When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment

[Applause] great well thank you all for coming and thank you Chris for that introduction I'm gonna lower the microphone a little bit chris is a little bit taller than I am hopefully this won't impact your hearing ability okay so 28 years ago the release of when Harry Met Sally dealt with one thorny issue weather men and women could really be just friends today we're forced to confront a different issue whether men can really become women America's in the midst of what's been called a transgender moment in a space of about a year transgender issues went from something that most people hadn't ever really thought about to an issue claiming the mantle of civil rights but is it true that a boy can be trapped in a girl's body is our sex assigned to us at Birth can modern medicine reassign sex what's the most loving and compassionate response to the condition of gender dysphoria and what should our laws say on these issues to a certain extent these shouldn't be difficult questions in the late 1970s dr. Paul McHugh thought he had convinced the vast majority of his professional colleagues not to go along with bold claims that were being made about gender identity McHugh I'd receive a world-class education first as an undergraduate at Harvard College then at Harvard Medical School he now found himself as chair of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and of psych and a psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital and in 1979 he put a stop to sex reassignment procedures at that institution and it's only last year that Johns Hopkins started offering sex reassignment procedures again but back in 79 after McHugh did this many other medical institutions followed the lead of the elite Johns Hopkins but recent years have seen a resurgence in sex reassignment procedures not in light of new science but in light of ideology now the people increasingly in the spotlight of the transgender moment are children in 2007 Boston Children's Hospital became quote the first major program in the United States to focus on transgender children and adolescents and quote as its website brags a decade later more than 45 pediatric gender clinics have opened their doors 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 show that somewhere between 80 to 95 percent of children who struggle with their gender identity will naturally grow out of it and come to identify with their bodies if development is allowed to progress never mind that transitioning treatment hasn't been proven to be effective at providing long-term wholeness for patients 41% of people who identify as transgender attempt suicide at some point in their lives and people who have had transition surgery are 19 times more likely than average to die by suicide these statistics should stop us in our tracks these statistics are heartbreaking and they should definitely prevent us from rushing headlong into embracing transgender therapies and transgender ideology so in the book that'll be released in two weeks went the wrong way when Harry became Sally I argue that dr. McHugh got this right that the best biology psychology and philosophy all support an understanding of sex as a bodily reality and of gender as a social manifestation of sex biology isn't bigotry and so in the book and in today's lecture what I want to do is offer a nuanced vision of human embodiment a balanced approach to the various public policy questions and for today's lecture we actually probably won't get too any of the legal policy questions but feel free to ask during Q&A and then an honest survey of the human costs of getting human nature wrong where I want to start are with going back to the the title of today's lecture the understanding and then responding to the transgender moment are with some of the claims that are being made by transgender activists and what I want to initially do is distinguish transgender activists who promote what's been called gender ideology from people who suffer from gender dysphoria and people who identify as transgender most people with gender dysphoria most people who identify as transgender they're not activists of any sort and they don't embrace ideology but there are activists within this debate and they do present and try to push a certain ideology and so it's important that we understand what those claims are because people say we live in a postmodern era that has rejected metaphysics but that's not quite true we live in a postmodern era that promotes an alternative metaphysic and at the heart of this transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person in particular that people are who they claim to be regardless of evidence that a transgender boy is a boy not a girl who identifies as a boy and this shift has actually taken place within the past decade within transgender activists own speaking so in the book I highlight various statements from the Human Rights Campaign and other LGBT activist groups that when they define transgender identities and transgender people they said that it's a boy who identifies as a girl a decade later they had changed that to say for journalists don't refer to people who identify as trans as a biological boy who identifies as a girl or a woman who identifies as a man the new claim is that a transgender boy is a boy transgender girl is a girl now it's understandable by activists would want to make that sort of a claim an argument about transgender identities will be much more powerful if it concerns who someone is rather than how someone identifies and so the rhetoric of the