HEY, GAY-STAPO: No More Gender Reassignment Surgery at John Hopkins University. Are They Anti-Science?

If it were anyone but Johns Hopkins, the response would have been raw fury.

Rainbow flags would have come out, pressure groups would have marched, boycotted, and issued time-honored boilerplate press releases to all their MSM buddies about how offended they are by this latest indignity. (To clarify, by MSM I mean, of course, Mainstream Media, and not CDC’s shorthand for male with male sexual partners.)

Perhaps the Pride Lobby has shifted its efforts from same-sex politicking and is moving on to bold new horizons. (It looks like they are now treating that battle as a victory that has entered its mop-up phase.) They have begun applying themselves more directly to important new frontiers, like special status for transsexuals.

(Not convinced that this is where we’re headed? Then check this out. Last June, Time Magazine wrote an article called “The Transgender Tipping Point: America’s next civil rights frontier.”)

Predictably  — like the good little patsies that they are — the courts are providing their services as a work-around to bypass the general will of the people. Why let peevish little things like the legislative process get in the way of fundamentally transforming America, after all?

Why bother with that whole messy process of consensus-building when you can simply present your case to a politically-sympathetic judge? Its so much easier to have a black robe strong-arm The People to bow to terms you dictate as the new normal.

And that is how we come to find bizarre situations like a Californian judge ruling that Michelle-Lael Norsworthy must have gender reassignment surgery.  (That’s not even the weird part, yet.) This surgery must be paid for by the California Corrections Department. Refusal to offer radically transformative surgery has somehow morphed into a violation of the inmate’s constitutional rights.

You see, the argument rests entirely on the alleged right to be physically modified (at someone else’s expense). “Gender dysphoria” symptoms need treatment, it is said, and the current hormone replacement is damaging the complainant’s liver.

For the pittance of $100k, (a bargain, really!) the Correctional Facility can surgically put an end to the suffering of an inmate currently serving 17-to-life for second-degree murder. This 51 year old, if you’re wondering has been behind bars since 1987.

And this isn’t the first such pay-for-the-lopitoffame ruling by the courts, either.

So, the State is once again obligated by some judge (one that has accepted arguments couched in such language as identity, rights, compassion and medical need) to literally change objective, physical reality for an inmate to align it with said inmate’s own internal, subjective reality. Which is somehow ruled to be more real than reality.

Riiiiiiiiiight. But is any of this — you know — actually Scientific?

Let me put the question another way: the very first American Institution to perform gender reassignment surgery was Johns-Hopkins. That was in 1966. They were leaders and pioneers in the field. That was then.

Why did they stop offering that procedure?

What? Are you shocked? Have they caved under some radical pressure group? Are they now in the pocket of Chick-Fil-A? Focus on the Family? Hardly.

Actually, from the Leftist’s perspective, it’s much worse than that. Their decision comes from having looked at scientific studies.

Et Tu, Science?

The Psycho-Social adjustments of post-op transsexuals were not any better than those who had no surgery. A 30 year study in Sweden discovered an increase in mental difficulties, including a 20-fold jump in suicide rates vs. the general population. What’s more, 70-80% of children who reported transgender feelings, in Vanderbilt University, or Portman clinic (London) spontaneously lost them without any sort of medical intervention.

Dr. Paul McHugh, whose article I’ve been referencing in the paragraph above, makes the case that gender dysmorphia is similar to other dysmorphic disorders (like anorexia). Both are a psychological disorder causing an unhealthy and unrealistic view of oneself.

How would we react to a court ordering a gastric bypass for a 91 lb woman suffering from anorexia? Would we support her quest to lose more weight? Because, if Dr McHugh’s comparison is accurate, this court is doing basically the same thing.

Dr. McHugh’s article — published in the Wall Street Journal (and elsewhere) can be found here.

A little about his credentials, before proceeding. He’s a Democrat, for one thing. Harvard trained, and is “currently University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine”. In other words, he’s not easily dismissed as though he were some uncredentialed whackjob with an outlandish opinion.

The point being made by Paul McHugh is that for gender identity issues, we keep moving the goalposts. If his claims about Gender Dysphoria are true, they would have a dangerous consequence.

It would mean that we are in the process of explicitly disqualifying the one group of medical experts (psychologists) who can offer proper medical support to someone genuinely suffering with a disorder (of the mind) while simultaneously insisting that the only people truly qualified to solve their problem will affirm their inner reality with a scalpel.

Which would mean affirming it with the same procedure Johns Hopkins stopped offering.

Perhaps next we’ll be funding body modification for those people who self-identify as tigers or lizards. Courtesy of the taxpayer, of course.

Image: http://www.trenddelacreme.com/2011/09/trending-chick-beards.html