Orthodoxy, Intolerance and Transgender Wars

 

We've all seen articles about controversies involving the topic of transgender youth.

Here is an article from a New Hampshire newspaper about an incident on a school bus carrying students home from Exeter High School, the same town where Philips Exeter Academy is located, but this is the public high school for a liberal community.

“The student then turned a copy of this text conversation over to Vice Principal Dovholuk, who confronted M. P. with printed copies of the text messages. M. P. was then subject to an athletic suspension,” according to the complaint.

Dovholuk suspended M.P. from athletics because of this conversation, which happened outside the school building, Cornerstone said.

Exeter adopted a Gender Nonconforming Students policy in 2016 that states in part, “[a] student has the right to be addressed by a name and pronoun that corresponds to the student’s gender identity,” it also includes a broader rule: “the intentional… refusal to respect a student’s gender identity… is a violation of this policy.” 

The principal of the school suspended the offending student from participation in inter scholastic sports, because he expressed an opinion that there are only two genders. 

The confrontation on the school bus occurred when a boy said he thought there are only two genders, and a girl replied gender is fluid and called him a bigot.

The connection between the student's thoughts on gender and his being forbidden to play in a basketball game against a rival school escaped me. He violated a policy on pronouns?

Male Puberty; Women's Swm Meet

I attended a conference where "Androgen Abuse Syndrome" was discussed in a session. Men with bodies like Arnold Schwarzenegger show up at Endocrine Clinics asking for testosterone injections because they think they do not look big enough. They are treated much like women with anorexia nervosa, which is to say, they are told have have a single wrong idea. They are looking in a mirror and seeing a 98 pound weakling when in fact, they are massively muscled. They eventually are brought to the realization there is something wrong with their perceptual processes, and they enter into contracts agreeing not to seek testosterone at other clinics and to attend only the one clinic and then they embark on a program to lower their doses of testosterone and they are treated with tapering doses of testosterone, visits to insure compliance with this regimen,  they are weaned off the testosterone. It's similar to how women with anorexia nervosa are treated, and there are often set backs, patients falling off the program, and then re-entering unto completion. 

I walked from that session to one on Transgender Medicine.

In that session, the Transgender Clinic people talked about the doses they used to bring a patient born female to male. The doses they were using were nigh on astronomical, four times the highest doses I've ever used to replace a male who was deficient. I texted the doctor who led the Androgen Abuse session, saying here is a clinic where they practice androgen abuse, and he quickly responded saying these are doses used for "gender affirming therapy," and so that was perfectly fine.

I tried asking about the doses at the Transgender session, but was quickly shut down and the scowls and murmurs around the room told me I was quickly becoming a pariah.

Dr. Paul McHugh

The cases presented at the session left me reeling: a couple, a transgender male to female (who has not been castrated, and still has penis and testicles), with his lesbian partner who want to have a baby and are directed into IVF. A female to male transgender who continues menstruating through the testosterone therapy, so the doses of testosterone are escalated to levels I would be afraid to give any human being, but the menses are said to be so disheartening to the patient, undermining the new male identity, it's worth the risk of the high testosterone doses.

Paul McHugh, as a newly appointed Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, was asked to provide psychiatry liaison to the Transgender Clinic there. He reviewed the records and found a 40% suicide rate among patients in that clinic, and he declined to participate until he could understand why this program had such a high mortality rate. (Even today, this is the figure most often quoted for Transgender Clinics--somewhere between 25% and 40% suicide rates.)  Eventually, he concluded that patients with "gender dysphoria" might be a lot like patients with anorexia nervosa: in his mind these patients had "a single wrong idea." In the case of anorexia, the idea was the patient believed herself to be too fat. In the case of gender dysphoria, people who said they felt as if they were in the wrong body, that even though declared a girl at birth, they felt more like  boys. 

McHugh found that Johns Hopkins medical students refused to speak to him. Students refused to hear what he had to say. At one of the most "elite" medical schools in the country. Free inquiry enjoined.

Writing in an NBC News posting, a reporter named Dawn Ennis said, "The 'research' Paul McHugh has been peddling and marketing are a weapon in the arsenal of anti-transgender politicians and extremists."  This under the headline, "Human Rights Campaign Sets on Johns Hopkins After Controversial Trans Report."

So, clearly there were and still are "anti-transgender politicians," who might fairly be called, "extremists" but is it not also true there are pro-transgender extremists?

McHugh was vilified as a Catholic who was simply pushing his religious beliefs as science.

What McHugh was doing, for whatever reason, was questioning orthodoxy.

Dave Chappelle has been attacked for his ruminations on transgenders, as he openly questions what rights and deference society should allow to accommodate these folks. 

But one of his most affecting stories is about a trans woman who he befriended, after she approached him for help with her nascent comedy career. Like so many Chappelle monologues, it is a long and winding road, filled with sly take downs, but it ends with the news which devasted him-- that this transgender person threw herself off a roof to her death--one of those 40%. 

No sentient person could or should hear him tell that story and think anything but Chappelle was desolated by her fate, and yet his clear empathy has been ignored in the maelstrom of hate pouring down on him for his criticisms of the orthodoxy of pronouns and things we are not allowed to say.

Even the New Yorker writes in correct pronouns, constructing such sentences as "Even during periods of grief and exhaustion, they said, they were 'still able to write some of my best gags,' and they took this as a hopeful sign that 'they'll still be fun to have around.'"

Academia has been particularly inept at dealing with the demands for correctness, not just at Exeter High School but at Harvard. 

And the whole BLGT thing is misleading, as if a gay person is simply one of the same group as a trans person. Both may face societal hostility and stress, but gay people do not need doctors or medications. They are more different than alike transgenders.

Most of the academic deans and professors I speak with actually have no idea what a transgender is, what sorts of therapies they request, what is known about sexual differentiation, and how that may relate to gender dysphoria, but they are very certain about policies on pronouns.

The very institutions which are supposed to foster open discussion--universities, medical schools, medical societies-- at all of these, free inquiry has been all but shut down.

This is one of the reasons we have President Trump in the White House today.