When Harry Became Sally – Responding to the Transgender Movement
Ryan T. Anderson
It is well researched and written, with a great mixture of theory and practice. I was particularly moved by the personal testimonies of those who have been harmed by the current trans fad amongst the governing elites. They are heartbreaking.
Before any lawmakers, just following the fashion, pass any further laws on changing gender and adopting the whole concept of gender fluidity – they should read this book. (In my own country I hope every MSP will read this before passing the Scottish Governments mad gender self-identity proposals – if you baulk at my description of it being ‘state sponsored child abuse’, then read this book for the evidence. Of course the way the militant trans activists conduct themselves I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to get it banned – so get your copy now. It will enlighten, inform and sadden you. It will also make you glad that someone with brains and sanity has their finger on the pulse of what is going on!
As usual I take highlights out of books – but this one is so good I have over 90 – so I have reduced them down to the highlights of the highlights. Better still get the book for yourself. Read and weep – for surely we are heading down a dark and dangerous path. May we come to our senses as a society before any more young people and children are harmed.
- Biology is not Bigotry
- Transgender ideology is self-contradictory
- Its politically incorrect and dangerous to oppose the Trans ideologues
- Transgender procedures do more harm than good.
- Transgender ideology is changing and harming the medical and psychiatric professions
- Transgender ideologues seek to use the education system to indoctrinate their ideology.
- Transgender ideology is unscientific and irrational
- Transgender ideology is based on a false and dangerous understanding of gender
- Transgender ideology harms feminism and women
- Transgender ideology harms children
- Transgender ideology must be opposed and defeated – for the good of all of us.
David Robertson
1) Biology Isn’t Bigotry
The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality, and of gender as a social manifestation of bodily sex. Biology isn’t bigotry. Every human society has been organized around a recognition that men and women are different, and modern science shows that the differences begin with our DNA and development in the womb.
2) The Self Contradictions of Transgender Dogma
Activists tend to be uncompromising in their demands, yet their worldview is fraught with contradictions. It holds that the real self is fundamentally separate from the material body, yet insists that transforming the body is crucial for personal wholeness. It attaches a notion of authentic gender identity to stereotypical activities and dispositions, yet it grows from a philosophy holding that gender is an artificial construct. It promotes a radical subjectivity in which individuals should be free to do whatever they wish and to define the truth as they choose, yet it calls for enforced conformity of belief in transgender dogma.
A CNN report on the subject in 2016 said that gender identity and expression “can change every day or even every few hours,” and this fluidity “can be displayed in how we dress, express and describe ourselves.” Moreover, it added, “Everyone’s gender exists on a spectrum.”
3) It’s Politically Incorrect and Dangerous to oppose the Trans ideologues
But it’s better to be correct than politically correct where human lives are concerned.
But Time was judged guilty of using “a simplistic and outdated understanding of biology to perpetuate some very dangerous ideas about trans women,” and failing to acknowledge that biological sex “isn’t something we’re actually born with, it’s something that doctors or our parents assign us at birth.”
4) Transgender Procedures do more harm that good.
The institution was a forerunner in offering sex reassignment procedures, largely due to John Money, a professor of medical psychology at Johns Hopkins University who in the 1960s advanced a radical notion that gender is only a social construct without any real connection to biology. Indeed, Money appears to have been the first person to use the term “gender” in this way in the academic literature. He famously claimed to have helped a family successfully raise their twin sons as brother and sister after a botched circumcision destroyed one boy’s penis. Money presented this case, along with findings from his work with “intersex” children, as proof that infants aren’t born with a specific gender and that any child might be raised as either a boy or a girl (perhaps with medical assistance). In reality, the young boy raised as a girl always felt that something was wrong, despite all the hormones and surgery and social conditioning he was subjected to. When he was fourteen, his parents told him the truth. Both twins took their own lives in their mid-thirties. Yet Money never backed away from his radical claims.
After studying the evidence, McHugh decided that sex change surgery was bad medicine and was “fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.” Psychiatrists, he thought, could better help patients with gender dysphoria by “trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
This is a real outcome of transition. I’m a real live 22 year old woman with a scarred chest and a broken voice and 5 o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman. That’s my reality.
