Speaking of Religious Bigots...

One of my 'bots that trawls for news dug up the following story: ‘Sex-change’ treatment for ‘transgender’ kids? Hospital clinic draw moral criticism. It appears that the Bible bleaters are at it again - and still getting the story dead wrong.

These patients are called “transgender,” a term coined by homosexual activists pushing the idea that “gender” is a changeable psychological notion divorced from biology. The American Psychiatric Association calls the condition Gender Identity Disorder.

First of all, the term 'transgender' is not an invention of "homosexual activists" - it is a term with a specific meaning intended to describe a particular group of people.

Transgender people will argue that psychological gender is distinct from biological sex for very good reasons. I'll come back to addressing those reasons a bit later, once I've finished demonstrating the sheer lunacy of the rest of the article.

The family eventually turned to Spack, who prescribed testosterone, which stopped menstruation and gave Holly facial hair and a deeper voice. Holly bound her breasts to conceal them until she could have a double mastectomy, which was carried out at another hospital.

Holly had her name legally changed to Hal. As of last year, Hal was considering a hysterectomy in the future, and was now “presenting” as a male.

“This is cooperating with psychosis,” commented moral theologian Father Anthony Mastroeni of Patterson, N.J. Father Mastroeni, who has taught at Franciscan University of Steubenville and Christendom College, has written extensively to refute the notion that sex-change surgery might be morally justified.

Father Father Anthony Mastroeni is a Professor of Theology, not a psychiatrist or psychologist. I doubt very much that he has the appropriate psychological training, or personal experience with transgender people to make such a sweeping statement. (actually, it's a sweeping statement that sounds a lot like one Dr. McHugh's writings on the subject:

With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.

Please note that McHugh publishes his anti-transgender material in forums that are primarily religious, and seems to studiously avoid actually addressing the issues in a more scholarly environment where he might have to back up his claims with facts. However, it's this statement that really slays me:

“It does nothing but increase human misery,” he said in an interview. “There’s no scientific evidence that anyone is born with gender dysphoria.”

Oh really? No evidence? Clearly the man has neither looked, nor chosen to consider the evidence that has been gathered. One of the most common parts of the transsexual's narrative are memories of 'being wrong' that go back to their first memories. While that doesn't empirically "prove" anything, it's an amazingly strong clue.

Additionally, some transsexuals will point to some small post-mortem studies of the BSTc region of the brain which suggests that transsexuals often have "chosen gender"-normal attributes in that region. (E.g. A MTF TS will have a BSTc region that is size and structurally typical for a female) I consider these to be somewhat weak evidence because of the small size of the studies, and the fact we have little ability to study the structure as it develops at the moment. (The BSTc studies were done on deceased people for a reason)

I've often said before that coincidence does not equality causality, and in this case I stand by that statement. I believe that from a theoretical perspective, the evidence suggests quite strongly that someone's gender identity is in fact set quite early in life - certainly by the time early memories start to form.

There are legitimate medical problems, such as ambiguous genitalia, that doctors can correct, he said. “But when there’s nothing to suggest that these kids have a genetic anomaly, something in their background is dysfunctional. The evidence shows that in a boy, he’s over-identified with his mother or other female to the extent that his ego boundaries are blurred. With a girl, usually her mother was seen as ineffective and she identified with a dominant father figure.”

Allow me the pleasure of tearing this bit of amazingly bad analysis apart - piece by piece.

First off, doctors cannot "fix" ambiguous genitalia. They can, in a manner analogous to the surgical procedures for transsexuals, construct gender-appropriate looking structures. Second, as the Organisation Intersex International and other groups have lobbied for deferring such surgery until the individual is able to express their desires with respect to gender, simply assigning a gender doesn't always work. (similarly, Dr. Money's unfortunate work with David Reimer also demonstrates that you cannot simply assign a gender to someone by surgery and hope that socialization does the rest.)

The second claim is little more than an awful bit of bad psychoanalytics. Essentially, if someone isn't physically "deformed" (in Fr. Mastroeni's view), it must be something dysfunctional in the family environment. Superficially, that might almost seem reasonable. Except for the fact that the vast majority of transsexuals come from perfectly normal family settings. The "distant father" or "overbearing mother" theories of causation were discarded decades ago - because they don't describe any more than a small fraction of cases.

To Fr. Mastroeni, and others who think he's right, I must pose the following question:

If someone can be born with ambiguous genitalia or chromosomal variations (there are people out there who have both XY and XX chromosomes and still others with XXY or other variations), what is to say that someone cannot be born with a "female brain" in a male body (or vice versa)?

Father Mastroeni placed the scenario in a societal context. “We’re living in an age of narcissism, of flight from struggling or pain, with an obsessive-compulsive focus on pleasure. Children become confirmed in their narcissism when they watch self-absorbed parents. So they insist they want to ‘free themselves’ from this dysfunctional idea they have of themselves. That grown people would sanction feeding this neurosis is even sadder.”

Anyone with the vaguest notion of the inner struggles that transsexuals face and deal with will know that narcissism is far from even being related to the picture. The ideal of "noble suffering" is positively offensive here. We are all called to struggle with some aspect of ourselves in life, I do not believe that scripture calls upon anyone to struggle without hope and relief. For a transsexual, transition is that relief, and it is necessary.

The Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith in 2000 issued a document that authoritatively concluded “sex-change” operations are invalid — they do not change a person’s sex, according to a Catholic News Service report reprinted in LifeSiteNews.com.

Frankly, if the relgious organizations wish to nitpick about whether they believe GRS does what they think its name suggests, that's their problem. Gender transition isn't about the surgery - that's just what the ill-informed and clueless think.