Reality Is Kinder

Have you ever known anyone with anorexia? I’ve known a couple. Their brain is telling them that they are fat, that they must do something to lose weight, when in reality they are dangerously thin. They starve themselves, affecting their health, possibly causing permanent damage, and risking their life if left untreated. It is treatable, but not easily.

Would you go to such a person and support them in their delusion about themselves? Would you say, “You’re right; those people who are telling you that you don’t know what you’re talking about are so unsupportive. You stay away from that food all you want”?

No. If you care about them, you do whatever it takes to bring them back to reality—because their life is at stake. You get them mental health care. You might get them to a hospital or live-in program that will intervene long enough to get their brains to develop new neural pathways.

So, can we agree that, when a person has a mental disorder that causes them to be unable to perceive or accept reality—if that delusion is life-threatening, it would be better to offer treatment than to attempt to change the world to buy in to their false view?

If we compare this anorexia example to gender dysphoria, leading to transgenderism, we need to know two things:

·         Is the person with gender dysphoria unable to accept reality?

·         Is going along with the delusion (if that is what it is) life threatening?

If the answer is yes to both, then the treatment for gender dysphoria ought to be similar in process to treating anorexia or other mental delusions. I’m not saying the treatment is the same, or even that I know how to treat mental delusions. I am saying that treating for the delusion is a more humane approach than supporting the delusion.

image from here

I’m not the first to make this comparison. The CanaVox video blog uses this as a way to discuss transgenderism in an age appropriate way when it comes up with children. And, because of media, and activists within academia, these issues are coming up for children at younger ages than we wish. I'm unable to provide the video here, but this link will take you to the 5-minute video on Vimeo.

Let’s start with definitions. Back when my dictionary was written (which I use in order to recall what certain words meant before recent definition changes), gender referred mainly to the classification of nouns and pronouns in languages that use those distinctions. In Spanish, for example, you can’t communicate without knowing the gender of the nouns and modifiers you’re using. In English, gender is mainly confined to pronouns that are referring to the sex of a person or animal: he, she. But, colloquially, gender can also be a synonym for sex; i.e., male or female.

The invention of gender as something separate from sex, something outside of biology, is newly invented.

So, back to the two questions. There’s the scientific, biological answer. And then there’s the non-scientific, or philosophical (personal belief) answer.

The non-scientific newly invented definition insists that gender is fluid, and a matter of choice, and refers mainly to expression to the world. That’s pretty vague. But it essentially means putting on the trappings—clothing, hair, makeup, mannerisms—of the gender of choice. And this has been extended to include more elaborate expressions, by hormonal and/or surgical interventions that make the transgendered person appear more like the opposite of their biological sex.

The scientific answer is that the gender, or the sex, of a biological creature is determined by what part is played in the reproductive process of the organism.

Ryan T. Anderson, author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, explains it this way:

available here

Sex is a bodily reality that can be recognized well before birth with ultrasound imaging. The sex of an organism is defined and identified by the way in which it (he or she) is organized for sexual reproduction.

This is just one manifestation of the fact that natural organization is “the defining feature of an organism,” as neuroscientist Maureen Condic and her philosopher brother Samuel Condic explain. In organisms, “the various parts… are organized to cooperatively interact for the welfare of the entity as a whole. Organisms can exist at various levels, from microscopic single cells to sperm whales weighing many tons, yet they are all characterized by the integrated function of parts for the sake of the whole.”

Male and female organisms have different parts that are functionally integrated for the sake of their whole, and for the sake of a larger whole—their sexual union and reproduction. So an organism’s sex—as male or female—is identified by its organization for sexually reproductive acts. Sex as a status—male or female—is a recognition of the organization of a body that can engage in sex as an act.

That organization isn’t just the best way to figure out which sex you are; it’s the only way to make sense of the concepts of male and female at all.

There is no alternative scientific definition of sex. Maleness and femaleness are biological realities in particular organisms.

As Anderson says, this shouldn’t be controversial. In social “science,” however, the non-biological approach has gained traction. That should not be construed in any way to actual science overriding what we know of biology. Anderson quotes Dr. Lawrence Mayer:

I have searched dozens of references in biology, medicine and genetics—even Wiki!—and can find no alternative scientific definition. In fact the only references to a more fluid definition of biological sex are in the social policy literature.

