Disorder or Reality?

            Is transgenderism a reality or a disorder? Is it possible for a man to become a woman simply because he thinks that he is a woman? Is it possible for a short person to become tall by thinking they are tall? Is it possible for a white person to become colored – or a colored person to become white – simply by thinking? This author believe that transgenderism is a disorder and that all of the other questions should be answered with a firm “NO!”

            Daniel Trotta reports that a transgender woman – a man who wants to be a woman - recently won the right to sue her employer under the Americans with Disabilities Act – an act that excludes transgender people from protection. Kate Lynn Blatt is the first transgender person allowed to sue under this act. She is suing Cabela’s Inc., her former employer, for sex discrimination, claiming that she was denied the right to use the women’s restroom and forced her to use her male name on her name tag temporarily. Cabela’s says that she was fired because of a threat to a co-worker’s child.

            According to Trotta, the American Psychiatric Association does not consider being transgender to be a disorder even though it can lead to “gender dysphoria, a type of anxiety that may require medical treatment.” The basis of Blatt’s claim is gender dysphoria. U.S. District Judge Joseph Leeson “avoided ruling on the constitutionality of the ADA,” but he “found that simply being transgender would be insufficient to bring a case.” If being transgender became gender dysphoria, it would be “a medical condition worthy of protection against discrimination.”

            Almost two years ago Dr. Paul McHugh published an article titled Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme.” He says that he studied people who claim to be transgender for 40 years as the Psychiatrist in Chief of Johns Hopkins Hospital and as the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School. He says that transgenderism began as a rare issue but has become common in the past 10-15 years.

The champions of this meme, encouraged by their alliance with the broader LGBT movement, claim that whether you are a man or a woman, a boy or a girl is more of a disposition or feeling about yourself than a fact of nature. And, much like any other feeling, it can change at any time, and for all sorts of reasons. Therefore, no one could predict who would swap this fact of their makeup, nor could one justifiably criticize such a decision.

At Johns Hopkins, after pioneering sex-change surgery, we demonstrated that the practice brought no important benefits. As a result, we stopped offering that form of treatment in the 1970s. Our efforts, though, had little influence on the emergence of this new is idea about sex, or upon the expansion of the number of “transgendered” among young and old.

            Dr. McHugh says that sex changes “brought no important benefits” and should be stopped. He believes that gender dysphoria should be treated in much the same way that anorexia nervosa and body dysmorphic disorder are treated. He says that “treatment should not be directed at the body as with surgery and hormones [but] should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it.”

The larger issue is the meme itself. The idea that one’s sex is fluid and a matter open to choice runs unquestioned through our culture and is reflected everywhere in the media, the theater, the classroom, and in many medical clinics. It has taken on cult-like features: its own special lingo, internet chat rooms providing slick answers to new recruits, and clubs for easy access to dresses and styles supporting the sex change. It is doing much damage to families, adolescents, and children and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges.

            This author believes that transgenderism is a mental disorder that should be treated in a similar manner as any other psychological illness. This also believes that those people who promote transgenderism are doing a great disservice to individuals and society as a whole.

            Dr. Barry Starr at Stanford University claims that nothing can change a male to a female or vice versa and that the sex of individuals is determined at conception.

No amount of surgery, hormone injections or anything else will change someone’s DNA from a man’s to a woman’s (or vice versa).

As you know, for humans, sex is determined by the presence of a Y chromosome – humans with an X and a Y chromosome are male and those with two X chromosomes are female. No current (or probably future) technology can replace a chromosome in all of our trillions of cells.

In fact, it probably wouldn’t matter if they did. The genes on the Y chromosome sort of get the ball rolling for becoming a male. Once that has happened, the system can go on indefinitely….

So as you can see, with a sex change operation the underlying DNA stays whatever sex they started out with. The hormone injections, though, cause a different set of genes on the DNA to be turned on so that you get, for example, a male pattern of gene expression in someone who is XX.

            Sex is determined by the X chromosome, so sex cannot be changed without changing every chromosome in each cell of the body. Therefore, sex surgery and hormone injections may change how a person looks and acts, but it does not change the actual sex of the individual. This means that Dr. McHugh is correct in his assertion.

Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men. All … become feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they “identify.” In that lies their problematic future.

            The comments by Dr. McHugh and Dr. Starr explain why so many transgender people remain unhappy with their lives. They think that they are the opposite sex and do everything in their power to become that sex. Yet, when everything is said and done, they are the same sex with the hormones of the opposite sex raging through their bodies. This author believes that transgenderism is a mental disorder rather than a reality and should receive appropriate treatment without attempting to change the sex of the individual.