When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment

by Ryan T. Anderson

Parents are told that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones may be the only way to prevent their children from committing suicide. Never mind that the best studies of gender dysphoria (studies that even transgender activists cite) show that between 80 and 95 percent of children who express a discordant gender identity will come to identify with their bodily sex if natural development is allowed to proceed.

In fact, people who have had transition surgery are nineteen times more likely than average to die by suicide.

The best biology, psychology, and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality, and of gender as a social manifestation of bodily sex. Biology isn’t bigotry.

It is true that men and women differ among themselves, and that some people have difficulty identifying with their bodily sex. But this doesn’t mean that sex is either fluid or subjective, as transgender ideology maintains.

Activists tend to be uncompromising in their demands, yet their worldview is fraught with contradictions. It holds that the real self is fundamentally separate from the material body, yet insists that transforming the body is crucial for personal wholeness.

It promotes a radical subjectivity in which individuals should be free to do whatever they wish and to define the truth as they choose, yet it calls for enforced conformity of belief in transgender dogma.

Contrary to the claims of activists, sex isn’t “assigned” at birth. It’s a bodily fact that can be recognized well before birth with ultrasound imaging.

Secondary differences between the two sexes—attributes that may be visibly altered by hormone treatment—are not what make us male or female.

Many psychologists and psychiatrists think of gender dysphoria as being much like other kinds of dysphoria, or serious discomfort with one’s body, such as anorexia. These feelings can lead to mistaken and harmful beliefs. The most helpful therapies do not try to remake the body to conform with thoughts and feelings—which is impossible—but rather to help people find healthy ways to manage this tension and move toward accepting the reality of their bodily selves.

This therapeutic approach rests on a sound understanding of physical and mental health, and of medicine as a practice aimed at restoring healthy functioning, not simply satisfying the desires of patients.

A more cautious therapeutic approach begins by acknowledging that the vast majority of children with gender dysphoria will grow out of it naturally.

An effective treatment plan for children will help them develop a more nuanced view of gender, so they understand that real boys and real girls don’t all conform to narrow stereotypes. But this doesn’t require adopting the view that gender norms are purely “social constructs,” and hence artificial and oppressive.

This means that women should not be forced to live, work, and compete as if they were men—which is what some people would prefer, with proposals to ban stay-at-home moms.

Children are especially vulnerable, so we must do everything possible to protect them and provide an environment that fosters healthy development.

political and cultural elites have tried to shut down the discussion before it starts by imposing a politically correct orthodoxy on the nation, an ideology in which “gender identity” is both a subjective matter and a category meriting civil rights protection.

Dissent is not tolerated in the transgender moment.

So while the Medicare plans run by the federal government weren’t required to cover sex reassignment procedures, the federal government’s civil rights office was requiring it of private insurance plans and physicians covered in those plans.

The military too has been swept up in the moment, and it now pays for sex reassignment surgery—even for convicted spies.

The attorney general seemed to miss the fact that some distinctions do indeed make a difference. Whereas our skin color is irrelevant to which bathroom or locker room we use, our bodily differences as male or female are precisely why we have “men’s rooms” and “women’s rooms.”

After studying the evidence, McHugh decided that sex change surgery was bad medicine and was “fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.” Psychiatrists, he thought, could better help patients with gender dysphoria by “trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”

“We have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it.”37

postmodern worldview is changing medicine from a profession that restores health and wholeness, into a set of techniques to provide customers with what they desire.

Without any fixed position on what is given in human nature, any manipulation of it can be defended as legitimate.

the costs of the surgeries and lifelong hormone treatment are exorbitant no matter who pays for them, and meanwhile many Americans have unmet needs for essential health care.

Simply accepting the self-declaration of a gender-dysphoric child and encouraging persistence in a transgender identity does not constitute sound, science-based medicine. But politics now rules the debate. If one of the world’s leading experts on gender dysphoria can be railroaded in this way, it means that medical practice is seriously compromised by an ideological agenda.

Now they assert that people actually are the sex they claim to be.

yesterday’s enlightenment will be tomorrow’s benighted bigotry;

even as their own position shifts, the activists are absolutely closed off to contrary evidence:

because the transgender movement is so close-minded, it inclines toward coercion.

At the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person—in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence.

This is a remarkable claim, not least because the argument recently was that gender is only a social construct, while sex is a biological reality. Now, activists claim that gender identity is destiny, while biological sex is the social construct.

The Gender Unicorn is the graphic that children are likely to encounter in school. These are the dogmas they are likely to be catechized to profess.

In New York City, you can now be fined up to a quarter million dollars for intentionally “misgendering” someone by using pronouns other than those the person prefers.37 And in October 2017, the governor of California signed a new law that could send health-care workers to jail for failing to use a person’s chosen pronouns.38

They promote a radical expressive individualism in which people are free to do whatever they want and define the truth however they wish, yet they try to enforce acceptance of transgender ideology in a paternalistic way.

If gender is a social construct, how can gender identity be innate and immutable? How can one’s identity with respect to a social construct be determined by biology in the womb? How can one’s identity be unchangeable (be immutable) with respect to an ever-changing social construct? And if gender identity is innate, how can it be “fluid”? The challenge for activists is to offer a plausible definition of gender and gender identity that is independent of bodily sex.

The challenge for the transgender activist is to explain what these feelings are like, and how someone could know if he or she “feels like” the opposite sex, or neither, or both.

Even if trans activists could answer these questions about feelings, that still wouldn’t address the matter of reality. Why should feeling like a man—whatever that means—make someone a man? Why do our feelings determine reality on the question of sex, but on little else?

If those who identify as transgender are the sex with which they identify, why doesn’t that apply to other attributes or categories of being?

should these people receive medical treatment to transform their bodies to accord with their minds?

Gender identity can sound a lot like religious identity, which is determined by beliefs. But those beliefs don’t determine reality.

So, too, a person either is or is not a man, regardless of what anyone—including that person—happens to believe.

Determining reality is the heart of the matter,

On the one hand, transgender activists want the authority of science as they make metaphysical claims, saying that science reveals gender identity to be innate and unchanging. On the other hand, they deny that biology is destiny, insisting that people are free to be who they want to be. Which is it?

If we should be free to choose our own gender reality, why can some people impose their idea of reality on others just because they identify as transgender?

At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality.

A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands.

I was going to need an operation every 10 years to replace the erectile device.4

I was so focused on trying to change my gender, I never stopped to think about what gender meant.5

The media play up the “success” stories of people like Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner, but largely ignore the stories like those told in this chapter.

I want to ask you, how many other medical conditions are there where you can walk into the doctor’s office, tell them you have a certain condition, which has no objective test, which can be caused by trauma or mental health issues or societal factors, and receive life-altering medications on your say-so?9