Dr. Ryan Anderson - When Harry Became Sally (2019 Defending the Faith Conference)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you and thank you to Scott for inviting me to attend and to speak at this conference I've never been to one of those stupid ville summer conferences but I always have heard about them and so it's amazing just to see how much good this university does and I should also mention that two months ago in April the University hosted a conference here on the transgender moment and how Catholics should respond to it I'm a visiting fellow here in the veritas Center at Franciscan and they let me organize this conference bring together a team of medical doctors psychiatrists surgeons endocrinologist pediatricians philosophers theologians counselors lawyers for a two-day conference on how to understand what's going on and how to respond to it and I can't think of any other university that would host such an event that would allow the speakers that I selected to speak at such an event they were all Orthodox they were all coming at this from a perspective where charity and truth come together and too many schools sacrifice one or the other that said Scott has asked me to condense that two-day conference into a 45-minute talk so I'm gonna do my best I'll also mention more or less everything else say today is contained in the book that Scott had mentioned when Harry became Sally most of you are old enough to know what the reference is to when I speak to stood out audiences they have no idea what the references to so take that for what you will and it may be odd to be starting a conference with this talk what does this have to do with evangelism what is f to do with defending the faith what does this have to do with advancing the mission of the church and so I want to kind of frame this simply to say I imagine most of you are well-equipped to talk to your neighbors about the pro-life issues whether it's the beginning of life or the end of life I imagine most of you are well-equipped to talk about some of the marriage issues especially with the Supreme Court recently redefining marriage but I imagine many of you feel like I felt five years ago woefully it equipped to carry on a conversation about gender identity and gender dysphoria and people who feel trapped in the wrong body and this is something that we need to equip ourselves to be able to speak into the culture because the reality here is that there is a segment of our neighbors who are suffering profoundly imagine feeling so alienated from your own body such a sense of distress and alienation and discomfort that you would contemplate having radical surgeries to permanently remove certain body parts and to then try to recreate other body parts to make you look like the opposite sex these people aren't faking it they're not making it up they're not choosing to have gender dysphoria but they're being Mis served by many in the medical professions are being Mis served by many in the media they're being Mis served by many in the Academy and many people and university campuses and to my mind the only institution in the United States that has a fighting chance at actually ministering in both truth and love to these neighbors of ours is the church that if we don't do it it won't get done that if we leave it to the Academy to the media to the courts to the Congress it's not going to happen and so hopefully I'll be able to share a few things with you tonight first to inform you as to what's going on Scott said the talks would be profound they would be funny the first half of this talk is this gonna be depressing but that's the reality of what's going on in our culture and it's important that we know what's going on and the second afterthought will be how do we evaluate it how to understand and make sense of what's going on and then lastly how to respond so with that let me start by saying I think John Paul the second I got the 20th century entirely right when he said it was a crisis of faulty anthropology when he was Pope he was analyzing this in terms of the two world wars the Holocaust the gulag with the killing fields and then the horror of abortion had he been with us for the past decade he would have extended that to include the legal redefinition of marriage and now even the very redefinition of what it is to be a man or a woman all of these things are built upon a faulty anthropology what on Rita luboc described as an atheistic humanism and a faulty humanism but in our culture the high priests aren't the philosophers and the theologians right in our culture the high priests the people with credibility on cable news they're not the philosopher theologians like a caravel tiwa or a Joseph Ratzinger and our culture the high priests are the doctors and the scientists so what's fundamentally a philosophical debate about anthropology is being dressed up as a scientific or medical debate and so the first quote I want to share with you and I should mention everything that I'm good a quote will go up on the projection so you can see the slides read along feel free to pull out your smartphone take a picture of it if you want to have the reference for the future if you don't want to do that all the quotes with footnotes and citations are in the book so feel free to do whatever is gonna be best for you for taking notes but here's the first quote from a medical perspective the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity it is counter to medical science to use chromosomes hormones internal reproductive organs external genitalia or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for purposes of classifying someone as male or female now those are radical claims radical claims for at least two reasons the first is that just a generation ago radical feminists were telling us that sex was merely a bodily biological thing and that gender was merely a social construct gender was a socially constructed imposition on us stereotypes now we're being told that your gender identity determines your sex just five years ago the bread and butter of medical science were things like chromosomes hormones internal organs external genitalia secondary sex characteristics now we're being told that if any of those aspects of objective reality conflict with someone's subjective identity the subjective identity Trump's objective reality this isn't a scientific or a medical claim this is a philosophical claim about