transgender moment drips with ontological assertions people are the gender they prefer to be that's the claim now frequently transgender activists they won't admit that this is a metaphysical claim they won't admit that this is a claim about ontology about the metaphysics of personhood they don't want to have the discussion at the level of fundamental philosophy so what they'll do is they'll dress it up as a scientific claim and then since the high priests in our culture are scientists and doctors they'll rely on the authority of science to support their philosophical assertions so these next quotes that I want to read you are from a court document filed in the North Carolina hb2 case and it comes from one of the expert witnesses arguing against hb2 dr. Diana Atkins she's a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and she's the director of the Duke Center for child and adolescent agender care that opened back in 2015 I showed so jus how recently these pediatric gender clinics have been created and how they are now in existence at the most elite institutions of American culture Duke's one of the better medical schools out there and so this is what Professor Atkins said in her declaration from a medical perspective the appropriate determinants 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 the purposes of classifying someone as male or female now that's a remarkable claim because a generation ago medical students would have been taught that chromosomes hormones internal reproductive organs external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics are the bread and butter of medical science right and so now a generation later it's contrary to medical science to use chromosomes hormones internal reproductive organs external genitalia or secondary sex characteristics if all of those things conflict with the professed gender identity of the patient now this this scientific claim because again this is being presented as a scientific claim when in fact it's going to be more of a philosophical assertion about the nature of the human person it's not just being left to the courts to litigate these questions it's also being promoted in schools all across the country and so many of you are probably too old now to have ever had first-hand experience with the gender bread person but the gender bread person is what's being used in K through five schools to help catechized children into the new gender ideology and so as you can see on the gender bread person it says that when it comes to a human anthropology we each have five different spectra on sex and gender and so you have gender identity and since the font is a little small it says quote how you in your head define your gender based on how much you align or don't align with what you understands to be the options for gender and then the graphic lists it says quote for of infinite possibilities and the four of the infinite possibilities edit lists include womanís madness two-spirit and genderqueer so that's gender identity but then and you can see the identity is kind of being pointed towards the brain then there's also gender expression and gender expression is encompassing the entirety of the gender bread person from from top to bottom they define this as the way you present gender actions dress and demeanor and then they list let me see they list six options underneath there they have feminine or masculine butch femme androgynous or gender-neutral then the gender bred person lists something known as biological sex this will get the gender bred person in trouble so remember that the gender bred person has biological sex and then finally I'm not as relevant for today's discussion it also lists sexually attracted to and romantically attracted to now the gender bred person got in trouble for two reasons the first was that it looks too much like a man and the second was that it looks like a gender bred man and then the second is that it has biological sex and you knows where it lists biological sex there in the pelvic area so the new graphic that was created to be used in catechism class in public schools all across the country is the gender unicorn right so a mythical creature and the big changes here it doesn't look either like a man or a woman and then you'll notice that there's no longer biological sex um the latest version of the politically correct gender ideology is that sex is assigned at birth so when each of us was born a doctor simply assigned sex to us which raises all sorts of questions about when parents are having an ultrasound and they already know the sex of their child if it's not assigned until birth you know is is the ultrasound technician now assigning sex that ultrasound do we have to update the gender unicorn again or is sex a bodily reality that we recognize rather than a social construct that we assign and so those are the two alternative visions of the human person going on now from transgender ontology um how the activists understand the human person follows a transgender medicine how you view the human person will then influence how you think about I'm gonna turn this a little bit so I'm not angled against people coming in the door so there's a four-part standard of care that has been promulgated by the endocrine Society and ER chronologiste s-- study hormones and they do hormone therapy and then the W path which is the professional association of transgender health experts and so I want to focus here particularly for the four part Senate of care for children and so the for the first set of treatments if a child is persistent insistent inconsistent in