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from Gender Identity Disorders
Destabilizing the Categories of Sex and Gender: The Case of the Transgendered Student
In October, a judge in Brockton, Massachusetts ruled that a junior high
school boy must be permitted to attend classes while wearing girls'
clothing.
The boy had been suspended three times for using the girls' bathroom and
wearing padded bras, wigs and high heels to school. School officials
said the boy's behavior was disruptive. UPI reported that "school
officials said [the unidentified student] sometimes wore tight skirts
and high-heeled shoes, blew kisses to a male student, and once grabbed
another boy's buttocks."
The boy's therapist had diagnosed him with gender-identity disorder.
She said it was "medically and clinically necessary for [him] to wear
clothing consistent with female gender." If he was not allowed to dress
as a girl, the therapist told the court, he would experience
psychological trauma. The judge in the court case, who is a
self-identified lesbian, agreed with the boy's therapist. When
reporting her ruling, the judge referred to the gender-disturbed boy as
a female.
But Dale O'Leary, author of The Gender Agenda, observes that society is
colluding with what really amounts to a self-delusion. The following is
her commentary:
The boy in Brockton MA, is not a "she" no matter how many judges or
therapists pretend he is. He is a boy with a severe gender identity
disorder who needs real help. Unfortunately, many medical and mental
health professionals--rather than working to find a cure for this type
of psychological problem--have decided that supporting the delusion
constitutes treatment. Or worse, they further the delusion through
surgery aimed at "changing" a person's sex.
Patients who suffer from the belief that they are men trapped in the
bodies of women (or women trapped in the bodies of men) need real help.
Cutting off a man's private parts, giving him breast implants, shooting
him full of female hormones, and taking off his beard will not make him
a woman--it will make him something less than a eunuch. Surgery will
not change the fact that every cell of the man's body is clearly marked
male (XY).
The promotion of "sex changes," and the normalizing of severe
gender-identity disorders by radical feminists,
pro-same-sex-attraction-disorder activists, and sexual revolutionaries
is part of their larger agenda--namely, the destablization of the
categories of sex and gender.
Judge Giles justifies her decision by claiming that "exposing children
to diversity at an early age serves the important social goals of
increasing their abilities to tolerate differences and teaching them
respect for everyone's experience in that 'Brave New World' out there."
I find the statement particularly revealing. Years ago, I read Brave
New World and remember being horrified at the ugly, anti-human future
it portrayed.
This is not as the lesbian judge would have it about tolerance. Of
course, we should be kind to people with severe psychological problems.
But there is nothing kind about denying them real help, or using them as
pawns in the culture wars.
The idea that gender identity can be changed was long promoted by Dr.
John Money, formerly of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Money's strident
promotion of the sexual revolution, his tolerance toward pedophilia, and
his highly controversial approach to gender issues in psychiatry have
been documented by John Colapinto in the new book, "As Nature Made Him."
The following are quotations from the book:
"[Dr. Paul] Mc Hugh [chairman of the Psychiatry Department at John's
Hopkins] has always reserved special scorn for the practice of
sex-change surgery on adult transsexuals. Classifying transsexualism as
merely one symptom in a larger complex of personality disorders, Mc Hugh
had long believed that psychiatrists should treat such patients with the
talking cure--not radical, irreversible surgeries. In a 1992 article in
the American Scholar, McHugh lambasted transsexual surgery as 'the most
radical therapy ever encouraged by twentieth century psychiatrists,' and
likened its popularity to the once widespread practice of frontal
lobotomy."
"Dr. Jon Meyer, a Hopkins psychiatrist and former director of the Gender
Identity Clinic, produced a long-term follow-up of fifty postoperative
and preoperative adult transsexuals treated at Johns Hopkins since the
clinic was founded in 1966. Meyer reported that none showed any
measurable improvement in their lives, and concluded that 'sex
reassignment surgery confers no objective advantage in terms of social
rehabilitation'."
Updated: 8 February 2008
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