relativism about subjectivism it's a bad anthropology and this was an expert testimony that was delivered in a federal court when the previous administration was suing the state of North Carolina for passing a law that said biological males couldn't enter female only restrooms and locker rooms and this was the expert witness to say that gender identity is the appropriate determination what's happening in courtrooms is also increasingly happening in classrooms so this next graphic is called the gender bred person and you'll see that this is a graphic used to catechized children on how they should think about their own bodies how they you think about their own identities with respect to their bodies and you'll see it has five rainbow colored spectrum right so you see each and every one of these ideas has an arrow that exists a long a spectrum I'm actually gonna move the podium so I can see my monitor so I can read them off to you accurately there's gender identity which is how you identify in your head and those arrows go from womanís to madness and you could exist anywhere in between then there's gender expression which is how you give expression to your gender identity there's biological sex which also exists along a spectrum you'll see the two arrows and then they have sexual attraction and romantic attraction and none of these five aspects of your identity need to necessarily line up your gender identity could be one way your sexual attractions another your romantic attractions a third direction and you as a child because this grafix being used in grade schools you need to decipher for yourself where do you follow along these spectrums these aren't realities that God has created you with these are malleable determinations that you have determined not the Creator now the gender bread person has gotten in trouble and so the new graphic that they're using is called the gender unicorn and you'll see the two major differences are the criticism of the gender bred person was that it looked like a man and so it was supporting the patriarchy so it looked like a gingerbread man so the gender unicorn doesn't have a identifiable body type as male or female I mean it's oddly appropriate that they're using a mythical creature to embody their worldview I'm not entirely sure they thought this all the way through but you'll also notice that it no longer says biological sex because that's now considered a hate speech that's now considered politically incorrect so the new phrases sex assigned at Birth the idea here is that if the doctor merely assigned your sex at birth the doctor can reassign your sex later in life through puberty blocking drugs or cross-sex hormones or surgery your sex can be reassigned now when you saw this graphic the reaction in the room was one of disbelief and somewhat one of ridicule you kind of laughed at it you weren't being persuaded by this this isn't meant to persuade you this is meant to persuade your children and your grandchildren this graphic is colorful it's playful it looks like Barney right so in that respect they did their market research they wanted a graphic that would shape the moral imagination of your children and your grandchildren and so now imagine two kids with the same feelings each child feels a sense of distress and alienation and discomfort in his own body one has been catechized to believe that he's created by an all-powerful all-loving God as male and that he can overcome this feeling of discomfort that God has created him as a boy he is gonna grow up to be a man and that there are ways in which he will one day again feel comfortable in his body the other child has been catechized with the gender unicorn to believe that his sex was merely assigned at birth that his gender identity is what determines reality and that doctors can reassign his sex later in life through puberty blocking drugs cross-sex hormones etc how are those two children going to interpret the very same feelings the very same thoughts how are their parents and their doctors and their counselors and their pastors all of the adults in their lives going to respond to the same exact situation depending on whether they believe a true anthropology or if they believe the gender unicorns anthropology to give you an idea as to why they're using this new expression the next slide they explain biological sex is an ambiguous word that has no scale and no meaning besides that it's related to some sex characteristics it's also harmful to trans people instead we prefer sex assigned at birth which provides a more accurate description of what biological sex may be trying to communicate okay so from this world view this anthropology this ontology this gives rise to a certain medical treatment protocol and so the official guidelines that have been published by The Endocrine Society a call for a four-part standard of care for children with gender dysphoria first is what's known as social transition a child as young as two or three years old who is persistent insistent and consistent that they're the opposite sex should be allowed to socially transition meaning they should be given a new name and a new wardrobe new pronouns access to new bathrooms they should be treated as if they are the opposite sex the second step as that child approaches puberty they should be prevented from going through puberty in the quote wrong body so doctors are using off-label a drug that's not FDA approved for this purpose but they're using a drug to indefinitely block a child's pubertal development this then sets up the third step in this treatment protocol because now you have a young teenager who is trapped in an adolescent's body this 13 14 15 year old hasn't gone through puberty hasn't hit the growth spurt hasn't matured in the way that all of his or her classmates have and so they try to mimic puberty of the true gender identity so they'll administer testosterone to high-school girls to masculinize her body and they'll deliver estrogen to high school boys to feminize his body to try to develop their bodies in accordance with their true gender identity the official guidelines recommend this at age 16 but increasingly it's being done at younger ages increasingly starting at age 14 and then the last step the fourth step is surgical transition so you have social transition puberty blockade hormonal transition and the fourth step is surgical transition the guidelines recommend this to take place at age 