identifying as the opposite sex that child is first to be encouraged to socially transition and so social transition this is where a child as young as three or four years old would be given a new name would be referred to by new pronouns would be given a new wardrobe would have access to new bathrooms and locker rooms and sports teams and so if you remember about a year and a half ago when the Obama administration Department of Education and Department of Justice sent that Dear Colleague letter to all of the schools in the nation instructing them that they were to do all campus policies not based on biological sex but based on gender identity that was an attempt of ensuring the ability for this first step of the standard of care for children to be able to socially transition at school so not just the new name the new wardrobe the new pronoun but then also access to the new appropriate intimate facilities so then second as a child approaches puberty the child is to be placed on puberty blocking drugs so for a child around age nine ten eleven the child would be administered drugs to indefinitely delay the onset and the development of puberty these are drugs that were developed and tested for a condition known as precocious puberty some children go through puberty too early in life and so physicians developed a drug that would delay puberty to an age-appropriate time that's not good to go through puberty when you're six or seven so they develop a drug that would delay puberty till when you're supposed to go through puberty those drugs are now being used off-label they're not FDA approved for these purposes that are being used off-label to indefinitely delayed puberty they haven't been FDA approved for these purposes and so we don't actually know what the long-term consequences will be for children who never go through their sexes pubertal development which is why the third step of the standard of care that the activists promote is the administration of the opposite sexes sex hormones to start mimicking the initiation of puberty of the opposite sex so a teen now we're in the teenage years 14 15 and 16 a boy would be administered estrogen and a girl would be administered testosterone to feminize the boy's body and to masculinize the girl's body and then the fourth part of the four parts and of care is surgical transition and so at age 18 a child can be eligible for both top and bottom surgery we won't go into detail as the book does go into details but more or less you can have various surgeries to remove both external genitalia and internal reproductive organs and then various forms of cosmetic surgery to try to create the app the opposite sexes of the appearance of the opposite sexes sex organs as I'll discuss later you can't actually reassign sex because sex wasn't assigned in the first place so from the transgender ontology follows the transgender medicine and then lastly is the transgender policy I've already mentioned one aspect of that that's the lessons that children will be taught in school so many of the public schools are now using the gender bed person in the gender unicorn to help teach children what they view as the truth about human nature and about sex assigned at birth and gender expression and gender identity and romantic attraction and sexual attraction the next part would be um access to sex specific facilities what sports team what locker room what bathroom what dormitory should people use sort of be based on bodily sex or should it be based on their internal sense of gender in some jurisdictions it has involved the punishment of misgendering someone so in New York City you can be fined a quarter million dollars if you intentionally use the wrong pronouns against someone a form of hate speech and then lastly the provision of medical services so this is a lesser-known part of Obamacare but under in the last year of the Obama administration the Department of Health and Human Services redefined the word sex to mean gender identity and so Obamacare prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in all the healthcare plans that are regulated under Obamacare and what that meant when Congress passed this law was that you can't provide like really really good health insurance to your male employees and then kind of subpar health insurance to your female employees you can't cover certain medical procedures for men and then not cover them for women so no discrimination on the basis of sex the Obama administration in the last year of office redefined the word sex to mean gender identity and then they issued a regulation saying that all health care plans would have to cover sex reassignment procedures both hormonal and surgical so you would have to if you were covering surgery for the same the same type of surgery for other purposes you would have to cover that surgery for reassignment purposes if you were covering hormone treatments for other purposes you would have to pay for hormone treatment for reassignment purposes this regulation also said that physicians would have to form them so if you're an endocrinologist that does testosterone therapy for men with low testosterone you would also have to provide testosterone female for women who want to identify as men if you're a surgeon who performs hysterectomies or mastectomies because of cancer you would also have to perform hysterectomies and mastectomies for a woman who wants to identify as a man this Obamacare regulation had no religious liberty exemptions it had no conscience protections and it had no provisions simply for best medical judgments many physicians apart from