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July 8, 2008
Prepping Kids for Sex Change
Incredibly, he is giving kids as young as seven drugs that delay the onset of puberty—the first step in sex-change surgery when they are older. When these kids hit their teen years, they are given the option of taking cross-hormones for a few years—which will allow them to develop the characteristics of the opposite sex. Tragically, the treatment will condemn these teenagers to lifelong infertility. Spack appears to think that that is a reasonable trade-off for teens who feel they are trapped in the body of the opposite sex: After all, the cross-hormone treatments will make it easier for them to “pass” as the opposite sex. For instance, men will not grow as tall as they normally would, nor will they develop beards or Adam’s apples. In a fawning article about Spack, the Boston Globe referred to his treatment of gender-confused children as “modern medical care.” Medical care, my eye! This is medical mayhem. It is unconscionable. Dr. Paul McHugh, a distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, agrees: He says that treating these children with hormones “does considerable harm, and it compounds their confusion. Trying to delay puberty or change someone’s gender,” he added, “is a rejection of the lawfulness of nature.” Dr. McHugh knows what he is talking about. He and psychiatrist Jon Myer studied men who received sex-change operations at Johns Hopkins. His conclusion? “That Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.” Better, McHugh thought, to concentrate on fixing their minds instead of taking the more drastic step of changing their sex. Thanks to the research of Myer and others, this practice was stopped at Johns Hopkins. And it became possible to begin to make sense of the mental disorders that were driving the request for the surgeries. So why are doctors like Spack altering young bodies instead of treating confused minds? The answer is that many doctors have embraced the modern teaching that sexual identity, rather than being biologically determined, is a preference or a choice. According to this, people should be allowed to choose whatever sex they want to be. But both science and the Bible teach otherwise: God created us male and female in His image. Shots and surgeries and politically correct teachings cannot alter this fundamental truth. Tragically, some parents are now buying into this false teaching—and allowing their children to undergo destructive treatments.
You and I need to be spreading the word that legitimate treatment is available for people suffering from gender confusion—and it is a treatment that does not sacrifice the well-being of children to the political agendas of adults. (related reading below) “Critics Slam Boston Doctor Who Offers Sex Change Treatment to Kids,” FOX News, 19 May 2008. Ashley Smith, “Mom Accepts Transgender Manchester Tween,” Nashua Telegraph, 22 June 2008. Paul McHugh, “Surgical Sex,” First Things, November 2004 (reprinted by GodSpy). Stephen Reed, “Sex Change Operations . . . for Kids,” The Point, 19 May 2008. Gina Dalfonzo, “Who Will Watch the Watchers?” The Point, 27 May 2008. BreakPoint Commentary No. 050615, “The Wisdom to Know the Difference: Is Sexual Identity Malleable?” BreakPoint Commentary No. 040209, “Gender Blender: Adolescent Girls and ‘Heteroflexiblity’.” BreakPoint Commentary No. 061121, “Pick Your Nose, Not Your Gender: Postmodern Mischief.” BreakPoint Commentary No. 070423, “Coming to a School near You: Normalizing Homosexuality.” Comments (2)
  written by Zoe Brain, July 09, 2008
We should leave it up to the Liberals to go with "feelings" and "beliefs", "opinions" rather than hard data and facts. That's what happens over Iraq, or the various Moonbat conspiracy theories about 9/11, and the whole Bush Derangement Syndrome.
