Current Events –
Transgender: Trendy Or Abnormal?

Modern society is training itself to accept transgender men and women as the politically correct thing to do.  However, is this the right thing to do?  According to one noted psychiatrist, the answer is a resounding NO!

Current Events
Jazz Jennings is a 14-year-old trans girl noted as the youngest publicly documented person to be identified as gender dysphoric. Her transition from male to female has made her a YouTube sensation, a celebrity spokesmodel and a generational voice for LGBTQ rights. Having won the Olympic Decathlon gold medal in 1976 and most recently receiving ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Award for bravery, Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner has become perhaps the most famous face of the transgender movement.  As the daughter of Sonny and Cher, Chastity Bono said she always hated wearing dresses because she always felt like a boy inside.  As an adult, Chastity reassigned her gender and become Chaz Bono.

Are Jazz, Bruce and Chaz trendy, normal, or abnormal?

In a recent discussion on society’s newfound acceptance of men as women and women as men, Dr. Paul R. McHugh, former Chief of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital offered some interesting thoughts on the subject.

“While the Obama administration, Hollywood and major media such as Time magazine promote transgenderism as “normal,” these policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention,” Dr. McHugh said.

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects,” he continued. “The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken – it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

“The transgendered person’s disorder is in the person’s “assumption” that they are different than the physical reality of their body, their maleness or femaleness, as assigned by nature. It is a disorder similar to a “dangerously thin” person suffering anorexia who looks in the mirror and thinks they are “overweight.”

Current Events
Dr. McHugh added that the assumption that one’s gender is only in the mind regardless of anatomical reality, has led some transgendered people to push for social acceptance and affirmation of their own subjective “personal truth.”  As a result, some states, including California, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, have passed laws barring psychiatrists, “even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor,” he said.

“The pro-transgender advocates do not want to know,” said McHugh, “that studies show between 70% and 80% of children who express transgender feelings spontaneously lose those feelings over time.” Also, for those who had sexual reassignment surgery, most said they were “satisfied” with the operation “but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.

“And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a ‘satisfied’ but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.”

For the effeminate male or the emasculate female to take their inner feelings all the way to gender reassignment, this could be a recipe for irreversible disaster.  And we could be making it worse by becoming an accepting accessory in not wanting to offend their choices.  Further, what about those who don’t go through gender reassignment, but merely dress the part as drag queens or kings?  Should we embrace this as acceptable simply because that’s how the person “sees themselves,” or is this as dangerous as Dr. McHugh’s correlation to how an anorexic person “sees themselves?”

With the U.S Military now considering a plan to allow transgender men and women to serve openly, society seems hell-bent not to offend anyone’s choices for fear of it being labeled as discrimination.  However, what are our boundaries and do we/should we have any anymore?  Is transgender some biological abnormality?  Is it a cry for attention or help? Could it be a trend that eventually fades out?  Or is it something completely normal that deserves our respect and acceptance?

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Is Transgender trendy, or abnormal?