any religious or ethical concerns simply think sex reassignment procedures are bad medicine some think it's good medicine others think it's bad medicine and the federal government was now going to force physicians who think it's bad medicine to perform bad medicine they would have to provide the surgery and the hormones if they would do it in medically indicated reasons like low testosterone or cancer now as I was going through the claims that transgender activists make about the human person about medicine and about public policy I tried to wrap my head around what's actually going on here and what I kept finding is that there are various contradictions that lie right at the heart of the transgender worldview so the transgender worldview combines a new form of the ancient philosophy of Gnosticism in which the real self is something other than a material body while at the same time it embraces materialism in which nothing but physical matter and physical bodies exist so you can see that first tension how can you on the one hand say the real self is something other than the physical body but on the other hand say only matter exists many of the activists are materialists and so it seems opportunistic to rely on one or the other of those mutually contradictory propositions second is that it relies on rigid sex stereotypes in which girls play with dolls and boys play with trucks yet it insists that gender is purely a social construct and thus there are no meaningful differences between men and women all the while insisting that gender identity is real and meaningful but our human embodiment is not it embraces a radical expressive individualism where people should be free to define the truth however they wish it to be and to do whatever they want to do and yet it enforces a ruthless paternalism to coerce anyone who would dare dissent you've already seen this happening on various campuses four speakers are shouted down where clinicians have their clinics shut down so on the one hand radical expressive individualism everyone should be free to live out their truth on the other hand you must accept transgender ideology or you will be coerced so there are a series of questions that we can ask to think through the contradictions that lie in the transgender worldview I just want to explore some of those with you first is a an ontological series of questions metaphysical about the nature of reality if gender is a social construct as activists claim how can gender identity be innate and immutable that is how can one's identity with respect to a social construct be determined by biology in the womb and how can one's identity be unchangeable how can it be immutable with respect to an ever-changing social construct social contract of gender constantly is evolving and so how can your identity with respect to an ever evolving social construct be both innate and immutable and determined by biology the womb so the challenge for those who embrace am a transgender worldview is to offer a meaningful understanding of gender and gender identity independent of bodily sex if gender and gender identity or something other than bodily sex explain what it is so that's the ontological set of questions then there's a series of a pisum illogical questions of histologic epistemology being a study of knowledge and how do we know things so what does it even mean to have an internal sense of gender what does gender feel like and apart from a body what meaning can we even give to the concept of sex or gender and thus what internal sense can we have of gender so to put this more concretely apart from having a male body what does it feel like to feel like a man apart from having a female body what does it feel like to be a woman or to put this even more pointedly and remember that gender need not be limited to a binary you can be both a man and a woman or you neither what does it feel like to be both a man and a woman or to be neither now we're going back to some ontological questions why should feeling like a man whatever that means make someone a man that is why do our feelings determine reality on the question of sex but on little to anything else after our feelings don't determine our age or our height I sometimes feel like an old man but I'm not I wish I was taller but my feelings don't change these realities and very few are the people who went along with Rachel Dolezal the white woman who feels like she's black and who identifies as black so if our feelings don't determine our racial identity why do our feelings determine our gender identity and what about people who identify as animals you can look this up on the internet and see pictures of people who have actually surgically transformed their human bodies to look more like other animal bodies what about people able-bodied people who identify as disabled do all of these identities determine reality and should all of these people receive medical treatment to conform their bodies to their feelings or should they receive medical treatment to help conform their thoughts and their feelings to reality including the reality of their bodies to a certain extent when I was finishing some of the research for this I said to myself gender identity can actually sound quite a bit like religious identity identities that are determined by beliefs but just like religion our beliefs don't determine reality right so someone who identifies as a Christian believes that Jesus is the Christ someone who identifies as a Muslim believes that Muhammad is the Prophet but Jesus either is or is not the Christ regardless of what any of us believe Muhammad