Re: Transgenderism Has No Basis in Science or Law

Conservative <[email protected]> wrote in
news:[email protected]: 

> Nic wrote
> 
>> Transgenders do not exist.  They are just mentally ill faggots
>> pushing an agenda to force acceptance. 

In a domain in which the proposed “therapies” are so drastic, it is not 
too much to ask for a solid, evidence-based statement of who is being 
treated, for what, and why, before writing a prescription or passing a 
law.

By Margaret A. Hagen

In recent months, there has been an explosion of highly controversial 
legislation, threatened executive edicts, and heavy-handed federal 
mandates regarding discrimination and public accommodation laws that 
require—among other things—public and private institutions, businesses, 
and schools to allow biological males who self-identify as females to use 
the toilet facilities and locker rooms of females (and vice versa). These 
developments have been accompanied by a chorus of pundits and editors 
expressing derision for “bigoted” opponents and cheerleading the valiant 
proponents of “transgender equality.”

What is missing from the conversation about these laws is any sound legal 
or scientific basis for the proposed changes. Who, exactly, are the groups 
who are supposed to be protected or accommodated? On what legal basis are 
those groups to be protected or accommodated? What are the consequences 
and implications for the larger society?

The Spectra of Nonconforming Sexuality

Lawmakers and commentators should grasp the variety of people who claim to 
be “nonconforming” to American understandings and expectations of sex and 
gender before leaping into action on their behalf. A continuing legal 
education program held recently in Massachusetts taught participants that 
nonconformists fall on various places on five different spectra of being, 
expression, and attraction:

Sex: “The sex you were assigned by the doctor in the hospital” at birth. 
Sex is either Male or Female—a binary distinction.
Gender Identity: The sex you know yourself to be. Gender is also Male or 
Female, but is a spectrum, not binary.
Gender Expression: A characterization of how you dress, talk, style your 
hair, accessorize, use makeup, and so on, which is described as being more 
or less Masculine or Feminine.
Sexual Orientation: The sexual attraction you experience, whether to those 
of the same sex, opposite sex, or people of both sexes.
Affectional/Emotional Orientation: The pattern of romantic attachments you 
form; whether you tend to “fall in love” with and  seek emotional 
closeness with men, women, both, or persons who see themselves as 
somewhere between or beyond the categories of male and female.
While there is no consensus even among transgender people on these 
distinctions and definitions, it seems abundantly clear that modern 
discrimination law based on dividing people into various subgroups is 
going to be under severe stress within such an extremely complex scheme. 
Is it possible or desirable for people with widely different types of 
“nonconformism” to be treated as a single identifiable group?

While the application of discrimination law to a particular individual can 
involve a complex analysis, “Nonstandard Sexuality” would be a protected 
group that truly makes a mockery of our already risible “protected” 
categories. Who, specifically, within the spectral clusters of 
nonconformist sexuality, is to be protected from discrimination? Should, 
for example, the simple desire to cross-dress place a man into a legal 
category of citizen “protected” against discrimination, or require 
businesses and institutions to accede to his request to use women’s 
facilities?

Is Sexual Discrimination Really the Problem?

The federal Department of Education recently mandated that schools provide 
access for nonconformist students to the toilet and locker room facilities 
of their choice, on the grounds that requiring biological males and 
females to use the facilities appropriate to their biological sex amounts 
to a violation of rights under Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 
1972. That is, such biological sexual segregation constitutes sexual 
discrimination, because it discriminates against students who are of a 
“trans” sex and produces a hostile, intimidating, or offensive environment 
for them. This Title IX finding ignores any definition of the categories 
of students to whom it applies; it even ignores the research on the sexual 
development of children who outgrow their feelings of gender dysphoria.

The new regulations also ignore the very real possibility that such 
“inclusion” will create a hostile, intimidating, and offensive environment 
for sexually conformist students, staff, and teachers. This is remarkable, 
since less than two years has passed since the Department of Education 
mandated that every student who found any action—including speech—of 
anyone at her or his school offensive is entitled under Title IX to make a 
complaint of sexual harassment that must be investigated by the school.