One study from 2011, for example, found suicide rates for people who have transitioned that are nineteen times higher than those of the general population.
A study done in 2014 found that 41 percent of people who identify as transgender will attempt suicide at some point in their lives, compared with 4.6 percent of the general population. Suicide attempts do not spring from nowhere, and people who identify as transgender are more likely to suffer from conditions that too often lead to suicide: depression, anxiety disorders, and substance abuse. These problems do not seem to be alleviated much by sex reassignment procedures. While those measures may bring temporary satisfaction, as we saw in the stories of detransitioners, they do not tend to promote long-term mental health. The poor outcomes can’t be blamed on a hostile or bigoted society, since they are reported even in the cultures most accepting of people who identify as transgender. It is true that transgender individuals face discrimination and other kinds of social stress, but the research doesn’t show these factors to be solely or chiefly responsible for the relatively poor mental health of transgender subpopulations.
5) Transgender Ideology is changing and harming the medical and psychiatric professions
A postmodern worldview is changing medicine from a profession that restores health and wholeness, into a set of techniques to provide customers with what they desire.
Truth tellers and healers are being punished by government and by society. In several states, McHugh points out, “a doctor who would look into the psychological history of a transgendered boy or girl in search of a resolvable conflict could lose his or her license to practice medicine,” but there is no penalty for putting such a patient on drugs to block puberty, which may cause a host of problems.
I want to ask you, how many other medical conditions are there where you can walk into the doctor’s office, tell them you have a certain condition, which has no objective test, which can be caused by trauma or mental health issues or societal factors, and receive life-altering medications on your say-so?
When we step back from contentious political debates, we can see scientists acknowledging what might otherwise be an unpopular truth: that there are biological differences between men and women, and they are consequential for our health. Recognizing differences between the sexes is increasingly regarded as vitally important for good medical practice, because scientists have found that male and female bodies tend to be susceptible to certain diseases in different ways, to differing degrees, and they respond to treatments differently. For this reason, the best research protocols now require that both males and females be included in samples, and that the sex of participants be tracked so that any sex-specific results can be recorded.
In all cases, the starting point is to recognize that feelings are not the same as reality. “Psychiatrists obviously must challenge the solipsistic concept that what is in the mind cannot be questioned,” says McHugh. “Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry’s domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field.” He’s right. Mental health professionals must not simply help people survive with whatever beliefs they happen to hold, but help people accept the truth, as they work through the deeper issues beneath the false beliefs.
Unfortunately, many professionals now view health care in general, and mental health care in particular, as primarily a matter of fulfilling a patient’s desires. In the words of Leon Kass, a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, today a doctor is often regarded as merely “a highly competent hired syringe”: The implicit (and sometimes explicit) model of the doctor-patient relationship is one of contract: the physician—a highly competent hired syringe, as it were—sells his services on demand, restrained only by the law (though he is free to refuse his services if the patient is unwilling or unable to meet his fee). Here’s the deal: for the patient, autonomy and service; for the doctor, money, graced by the pleasure of giving the patient what he wants. If a patient wants to fix her nose or change his gender, determine the sex of unborn children, or take euphoriant drugs just for kicks, the physician can and will go to work—provided that the price is right and that the contract is explicit about what happens if the customer isn’t satisfied.
Whereas the law forbids discrimination on the basis of sex, HHS redefined the word “sex” to mean “gender identity,” without legal authority to do so. Medical professionals and health-care organizations would thus be penalized for believing—as a matter of faith, moral conviction, or professional judgment—that maleness and femaleness are biological realities to be respected, not defects to be corrected.
6) Transgender Ideologists seek to use the education system to indoctrinate their ideology
Activists are particularly intent on promoting their policy agenda in schools, with serious consequences not only for students’ privacy and safety, but also for their development: for what is taught about biological sex and gender identity, and for whether children with gender dysphoria will be helped or harmed.