18 increasingly doctors are suggesting age 16 as part of a NIH funded study so your tax dollars funded study it was revealed that there were two girls who were 12 years old who had had double mastectomies performed on them as their participation in this study so this is radical surgery that permanently removes various body parts secondary sex characteristics like breast tissue external genitalia internal reproductive organs and then they use the techniques of cosmetic surgery to try to create something that would resemble the body parts of the opposite sex so that's the four part standard of care why do they start so young peer-reviewed research demonstrates that pre-pubertal children asserting a different gender identity from the one they were assigned at birth are cognitively capable enough to be aware of the gender they are asserting the meaning of a child's gender identity assertion at a younger age is no less valid than the meaning of a gender identity assertion of an older child this is from dr. Scott Leibovitz another expert witness in that federal lawsuit against the state of North Carolina so there's peer-reviewed research that says your pre-pubertal child knows that he's actually a girl trapped in a boy's body or a boy trapped in a girl's body I'm gonna skip the next couple of slides just for the sake of time and actually I want to read one of them so I'm gonna skip ahead to this one right here speaking of children with gender dysphoria the director of mental health at the University of California San Francisco says these children quote refuse to pin themselves down as either male or female maybe they are a boy girl or gender hybrid or gender ambidextrous moving freely between genders living somewhere in between are creating their own mosaic of gender identity and expression as they grow older they might identify themselves as a gender or gender neutral or gender queer each of these children is exercising their gender creativity and we can think of them as our gender creative children just two things to say about this first had you ever heard of the term boy girl or gender hybrid or gender ambidextrous before and so if you were the parent of a child suffering from gender dysphoria living in the San Francisco area and being a conscientious parent you said I'm just gonna go to the best Hospital I can find to the director of mental health at that hospital and she's gonna help me with my child this is the advice you could be given about your child right many of these children many of these parents they're victims of the activists and if anything we shouldn't feel any form of a contempt or hostility towards people who are transitioning many of them are simply making the best of a bad situation based upon bad advice from people like dr. Aaron soft the second thing to say about this is in the very same breath that this physician would say we should prescribe puberty blocking drugs or we should prescribe cross-sex hormones she also admits that as the child grows older the gender identity might change so why are we making radical transformations of a child's body today in accordance with the gender identity that the child happens to have today well even the most progressive activists acknowledge that that gender identity may very well change over time why not give the child the time in the space to grow out of a stage of gender dysphoria to give them the child the help to reconcile their identity with bodily reality why are we trying to transform bodies into conformity with misguided thoughts and feeling rather than trying to help people align their thoughts and their feelings with the reality including the reality of their bodies there are two different ways of thinking about what's going on here all right so I've mentioned some of the Anthropology I've mentioned some of the medicine let me say a few words about the public policy and then I'm gonna start evaluating this for aspects of public policy that I want to mention first what will be taught to your child and your neighbor's child at school what will be taught at your local Catholic school you can't just assume that parochial schools are gonna get this correct we need to be vigilant to make sure that our Catholic schools are actually teaching the truth on these issues but also what will be taught at the government-run schools maybe you're fortunate that you can opt out of the government-run schools but part of being a good citizen being a good neighbor is making sure that the neighbors children aren't being indoctrinated by the state will the gender unicorn the gender bred person be used as the truth of the matter right as gospel fat in public schools second how will access to sex specific facilities and programs be governed you've probably seen the headlines of several Track Championships in the New England states where female athletes have lost championship races to males who were identifying as females and competing as females what will happen to the Equality of female athletes when they're forced to compete against boys who identify as girls what will happen to their privacy their safety in bathrooms locker rooms shower facilities dorm rooms hotel rooms for overnight field trips will they be governed on objective facts about bodily reality or subjective identities we're boys who identify as girls have access to the girls bathrooms and locker rooms etc a third how will speech be governed Scott mentioned that New York is highly represented here well for the New Yorkers here if you go to New York City you can be fined up to a quarter million dollars if you intentionally misgender someone if you intentionally fail to use the proper pronouns you could be fined up to a quarter million dollars and then lastly how will the provision of medical services pika and here there are two concerns one is will bad medicine be mandated and then chew as well good medicine be prohibited and so let me take those in reverse order first I believe the number is now 12 so in 12 states doctor Paul McHugh the former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital who back in 1979 shut down the Johns Hopkins sex reassignment clinic in a dozen states he could lose his medical license for practicing medicine with a minor according to how he believes medicine ought to be practiced in 12 states a physician could lose his or her medical license if they try to help a child feel comfortable in his or her own body the