PURELY POLITICAL TRANS

Examining the Transgender Explosion

How Did We Get Here?

The transgender movement has a lot in common with another medical craze of the recent past. From the 1940s to early ‘60s, lobotomy was seen by many as a medical miracle used to “cure” difficult patients. By the mid 1960s, and after some 60,000 lobotomies, the procedure had been completely discredited.

This similarity occurred to me after reading a short piece by Reagan Reese, a reporter for The Daily Caller News Foundation. She reported on a Milwaukee Wisconsin public school counselor placed on administrative leave on the last day of school “for speaking out against transgender students.” The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the woman had given a speech at a rally on April 23 that was filmed and put online by Women’s Liberation Radio News.

The offending counselor was recorded saying: “My name is Marissa Darlingh. I am an elementary school counselor in Milwaukee Public Schools and I oppose gender ideology ever entering the walls of my school building. On my dead (expletive deleted) body will my students be exposed to the harms of gender identity ideology.”

An “investigation” by Milwaukee Public Schools into Ms. Darlingh’s activities was authorized.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty has taken up her case and has agreed to defend her, so the issue isn’t likely to die any time soon. The Milwaukee Public Schools system is trying to decide whether Melissa’s outburst rose to the level of “immoral conduct,” and therefore enough of a transgression to allow the school system to revoke her educator license.

According to a June 2019 report cited in the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine from the American Society for Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), sex-reassignment surgery was the highest growing surgery in 2016-2017, which grew by 155%: for transgender men the percentage was 289%, for transgender women, 41%. “These rates,” the report states, “are significantly increased from the more modest but still marked net 19% increase in GCS [Gender Confirming Surgery] from 2015 to 2016 reported by ASPS. What is certain, however,” the report concludes, “is that GCS is a rapidly-expanding field.”

Gender Confirming Surgery a rapidly expanding field? A flurry of various (and confusing) sexual identities from A to Z, the insistence of using personal pronouns and being punished for not using them, drag queen readings in first-grade classes…

How did we get here?

How did we get to the point that there are tens of thousands of people and certainly hundreds of organizations eager to channel an increasing number of confused and vulnerable school-aged children into the bizarre world of “transgenderism” – the idea that people born with a certain set of reproductive organs and sexual characteristics are in the wrong body and deserve to alter that fact – in the first place?

A little history: In 1948, noted sexologist Alfred Kinsey asked Dr. Harry Benjamin, an early advocate for homosexual and transgender rights, to investigate the case of a boy desirous of becoming a girl and to see what he could come up with to treat the boy’s apparent case of “gender dysphoria.” The doctor began with doses of a new drug called Premarin (estrogen).

By 1963, industrialist Reed (née Rita) Erickson – a lesbian transsexual man and patient of Dr. Benjamin – had launched the Erickson Educational Foundation that supported and promoted the nascent LGBTQ community. Johns Hopkins Medicine Center performed the first trans-gender surgery in 1965 (but stopped offering it in 1970 because of negative and inconclusive results). Dr. Benjamin published “The Transsexual Phenomenon” the following year.

In December 1952, New York born George Jurgensen revealed that he had gone to Denmark to become Christine Jurgensen in the first reported sex-change operation that included both the use of hormone therapy and actual surgery.

The celebrated riots in New York City’s Greenwich Village outside the Stonewall Inn (a popular gay meeting place) in 1969 were headed up by a transwoman (Sylvia Rivera).

In 1975 Richard Raskind became the much followed and publicized “Renée Richards” who was allowed to compete with women as a professional tennis player. The Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association was formed in 1979, and in 1987 the American Psychiatric Association (APA) added “gender identity disorder” to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In 2009, Sonny and Cher’s daughter Chastity became “Chaz” and President Obama nominated the first transgender federal appointee. The APA changed the definition of “gender identity disorder” in 2013 to “gender dysphoria,” classifying the condition as a state of dissatisfaction and stress rather than a disorder. Bruce Jenner became “Caitlyn” in 2015 and in 2016 Johns Hopkins Medicine Center announced it would once again provide “gender-affirming surgery.”

It’s difficult to impossible to find a social-media site that offers anything other than positive and transgender-affirming psychological advice. In many states, any advice to the contrary is illegal and cause for loss of license or worse.

Once on this transgender road, it is apparently very difficult to get off. Powerful drugs and hormones, along with regular and frequent doctor visits become a part of everyday existence for anyone who’s chosen to “transition,” even non-surgically.

The transgender route for men or boys begins with hormone injections and many options are offered, such as facial injections to alter one’s cheekbones; one can soften or more prominently define the angle of one’s chin. Rhinoplasty will give a man a more feminine nose, and shaving one’s jawbone can soften its prominence. There’s also Adam’s apple reduction, breast implants, and in the end, comprehensive surgery.

Women take a similar route with testosterone orally or via injections, and advance to “top surgery” and other bodily alterations.

Records indicate that up to 25% of people who identify as transgender opt for the complete surgical route.

The only study I could find relating to any negative long-term effects of undergoing complete reassignment surgery was a thirty-year Swedish study of sex-reassigned men and women that revealed from ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers (LGBT’s without having undergone surgery).

In any case, the abovementioned stats and situations are the reason for the backlash against introducing the concept of transgenderism in elementary schools. If wisdom prevails, such classes will be curtailed, the popularity or desirability of changing one’s sex or gender will fade, and doctors, educators, psychologists and coaches will once again be allowed to deal with the often upsetting and unexpected physical and mental changes that growing children experience by offering sympathy and understanding. And perhaps they’ll even be allowed to suggest that their young charges would be best served by living with what they were born with.

Right?