Dr. Mayer says further:

Scientifically speaking, transgender men are not biological men and transgender women are not biological women. The claims to the contrary are not supported by a scintilla of scientific evidence.

So, the answer to the first question, about reality, is that gender dysphoria is a condition in which the person is unable or unwilling to accept reality. It is not possible to change from male to female, or from female to male. It is only possible to do elaborate play-acting.

There are plenty of delusions in which otherwise sane people might be unable to accept reality, and yet the delusional can go along with their lives functioning well enough anyway. So the second question is also important. Is it harmful?

“Transitioning” does not bring psychsocial outcomes of wholeness. This proves true even in countries that are considered “trans-friendly.” That is, they accept what many societies would consider weird, and take it in stride without social isolation or stigma.

Long-term follow-up studies are rare and inconclusive. But Anderson suggests the best one comes from Sweden. There, it was found,

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.

An argument for having transitioning treatment (hormonal and surgical) has been that it would solve the dysphoria, assuming the dysphoria was caused simply by a mismatch between brain and body. So it was assumed the depression and suicide among those with gender dysphoria would be drastically reduced. Instead, the underlying problem causing the dysphoria is untreated, leading to even greater hopelessness, and 20-fold more suicides.

It is difficult to know if that number is accurate. It may be higher. One of the difficulties with long-term studies is that the few attempted studies have lost track of more than half of participants. One likely reason for being unable to re-locate a participant is suicide.

If that weren’t tragic enough, according to Anderson, “death due to neoplasm and cardiovascular disease was increased 2 to 2.5 times as well.”

So the answer to the second question is, yes, going along with this delusion can be life threatening.

Therefore, treatment to bring the person into touch with reality is much kinder and more healthful than joining activists to change the world and insisting it is wrong to even question the “right” and “rightness” of playing along.

I am now acquainted with a transgender person, which I wasn’t aware of a week ago. I have seen several, of course. But not among people I know. This is not someone I know well. But I have known his wife since she was born, and was there for their wedding.

He has decided to become a woman, and is already undergoing hormonal therapy. He has not, prior to this, been cross-dressing. It used to be a requirement, or at least a recommendation, before transitioning “treatment,” to live as the opposite sex for a full year. Now it appears that, at the first sign of gender dysphoria, a therapist encourages transitioning—permanent changes, as yet untried, just to see whether it helps. Because a delusional person who is denying biological fact should be treated as sensible and capable of making such important decisions?

So, I am sad for the people I know who care about this young couple. So far the couple is childless, and cannot going forward ever engage in sex that results in offspring. They froze some sperm, just in case—because they’re not actually unaware of biological reality. But they stopped going to church and completely altered their lifestyle at the moment of beginning the hormonal treatments. So their support system is compromised as well. The wife is staying with him for now. But she is not a lesbian; she is not attracted to women. But staying with him forces that pretense upon her.

Also, I’m just saying, as a woman, we’re aware of body image, more so than your typical male. What are the odds that a 6”2” “woman,” who is a slightly doughy and hairy male to begin with, will be without body image issues simply by “changing” into a female?

My disapproval will matter not at all to these people; we are not close enough for me to have that influence. But I am sad that people who should have been able to offer actual help—particularly the psychiatric/medical community—offered instead something that is likely to lead to suicide, misery, and the loss of parenting opportunities and anything we might have meant when we wished this couple happiness in their marriage. I see nothing but tragedy in their situation—chosen, avoidable tragedy.

Make-Believe Is Getting Out of Hand

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not that far away, a young boy was holding his mother’s hand as they watched the royal procession coming toward the plaza, along with most of the rest of the king’s subjects.

The boy turned to his mother and asked, “Why is the king wearing a dress?”

This is the original Wilhelm Pedersen illustration
of the Hans Christian Andersen story,
on which I have literally cut and pasted a dress

“Shhh,” whispered the mother.

“But…” persisted the boy.

“He’s the queen; I mean, she’s the queen.”

“Nuh uh,” said the boy. “I’ve seen the king every time there’s a procession, my whole life, and that’s him.”