government calls that conversion therapy because you are trying to convert the child's true gender identity into something that it's not so if you try to help the boy feel comfortable being a boy that's conversion therapy and you can lose your medical license by contrasts in all 50 states if you prescribe that boy puberty blocking drugs and then prescribe that boy estrogen that's entirely acceptable and it might one day be mandated in the very last months of the previous presidential administration the Department of Health and Human Services issued a new rule under Obamacare that said every health care plan that covered testosterone therapy for men with low testosterone also had to cover testosterone therapy for women who identify as men that every health care plan that covered hysterectomies and mastectomies in the case of cancer also had to cover hysterectomies and mastectomies in the case of sex reassignment it was an order of Catholic nuns that sued the federal government and on New Year's Eve just hours before that new regulation was to go into effect a judge ruled in their favor placing a 50-state injunction on the enforcement of that rule and then three weeks later there was a change in presidential administration and then a new Department of Health and Human Services has agreed with that Judge and has subsequently moved to formally remove that regulation my former boss at the Heritage Foundation is now the director of civil rights at the Department of Health and Human Services but as soon as there is a different as soon as there is a different administration in DC that is hostile to people like me we can expect to see this regulation come back and this will be a crisis for Catholic physicians pediatricians and/or chronologist surgeons psychiatrists psychologists for Catholic hospitals for Catholic health care it would be as if the government was saying that Catholic physicians had to perform abortions Catholic hospitals had to offer abortions businesses Hobby Lobby had to pay for abortions we would see all those same struggles come back but with respect to sex reassignment procedures for the physicians for the hospitals for the health care plans this this unfortunately it'll be back either in a year and a half or in five and a half years or whenever that transition takes place I don't think we can avoid this and so we have to prepare before it I want to skip a slide and go to this one and just let you know what the bottom line is for schools quote the school environment must be set up so that transgender girls are treated like all other girls and transgender boys like all other boys remember what a transgender girl is it's a boy who identifies as a girl and the bottom line here is that that student the boy who identifies as a girl needs to be treated like all other girls this is in the official handbook that was produced by the ACLU the Human Rights Campaign gender spectrum the National Center for lesbian rights and the National Education Association so the largest teachers union in the nation partnered with a left-wing law firm and three LGBT activist groups to produce a handbook on how school should allow students to transition and then the most shocking part to me as a as a new dad privacy and confidentiality are critically important for transgender students who do not have supportive families in those situations even inadvertent disclosures could put the student in a dangerous situation at home so it's important to have a plan in place to avoid any mistakes or slip-ups what this quote is getting at and then the handbook has an entire worksheet is how principals can create a school environment where a student can transition without the parents knowing about it that's the plan in place and it includes advice on how you can have a separate wardrobe waiting for a student in the nurse's office so the student could go to school dressed as a boy go to the nurse's office change clothes go throughout the day dress as a girl being referred to by a girl's name a girl's pronoun etc cetera without you ever knowing because the privacy and confidentiality of the student Trump's the parental authority okay so that's the depressing part of the talk let me now turn to some of the evaluation which might also be depressing it'd be quite honest alright so I want to go through this in three steps first some of the philosophy then some of the science and then finally some of the medicine so it's largely gonna track at the opening part and the first thing to say is that the transgender worldview it combines a new form of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism in which the real self is something other than a material body while simultaneously embracing materialism in which only material bodies exist right and so there are all sorts of contradictions at the heart of this worldview here's one of them on the one hand they say the real me is something other than my body but at the same time they're largely almost entirely materialists in which nothing but material bodies exist both of those things can't be true at the same time in the same place it violates the principle of non-contradiction but they don't matter they don't seem to care if it contradicts they'll advance whichever argument is most appealing at the time it actually relies so another contradiction it relies here on rigid sex stereotypes where gender identity is defined as boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls boys like the color blue girls like the color pink so it relies on rigid sex stereotypes yet it also insists that gender is purely a social conscious and so that there are no meaningful differences between men and women and yet gender identity identity is real and meaningful right you can't believe both of those things at the same time and so let me ask you a couple of questions if gender is a social construct how could your gender identity be innate and immutable and determined in the womb right so how could your identity with respect to a social construct be determined while you were still a fetus if gender identity is ever if gender is gender is a social contract which is ever-changing because society is constantly restructuring and constructing it how could your identity with respect to gender be biologically determined so that you could be quote trapped in the wrong body but what does it even mean to talk about gender in this way that's disconnected from the body what