either is or is not the Prophet regardless of what any of us believe and so to a person either is or is not a man regardless of what anyone including that person believes and so again the challenge for someone who embraces the transgender worldview is to explain why do thoughts and feelings determine reality on the question of sex and gender 1 on any other issue they don't right so think about the education that you're receiving at UD the entire point is to conform your thoughts to reality to discover what the truth is and then to shape your identity in conformity with the truth to shape your thoughts and your feelings in harmony with the truth that's the entire point of Education if we're supposed to be shaping a reality in accordance with our thoughts and feelings why do we only do it under this issue the issue of gender and gender identity now it's not surprising that for many people who have struggled with gender dysphoria that sex reassignment procedures have not brought the wholeness that they have sought for some it does at least temporarily but for many others in the long run it is not and so the chapter of the book that was most difficult to actually research and write I was a chapter about people who had transitioned and then D transitioned these are stories that frequently are ignored by the mainstream media they'll show a 20/20 to our special of Bruce Jenner becoming Caitlyn Jenner but they won't show a special of Walt higher when he became large and sin and then 15 years later went back to being Walt higher his story doesn't get the primetime coverage on ABC News so many especially of the people who transitioned as children and as teens report feeling pressured into transitioning they say that it was presented to them as if it was their only real option and they now regret that medical professionals didn't discuss other options with them and didn't explore other possible underlying causes for their gender dysphoria many of these people regret the permanent damage done to their bodies and the ones who transition as teenagers report feeling in hindsight that they were much too young to be making such life-altering decisions that at age 14 15 and 16 they weren't in a position to be making decisions that at age 30 would be more or less irreversible at the functional level they can obviously undo the cosmetic surgery but once you've removed internal and external genitalia and reproductive organs you can't replace them and they don't grow back many of these people report that one of the causes of their gender dysphoria was what they perceived to be hostility to people like them from people like me social conservatives who stigmatize gays and lesbians or people who are gender non-conforming and so that should immediately caution us as we think about these issues and as we respond to them not to stigmatize people to actually have a more expansive understanding of what it means to be a man and a woman than the rigid stereotypes that are actually being reinforced by much of the gender ideology in October 2017 so three months ago The Telegraph a newspaper in the United Kingdom ran a report with this headline sex change regret gender reversal surgery is on the rise so why aren't we talking about it and the answer to that question is political correctness but when it comes to human nature it's much more important to be correct and politically correct so in the time that I have left because I want to get to your questions I want to say a little bit about how to properly understand sex and gender and therefore gender identity and then say a little bit about how some clinicians have been treating this but dr. McHugh suggests and what are their clinicians like him so the first thing to say how to think about sex sex is not something that's assigned to us at birth nor is it assigned to us at an ultrasound sex is a bodily reality based upon the organization of the organism and is true for all sorts of organisms not just human beings but go through more or less every species of animal you can think of and the way that biologists classify instances of the species as male or female are how they are organized with respect to reproductive function so an organism is a collection of organs systems of organs cardiovascular system respiratory system reproductive system and then how those organs are organized what makes us not just a clump of cells is that our various cells and tissues and organs are integrated they're organized how those organisms are organized or how we then classify someone as a male or a female not sex stereotypes so we don't say because this child is compassionate and sensitive it likes to play with dolls therefore this child is a girl and that child because that child is rambunctious and a bully that child is a boy that's not how we identify the sex of a species we identify it based on its organization so to a certain extent you can think that sex as a as an object as a noun in terms of male and female is determined by sex as an action our capacity to engage in sexual intercourse as either a man or a woman this is the only scientific way to identify male and female of a species if you depart from this you will have no way of identifying male and female cows male and female dogs male and female chickens male and female humans this is how science actually looks at this now this aspect of sexual organization the fundamental kind of ontological polarity of male and female then expresses itself in other ways but those other expressions are all distributional patterns right so on average and for the most part you can say that there are