But this article is worthy of "Green Left Weekly" in its disregard for facts in pursuit of "truthiness". First, gonadotrophins, the "puberty delayers" are not given at age 7. They wait till puberty, as a moment's thought would have made obvious. Second, Dr McHugh's fringe views are based on one "cooked" survey in the late 70's, and his opinions pre-date him being head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. He went in with pre-conceived ideas based on fervent religious, political and moral convictions, and wasn't about to let mere science get in the way. There are now some 280 studies in reputable medical journals that not only were unable to replicate the results, but directly contradicted them. There's even a few pointing out the egregiously bad science that led to such a vastly erroneous conclusion. That is why he, and no one else, is continually quoted, from an article not in a medical or scientific journal, bit in "First Things" - or to give it it's full title, "The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life". This is much the same as the one or two Ultra-Left engineers who continually get quoted about the WTC "demolition by Bush" in various political magazines, but not in any reputable engineering journals, because they're so obviously false. Worse, the one area where he was correct was in the un-malleability of gender. Unlike fashionable Leftist theory, gender is innate, and only very slightly malleable in extreme cases. Basically it takes years of torture to change gender in a few percent, and then the sequellae, depression and so on are so severe that you can say the cases have been driven insane. Unfortunately he ignores the fact that some people's innate gender does not match their body. Many such people are Intersexed, only "mostly male" or "mostly female" in body form. But the important part of the body in question is the brain, not the genitalia or anything else. That is the seat of gender identity. I'll quote actual medical journals, not political and religious ones here: A sex difference in the human brain and its relation to transsexuality by Jiang-Ning Zhou, Michel A. Hofman, Louis J. G. Gooren & Dick F. Swaab. That's from Nature magazine, not exactly a hotbed of irrationality (unlike the formerly prestigious Lancet, alas). Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus by Frank P. M. Kruijver, Jiang-Ning Zhou, Chris W. Pool, Michel A. Hofman, Louis J. G. Gooren and Dick F. Swaab . That's in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, not some Op-Ed journal. Those studies involved autopsies of transsexual people. They showed that in one area of the brain, the lymbic nucleus, which is involved with emotion and gender identity, that transsexual people really did have male brains in female bodies, or the reverse. But you don't have to cut up cadavers. From the German Physician's Journal, ArzteZeitung : "In men, the limbic system and upper regions of the hypothalamus, the amygdalae and the insular cortex were activated substantially more strongly. “We confirmed this finding in the comparison between the heterosexual men and women of our Cohort”, said Gizewski. This specifically male activation of the limbic system was not found in the transsexual sample. Under fMRT, the pictures corresponded rather accurately to those of the female sample. Radiologists can now confirm what transsexuals report - that they feel “trapped in the wrong body” - on the basis of the activation of the brain when presented with erotic stimuli. There is obviously a biological correlation with the subjective feelings." report abuse
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By Chuck Colson
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That the problem is at least sometimes associated with hormonal imbalance in the womb rather that some psychiatric disturbance is proven by Prenatal exposure to diethylstilbestrol(DES) in males and gender-related disorders:results from a 5-year study , a paper presented at the 6th annual E-hormones conference.
"More than 150 network members (out of 500) with “confirmed” or “strongly suspected” prenatal DES exposure identified as either “transsexual, pre- or post-operative,” (90 members), “transgender” (48 members), “gender dysphoric” (17 members), or “intersex” (3 members)."
That compares to an expected number of 0.15, a 1000 fold increase. The effect is not subtle.
I could go on, quoting paper after paper refuting Dr McHugh's views. Or even look at reviews by learned judges - from the Australian Family Court, again no hotbed of Moonbattery:
"At paragraph [252]: ‘The traditional analysis that they are "psychologically" transsexual does not explain how this state came about. For example, there seems to be no suggestion in the evidence that their psychological state can be explained by reference to circumstances of their upbringing. In that sense, the brain sex theory does not seem to be competing with other explanations, but rather is providing a possible explanation of what is otherwise inexplicable’.
At paragraph [253]: ‘In other words (as I understand it) the brain of an individual may in some sense be male, for example, though the rest of the person’s body is female’.
At paragraph [272]: ‘In my view the evidence demonstrates (at least on the balance of probabilities) that the characteristics of transsexuals are as much “biological” as those of people thought of as inter-sex’.
It's like the situation with Iraq. In one side, we have people saying, out of deeply felt conviction and political belief, that Saddam Hussein had no nuclear program. And all we have to argue against that is the 500 tons of enriched Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to the USA, plus the parts of centrifuges, plans etc. Facts as opposed to what some feel *has* to be true because of their beliefs.
I know this is all rather hard to swallow. There's been enough Junk Science used for political ends, such as the notorious Lancet figures for Iraq - which until they excluded Mosul, showed that everyone had been killed in that city, and the children killed at least twice. There's a lot of snake oil salesmen out there. But look at not one, or two, but hundreds of medical journals written by scientists of all political persuasions saying the same thing.
Look at "Gender change in 46,XY persons with 5alpha-reductase-2 deficiency and 17beta-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase-3 deficiency." by PT Cohen-Ketternis, describing the two most common Intersex conditions that cause a natural sex change. Yes, it happens, though it's outside most people's experience and against "common sense". Like the world not being flat is against "common sense".
Saying that it is, or the medical equivalent, brings conservatism into disrepute,and is a gross calumny against the doctors working to help people with these rare conditions. Please check what I've said yourself.