does gender feel like when they say that your gender identity is your internal sense of gender what does your internal sense of gender feel like what does it feel like to feel like a woman do all of the women in this gymnasium feel the same way have you talked to each other to see if you're having the same feelings is that what makes you women right is it some internal feeling of womanhood that you all share and that's what makes you all members of the class woman how would I know if I was feeling like a woman right so they're they're both ontological metaphysical questions of what is gender identity what is it to feel like a woman and then there are pissed them illogical questions knowledge questions of how would I know if I was feeling like a woman it assumes that there's this thing out there that I could be experiencing that I would have knowledge that I'm feeling the way that my wife is feeling and that my wife is feeling the way that all other women are feeling and that's what makes her a woman this is why so many feminists get upset at transgender activist because they say look you're just perpetuating stereotypes what does it like to feel like a woman well when Bruce Jenner became Caitlyn Jenner and posed for that cover picture it was like red lipstick high heels and cleavage right all of the stereotypes about what it is to be a real woman that feminists had been fighting for 30 years that's why you see these interesting disagreements between radical feminists and transgender activists but here's another question why should feeling like a woman whatever that means makes someone a woman our feelings don't determine reality on anything else right just because you feel like you're old doesn't make you old just because you feel like you're young doesn't make you young no one went along with Rachel Dolezal the white woman who felt like she was black who was running the local n-double-a-cp chapter do you remember this from a few years ago so no one said oh she's trans racial that wasn't so why say that a man who feels like a woman whatever that even means apart from stereotypes why why said that means that person is a woman the last thing I'll say here is that gender identity to a certain extent can sound a lot like religious identity and by that I mean identities that are determined by beliefs but just like religious identity our beliefs don't determine the truth right so a Christian is someone who believes that Jesus is the Christ a Muslim is someone who believes that Muhammad is the Prophet now here's the reality Jesus either is or is not the Christ regardless of what any of us believe and the entire point of the religious life is to conform our beliefs to reality to conform our beliefs about God to the reality about God and then to conform our actions in accordance with the truth about God about nature about reality about our own reality and so the same thing is true about gender someone either is or is not a man regardless of what anyone believes including that individual him or herself I either M or I am NOT a man regardless of what any of you believe regardless of what I believe and so the task of formation is to try to align my beliefs and my actions in accordance with the truth in accordance with the truth about God and in accordance with the truth about me and this is what trained professionals whether it's spiritual realities spiritual professionals priests or medical professionals this is what their professions are all about helping people live in contact with reality and so why should it be any different with gender identity okay so that's some of the philosophy let me now turn to some of the science the first thing to say here is that precisely because sex isn't assigned at birth it can't be reassigned later in life our sex is determined at conception by the chromosomes that we inherit from our mother and our Father from that sperm in that egg that fuse to create that one cell zygote at that very moment we're determined to be either a man or a woman in utero that unborn baby starts developing to have different chromosomal compositions XX or XY which leads to the development of certain internal organs which produce certain hormones that then lead to the development of certain external genitalia all of this takes place before week 20 so that when you go for your 20 week ultrasound the ultrasound technician can tell you if you're having a boy or a girl this isn't sex assigned at ultrasound the ultrasound technician isn't assigning a sex to your child the ultrasound technician is doing what all of us do he or she is recognizing a reality so when I look out in this auditorium I can recognize realities of men and women when you greet each other you can recognize realities when that ultrasound technician who is trained to read that blurry black and white screen he or she can tell if you're having a boy or a girl a male or a female child and none of that can be reassigned later in life you can't go back and change the DNA composition of every cell in the body you can't go back and rearrange how the body has developed to produce certain hormones to produce certain internal reproductive organs certain external genitalia all you can do is masculine eyes or feminized bodies what you can do is remove certain body parts and then use plastic surgery to create appendages that resemble the as its sex but that doesn't actually reassign the sex of the individual so doctor Larry Maher at Arizona State and Johns Hopkins scientifically speaking transgender men are not biological men and transgender women are not biological women the claims to the contrary are not supported by a scintilla of scientific evidence and then my co-author Robbie George changing sexes is a metaphysical impossibility because it's a biological impossibility ok so now we'll turning to the medicine sadly just as sex reassignment is physically impossible it also proves not to be the best idea from a psychological and a social perspective what the best studies show is that even when the transition goes well as a cosmetic matter and even in communities that are very trans friendly individuals who have transitioned still faced a host of elevated risks for outcomes in terms of depression in terms of substance abuse in terms of anxiety in terms of alcoholism in terms of suicide ideation in terms of suicide attempts and deaths by suicide it doesn't adequately address the underlying problem what doctor