differences between men and women one average for the most part men are stronger than women but some particular women are stronger than some particular men and that doesn't mean that those women are actually men or those men are actually women that's where we actually need to be more capacious in our understanding of what real men and real women are what defines us as men and women our organizational capacity for reproduction that then influences our subsequent development in terms of the development at puberty when our sex hormones estrogen and testosterone masculinize and feminized our bodies but those differences personality in characteristic interests in body type those are all laws of averages it's a distributional curve and so there will be substantial overlap substantial outliers and that's okay the problem is when we get away from the objective determinants of sex and we actually start relying on the sex stereotypes to define people as men and women where this is particularly important though is in medicine and health care what physicians now know is that male and female bodies respond to medicine differently and they experience illness differently both physical illness and mental illness and at one point pharmaceutical studies were only conducted on men and then the FDA realized that they were miss dosages orts of pharmaceuticals for women because they had only tested how this pharmacological agent would respond to the male body and then they actually realized that men and women are different and so both the medicine itself and the appropriate dosage for certain diseases in certain drugs is sex specific we see this in mental illness as we see this in physical illnesses we see this in heart disease for example and so it's important to know when to take sex differences seriously and when not to so then the second thing is how to think about gender if sex is a bodily reality gender is how we manifest that bodily reality to the world so to a certain extent gender is socially constructed but it's not merely socially constructed because the point of gender is how should we express our identity as male or female to one another and so when does it matter that some of us in this room are men and some of us in this room are women and when doesn't it matter so the various ways in which our culture has thought about this is that it doesn't matter when it comes to algebra or chemistry or history or philosophy we don't have separate courses in those subjects at the collegiate level for men and women we do have separate sports teams for men and women and we don't say that's a form of sexism we don't say that's a gender stereotype we say that when it comes to soccer men should compete against men women should compete against women not because men wear coats and ties and women wear dresses and it's not because of our gender identity in that respect because of our bodily differences and so then those bodily differences give rise to certain social practices like how we organize competitive athletics then you notice when we're doing non-competitive athletics when we're doing intramurals various intramurals are co-ed I play on a co-ed softball team and many of the women are better at softball than I am on my softball team and that's okay we don't need to rely on rigid sex stereotypes but where I think it makes the most immediate differences where our bodily differences as male and female matter the most are how we think about marriage and how we view friendship so where you actually see the can or Medivh difference in how ought we to present ourselves are precisely in how we channel our sexual capacities towards a one flesh union of marriage so this goes back to a lecture I gave at U Dallas probably two or three years ago on how to properly understand what marriages and so it's precisely our organization as male and female that makes marriage possible what makes it possible for two people to unite as one flesh is that the male and the female body are complementary they can unite in' the type of act that actually unifies them as a single organism remember I said that we as individuals our organs that are organized towards the common good of our individual bodies in the marital act a male and a female unify so as to perform one action with respect to one function the reproductive systems are each of us have half of a reproductive system in that respect and when we unify they complete a full reproductive system that becomes the basis for how to think about how you can unite bodily with someone else and then we have various social practices of organizing these capacities to come to fruition right so how we view things like courtship and dating how we view things like marriage and childbearing and child-rearing that's gonna be the focal instances where being a man or a woman a husband or a wife a mother or a father matter but whether you enjoy playing with dolls or playing with trucks whether your favorite color is blue or pink that's not something that makes a difference and so if we're a Fi the wrong aspects of gender we can actually be perpetuating people's struggles with gender dysphoria so then lastly let me say a couple of words about treatments for gender dysphoria especially in children because with dr. McHugh and in the case of a Canadian therapist a kenneth sucker and position about suckers that sucker was in favor of sex reassignment procedures for certain adults but he thought it was a bad idea to do sex reassignment procedures for children and then after a targeted campaign from LGBT activist the Canadian government shut down his clinic two