In the case of gender dysphoria, unfortunately, the mistaken belief is often encouraged by school counselors who, “rather like cult leaders, may encourage these young people to distance themselves from their families and offer advice on rebutting arguments against having transgender surgery.” What these young people need is to be removed from this “suggestive environment” and be presented with a different message. The proliferation of gender clinics in America and gender identity programs in the schools makes it less likely that children will get the help they need to work out their issues. Instead, they find “gender counselors” who encourage them to maintain their false assumptions.
Schools are a major front in this campaign, as we saw earlier in the guidelines produced by the National Education Association and the ACLU along with various LGBT groups. The aim of protecting students who identify as transgender from bullying and respecting their dignity is reasonable in itself, but that’s not what these policies are about. They’re about a larger program of indoctrination in gender ideology.
7) Transgender ideology is unscientific and irrational
At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims. Trans ideologues ignore contrary evidence and competing interests; they disparage alternative practices; and they aim to muffle skeptical voices and shut down any disagreement. The movement has to keep patching and shoring up its beliefs, policing the faithful, coercing the heretics and punishing apostates, because as soon as its furious efforts flag for a moment or someone successfully stands up to it, the whole charade is exposed. That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths. A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.
In all cases, the starting point is to recognize that feelings are not the same as reality. “Psychiatrists obviously must challenge the solipsistic concept that what is in the mind cannot be questioned,” says McHugh. “Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry’s domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field.” He’s right. Mental health professionals must not simply help people survive with whatever beliefs they happen to hold, but help people accept the truth, as they work through the deeper issues beneath the false beliefs.
The first observation to make about the outcome of sex reassignment surgery is that it doesn’t actually reassign sex. Cosmetic surgery and cross-sex hormones don’t change the deeper biological reality, which begins with our DNA and fetal development, unfolding in every bodily system.
“Transgendered men do not become women, nor do transgendered women become men” through hormones and surgery, Dr. McHugh emphasizes. Instead, they become “feminized men or masculinized women, counterfeits or impersonators of the sex with which they ‘identify.’” Their future is problematic, since it is “not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb.
Things are even more opaque when people claim a gender identity at odds with their biological sex. This raises metaphysical questions concerning what it could mean to “be” a man in a woman’s body, and epistemological questions concerning how a man could know what it is to “feel” like a woman. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel argued back in 1974, no one (other than a bat) can answer the question “What is it like to be a bat?” So, can a man know what it feels like to be a woman? Or vice versa? It is impossible to know experientially what it is like to be something one is not. The claim of a biological male that he is “a woman stuck in a man’s body” presupposes that someone who has a man’s body, a man’s brain, a man’s sexual capacities, and a man’s DNA can know what it is like to be a woman. As many feminists have pointed out, no biological male can really experience what it is like to be a woman, for males can have no embodied female experiences. Many of the claims made by transgender activists seem therefore to rely on stereotypes of what “real” men and women are like, of male versus female preferences and interests.
8) Transgender Ideology is based on a false and dangerous understanding of gender
A week before the Karen Pence profile ran in the Post, a columnist for the Daily Telegraph wrote an op-ed titled “It should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mum.” Sarrah Le Marquand argued that feminism shouldn’t be about giving women choices, but rather about making women equal to men, with “equal” understood as acting the same—regardless of what any woman might want. Le Marquand is willing to tolerate moms staying home for the first couple of years in a child’s life, but she isn’t willing to tolerate that choice when children are old enough to attend school, and she wants her preference to be enforced by law. “Rather than wail about the supposed liberation in a woman’s right to choose to shun paid employment,” she wrote, “we should make it a legal requirement that all parents of children of school-age or older are gainfully employed.”
Sex is a bodily, biological reality, and gender is how we give social expression to that reality. Gender properly understood is a social manifestation of human nature, springing forth from biological realities, though shaped by rational and moral choice. Human beings are creatures of nature and of culture, but a healthy culture does not attempt to erase our nature as male or female embodied beings. Instead, it promotes the integrity of persons, in part by cultivating manifestations of sex differences that correspond to biological facts. It supports gender expressions that reveal and communicate the reality of our sexual nature.