McHugh has said is that you're using a surgical technique a bodily technique to solve what isn't a bodily problem and surgery doesn't address the underlying psychosocial struggles so dr. McHugh wrote shortly after Bruce Jenner had his 20/20 interview transgender men do not become women nor do transgender women become men all become feminized men or masculinized women counterfeits and impersonators of the sex with which they identify in that lies their problematic future when the toll molten shouting dies it proves not easy nor wise to live in a counterfeit sexual garb the most thorough follow-up of sex reassigned people extending over 30 years and conducted in Sweden where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgender documents their lifelong mental unrest 10 to 15 years after surgical reassignment the suicide rate of those in undergone reassignment surgery to 20 times that of comparable peers this was the knowledge that dr. McHugh had back in the 70s when he shut down the Hopkins sex reassignment clinic Hopkins reopened that clinic two and a half years ago not in light of new evidence human nature hasn't changed in the past 40 years but largely because of ideology and because of pressure from activist groups dr. McHugh is now in his 80s he still sees patients one day a week there but he's no longer the psychiatrist in chief and he's no longer the chair of the psychiatry department and so as new people of assumed leadership roles they reopened the clinic and let me point out one thing here where dr. McHugh says it proves not easy nor wise to live in counterfeit sexual garb he says that you know in that lies their problematic future what he's getting at is there's an underlying problem that leads someone to feel distress at their own body and then that problem doesn't go away when you now try to live as if the opposite sex that problem persists and there are now new problems that are created it's not easy nor wise to try to live as if the opposite sex and what the best research shows is that first patients are happy about it right their desires are fulfilled they've been longing to be the opposite sex for a while they have the hormonal surge transition they have the surgical transition and they're like finally get to be my real self and then over time they realize all of those same struggles persist that's why it's dr. McHugh points out here it's 10 to 15 years after the surgery you see the spike in death by suicide let me read you a couple other quotes to reinforce the same perspective so in 2004 the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom they asked Birmingham University to do a study of 100 post-op studies this is the Guardian reporting on its own Commission study Guardian Weekend asked Birmingham University's aggressive research intelligent facility arif to assess the findings of more than 100 follow-up studies of post-op transsexuals arif which conducts reviews of healthcare treatments for the NHS concludes that none of these studies provides conclusive evidence that gender reassignment is beneficial for patients it found that most research was poorly designed which skewed results in favor of physically changing sex there was no evaluation of whether other treatments such as long-term counseling might help or whether their gender confusion might lessen over time so 15 years ago there was no conclusive evidence that this was beneficial many of the studies were poorly designed and lo and behold all of those poorly designed studies were skewing the results in one direction in favor of changing sexes because the people conducting the research had a vested interest in what the outcome of the research was going to be so five years ago a Hazen corporation this is a consulting firm that hospitals that health insurance plans use to figure out what medical treatments are safe to be offering to the general public they did a literature review just five years ago statistically significant improvements have not been consistently demonstrated by multiple studies for most outcomes evidence regarding quality of life and function and male to female adults was very scarce evidence for less comprehensive measures of well-being was directly applicable to gender dysphoria patients book was sparse and or conflicting the study designs do not permit conclusion of causality and studies generally had weaknesses associated with study execution there were potentially long-term safety risks but none have been proven or conclusively ruled out so what Hayes was saying five years ago this is a giant experiment right the research shows that nothing has been conclusively proven or ruled out we don't have statistically significant improvements being demonstrated by multiple studies what we are doing is experimenting on a patient population so if you don't believe doctor McHugh if you don't believe Birmingham University or The Guardian newspaper if you don't believe the Hays Incorporated would you believe the Obama administration and in this case you should because three years ago the Obama Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued a report and this is what they wrote based on a thorough review of the clinical evidence available at this time there is not enough evidence to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria there were conflicting incomes since studied results of the best design studies some reported benefits while others reported harm the quality and strength were slow due to the mostly observational study design with no comparison groups potential confounding of causality and small sample sizes many studies that reported positive outcomes were exploratory studies with no confirmatory follow-up so what they were saying just three years ago was that it's a giant experiment some report benefits some report harms and the ones that are reporting benefits are frequently the ones that don't actually have controls or follow-ups so this was their proposed decision memo which came out in June of 2016 two months later in August they issued their final memo and you can see here they just repeat all of the study design problems so when you hear the media say there's a consensus of all the studies just three years ago the Obama administration was willing to point out all of the problems in the research design no comparison groups subjective endpoints potential confounding of causality small sample sizes lack of validated assessment tools and