Transmania, Part Deux

Hacsi Horvath believed that he was a woman. He took hormones that were supposed to bring out his true womanhood. He did it for thirteen years. Eventually, he stopped and returned to maleness.

Now, Horvath is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California at San Francisco. That means—he does not have a full time faculty position.  He has some professional and personal expertise in the matter of transgenderism and exposes many of the problem with the current wave of transmania. See yesterday's post.

He has written a long and detailed exposition of the facts and myths about transgenderism. For those who are especially interested in the phenomenon, I recommend it highly. For now I will merely excerpt some of the highlights.

Horvath begins by recounting his personal experience:

For about 13 years, I also masqueraded “as a woman,” taking medical measures which suggest, shall we say, that I was completely committed to that lifestyle. Most men would have recoiled from this, but in my estrogen-drug-soaked stupor it seemed like a good idea. In 2013 I stopped taking estrogen for health reasons and very rapidly came back to my senses. I ceased all effort to convey the impression that I was a woman and carried on with life.

He is one of the happy few. For other children and for the culture at large the results have been less happy:

I am not a happy camper. I have been badly harmed. However–as a father myself–I am far angrier that thousands of young people are being irreversibly altered and sterilized as they are inducted into a drug-dependent and medically-maimed lifestyle. I’m furious that women and girls are being steamrolled by trans activists into accepting any man who claims to be a woman in sex-segregated changing rooms, prisons, shelters, women’s sports, and elsewhere. If any man can simply announce that he’s a woman, then what is a woman?

Given the cultural atmosphere, physicians are not allowed to doubt a child’s assertion that he or she belongs to the opposite sex. At times they even impose the diagnosis before the child has had a chance to declare it himself. Said physicians hand out hormone drugs indiscriminately:

Costume change, with or without cosmetic surgery, is an ineffective means of changing sex. Indeed, changing sex is impossible. “Transition” is thus mostly concerned with personality expression and receiving (in my view) unnecessary medical care. It can begin almost at a moment’s notice. In the US, self-diagnosed adolescent and adult GD patients may even receive prescriptions for cross-sex synthetic hormone drugs on the day of their first clinical visit.

I have suggested that many of those who become transgender are really denying their homosexual inclinations. Now, apparently, as I have feared, other children are being thrown into the transgender basket by an industry that is designed to produce it. Horvath says that there is now a factory farm to produce transgenderism. Or better, that is designed to diagnose transgenderism as a common fix to a variety of psychological problems:

The biggest risk factor for continued large increases in GD may be the normalization of what has become common practice: that people with a variety of problems in life, or even just confusion, should be able to self-diagnose as trans, be celebrated and congratulated as such, and then turned into permanent patients. In North America and the United Kingdom, and perhaps in other settings, even children’s schools seem to operate as factory farms for transgenderism, with a pseudoscientific curriculum that disseminates transgender ideology.

As has been known for some time now, children who announce as transgender most often change their minds upon reaching puberty. The transgender lobby refuses to allow such a change of mind, so they are now prescribing puberty-blocking drugs to eight and nine year olds:

This means that even though young children nearly always desist from believing they are the opposite sex, socially transitioned kids are much more likely to begin puberty-blocking drugs at age 8 or 9, and then carry on with the rest of the complex medicalized transition process. If parents make any objection or refuse to “affirm” their child’s plan, they are shamed and belittled as “transphobes.” In some instances, parents can even be prosecuted and have their children taken away by the government.

Girls as young as twelve or thirteen are subjected to a double mastectomy, a mutilation that the physicians believe can be “reversed” with silicon:

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles is a prominent affirmative care physician. Earlier this year at a gender conference, she described radical mastectomy outcomes in gender-confused girls as young as age 13. She doubled-down on this affront to Hippocrates by suggesting that if teen girls later regretted the loss of their breasts, they could “go and get” new breasts, suggesting that breast implants would make them as good as new. There has been a tremendous surge over the past decade in girls and young women presenting to gender clinics (Zucker 2017, Littman 2018), and Olson-Kennedy says she has personally ushered more than 1100 of them into the medicalized trans lifestyle. In a 2018 paper, she recommends referring girls for this “top surgery” first, and only afterwards prescribing testosterone – thus removing the option for what might have been a little more time to think through this irreversible decision (Olson-Kennedy, 2018).

Taking opposite-sex hormones comports a serious medical risk:

Cross-sex hormone drugs have a drastic effect on the body and carry serious health risks. Notwithstanding this, UCSF’s guidelines suggest that almost anyone is qualified to prescribe a lifelong regimen of the drugs – even physician assistants, naturopathic providers (!) and nurse midwives. It is unclear why the MTF author of these guidelines, Dr. Madeline Deutsch, who trained as an emergency room physician, thought this would be wise. A healthy endocrine system’s ecological balance can easily be thrown into chaos – which is what happens when one takes cross-sex hormones anyway.

Horvath has provided a useful and valuable and detailed study of the current transmania. It is well worth a read.