The Truth About Transgenderism and “gender-reassigment” Surgery

If you’re contemplating major surgery, for your own interest and well being, it’s a good idea to:

Get a second opinion.
Do some research on your surgeon and, if in doubt, find another surgeon.
Don’t depend on what the doctor tells you. God created us with a mind. Use it! With the ubiquity of information now available on the Internet, there is no excuse not to undertake your own research on whether that major surgery will actually cure or ameliorate whatever that ails you.

Given the above entirely sensible counsel, isn’t it strange that the media and pop culture, in their push for transgenderism, never tell you the risks of “gender-reassignment” surgery or whether post-surgery transgenders actually are happy?

Bruce Jenner, poster-child of transgender propaganda

In a recent commentary in the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, and author of six books and at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles, reported on a 2011 study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people.

The study was at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, which followed 324 people after they’d had sex-reassignment surgery for up to 30 years. The study showed that about 10 years after the surgery, transgendered people began to have increased mental difficulties. As they progressed through life, their suicide mortality rose almost 20 times above the comparable nontransgender population. McHugh points to the data as evidence that the high suicide rate trumps the typical surgery prescription propagated by many as the answer to gender confusion.

Dr. McHugh explains that transgender surgery is not the solution for people who suffer a “disorder of ‘assumption’” – the notion that their maleness or femaleness is different than what nature assigned to them biologically, much like other amorphic disorders, such as anorexia. The difference is that body parts are not amputated in an effort to “cure” other assumption disorders.

Dr. McHugh says, “This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.” The transgendered person’s disorder is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight.”

While the Obama administration, Hollywood, and major media such as Time magazine promote transgenderism as normal, Dr. McHugh says these “policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention.”

In truth, although the surgery is called “gender reassignment,” the surgery does no such thing. After all the torturous body mutilations — shaving off the Adam’s apple; castrating the penis and testicles, or chopping off the breasts; gouging a hole as a pretend-vagina that must be “dilated” until the wound eventually scars over — the transgender’s body is still genetically and chromosomally what God had made.

That is why, like Dr. McHugh, psychiatrist Joseph Berger, M.D., board certified as a specialist by both the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, has stated there is no scientific basis for transgender.

In a statement against the Canadian federal government’s Bill C-279 (popularly known as the “bathroom bill”) giving special protection to transgenders, Dr. Berger stated that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a “transgendered” person, and that terms such as “gender expression” and “gender identity” used in the bill are at the very least ambiguous, and are more an emotional appeal than a statement of objective scientific fact. Dr. Berger said in his statement:

“I have read the brief put forward by those advocating special rights, and I find nothing of scientific value in it. Words and phrases, such as ‘the inner space,’ are used that have no objective scientific basis. There seems to me to be no medical or scientific reason to grant any special rights or considerations to people who are unhappy with the sex they were born into, or to people who wish to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex. The so-called ‘confusion’ about their sexuality that a teenager or adult has is purely psychological. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else in Canada.”

In other words, transgenderism is a psychological, not biological, disorder, which would explain why gender dysphoria (aka gender identity disorder) fluctuates over time —

For children: Dr. McHugh notes that studies from Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic of children who had expressed transgender feelings but for whom, over time, 70%-80% “spontaneously lost those feelings.” Indeed, Toronto specialist Ken Zucker, who opposes the use of sex change therapies, also asserts that only about 12% of boys and girls with gender dysphoria will still have persistent dysphoria as adults. This fact alone should lead even the most committed supporters of early intervention to err strongly on the side of caution.
For adults: More compelling than the malleability of transgender feelings among children is the recovery data of adult transgenders. Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic found that 70% to 80% of adult transgenders who had refrained from undergoing gender-reassignment surgery report that their feelings dissipate over time. In other words, the transgender disorder has a recovery rate of as high as 70-80%!

Johns Hopkins ended their sexual reassignment surgery in 1970 for the above reasons, but there is little in the news about that.

McHugh says that “given that close to 80% of such children would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated, these medical interventions come close to abuse.” He recommends a prescription of devoted parenting instead.

McHugh adds that just as it is incumbent upon the medical community to begin to speak about truth on this matter, it is equally incumbent upon the mental health community to challenge the concept that what is in the mind can never be questioned. “Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry’s domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field.”

But that is exactly what states like Massachusetts, California and New Jersey have already done by passing laws barring psychiatrists and other mental health professionals from trying to help “transgendered” children to regain their natural gender feelings, even upon parental request. Instead, psychiatrists are told to refer these children to endocrinologists to prescribe gender bending/gender delaying hormone treatments that do not address the child’s psychological disorder.

These hormones have other physical side effects, too, such as delayed growth, sterility and more.

Dr. Judith Reisman told WND: “They simply reject the factual data. Goebbels said that if you repeat a lie often enough, soon everyone is repeating it, too. That is what has happened. Fact checking seems to be a way of the past.”

H/t FOTM’s MomOfIV