“The k— queen sent out a proclamation announcing that h— she feels more like a woman, so now s/he is the queen.”

“But that’s just silly. You can’t just change what God made you by sending out a proclam—  a lie.”

“The sovereign ruler can do whatever h— she wants; it’s what she was born to do.”

“He was born a boy—just like me. I know, because, remember that procession a couple of months ago? When those frauds had sold him an invisible suit of clothes, and told him only the wisest could see it? But he wasn’t really wearing anything? So I saw that he had boy parts, like me. And like Daddy. Not woman parts like you.”

The mother was getting uneasy. People might overhear. The boy wasn’t, as a rule, a quiet child. She knelt down to look at him face-to-face.

“Son, you need to not speak your mind so boldly. If you go against our ruler, you could get us into a lot of trouble. The queen might put us out of business—label our laundry an enemy of the queen, make people afraid to do business with us. People might break our windows or chop down our door, because they say we’re the kind of people who hate the queen.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. We don’t hate the king; we just think some of the things he does are kind of silly. That doesn’t have anything to do with how clean we get people’s clothes.”

“Nevertheless, people with power need to be dealt with carefully,” warned the mother.

“But maybe someone just needs to wake him up to what’s real,” said the boy, breaking free and moving to the front of the crowd.

When he got right near the king, he called out, as loudly as he could, “Your Majesty, do you remember me?”

The ruler in the royal gown turned to the boy, uncertain who he was, since there were so many subjects. But in a show of goodwill, he beckoned the boy forward. He held out a bejeweled hand and, in a voice as deep and regal as ever, said, “You may approach.”

The boy curtseyed before the king. A nearby guard ordered, “Bow, boy!”

“Oh, I thought the rules were changing, but, sure, I’ll bow.” So he bowed, and then knelt right before the king.

“You may speak,” said the king.

“Your majesty, you have been a pretty good ruler. Most of the time you’re fair, and you haven’t taxed us beyond what we can bear. And we have good roads and such. But, if you don’t mind my saying so, you think way too much about your appearance. There was that debacle last spring, remember? And now this. It’s a lovely dress, but it’s meant for a woman, and you’re not a woman. You’re a man.”

“How dare y—“ the king began

.

But a rumble began among the people. “The boy told the king to his face that he’s not a woman!”

“I knew all along he wasn’t a woman.”

“The boy tells it like it is. I wish I had dared.”

“Our king is a man wearing a dress! What is he thinking?”

“Not thinking,” said another, and circled the side of his head in a gesture that, even back then, meant the brain wasn’t working quite right.

“But what if he’s not happy being a man?” asked a sympathetic neighbor.

“What if? I’m not happy being a poor ditch digger, but proclaiming I’m a wealthy banker don’t make it so.”

And so the murmuring grew, until it became a roar, with laughter and shouting.

The king’s embarrassed face turned blotchy red. He was on the verge of tears. The boy patted him on the bare shoulder above the sleeve of his elegant dress. “There, there, Your Majesty. It’s just clothes. You’re still the king. I say, go back to your palace, and do what you were meant to do. And here’s some advice: when you’re going outside among the people, I think it might be better for you to leave your clothing choices to someone else, maybe your valet. OK?”

The king could have said, “Off with his head!” He had an urge to do just that. But he didn’t. The optics of executing a child could cost quite a lot of political capital. Instead, he stiffly turned around, and led the procession back into his palace.

He didn’t come out again for quite some time. But when he did, he wore breeches.

Maybe his majesty struggled the rest of his life, wishing he’d been born a queen instead of a king. But he was what he was.

Because, it turns out that as long as there are bold little boys out there willing to say what they saw, there was no getting the whole world to join in one’s make-believe.

In the real world, we’re hearing fantasies like this. Read one here.

One of my favorite speakers, Neal A. Maxwell (who passed away a few years ago), spoke about some related issues, with beautiful prose, in 1993. Worth hearing again.

Identity

Earlier this month I read an essay by Robert George, “Transgenderism,'Marriage Equality,' and Liberalism’s Tragic Error”—an excerpt from his recent book Conscience and Its Enemies. It’s philosophical, but I think it’s relevant to issues we’re dealing with. Issues we shouldn’t, if we’re sane, have to be dealing with, but here we are.