considerable loss to follow-up and unfortunately that's a euphemism for some patience for suicide the reason they have been lost to follow up with is that they are no longer with us I want to read one more line here from that Obama study starting halfway through the quote after careful assessment we identified six studies that could provide useful information of these the four best design and conducted studies that assess quality of life before and after surgery using validated psychometric studies did not demonstrate clinically significant changes or differences in psychometric test results after GRS gender reassignment surgery let me translate that into English out of all those studies out there the media talks about we could identify six that were actually useful and of these the four best studies show that after sex reassignment surgery there's no clinically significant change in the psychometric test results so let's say you go to a doctor's office because you're struggling with badi self alienation you're struggling with discomfort in your own flesh or struggling with depression with suicide ideation with drug abuse alcohol abuse no clinically significant change after the surgery because the surgery wasn't addressing the underlying problems and this is what the prior administration was willing to admit just three years ago and then they point to that same study in Sweden that dr. McHugh points to so starting with the second sentence the mortality was primarily due to completed suicides nineteen point one fold greater than in control Swedes in the next sentence we know mortality from this patient population did not become apparent until after ten years so when you see the news reports that say how happy Caitlyn Jenner is or when you see the news reports saying there's a new study that shows a year after transition the patients are really happy happy that's not looking lajjun to Denali it's not doing a long-term follow-up of what happens 5 10 15 years later when I've spoken to dr. McHugh about this he thinks that 10 15 years from now we're gonna see a lot of 20 and 30-somethings who are gonna be deeply regretting the transitions that were conducted on their bodies when they were children children currently transitioning 15 20 years from now McHugh thinks we're gonna see a large increase in the number of people D transitioning so let me say a few words about children and then I'm gonna wrap this up first that four-part standard of care is entirely experimental there's not a single study on the long-term outcomes of permanently blocking puberty in a child we have no idea what it does to a child psychologically or physically to not go through their bodies puberty because it's never been done before to a human being it's entirely experimental there's not a single long-term study on it second parents are being told by clinicians that it's fully reversible the idea here is that well if we take the child off the puberty blocking drug normal puberty we'll just recommend one they don't know if that's true or not and then chew it's or no welly in abusive language to say that going through puberty at age 18 is reversing eight years of blocking puberty everything in the developmental biology is a sequenced and so to go through a development till stage eight years later isn't reversing eight years of blocking it and so we also have no idea what it means to go through puberty at the end of your teen years what this means for your height your weight your bone density your bone length your musculature it's not just the sexual aspects of our bodies that develop during puberty every aspect of our body matures and develops during puberty and so parents are being told that this is fully reversible it's safe and they have no idea it's entirely experimental then the last thing I'll mention is that it may very well be self fulfilling many of the doctors I've spoken with the doctors who spoke here on campus back in April they point out that the the clinic in Sweden that conducted this technique 100% of the children who went on puberty blocking drugs then went on to cross sex hormones 100% of them persisted in their transgender identity whereas normally somewhere between eighty and ninety five percent of children will naturally grow out of a gender conflicted stage that citizen comes from the dsm-5 so the handbook of the APA for mental health issues shows that 80 to 95 percent of children with a gender identity conflict will naturally reconcile their identity with their body if development isn't interfered with but the children who replaced on puberty blocking drugs 100 percent of them in the study that was a performant the first clinic to do this persisted so some physicians fear that what we're doing is rock shewill walking in the gender dysphoria that if you take a young child and tell the child you're actually a girl trapped in a boy's body and then you block puberty you may actually be reinforcing that false identity and it may very well be that going through puberty let's say you're a boy who is uncomfortable being a boy going through puberty getting that rush of testosterone hitting your growth spurt having your voice deep in developing in your musculature those may very well be the developmental pathways that help you I reconcile your identity with your body you'll feel comfortable being a man precisely as you go through puberty and develop into a man and so some physicians fear that the puberty blocking procedure is actually blocking off nature's pathway for helping people feel comfortable in their own body so it's a self-fulfilling protocol what's the alternative dr. McHugh draws an analogy to anorexia and he says that if you had an anorexic high school student no physician would prescribe liposuction because the problem is not with that high school students body if you had an anorexic high school student you would try to figure out what's the underlying cause and no two cases of anorexia are the same sometimes it's a body image struggle the student has a faulty image of herself normally this occurs with high school women more so than men but it can happen to both boys or girls but sometimes it's a body image problem sometimes it's an eating disorder right where it's primarily focused at control with respect to food something the eating disorder and the body image problem overlaps sometimes they have separate causes what the therapist would do is try to figure out in