I'd rather take advice from experts who have studied the people over time:
......... Blanchard’s theory is that transgenders fall into two distinct categories whose sexual orientations, interests, choice of careers, and even, to a large extent, social class are violently different from each other. One of those categories he calls “homosexual” transgenders, whose sexual attraction, from childhood to death, is strictly toward members of their own genetic sex. Among males, they’re the extremely effeminate boys who identify as girls in early childhood, play with dolls and other girls’ toys, and shun the rough-and-tumble play typical of boys their age. Studies at Vanderbilt and the University of London have shown that 70 to 80 percent of those trans-children grow out of their trans-identity at puberty and become, simply, gay adolescents and, later, gay adult men. The 20 to 30 percent who do take formal steps toward transitioning, Blanchard believes, are a self-selected group who, thanks to their more delicate looks, can function fairly successfully as women. “They’re people who might be unsuccessful as men,” Blanchard said.Homosexual transgender men transition early in adulthood, typically during their twenties, Blanchard observed.
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The effective silencing by activists of anyone who disagrees, at least in public, with the “man trapped in a woman’s body” theory of male-to-female transgenderism has created a regime of transgender political correctness that has been thoroughly embraced by both the media and politicians. Nowhere is this so evident as in a spate of sympathetic news stories about children who identify as members of the opposite sex at toddler and elementary-school age, and whose parents simply indulge them, buying their boys-turned-girls wardrobes of frilly dresses and glittery shoes, doing up their hair in elaborate arrangements, sometimes transferring them to schools where no one knows their genetic identity, and usually letting them pick out new names. (One little boy chose to become “Hannah,” after Hannah Montana.)
The childhood transition that some parents have enthusiastically embraced also usually involves monthly injections of “puberty blockers,” the most controversial?—?or at least what ought to be the most controversial?—?aspect of childhood transition.
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Nicole’s lead endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital was the U.S. pioneer of transgender puberty-blocking, Dr. Norman P. Spack, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. Spack was inspired, he said in a phone interview, by what he believes is the success of blockers in the Netherlands, where more than one hundred young transgenders have used them since the 1990s. Spack agreed that up to 80 percent of genetic boys who identify as girls during childhood grow out of it naturally at puberty—?but “we get the 20 percent,” he said.
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Critics of puberty blockers, now administered in at least 37 locations in the United States according to Spack, point to the expense, the numerous side-effects associated with Lupron and its pharmaceutical relatives, and the possibility that parents and physicians might be pushing children who would otherwise grow out of their transgender identities into a lifetime of painful and costly surgery, dependence on daily doses of estrogen and other hormones, and the difficulty of finding a place for themselves in a world in which their femininity will always be questioned. On top of that, taking large doses of the hormones of the opposite biological sex almost invariably renders the taker sterile.
One of the leading critics has been Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and former colleague of Blanchard who heads the gender-identity clinic at Toronto’s Clarke Institute. “One controversy is, how low does one go in starting blockers?” Zucker told the Globe in 2011. “Should you start at 11? At 10? What if someone starts their period at 9?” Zucker prefers a therapy regimen of trying to ease transgender girls into accepting that they will be happier in the long run by accepting their genetic maleness, since most of them will grow up to be gay men anyway.
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Another critic is Paul McHugh, psychiatry professor at Johns Hopkins University’s medical school and former chief psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins University Hospital. McHugh opposes gender-reassignment surgery and hormone theory, period, likening the position of their advocates to the theories of John Money (1921-2006), a longtime professor of pediatrics and medical psychology at Hopkins. Money believed that gender roles were learned, and he presided over a decision by Hopkins to persuade the parents of a boy, David Reimer, whose penis was lost in a botched circumcision in 1966, to raise him as a girl. The experiment was a disaster: Reimer rebelled from the beginning at his forced feminization and committed suicide in 2004. “In about 10 years these kids [subjected to intensive hormonal therapy as minors] are going to sue the hell out of those hospitals,” McHugh predicted in a phone interview.
McHugh cited a 2011 long-term study by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden that followed the 30-year trajectories of 324 people who had undergone genital and other reassignment surgery. Beginning about 10 years after their surgeries, the study found, those people began experiencing increasing mental difficulties that their transitions were supposed to have cured. Their mortality rate from suicide turned out to be 20 times that of the nontransgender population. “This isn’t some old study,” McHugh said. “This is from 2011!”
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http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/transgender-triumph_859614.html?page=3 |
