Awaiting the Transgender Backlash

Writing in The American Conservative Rod Dreher foresees a coming backlash against those who recommend and perform gender reassignment surgery. Today’s mental health professionals see gender dysphoria as a real condition: God made a mistake and put someone in the wrong body. Psycho professionals believe that surgery can solve the problem. Pretending that this is scientific fact, they persuade gullible and vulnerable young people to undergo the surgery, to take opposite sex hormones, and generally to ruin their lives. (via Maggie’s Farm)

Dreher recounts some stories from Sydney, Australia, stories of young people who have been tricked by the culture and their physicians into thinking that they are transgender, and into consenting to surgery that will purportedly cure them. The report comes from the Sydney Morning Herald. At times, they change their minds, sometimes when it’s too late. Dreher suggests that this will eventually be a boon for lawyers.

In fact, most researchers have discovered that a large majority of prepubescent transgendered young people change their minds. They have also discovered that among adults who have undergone the surgery, the incidence of suicide is somewhere around 20%.

Take the case of Andrew, a man who, while being wheeled into surgery told the surgeon to stop, that he had made a mistake, that he did not want to be mutilated. The surgeon ignored him, because scientists know best:

Andrew*, born male, was minutes away from an operation that would make him a woman. Psychiatrists said he had a female brain in a male body. Gender reassignment surgery was the only way to ease the mental torment he’d endured since adolescence.

But as the wheels squeaked towards the operating table he was struck by an unshakeable thought: “It’s not right.” He remembers telling the surgeon: “I think I’m doing the wrong thing, it’s not right, I think we’ve got to stop it.”

The surgeon stroked Andrew’s face, telling him it was natural to feel frightened before an operation. He protested again, insisting it felt wrong. Then it went black. When he woke up he was sure the surgery had been cancelled. The romantic tales he’d read of transsexuals who awoke post-surgery feeling “reborn” convinced Andrew the operation had been halted, because he felt no different.

“Then I remember lifting up the sheets and putting my hand down and feeling it all bandaged and packed. I just started bawling my eyes out and screaming … I remember saying to myself, you f–king idiot, Andrew, how could you be so bloody stupid?”

Twenty years after surgery that left him feeling like a “desexed dog”, the grief can still overwhelm him. Now 42, Andrew tells The Sunday Age the operation he had as a confused 21-year-old has shattered him.

Andrew was suffering from mental torment. Many of those who declare themselves transgender have also been traumatized as children. One recalls an 8-year-old girl who had been molested and who decided that if she were a boy she would never be molested again. Ergo, she decided that she would be a boy. 

One also understands that many transgendered children are in fact gay. When they feel yearnings for members of the same sex, they decide that they must have been born in the wrong body. In Iran, I am told, where gender reassignment surgery is popular, a gay person will need to choose between gender reassignment and execution. As you know, in Iran, homosexuality is a capital offense, punishable by hanging.

Another patient, a woman, consulted at the same clinic as Andrew. She was quickly diagnosed as transgender and prescribed male hormones:

Another former patient, Angela*, was also an abused child. Sexually molested by a cousin between the ages of four and nine, she grew up hating her femininity.

She recalls punching her breasts and working out obsessively at the gym to "remove anything that reminded me I was female". She was a 22-year-old university student when she was referred to the clinic by her GP, depressed and struggling with her identity. Dr Kennedy diagnosed her as transsexual at the first assessment, prescribing her male hormones and suggesting female-to-male surgery.

Within months Angela's body was covered in thick hair, her voice deepened and she had a full beard. She had to shave under the covers every morning to hide the truth from her conservative Catholic parents. Two years later she had surgery to remove both breasts and was scheduled to have a full sex change. Angela could no longer conceal the truth from her family and began living as "David". Thankfully, she says, she realised there had been a mistake before undergoing full genital surgery.

"I remember at one point looking at myself in the mirror with this beard, my breasts gone and thinking, 'Oh my God, what the hell am I going to do?' … I felt ugly. I was the classic bearded woman, a monster trapped between two worlds."

She claims her pleas for help were also ignored by the clinic and her return to life as a woman was a nightmare that involved two years of painful electrolysis to get rid of facial and body hair and surgery to reconstruct her breasts.

Again, sexual abuse led a child to think that it would be better to be of the opposite sex. Again, this child received only the most cursory evaluation and a psychiatrist who was promoting the transgender agenda had her take testosterone supplements. The clinic ignored her pleas, but Angela was able to reverse the process, to marry and to have three children.

Research has shown that the surgery is rarely helpful at all. The Sydney Morning Herald reports:

But what worries other psychiatrists is the mounting evidence that surgery may not actually improve the lives of those who feel they were born with the wrong body. A review of more than 100 international studies of post-operative transsexuals by the University of Birmingham found there was no scientific evidence that surgery was effective and, in many cases, patients were left feeling more distressed. Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University — which housed one of the pioneer gender clinics — no longer performs sex-change surgery due to such concerns.

A recent British review found suicide rates of up to 18 per cent among people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery. Doctors from London's Portman Clinic say they see many patients who feel trapped in "no-man's land" after surgery, finding themselves with a body which is no longer recognisable as male or female. Psychotherapy, the experts believe, may have saved them from such a fate but few gender clinics offer it.

Dare we mention that psychotherapy is highly unlikely to help patients who have been mistreated and abused by the medical profession.

Angela’s husband suggests that those who feel that they are transgender really feel the feeling. He suggests that the condition resembles those anorexics who declare that they feel fat. Of course, with anorexics we understand that their illness is talking, and that the illness has overwhelmed their minds. We would not deprive them of food because they genuinely feel fat.

Transgenderism is a belief. While some medical professionals insist that they can find an errant gene that can explain the condition, it feels more like the product of brainwashing than of a biological condition. One can only hope, with Dreher, that the physicians who are engaged in this ugly abuse will soon find themselves being sued for everything they have. If not thrown into prison.