What do these hashtags mean: #nonbinary, #TransHealth, and #LGBTHealth? Let’s look at them in context. Here is Children’s Hospital Colorado’s tweet from Sept. 20:

We've removed #gender markers from patient wristbands and more. See how else we support our #transgender and #nonbinary patients at our hospital: http://bit.ly/2MoE65H  #TransHealth #LGBTHealth

I looked up nonbinary. “Genderqueer, also known as non-binary, is a catch-all category for gender identities that are not exclusively masculine or feminine‍—‌identities which are outside the gender binary and cisnormativity.”

Still not getting this, I looked up “cisnormativity,” thinking a typo was afoot.

“Cisnormativity is the assumption that all, or almost all, individuals are cisgender. Although transgender-identified people comprise a fairly small percentage of the human population, many trans* people and allies consider it to be offensive to presume that everyone is cisgender unless otherwise specified.”

I don’t understand any of this. Perhaps it’s because none of it makes sense. Children’s Hospital Colorado is not just taking gender off wristbands and prescriptions — they provide services that remake children into any gender they chose. Children!

 

The Science

It is true there are a small number of babies born with undefined sex organs so that it’s uncertain what sex they are. It’s also true that some people suffer from dysphoria, which is when a person’s body image does not match with reality. So, if someone is starving herself because she looks in the mirror and 92 pounds appears to her to be 200, we know she needs help. Feelings are not facts, as any therapist knows. And feelings change.

A 2011 long-term study (up to 30 years) at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden revealed that beginning about 10 years after having gender reassignment surgery, the transgendered began experiencing increasing mental difficulties, and their suicide mortality rose twentyfold above the rest of the population.

A 2008 study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported that, “most children with gender dysphoria will not remain gender dysphoric after puberty.” 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. 

I have a friend who wanted to be a boy for many years when she was growing up. She completely grew out of that and is very feminine now, happily married, and the mother of four children.

Dr. Paul McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief and the current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, for Johns Hopkins Hospital explains that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” being treated like a civil rights issue. In a commentary in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote, “We have a very radical and even mutilating treatment being offered to children without any evidence that the long-term outcome of this would be good… Given that close to 80 percent of such children would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated, these medical interventions come close to child abuse.”

 

Bioethics

In the article, When Science and Technology Ignore a Deeper Truth, John DiCamillo, a staff ethicist at the National Catholic Bioethic Center said that the culture is not listening because questioning to find the truth these days is perceived as an attack. Gender issues are a prime example.

“Those pushing for gender-reassignment surgery do so with a lack of scientific data and a lack of respect for human sexuality and free will,” DiCamillo said. He noted that the studies on harm from sex-reassignment surgery and testimonies such as those such as those at “Sex Change Regret” are ignored.

“Instead of eliminating the disorder, we are accommodating it,” he said. “That is not a holistic understanding of the person as body and soul, because it fractures that person Another big danger is that it can mask other psychological issues that may be at the root of the problem, such as abuse or relationship issues.”

 

Changing Genders is Not Truth

Children’s Hospital Colorado assists in sex-reassignment for children at their TRUE Center for Gender Diversity, despite science that advises otherwise. Here are some statements from their TRUE Center for Gender Diversity website, along with my comments:

• “We embrace you for who you are, so you can become who you’ve been all along: your true self.” (You are born your true self. Some people need help accepting that. They don’t need sex-reassignment surgery.)
• “…our program includes an array of experts to assist with matters from the physical to the emotional to the spiritual.” (Spiritual? Rejecting God’s creation is following the wrong kind of spirit.)
• “True is what we stand for — Trust, Respect, Understand, Emerge — so you can stay true to you.” (“True” is not jury-rigging the bodies of children.)
• “We’ll listen and make every effort to understand your situation, to help you and your family achieve your goals.” (Goals change. They are fluid. Gender is not. Do they also make parents and children aware of all the testimonials such as the sixteen-year-old who changed his mind a year later?)
• “Just as you’re emerging as your true self, gender diversity itself is emerging as a medical field.” (Emerging? That means experimental.)
• “We’re developing clinical pathways and conducting some of the earliest research on the health effects of transgender hormone therapy and transition drugs like puberty-blockers.” (“Earliest research” aka guinea pigs.)
•  “With hormone therapy, we can produce the secondary sex characteristics — such as voice pitch and breast development — of your desired gender expression.” (Frankenstein. They are playing with people’s bodies in unnatural ways to make them into something they are not.)
• “Puberty-blocking medicines suppress the hormones that induce puberty. Using puberty blockers, we can avoid body changes that do not align with your identity.” (Pre-pubescent children cannot drive cars or give permission to get their ears pierced, but Children’s Hospital Colorado permanently alters their bodies. This is child abuse.)