Federalist, Jane Robbins observes that these attitudinal changes in the medical community “fertilized the soil for the sudden blooming of ‘transgender clinics’ ” to help the mushrooming number of gender dysphoric patients get medical alterations—and “by happy coincidence, create a lucrative new specialty for physicians willing to push the Hippocratic envelope.”
Robbins argues that the Endocrine Society has yielded to political ideology in lieu of sound medical practice and encourages its members to “ride the gender dysphoria wave regardless of concerns about safety and ethics.” Some brave endocrinologists are standing up to the gender bullies and the Endocrine Society by opposing “gender affirmation treatment (GAT).” They claim the risks in the treatment make truly informed consent for children, adolescents, and parents unlikely. In their letter to the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, these dissenting physicians state, “Physicians need to start examining GAT through the objective eye of the scientist-clinician rather than the ideological lens of the social activist. Far more children with gender dysphoria will ultimately be helped by this approach.”69
“GENDER BINARISM VIOLATES MY VALUES”
The insanity marches on as the left aggressively pushes the transgender lifestyle. In the summer of 2018, the Boston Public Library allowed the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” who are drag queens dressed as Catholic nuns, to read stories to kids. Is nothing sacred anymore? Princeton professor Robert P. George argues that it’s dangerous for the state to promote ideas that defy normal notions about gender. “It’s a message about power,” says George. “The group in question … is sending a message that they have the power to enter into the public domain, a publicly funded institution … and to essentially hold a catechism class for this new religion that they’ve created—a religion of hedonism, of self-indulgence, Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, say a religion of licentiousness.”70 In another case, the Houston Public Library allowed a man to entertain children during “drag queen story time” without conducting a background check on him. It turns out he was a registered sex offender who was convicted of assaulting an eight-year-old child in 2009, and the library issued an apology.71
At a separate reading event, a man dressed in drag encouraged a young child to become a drag queen. A video shows a little girl saying, “I want to be a superhero,” and the drag queen responds, “You can be a drag queen superhero.”72 Surely we can acknowledge this isn’t merely a live-and-let-live attitude but one of proselytizing and recruitment.
There are now parent-and-children teams transitioning to the opposite sex in tandem, as if it’s some hot new trend. In one case, a Detroit mother and her son transitioned to father and daughter. One writer glowed, “The family that transgenders together stays together.”73 In another reported case, a mother and daughter became father and son.74
Today, many parents have “gender-reveal parties” to celebrate their new baby and announce, “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl.” But these innocent celebrations offend gender identity enforcers. In New York Times Magazine, Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah wrote an article which asked, “Should I Go to a Gender-Reveal Party?” Appiah’s column relates his response to a correspondent who asked him whether he should go to a gender-reveal party of an expectant mother who is a close relation. The correspondent identified as “cisgender” but declared, “I am adamantly opposed to attending the gender-reveal party because it violates my moral code.” These parties “violate my values because they reaffirm society’s gender binarism and inadvertently perpetuate the stigma against nonbinary genders.”75
Dr. Albert Mohler, theologian and president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, comments, “This question represents just one more step towards cultural insanity,” because the questioner is appalled at celebrations of politically incorrect labels like “boy” and “girl.” This “violates the moral code of the transgender movement.” Mohler rightly notes that this type of question doesn’t appear “on the leading edge of a moral revolution.” The revolution must be well underway for someone to freely express such outrage in an ethics column in such a prominent publication. First, Mohler notes that the use of the term “cisgender” plays into the gender revolution. “Even adopting the vocabulary … assumes that you accept the ideology of the transgender revolutionaries—that gender fluidity exists and that the gender assigned at one’s birth may or may not be factual. ‘Cisgender’ signifies that you buy into the idea that all of humanity must be identified on a spectrum, with cisgender at one end and gender-nonconforming, or, transgender at the other end.”76
I’ll add that when gender activists demand that all people use their dictated terms, from “cisgender” to the other endless gender identities and pronouns, they are winning the debate and normalizing things in our culture that most people consider highly abnormal. Mohler notes the leaps in logic involved in expecting readers to share the writer’s moral outrage against parents for throwing a gender-reveal party. “The question, by itself, poses enormous problems and reveals the erosion of any sane ethic,” writes Mohler. He also rejects Professor Appiah’s response that “biological sex has nothing to do with gender identity.” “Christians operating from a biblical worldview understand Appiah’s assertions as manifest nonsense,” writes Mohler. “The morally important distinction between male and female is essential. Indeed, the biblical worldview clearly grounds the distinction as a vital component for true human flourishing.” The assertions in Mohler’s penultimate paragraph are well worth considering: “Articles like this one in the New York Times Magazine, and arguments like Professor Appiah’s, demonstrate the unceasing desire of the LGBTQ agenda to invert civilization itself. As relentless as they might be, the moral revolutionaries aim at insanity and position arguments as reality that have no basis in any scientific court or, for that matter, common sense.”77
“THIS ISN’T A DEBATE. THE DATA ARE IN.”
Jordan Peterson flatly rejects the concept of gender ideology. He notes that schools are using cartoon characters such as a “genderbread person” or unicorn to indoctrinate students, beginning with seventh graders, to believe that one’s biological sex, psychological sense of sex, manner of dress, and erotic feelings are independent of one another. The cartoons show four rows designated as “sex assigned at birth,” “gender identity,” “gender expression,” and “sexual preference.” Teachers instruct kids to place an X along the four continuums to show where they see themselves in these supposedly separate places. Yet there is
overwhelming evidence that there are biological differences between men and women. “The vast majority of people who have a biological sex also claim that they are psychologically … the same as that biological sex,” says Peterson. “So the idea that they are independent is completely insane.”78 In his book 12 Rules for Life, Peterson writes, “Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. Strikingly, these differences, strongly influenced by biological factors, are most pronounced in the Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest: this is the opposite of what would be expected by those who insist, ever more loudly, that gender is a social construct. It isn’t. This isn’t a debate. The data are in.”79
Science confirms that human beings are “sexually dimorphic”—they come in two forms, male and female.80 One illustration of the distinct differences between men and women occurred in 2013, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reduced by half the recommended dosage of the drug Ambien for women and not men. Studies showed that men and women metabolize the drug differently and the original dosage was remaining in women’s bloodstreams longer, which could cause problems such as impairing their ability to drive for a longer period.81
Larry Cahill, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine, admits that he used to believe men and women were fundamentally the same, apart from reproduction and sex hormones, but no longer.82 “The biomedical community has long operated on what is increasingly being viewed as a false assumption: that biological sex matters little, if at all, in most areas of medicine,” writes Cahill.83 Today’s biomedical research establishment, he explains, is changing but is still not properly accounting for the differences between men and women. This is partly because academia considered it distasteful to study sex differences in the brain.84 Feminist Gloria Steinem once proclaimed that it’s “anti-American, crazy thinking to do this kind of research.”85 Feminist attorney Gloria Allred said, “We take attacks from the media on our skills and our abilities and our talents and our dreams very seriously. This is not just entertainment. This is harmful and damaging to our daughters’ lives and to our mothers’ lives, and I’m very angry about it.”86
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