Simone de Beauvoir inaugurated this line of thinking in The Second Sex (1949). Recall these memorable lines from the book: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
9) Transgender Ideology harms feminism and women
Gender identity access polices will make girls more vulnerable to sex crimes and very possibly more reluctant to report them.
In Seattle, a man used a women’s locker room at a public swimming pool to undress in front of young girls who were changing for swim practice. When staff asked him to leave, the man said: “the law has changed and I have a right to be here.”
In a report for the Heritage Foundation, Melody Wood and I documented over 130 examples of men charged with using bathroom, locker room, and shower access to target women for voyeurism and sexual assault. Intimate facilities are already places where woman can feel unsafe, so why remove essential safeguards?
For the first time, progressive and conservative women have come together to challenge the notion that gender is the same as sex. We are radical feminists, lesbians, Christians and conservatives that are tabling our ideological differences to stand in solidarity against gender identity legislation, which we have come to recognize as the erasure of our own hard-won civil rights. As the Hands Across the Aisle Coalition, we are committed to working together, rising above our differences, and leveraging our collective resources to oppose the transgender agenda.
My driving goal in life is making the world a better place for girls and women, the people who are oppressed globally on the basis of female biological sex. These people are aborted in the womb or smothered to death as infants because they have vulvas. They are sold in childhood to men as sex and breeding slaves and the world calls it “child marriage.” They perform countless hours of uncompensated labor and are treated as servants by men of all cultures. They are trafficked as commodities in the global prostitution and surrogacy industries. They go to jail for suspicious miscarriages. They are criminalized for having home births and for extended breastfeeding. They suffer court-ordered forced caesareans. The list goes on and on. Transgender ideology tells us there is no such thing as biological sex and robs us of our ability to name the class of people who suffer sex-based oppression. If we cannot name a phenomenon, we certainly cannot fight it. Gender ideology is harmful to women and girls.
10) Transgender Ideology harms children
But there is no reliable scientific evidence to support the view that professionals can actually know whether a child will persist in a transgender identity into adulthood.
The use of any experimental medical treatment on children calls for “especially intense scrutiny,” they emphasize, “since children cannot provide legal consent to medical treatment of any kind . . . to say nothing of consenting to become research subjects for testing an unproven therapy.” The rapid acceptance of puberty suppression as a treatment for gender dysphoria with little scientific scrutiny should raise concerns about the welfare of the children who receive this treatment. In particular, we should question the claim that it is both physiologically and psychologically “reversible.”
There is no such thing as generic “parenting.” There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both. While many mothers and many fathers have raised children alone out of necessity, and have done so successfully, it remains true that mothers and fathers bring different strengths to the task.
The rate of teenage pregnancy is far lower among girls who have had a father at home throughout their childhood and adolescence than among those whose father has left the home sometime before they turn eighteen, and this effect is greater the longer a father sticks around.
The best sociological evidence available, controlling for other factors including poverty and even genetics, indicates that both boys and girls fare best on virtually every indicator examined—educational achievement, emotional health, familial and sexual development, and delinquency—when they are raised by their wedded biological parents.
11) Transgender Ideology must be opposed and defeated
Children need our protection and guidance as they navigate the challenges of growing into adulthood. We need medical professionals who will help them mature in harmony with their bodies, rather than deploy experimental treatments to refashion their bodies. And we need a culture that cultivates a sound understanding of gender and how it is rooted in biology, a culture that respects our differences without imposing restrictive stereotypes.
A healthy society would recognize a mother’s preference to care for her child not only as her personal wish but as what’s best for her child and for society.
12) We must be tolerant and loving towards those who struggle with their gender identity
We should be tolerant—indeed, loving—toward those who struggle with their gender identity, but also be aware of the harm done to the common good, particularly to children, when transgender identity is normalized
Religious leaders can contribute to these efforts in various ways. They’ll need to provide pastoral care to people struggling with their gender identity, to people who have transitioned, and to their families and communities. Pastors will need to teach their flocks the truth about the human person, male and female. They can do this by drawing from reason and revelation, philosophy and theology, psychology and biology. In addition to the resources and talents they already possess, they’ll need education specifically in gender identity issues.
Thrown to the Wolves – What happens when you dare to question the Trans agenda.