years ago there's actually a really nice article about this in New York magazine by Jessie Segal and New York magazine is not kind of a social conservative right-wing nut job publication it's a standard kind of lefty magazine for New Yorkers and what the journalist points out there is that here you have a therapist who thought that for some people the way that you would best treat their genders for it was actually with sex reassignment procedures but he didn't think that was appropriate for children and he had clinical evidence that showed it wasn't appropriate for children he'd been practicing for 30-some years helping children respond to their gender dysphoria and the government shut him down almost entirely based on ideology including falsified claims that he had been inappropriate with patients that they only later cleared him of but still did not reinstate him in the clinic all right so what do some of these therapies look like let me just give you two examples that I mentioned in the book that come from the clinical literature in one case there's a young boy and they say here's actually a biological predisposition and the biological predisposition is not that he had like a girl brain in a boy's body there's very little to none scientific evidence to support the brain sex theory but the biological predisposition was that this boy wasn't very active and so they talked about activity level um al is the acronym used in the literature in it so because this boy wasn't rambunctious he didn't enjoy roughhousing he didn't enjoy wrestling and doing king of the mountain and doing things like that he was picked on by the other boys in his class and then he developed closer friendships with the girls in his class and his interests lined up more with his female classmates than with his male classmates and after a while of being bullied and after a while developing close friendships with girls he started identifying as a girl partly as a way of coping with that bullying as a way of escaping that he wasn't a real man he wasn't a real boy because he didn't do all this stereotypical things that boys do and so what the clinicians suggested was one remove him from this toxic environment and then to help him find other friends his age who are also boys that have similar interests as he does so through a series of both talk therapy where the clinician talked with the child is Amaya do you think you're a girl you know what is it about you that makes you think you're a girl well girls are sensitive girls are nice girls aren't mean and I don't want to be mean I'm nice I'm sensitive so I must be a girl through a series of talking back and forth about how the child understood his own concept of gender and helping him have an enlarged more mature more nuanced understanding of gender and then through a series of experiences actually meeting with identifying with having friendship with other boys like him he was able to enlarge his self understanding and then naturally grow out of it so he was spared a lifetime of puberty blocking drugs and then the opposite sex is hormones and then potentially reassignment surgery in another case that's reported the therapy was not primarily directed towards the child but it was primarily directed towards the child's mother a mother had two children a son and a daughter and she was more affectionate with the daughter and so the son had started identifying as a girl as a way of currying favor with his mother no all this is at the subconscious level I mean the the five-year-old boy actually this might have been a grade schooler so slightly older if I remember correctly maybe eight or nine years old he wasn't doing this as like a logical calculation of mom's and I searched him sister if I identify as a girl she'll be nicer and cuddled with me more often right that's not what happening but children are perceptive and they're able to see if parents are inadvertently playing favorites and they can try to compensate for that so his coping mechanism was too if he identified as a girl he would get more affection from his mom and so in the course of family therapy the clinician was able to determine that the mother had been of the of sexual assaults earlier in her life and she never received the counseling and the care that she needed to heal from that experience and as a result of the sexual assault she had developed an aversion towards men and she was inadvertently even having an aversion towards her own son as a result of that and so it was after a year of working with a professional with the mother and that she was able to find the healing and the wholeness that she desired that she was then able to just naturally be more affectionate with her son and that her son was able to more readily identify as a boy so when we think about the headlong rush into things like the gender bred person the gender unicorn when we think about how difficult it is in general for children to go through the maturation process and to develop as boy is as men as husbands and fathers as girls as women as wives and mothers that's already a difficult developmental process in the best of circumstances we make it that much more difficult when we start catechizing children in false ideas about human nature

Channel: American Public Philosophy Institute

Views: 58,649

Rating: 4.5298371 out of 5

Keywords: ryan anderson, transgender, when harry became sally, when harry became sally: resonding to the transgender moment, heritage, university of dallas, politics, medicine

Id: 9VjlxHMwhsA

Length: 47min 42sec (2862 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2018