"Gender Reassignment" Doesn't Help, It Actually Hurts

Another quick thought to follow-up on my blogsplosion yesterday. This is a letter published in the Wall Street Journal from Dr. Paul McHugh, Transgender Surgery Isn't the Solution. Dr. McHugh is the "former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital" so he kind of knows what he is talking about. The narrative today is that by denying "transgenders" the "right" to seek gender "reassignment" surgery we are somehow harming them by not allowing them to pursue their desires, and thus by not allowing them to serve in the military and have Uncle Sam pay for it we are denying basic human rights to "transgenders" and making our country "less safe" according to a lot of Democrat politicians. How did we ever defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy without sailors in drag? The narrative is the same old standby, the benevolent, compassionate and wise liberals are trying to help people spread their wings and fly and those mean, old, probably either rich or living in a trailer park, certainly White and Christian and male, conservatives are trying to keep anyone else from enjoying their lives.

This is nonsense.

Someone with gender dysphoria is not someone who just needs to have their genitals lopped off and they will be fine. They are mentally ill. We have always understood this. Why do you think Corporal Klinger in MASH was dressing in drag? Because he knew that was a sign of mental illness and he wanted a Section 8 so he could go home. He wasn't really a "transgender" nor was he an activist for gender "reassignment". He was a regular guy pretending to be crazy so he could go home. We understood this when I was growing up but now that we are so "enlightened" in 2017 we can't seem to grasp that a man who wants to act like and look like a woman is suffering from a mental illness.

It turns out, to the shock of no one with an ounce of common sense, that giving them what they think they need, gender "reassignment" surgery, aka mutilation, actually seems to make things worse:

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into "sex-reassignment surgery"—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as "satisfied" by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn't have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a "satisfied" but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.

Shocking, I know. This was posted in 2016 but originally appeared in 2014. A whole, whopping three years ago. A lot has changed, I would imagine this sort of statement would get you censored and perhaps lead to your medical license being revoked today. Read the whole thing because it is powerful.

They are not committing suicide because people are intolerant or because Trump is President. I have to believe they are killing themselves because they convinced themselves, aided by medical malpractice from "doctors" and psychiatrists, that they needed to become the opposite gender and everything would be better but once they mutilated themselves it wasn't better and now they are hopeless. If I thought mutilating the image of God I was born with would make me feel better and then after I did so I was no better off, I would quite honestly be suicidal too. I don't say that to be cute or flippant, believe me I understand mental illness and hopelessness all too well.

Gender "reassignment" surgery is akin to gastric bypass surgery for a teenaged girl with an eating disorder. She thinks she is fat even though she weighs 90 pounds and really wants to be able to eat even less to be thinner so of course we should fulfill her desire and perform a procedure so she can hold even less in her stomach, as opposed to therapy to help her be happy with her body as it is. For someone with gender dysphoria the problem is not with their genitals or body hair. It is in their head. Trying to "fix" the problem by mutilating the body that they hate just makes things worse. This is absolutely simple common sense that even a few years ago would not have been questioned by any modestly serious person.

This issue is compounded by parents who encourage gender dysphoria in their children and even insist on gender "reassignment" surgery for them. Dr. McHugh addressed that issue with an interesting statistic:

You won't hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.

So something like 3/4 of these kids outgrew this confusion. 3 out of 4! With that information, an actual doctor who swore the Hippocratic Oath is still eager to slice and dice a child's body? Dermatologists presumably don't recommend radical skin treatments for general cases of teen acne because they grow out of it but "doctors" will permanently, radically and sinfully maul a child's body when it is shown that such surgery makes the mental illness worse and in around 75% of the cases it isn't even a serious mental condition at all because they grow out of it like bed wetting and thumb sucking. You don't give a kid a colostomy bag because they wet the bed and you don't hack off their thumbs to stop kids from sucking them. How a person is at 7 or 8 or even in their teen years is not who they will end up being as an adult. That is Parenting 101.

Growing up can be a confusing time for anyone as your body changes and hormones kick in, so trying to make lifelong decisions based on the feelings of a confused kid who doesn't quite grasp what is happening with their body when over 70% grow out of it later is not science. It is not medicine. It is not compassion. It is child abuse. I don't use that word lightly but what else can you call a parent signing off on the mutilation of their child's sex organs? Do you think maybe a confused 10 year old boy that has his sexual organs cut off by some quack who finds himself (and he will always be a him) now unable to have a normal relationship or father children when he is 30 might possible have some serious mental issues compounding what might already be there? It is obscene and heartbreaking that little boys and girls who are understandably confused in our incredibly confusing culture have their parents, who are supposed to guide and raise them up, instead agree to mutilate their child in a bid to seem like a "loving" and progressive parent, or perhaps to draw attention to themselves.

Too many people are playing politics with the mental health of people suffering from a serious medical condition and it isn't Republicans for the most part. Don't buy into the story that opposition to gender "reassignment" surgery and transgenderism is a failure to be loving and compassionate. It is the opposite. There is no more loving act than to reaffirm to someone who is confused that they are made in the image of God precisely as He intended and to encourage that person to seek to glorify God in the body and gender God create them with. Encouraging someone to pretend to be a different gender or to commit a heinous act of mutilation or to defile themselves by homosexual acts is not compassionate or loving.

It is evil. 

Don't ever be afraid or intimidated into not calling evil what God has declared to be evil. By all means love the person struggling with transgender confusion or homosexuality or any sin but never, ever confuse affirming their sin for love.