Posted on 06/13/2014 7:13:34 AM PDT by reaganaut1
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You won't hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned.
We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into "sex-reassignment surgery"—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as "satisfied" by the results, 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.
It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Yet due to liberalism, we are supposed to be sympathetic to the “LGBT” community. We no longer just talk about “gays”, we have to include the “T” or trans-gendered.
And we see this affect public policies, such as some cities which cover sex change operations in their public employee health plans.
Does Obamacare cover sex change operations? I would be surprised if it didn’t because it’s “homophobic” and “discriminatory” NOT to do these operations, in this politically correct world we live in.
I am absolutely opposed to making decisions about other people’s lives based on statistics gathered in observational studies. In this, or in any other case.
Just as it’s absurd to say that a nurse can’t carry a gun while walking to her car after working the night shift, because of purported statistics about what other people are likely to do, it’s absurd to say that gender reassignment is or is not appropriate for any individual, based on the same sort of statistical studies.
People aren’t statistics.
OMG!
Are you on the right forum?
Tell you what, then: you set up a charity with your own money and start paying for statistically worthless surgery, and leave my tax dollars - confiscated from me ultimately at the point of a gun, BTW - out of it.
Quite correct.
However, as the article points out, several states have passed laws prohibiting mental health pros from attempting to help even minors with trans leanings to regain their “natural” gender feelings, even at parental direction.
I don’t know of any movement among conservatives to legally prohibit such surgery, though a good many of us object to paying for it.
However, there is a growing movement to prohibit anybody from even opposing such surgery, and I’m sure it will quickly become as financially and socially suicidal as holding racist or “homophobic” views has become.
BTW, if one doesn’t base decisions about whether surgery is appropriate on studies of the long-term efficacy of the surgery, what would you suggest such decisions be based on?
Many of us consider most, if not perhaps all, of the transgender folks to be suffering from a serious mental illness. Would it not be more appropriate to treat it as such rather than with surgery to reinforce their delusions?
Personally, I’ve always believed I’m the reincarnation of Veronica Lake. I’ve got the hairdo down, but I think the public should pay for surgery to help me be who I really am.
So they start having second thoughts years after they've hacked off their genitals? Kind of like a suicide changing his mind after he's jumped off the roof of a tall building.
We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—
I was about 12 when I first heard the “reassignment” term used and it so forcefully struck me as the most amazingly stupid arrogance that I wondered how it’s issuers could not see it. But that’s ARROGANCE for you...
Rules!!! Submit pics pls!
Believe me, you really, really don’t want that!
Truth.
“Truth isn’t mean, it’s truth.” - Andrew Breitbart
Throwing truth on a liberal is like Dorothy throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West.
A mentally ill adult says I want to have major surgery to remove body parts. We used to say if you get a year of counseling and pay for it, you can. Now it is considered a right as LBGTA and covered by public sector health plans and some company health plans.
Now we are seeing bad parents listening to a child express these emotions and then give them life altering hormonal injections to prevent normal development - in children too young to stay home alone for an hour. “Trans” children are disturbed, and parents who give in to the LBGTA pressure to alter their bodies based on mental illness are by definition unfit.
Correct.
"Gender reassignment" is simply absurd on principle ... the statistics have nothing to do with it. What you call "gender reassignment" is mechanical and chemical mutilation and pandering to the delusions of lunatics. It is NEVER appropriate.
Disagree with Andy.
Truth can indeed be, and often is, mean.
But it’s still truth.
Too many people today believe that if something is mean or unpleasant, we can just decide it therefore can’t be true. But truth is what it is, not what we want it to be.
See my old tagline below, reactivated for this discussion.
Now, if a drug company tried to put a drug on the market where half of teens that take the drug tried to kill themselves, they would be hounded out of business. Yet, because this has a sexual aspect, same sex, sexual aspect; we are not allowed to even broach the subject of suicide.
I posited on a previous thread along the same subject matter; that, perhaps, those of us in opposition are the truly compassionate ones; because we understand that this is not a solution to the problems of these very troubled people.
When the Sandra Fluke thing was going on; hubby and I came out of a Mariner's baseball game where a handmade sign had been posted on a pole which said: "Keep your hands off my contraceptives!"
I really wished that I had, had a marker on me at the time, for I would have replied: "Fine. Just keep your hands out of my wallet."
This was the what the outrage over Fluke was really about. Not availability; but, about who pays for someone's contraception.
As for the validity of observational studies, I don't know what other type of evidence the medical community could gather on this issue. It obviously cannot conduct a double-blind, randomized trial!
“it’s absurd to say that gender reassignment is or is not appropriate for any individual, based on the same sort of statistical studies”
Perhaps, but it’s not absurd to say that gender reassignment surgery is never an appropriate treatment for a psychiatric condition. You can’t fix a problem in the brain by slicing at unrelated organs.
Breitbart also spoke to the absoluteness of truth, and truth that was not absolute was not truth at all.
What I see in the left today is the belief they can create their own truth. Sometimes they will say something which is demonstrably false, just because they want it to be true. My favorite example of this is Head Start. Liberals will not only say "Head Start helps children" (demonstrably false), but they will make up false claims: "Studies show Head Start helps children." Why? Because in their heart of hearts, they believe Head Start must help children, and because Head Start must help children studies must show it does.
You could hook these liberals up to a polygraph and it would not register a lie. They constantly create their own truth.
Liberals believe that gender reassignment surgery can cure transgenderism is a truth, while simultaneously believing the truth that Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a purely mental/psychological disorder and horrified at the thought someone suffering Body Integrity Identity Disorder would want a perfectly good limb amputated.
The very idea body modification can "cure" a mental/psychological condition is absurd on the surface, to any student of truth. If it were true, we would treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder with amputations, and plastic surgery would be covered by insurance to treat Body Dysmorphic Disorder.
These comments by Dr. McHugh no doubt are toxic to liberals:
""Sex change" is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women."
Truth.
Oh, I agree that it is truth. I just recognize that something unpleasant or “mean” does not cease to be mean because it is True.
Wisdom and maturity leads one to recognize that Truth must be accepted as such even when it is mean.
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