Proposed accommodation statutes, commonly called “Bathroom Bills,” would 
require that toilet facilities and locker rooms must be made available 
according to the wishes of sexually nonconforming individuals—regardless 
of the wishes of the other individuals using the same facilities. The 
proponents of such laws ignore the invasion of female students’ privacy 
that can occur when males are admitted to facilities where the girls are 
often in the nude, and of males in the comparable situation. Invasion of 
teens’ physical privacy can be intensely painful—even traumatic—but most 
pundits belittle any harassment or privacy issues felt by conformist 
students or parents.

Lacking not only accepted and acceptable categories of disabilities—much 
less reliable diagnostic categories of mental disorders—such forced 
accommodations have no reasonable basis in law or medicine.

Is Sexual Nonconformity a Mental Disorder?

Return now to the complicated spectra of nonconforming sexuality and 
gender expression laid out above. On what basis are some or all of these 
myriad sexual nonconformists supposed to be protected under discrimination 
law if not on the basis of a specific sex? It is possible that these laws 
are being proposed not on the basis of sexual discrimination, but on the 
grounds of the Americans with Disabilities Act as applied to psychiatric 
disorders. If so, are they being proposed on the belief that sexual 
nonconformists suffer from the mental disorders of Gender Identity 
Disorder (the old term), Gender Dysphoria (the new term), or any of the 
other possible disorders of gender identity variants?

That poses a very large problem for legislators and enforcers. There 
exists no consensus among psychiatrists on the question of which 
nonconformists fall—or should fall—into the medical category of mentally 
disordered. There is no consensus among the nonconformists either. 
Difficult, too, is the fact that most transgendered people do not regard 
themselves as mentally ill and do not wish to be identified as “disabled.”

A “transgender disability”—should one exist and be accepted by those so 
labeled—would have to be a mental impairment that substantially limits one 
or more of the major life activities of an individual. What would that 
impairment be? In what ways would the life activities of affected 
individuals be limited? It is very hard to conceptualize nonconforming 
gender identity as a disabling condition.

Disabilities law requires reasonable accommodations. Even if we postulated 
that nonconformists were somehow disabled in pursuing some life activity, 
how are they to be reasonably accommodated under disabilities law? How is 
a state legislature to lay out the range of reasonable accommodations for 
the whole spectrum of sexual expression? What is a reasonable 
accommodation and for whom? One size clearly does not fit all. There is no 
rational basis upon which such determinations can be made.

Where Is the Evidence?

More fundamentally, there is no consensus on the etiology of the diverse 
expressions of “gender identity variants.” Some LGBTQ advocates theorize 
that nonconforming sexuality is caused by certain family dynamics in the 
context of a bi-gendered patriarchal society. Others postulate that 
unidentified genetically based sex-hormone abnormalities cause 
transgenderism or homosexuality, even when there are no abnormalities of 
the reproductive anatomy.

Evidence-based conclusions are utterly lacking, whatever the claims of 
activists. Without clear distinctions not only among categories of the 
potentially mentally disordered but also between the mentally disordered 
and the normal population, how are diagnosis and treatment decisions to be 
made? It is hardly possible to pass disability laws without reliable 
diagnostic categories.

Most proposed legislation is driven not by medical research or theoretical 
differences but by the desire to make private or government insurance 
money available for hormone and surgical “treatment” for nonconformists 
experiencing psychological distress. The American Psychiatric Association 
has stated this unambiguously in its DSM-5, the current diagnostic manual. 
Pathologizing states of mind—even distress—simply to make insurance money 
available for attempts to change those states through surgical, medical, 
and cosmetic alterations to the body is simply not sound science. Neither 
is it just to the larger community that pays for medical insurance and 
funds the Affordable Care Act. Surely, in a domain with such drastic 
proposed “therapy,” it is not too much to ask for a solid evidence-based 
statement of who is being treated, for what, and why, before writing the 
prescription.

Our society cannot reasonably be expected to unquestioningly accept 
psychiatric “treatments” that strain our concepts of medical ethics, 
standards of care, and malpractice up to and past the breaking point.