this particular case why does this particular patient have this struggle and then how can I prescribe a therapy that would respond to that underlying cause not trying to transform a body into conformity with misguided thoughts and feelings but trying to realign the thoughts and the feelings with reality makuu says that's the same thing you should be doing for children with gender dysphoria figure out what the underlying causes and then try to address your intervention not at their body but at either their social environment or at their own self understanding let me give you two examples both of them come from a Canadian clinic in one case there's a young boy identifying as a girl the mom takes him to see a therapist and during talk therapy the therapist says you know what is it up being a boy that makes you uncomfortable what is about being a girl that you find attractive that you find a solution to your struggles the boy revealed that he was being bullied the other boys in school were picking on him they were calling him a wuss a a mama's boy and the way that he was coping with this bullying was by identifying as a girl all of his closest friends were girls and so he had convinced himself I must be a girl trapped in a boy's body I must be one of those people that I learned about with the gender unicorn that explains why I don't fit in with the boys I do fit in with the girls so the therapist said three things first get your son out of this environment this is an environment of toxic masculinity if you want to use that phrase get him out of there the bullying is the underlying cause second keep bringing him back to see me week after week so we can talk about what it is to be a real boy a real man what masculinity is really about contrary to dr. Scott Leibovitz your son is not cognitively capable enough to know what it means to be a boy or a girl all he has is his limited human experience very limited experience as a child and then stereotypes he knows what the stereotypical notions of boyhood of manliness are we need to enlarge his self understanding and then third precisely because he's a child it's not enough just to talk to him about this we actually need him to experience that he's a real boy the advice to the parents was fine your son a new peer group a new playgroup with boys just like him boys are a little bit more sensitive a little bit quieter a little bit less rambunctious so he could directly experience the reality that he's a real boy and so six months later this boy was readily identifying as a boy again he was spared a lifetime of visits to an endocrinologist office to get estrogen and the other example I like to give the therapy was not directed at the child but the mother again it was a boy identifying as a girl during a therapy session when the physician asked why he wanted to be a girl he said mommy's like little girls more than the like little boys and so that set off a red flag and so after that session the therapist met with the mother and said you know what's going on in your family that your son would say this she revealed that she had been sexually victimized she had been a victim of sexual abuse and inadvertently she had developed an aversion to men including her own son so she was more physically affectionate with her daughter than with her son her son was picking up on this subliminally this wasn't like a conscious decision but he was picking up on the fact mom's more affectionate with my sister if I were a girl she would cuddle with me more so the therapy wasn't directed at this child who's directed the mother the mother got the healing she needed after her sexual assaults and then she was able to be affectionate again with her son her son was able to identify as a boy again spared a lifetime of Endocrinology visits to get estrogen all right let me close by reading you two quotes just to let you know what the alternative looks like I was put on hormones after three months of therapy at the age of 17 in fact because I was only seeing a therapist once per month it was after three or four visits that I was prescribed testosterone with no meaningful attempt made to process the issues that I brought up that led in part to my wish to transition when I was transitioning no one in the medical or psychological field ever tried to dissuade me to offer other options to do really anything to stop me besides telling me that I should wait until I was 18 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 and then the next quote I wanted to make a video previously so that folks can see that I am a real live person but I didn't out of fear of showing my face but I think it's important when we talk about these issues to really understand that women like us aren't just statistics not just some dry data some gatekeeping doctor might throw at you we're real people this is a real outcome of transition I'm a real live 22 year old woman with a scarred chest and a broken voice and five o'clock shadow because I couldn't face the idea of growing up to be a woman that's my reality so this comes from two different YouTube videos that Carey made on transitioning as you saw in that first quote at age 17 she started the transition process she went on testosterone at age 18 she had the double mastectomy and then at age 22 she D transitioned when she says that you know she has a scarred chest that's from the mastectomy a broken voice the testosterone changing her vocal cords five o'clock shadow the testosterone changing her facial hair that's her reality because she was given bad information for medical professionals and so the challenge for us is what can we do to prevent this from being someone else's reality given our vocations whether we're academics or just good neighbors whether we're doctors whether we're teachers whether we're pastors every one of us has a role to play in helping to better educate and equip people on the underlying truths and then to walk with people who are struggling in this way there are people today who don't feel comfortable in their own bodies what can we do to help them feel comfortable to prevent this from being someone's reality thank you

Channel: Steubenville Conferences

Views: 7,733

Rating: 4.8367348 out of 5

Keywords: Steubenville Conferences, Catholic, Franciscan University, Catholic Ministry, New Evangelization, Youth

Id: 0dtQHs6HHWY

Length: 54min 55sec (3295 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 27 2019