Drop The T From LGBT
Transgender people have high rates of psychological problems that contribute to their identity expression. The LGBT crowd should ponder that.
The post-marriage culture war is asymmetrical in the group known as LGBT. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists have carried the rainbow banner for transgenders for issues that truly matter, such as employment and housing. Now the time has come for a genuine sanity check for them to stop enabling kookier parts of the trans agenda.
The current bathroom policy debate illuminates the growing gap between the concerns of the transgender community and of the LGB community. Perhaps those who favor gay marriage do not want any part of enabling pedophiles in wigs having easier access to kids in bathrooms.
Trans activists paint the entire LGBT group in an unsympathetic light when they lobby for laws to criminalize such trivialities as misusing pronouns, as passed recently in New York City. Practical LGB members might want to take this opportunity to disentangle themselves from the lunacy of today’s trans-rights movement. This will disassociate their movement in the public eye from people whom research shows have high incidents of psychological disorders linked with their transgender expression, and offers an opportunity to protect transgender people from being exploited by high-priced medical quacks.
The differences between the groups now seem glaring. Let’s list a few.
Difference 1: Same-Sex Attraction vs. Gender Perception
Many transgenders are not homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual. Unlike people who identify as LGB, transgenders suffer from self-deception disorders (gender dysphoria). They are convinced that they are in the wrong body, and with the help of enablers and affirmers of their delusion, undergo drastic body-mutilating surgeries to enhance the deception and deny the plain and simple truth of their gender. While some LGB people may be transgender, too, the majority are not.
Difference 2: Bathroom Access
The transgender public restroom issue, a hot topic in the news today, is exclusively a transgender cause not shared by those who are lesbian, gay, or bisexual. Transgender bills being debated at the state and local levels exclusively address gender identity and have nothing to do with sexual preference. This includes bills to legally change one’s gender marker on one’s birth certificate without surgically altering the appearance of one’s genitals. It also includes bills to allow any man to use women’s public restrooms and locker rooms if he says he feels like a woman—no surgery or birth-record change required.
Many gay men don’t care whether transgenders get access to the public restroom of the opposite sex. But gay men might care that pedophiles and deviants invoke such laws to indulge their sexual perversions in public restrooms and in doing so, bring a backlash on the LGBT community. Most women, lesbian or not, prefer to keep a man who has his toolbox intact out of the women’s restrooms and locker rooms, no matter how much he insists he is a woman. This applies particularly to women who have been sexually assaulted in the past.
The freedom to change genders without surgery and to enter gender-segregated spaces is an open invitation to perverts to use public restrooms to indulge their sexual corruptions at the expense of women and girls.
Difference 3: Mental Disorders
Studies show the transgender population has a wide range of co-existing mental disorders. Besides the obvious gender dysphoria, they suffer at high rates from a wide range of undiagnosed and untreated mental issues: body dysmorphic disorders, sexual fetishes like autogynephilia (arousal at the thought of being a woman), and masturbation addictions, to name just a few.
“We found 90% of these diverse patients had at least one other significant form of psychopathology,” says a 2009 study by the Department of Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University. The psychopathologies found were “mood and anxiety regulation and adaption in the world.”
A 2011 long-term follow-up of transsexual persons undergoing sex-reassignment surgery concluded: “Persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.”
People who are transgender have a higher risk of suicidal behavior, and suicide is known to be caused by depression and anxiety. The recommended treatment for depression, anxiety, or other mental disorders is not gender surgery.
The staggering number of co-existing disorders in the gender dysphoric population sets the transgender group apart from the lesbian, gay, and bisexual population. The deep psychological and psychiatric depression that results from the self-deception of gender identity and the untreated mental disorders has been the major contributor to transgenders’ position at the top of the most-likely-to commit-suicide list.
An Opportunity for LGB to Actually Help the T
Now that we’ve discussed some major points on which the trans agenda does not align with gay and bisexual priorities, let’s further discuss how gay, lesbian, and bisexual activists can benefit trans people by shifting their advocacy.
First, this will help reduce the political pressure that is currently resulting in gender dysphoric people being pushed into treatments that hurt rather than help them.
The high rate of mental disorders among transgenders has been well-documented for 50 years. But instead of diagnosing and treating those issues first, rushing the gender dysphoric person into hormones and surgery ignores any childhood trauma or other mental disorders that might be masquerading as gender dysphoria and leaps directly to the extreme measures of injecting cross-gender hormones and scheduling surgery to remove the original “equipment.”
In my own case, I was approved for surgery after one session with a gender specialist. That was in the 1980s. Today, according to the letters I receive, approval still happens that quickly, and the other psychological problems are deemed not important.
Perhaps when transgenders are considered apart from LGB there can be a fresh new insurgence of improved psychiatric screening, effective diagnoses of the underlining comorbid disorders, and effective treatment that does not include hormones and gender reassignment. That should reduce the number of suicides in this population.
Here is some more information about the history of medical treatments for trans people to help LGB folks understand why they need to step up now, and have done so in the past.
Continue reading below…
Source: Drop The T From LGBT
