Transmanian Devils

By Richard Saunders

According to a Swedish study, those who have been sickened, maimed and sterilized by transgender treatments need long-term “psychiatric follow-up.” But for young people tempted by transgender hell, it’s illegal in 18 states for them to get psychiatric help beforehand. Will Utah become state number 19?

I see him once or twice a week as I make my daily Front Runner commute to and from work. He has grown out his hair, and he typically wears makeup, a bra and a dress complemented by something no woman would ever wear—men’s boots. And yet, he apparently considers himself, or at least wants to be, a woman.
But a woman he is not, nor ever will be. That is biologically impossible. At best, he will eventually grow out of his gender dysphoria. At worst, he will become a mutilated man who, like an increasing number of people in the “trans community,” will live to regret any life-altering surgery or chemical regimen he undergoes.

He does not need affirmation. He does not need encouragement. He does not need praise. What he needs is compassion and therapy. And yet Rep. Craig Hall and the Utah Psychologist Licensing Board would deny him that help. According to a proposed rule drafted by the licensing board, “unprofessional” psychological conduct could soon include “engaging in or attempting to engage in the practice of sexual-orientation change efforts or gender identity change efforts with a client who is less than 18 years old.” Psychologists violating the rule could lose their license.

In other words, Utah parents would no longer be able to seek therapy for their children suffering from gender dysphoria. According to the licensing board, such therapy can “risk harm” and is “contrary to the ethical principles and standards of our profession; chief among these ethical imperatives is our responsibility to ‘Do No Harm.’”

Troy Williams, executive director of Equality Utah, said, “We’re confident that if this rule goes forward as drafted, that we will see a reduction of suicides in our state.”

“Do no harm”? “Reduction of suicides”? Keep those phrases in mind as I share some of the sordid facts about today’s agenda-driven transmania. If therapy is not allowed to help children, what is allowed? And at what cost?

An amicus brief currently before the Supreme Court in the case of R. G. and G. R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sheds some light. The brief was filed by a dozen people who at one point identified as transgendered but now affirm their biological sex at birth. Each of them overcame their gender dysphoria with help from therapy. And through therapy, they were able to identify emotional trauma and other root causes that triggered their dysphoria in the first place.

In the brief, Jamie Shupe, who once upon a time was legally recognized as America’s first “nonbinary person,” said, “I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.”

Added Hacsi Horvath, who identified as a woman for 13 years, “I am far angrier that thousands of young people are being irreversibly altered and sterilized as they are induced into a drug-dependent and medically maimed lifestyle.”

Mere anecdotes? Hardly. Let’s look at the science.

​In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, Swedish researchers who tracked over 300 “sex-reassigned persons” for 30 years discovered just how dangerous playing make-believe has become. When compared with a control group, victims of sex-reassignment surgery were 19 times more likely to die by suicide and were three times more likely to need psychiatric hospitalization, to suffer cardiovascular disease, and to abuse drugs.

“This study,” found at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3043071/, “found substantially higher rates of overall mortality, death from cardiovascular disease and suicide, suicide attempts, and psychiatric hospitalisations in sex-reassigned transsexual individuals compared to a healthy control population. This highlights that post-surgical transsexuals are a risk group that need long-term psychiatric and somatic follow-up.”

In two other studies, one published in 2018 at George Washington University and one published this year in the Netherlands, researchers found that use of cross-sex hormones can substantially increase the risks of heart attacks, strokes, and blood clots (www.ahajournals.org).

The Swedish study concluded that those who have been sickened, maimed and sterilized need long-term “psychiatric follow-up.” But for young people tempted by transgender hell, it’s illegal in 18 states for them to get psychiatric help beforehand.

And so, misogynistic surgical predators are performing double mastectomies on gender dysphoric girls as young as 13 and 14. In Oregon, you can get a taxpayer funded “sex-change surgery” at age 15—no parental notification required. And in England, the ironically named National Health Service is giving transgender treatments to three-year-olds caught playing dress-up.

According to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, 80–95 percent of gender-dysphoric children will accept their physical biology if they are allowed to pass through puberty without transgender treatments, which is more like with therapy. A study by two psychiatric experts affiliated with Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine has found that “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.” They also found that “only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood” (www.thenewatlantis.com).

Sadly, by the time many confused young people reach adulthood, they will have been irreparably injured. What was that about “do no harm”?

Deny a child professional therapy and put that child on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and the trans identity can become fixed. Unfortunately, the only therapy many children are getting is the propaganda they find on the internet.

Last year, a Brown University study by professor Lisa Littman found that identity politics is fueling a “social contagion” outbreak of transgender identification. Brown University took heat for the study’s publication, but a parent and research-driven petition stands by the study. It states: “The parental reports in this study offer important and much-needed preliminary information about a cohort of adolescents, mostly girls, who with no prior history of dysphoria are requesting irreversible medical interventions, including the potential to impair fertility and future sexual function. In any other group of children, these grave consequences would be seen as human rights violations unless there was significant and overwhelming evidence these procedures would be beneficial long-term.”

We shouldn’t be surprised that “parents describe a process of immersion in social media, such as binge-watching YouTube transition videos and excessive use of Tumblr, immediately preceding their child becoming gender dysphoric” (thefederalist.com).

Watch enough propaganda-filled YouTube videos, and you’ll be convinced you’re an L or a G or a B or a T—or all of the above. Watch a few more videos, and you might be convinced you’re a space alien. Social contagion is the internet’s own brand of conversion therapy—legal in all 50 states.

But there’s hope despite destructive social media mythology, activist witch doctors masquerading as psychologists and surgeons, and the nation’s headlong rush into insanity. Hundreds of transgendered young people in their mid-20s are detransitioning. Soon they will number in the thousands as more and more discover that they’ve been sold an ideological pack of lies.

Of those who would offend “one of these little ones,” Jesus said, “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6). As I watch the science-denying child abuse that is occurring in Utah and other states in the name of “do no harm,” it becomes clear just who Jesus was talking about.

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