The Science of Transgenderism

The report deserves attention. Doubtless, it will receive very little. Or better, it will only receive the most hostile attention, from those who would punish eminent scientists Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh for doing a close examination of the science of transgenderism.

Considering that the nation, as a whole, has bought into the notion that your gender is what you believe it is, not what your genitalia say it is and not what your chromosomes assert, this study will—in fact, it already has—elicit unbridled hostility and calls for punishing the bigots who produced it.

If so, science itself is bigoted. Or, if you prefer, God is a bigot.  In the great battle between science and ideology, we are now told that science must yield to ideology.

As it happens, the evidence does not support or sustain the politically correct dogma about the transgendered. Therefore, it must be ignored.

For the purposes of this blog, I will merely examine the summary conclusions of an extensive and well-researched report.

Beginning with this:

The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported by scientific evidence.

And this also leads to the correlate: you cannot identify transgender individuals by their brain structure:

Studies comparing the brain structures of transgender and non-transgender individuals have demonstrated weak correlations between brain structure and cross-gender identification. These correlations do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identification.

The following point has been made before. Gender reassignment surgery does not solve the mental health issues. In many cases, it aggravates them:

Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.

It has often been noted, here and elsewhere, that giving hormone treatments to a child to stop puberty is a form of child abuse. Given the very high percentage of children who change their minds about their gender, it is exemplary in its cruelty. One cannot express sufficient horror at the fact that our culture is telling us that such hormone treatments are a good thing to do.

The authors conclude:

Children are a special case when addressing transgender issues. Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.

 There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents, although some children may have improved psychological well-being if they are encouraged and supported in their cross-gender identification. There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.

The notion that children are actually encouraged to become transgendered boggles the mind. And yet, Mayer and McHugh do not represent mainstream mental health thinking. Their views, however sensible, are most often dismissed as pure bigotry.