The essence of the essay is that there are two warring beliefs about who we are as humans: we are either mental energy in a random physical body—George refers to this as “nonbodily persons inhabiting nonpersonal bodies,”—or we are made up of a mind and body together, “a dynamic unity: a personal body, a bodily self.”

The difference is important, he says, because, “Whether in the courts, on campus, or at boardroom tables, it significantly shapes the expressive individualism and social liberalism that are dominant among elites.”

Christianity in general has rejected the nonbodily identity, in a similar way that Aristotle veered from Plato on the issue. As George continues:

The living body, far from being our external instrument, is part of our personal reality. So while it cannot exist apart from the soul—which is its substantial form—the body is not inferior. It shares in our personal dignity. The idea of the soul as the substantial form of the body is orthodox Christianity’s alternative to the heretical conception of the soul as a “ghost in the machine.” One can separate living body from soul in analysis but not in fact; we are body-soul composites.

My religion has something specific to say on this as well: we are who we are from before being born in a body; gaining a body is progress in becoming more like our Father in Heaven. This is the second paragraph of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

George’s piece is about the liberal elite view of marriage—based on what the mind wants to create and be, rather than what is biological or real. He is a mentor of Ryan Anderson, and one of the best minds on marriage today.

But I’m going to use these ideas to talk about a different letter of the LBGT etc. alphabet: the T.

found here

It is my belief that we are in this life who we were when Heavenly Father created our spirits, and this included our maleness or femaleness. It’s not a matter of which body we got randomly put into. It is part of who we have always been and who we will always be. God does not mistakenly put us into the wrong body.

That means that, if a person thinks they are a gender other than what they biologically and to the core of their soul are, then they have a mental problem, accurately called gender confusion.

It is not possible to change gender. Gender comes up in every cell of the body. Genetically a person will continue to have a Y chromosome or not. What can be done is chemical and surgical mutilation of a body that will continue to have in all its cells that Y chromosome or not.

With that reality in place, the question becomes, how do we treat people who claim to be a different gender than they are?

The human dignity answer is, treat them with kindness and dignity, but as who they really are when confronted. This would include allowing them the same natural rights as the rest of us, but ends at creating special rights that encourage their delusion or negatively affect the natural rights of the rest of us.

It could include better mental health science and research to help them in whatever way will lead away from self-harm and toward a fully functional human life of contribution and joy.

However, the politically dictated answer is, we go along with their delusion, no matter how that inconveniences the rest of us, and no matter how harmful to the gender confused person.

As I mentioned earlier this month, adults who have gone through surgical and hormonal reassignment suffer 20 times greater rates of suicide than those who don’t undergo a chemical and/or surgical change. Wouldn’t it be kinder—healthier for the gender confused person—to treat the mental illness, to help them come to terms with reality, rather than to indulge their delusion?

The American College of Pediatricians recently called it child abuse to submit children to gender reassignment, since 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. Isn’t it kinder to deal with the child’s confusion as an error that can be corrected, rather than indulge the error and deepen the damage that could otherwise have self-corrected?

So, let’s start the “bathroom” question with the assumption that accepting the delusion is more damaging and less kind than indulging it.

We dealt with the bathroom question this past year in Houston. To remind you, the lesbian then-mayor of Houston had pushed through an ordinance, purportedly for “equal rights,” that imposed a demand on all places with public restrooms or locker rooms to allow self-identified transgendered people to use their choice of facilities. The people immediately gathered signatures to put the issue before the people on the ballot to repeal the bill. Mayor Anise Parker illegally threw out the signatures, but was overruled by the courts. She tried to intimidate local pastors by demanding copies, transcripts, and recordings of their sermons and communications so she could look for words against her agenda. Again the courts slapped her down. In November the issue was put before the people and her bill was repealed, in part because it was successfully accurately renamed “the bathroom bill,” rather than “equal rights.”

People in a liberal city that had already twice reelected a homosexual mayor did not want to force all businesses and public places to force women and girls to share intimate places such as bathrooms—and even more shockingly gym locker rooms--with “self-identified transgendered” men.