Surgical Mutilation Is Not the Answer

Some psychiatrists and surgeons have already collaborated to employ 
mutilation of healthy body parts as “psychotherapy.” The conviction that 
one is a “one-limbed person trapped in a multi-limbed body” is now being 
treated as an actual mental disorder called “Body Integrity Identity 
Disorder.” Seven such patients are reported as having had an arm or a leg 
electively amputated as “treatment” for this disorder. Immediate post-
operative reports seem to be positive, but what about follow-up reports on 
life as a voluntary amputee ten and twenty years after the surgery? How 
about an extensive social discussion of the ethical limits of elective 
amputation—both for the doctors and for the society at large?

The genital mutilation of healthy bodies of men and women demands no less 
serious consideration. The suicide rate in post-surgical patients has been 
reported to be twenty times higher than in controls matched for birth year 
and birth sex. It is hard to imagine more iatrogenic treatment. As one 
prominent member of the DSM work group on Sexual and Gender Identity 
Disorders put it,

It is difficult to justify the term “natural” variation for a condition 
that compels the respective individual to severely alter a healthy body by 
gonadectomy with attendant infertility and the replacement of intact 
primary and secondary sex characteristics with those of the other gender.

Let us be clear: there is no such thing as “sex-reassignment” surgery. A 
mutilated male pumped full of estrogen remains just that—a mutilated male 
pumped full of estrogen. He has not “transitioned” into being a woman. He 
can never be a woman. Nor are the hundreds of thousands of women who have 
undergone total hysterectomies for various reasons transformed into males. 
They remain women whose ovaries and wombs have been removed. They are not 
men.

While no one is yet publicly advocating the surgical alteration of 
children, loud voices in the media and among advocates—even at Boston 
Children’s Hospital—have called for and have even implemented hormone 
therapy to delay the onset of children’s puberty in order to facilitate 
gonadectomy later in their teens or young adulthood. Research on the 
sexual development of children who at some point are seen to be 
nonconformist shows that more than 80 percent of such children outgrow 
their “transgenderism” by the end of their teens. Interference with the 
normal sexual development of children on the basis of political ideology 
is not just unethical—it is child abuse. It is not only past time for an 
extensive public discussion of this practice; it is past time to put an 
end to it.

Stop Catering to Delusion and Make Laws Based on Reality

Many both in and out of the mental health community see the conviction of 
oneself as “transgender” as a delusion—a technical term referring to a 
fixed belief that is not amenable to change in light of conflicting 
evidence.

The larger community should not accommodate this delusion by pretending to 
accept it as reality. A deluded person is not “treated” by requiring 
everyone who encounters him to accept the validity of his or her delusion, 
contrary to all reality.

Up until the very recent past, reality testing was a fundamental component 
of psychotherapy. The opposite approach is irrational and indefensible. 
Indeed, one prominent psychiatrist in this field has termed this 
accommodation “collaborating with madness.” That is what American society 
is being asked to do by people who are well-meaning but profoundly 
confused about the realities of transgenderism.

We expect our legislators to have rational bases for the laws they enact. 
We expect our judges to have rational bases for the decisions they reach. 
Even amid political pandering by those seeking reelection, we expect at 
least a veneer of rationality in the exercise of legislative and judicial 
powers. There is simply no rational basis for the laws being proposed and 
imposed in the realm of transgenderism. There is very little knowledge at 
all—no common definitions of terms, no accepted methodology, no outcome 
analyses, no testing and rejecting of hypotheses, no agreed-upon 
standards, no science. There currently exists no reliable foundation for 
making these laws that will shape the actions of the larger community as 
they relate to sexually nonconforming individuals.

Laws that restrict our freedoms and direct our actions should never be 
passed without a clear definition of the interests and parties to be 
affected and a precise explication of the ways the laws will serve those 
interests. At present, we have no such definitions or explanations. Put 
the brakes on transgender lawmaking until we do.

Margaret A. Hagen, JD, PhD, is Professor of Psychological and Brain 
Sciences at Boston University.

The above essay originally appeared at Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and 
the Common Good – www.thepublicdiscourse.com. It is reprinted with 
permission.

<https://www.nccivitas.org/2016/nobasisinscience/>