The worry has not been about transgendered people, who are not only rare, but are not necessarily sexual predators (are probably not—although they are likely to still be attracted to the actual opposite sex, whom they’re sharing these private places with). It is that there is no way to identify the difference, and it takes away the rights of women and girls to feel safe. The law should not label a woman as a bigoted lawbreaker because as a punishment for feeling uncomfortable or threatened by a man. It should be obvious that is an infringement of her rights, and a loss of her freedom—as well as for those who care about the endangered women and girls.

In locker rooms, where private parts are more likely to be exposed, women—and particularly minors in schools—absolutely should not be exposed to the naked opposite-sex body and have no privacy from that person. Many of us thought the most traumatic part of going to junior high was being forced to shower and change in front of others of the same sex. (I’m told guys never had this same issue, but I’m telling you it was a normal fear and feeling among females.) A person who feels such natural modesty should not be told they’re the mentally ill ones, while the gender confused or the blatantly lying predator is protected.

We will not eradicate gender confusion, any more than we’re likely to eradicate depression, schizophrenia, or other mental illnesses. While we can work toward treatment, we meanwhile want to live kindly among suffering people.

We’ve actually been dealing with “transgendered” men in women’s restrooms for a long time. If they are serious about looking like the opposite sex, mostly they have been tolerated in the opposite-sex restroom, without a law. And good parents have been taking precautions in all restrooms all along: women take young boys in the women’s restroom with them. Once their boys are too old to do that, the mom waits just outside, within hearing range, and makes sure not too much time has passed. And boys have been taught how to avoid predators in those spaces. It’s not as ideal as being able to magically identify all predators and quarantine them, but failing that it has sufficed.

But females are more vulnerable, biologically, to sexual predators. It makes no sense to increase the vulnerability and then to shame them for noticing.

It seems like a parallel universe, that we are needing to discuss this obvious truth: men and women are different, and being separate in intimately private settings is respectful and important for safety. But a decade or two ago it was unthinkable that we would redefine marriage as something in which maleness and femaleness was irrelevant.

The “nonbodily persons inhabiting nonpersonal bodies” believers have the media megaphone. They are shoving their ideologies down our throats. But we don’t have to swallow.

The Emperor's New Clothes
illustration found here

If we don’t speak up wherever we can, we lose our freedoms. We need more of the honest child who stands up and says, “The Emperor has no clothes!” In the Hans Christian Anderson story, once the child spoke the words, everybody else gave up their pretense and embraced the truth. We need that to happen.

Haters

I came across this post a few days ago on Facebook:

When a person chooses hate, it is difficult to turn around and choose not to hate. Hate is not always the label they would choose for the emotion they put out. Usually, it is more as if they feel that they are right, no matter what.

OK. Basically I agree with that. But this particular statement is more than just a bit ironic. Here’s some background.

Several months ago, ahead of the November election, I posted my ballot recommendations, as I usually do. Unlike most of my posts, these occasional ones are meant for local/state friends that are looking at the same ballot I am and want more information before they vote. In this post I included a short section about the Houston mayoral race. I’m just outside the city of Houston, so I didn’t delve into the race, but I did point out some basic information:

 photo from David Bro/Zuma Press/Newscom,found here

The mayor, as well as city council races are non-partisan. That is, the candidates don’t run from a party, with a primary putting up a chosen candidate. The candidates themselves, however, generally have a strong party affiliation. And Houston hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1938[i]….

Then we got Mayor Anise Parker, who ran as a businesswoman. She sounded sensible. You’re supposed to vote for the best person. I don’t vote in Houston city elections, but she seemed reasonable, and I wasn’t against her. As soon as she was elected, the news announced how remarkable it was that a lesbian had been elected.

During her campaign her sexual orientation had not been an issue. Suddenly it was. And she conducted her administration as an activist for homosexuality. HERO (the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance), Prop 1 on the city ballot, is an example—which you must vote AGAINST if you're in Houston; it adds no equal rights protections to anyone, but does take away the right to believe women and children are put at risk if men are allowed in their bathrooms. If you followed that issue, you know Mayor Parker threw out tens of thousands of signatures intended to put it on the ballot, rather than just going along with her. And she subpoenaed pastors for their sermons and communications to see if they said anything about LGBT issues. She was legally slapped down for that.

So now, maybe it’s time to forget about who appears to be the best person, cross off everyone that is a Democrat, a liberal, or a progressive (or any other code word). And from whomever is left, find the best conservative and vote for that person.

That commentary was a trigger. Was I wrong to say we shouldn’t vote for that sort of leadership? The writer of the anti-hate words I quoted above thinks so. Disapproval came as a late-night Facebook attack, even though he had known me since my teenage years—and had not that long ago told me I was one of the kindest, sweetest people he remembered from high school. Suddenly I was one of the most hateful people he’d ever encountered. “So much hate,” and “homophobia,” and “How is this not defending hate?”

What had I done to deserve that epithet? Only write the above portion of a story on local politics—which I had posted where he could go read them, but I had not invited him to do so.

Family and friends messaged me and said to block the jerk (worse word was used). I disengaged, went to bed, and didn’t block him until I saw that he had gone on through hours of the night, and still tried to bait me the afternoon of the next day.

Because I’m hateful? For not approving of the former mayor of Houston’s illegal attack on local churches and anyone who disagreed with her?

A reasonable person would see that, in actual fact, I didn’t say anything anti-gay or hateful; I noted that the former mayor was elected even though she was a lesbian, because people didn’t care about that if she was going to be a good mayor. But she wasn’t a good mayor. And she betrayed the people who voted for her by using her platform as mayor to favor a segment of the population and attacking people who disagreed.

Writers get this kind of attack. Why bother about this one? Only to illustrate about the definition of hate that is being forced on reasonable people. Truth and people who speak truth are attacked louder and louder as haters.

Matt Walsh summed up the situation earlier this week:

But it’s one thing to fail in your pursuit of holiness, and it’s another to call holiness ”hateful.” It’s one thing to sin, it’s another to say that sinning is not sinful. It’s one thing to disobey the Commandments, it’s another to categorically reject the authority of the Commandments. It’s one thing to crawl back to God and beg for forgiveness, it’s another to stand there and say you don’t need forgiveness because God was wrong when he called your sin a sin. It’s one thing to follow Christian teachings imperfectly, it’s another to loudly denounce them. It’s one thing to fall short of the faith, it’s another to change the faith to suit you.

He was speaking at Catholic University on religious liberty. One would think that would be a safe place to speak on such a topic. But, it’s a university, not the safest place for free speech these days, maybe especially religious free speech. Walsh talks about the Q&A afterward:

Nobody shouted or heckled during my speech, which was nice, but the Q&A afterwards was mostly dominated by one student after another fishing for applause by calmly explaining why I’m a mean, hateful bigot, and so forth. I argued with as many of them as I could before they kicked us out of the room, then I stood in the hallway and argued for another hour.

Most of the kids offended by my arguments and my very presence were upset that I don’t believe in “marriage equality.” Some said they agreed with me but believe my approach is hateful. The word hate was tossed around quite a bit. My words are hateful, my ideas are hateful, my beliefs are hateful. Everything is hateful. Except for a crowd of people pointing at me and calling me hateful. They’re not hateful, remember. Just me.

Yes, there’s the irony.

There’s been a lot of that hate word in the news lately. North Carolina’s HB2 bill was similar to Houston’s anti-HERO fight. The bill intended to keep things the way they had been since about the time public restrooms were invented, a month after the Charlotte City Council imposed transgendered bathrooms on people there.

In Washington State female victims of sexual abuse are speaking out against a transgender bathroom policy there. They’re getting called hateful, but the people who disregard their realistic fears are supposedly the caring, open-minded, tolerant ones.

Are their fears realistic? These incidents lead to a yes:

·         A sexual predator in Toronto was jailed after claiming to be “transgender” as a ruse to assault women in a shelter.

·         In southern California, a perpetrator dressed as a women, spent two hours in a women’s restroom to video women going to the bathroom before being caught.

·         A man who had victimized grade school girls was caught in a women’s changing room where girls were changing into swim suits. He was caught in similar acts two years later.

·         A man put on a bra and wig to spy on women in a community college women’s bathroom. This was not his first voyeurism incident.

·         A self-identified transgender boy dressed as a girl, and insisted on accommodations by the school district, including using the girls’ locker room.

·         A 24-year-old transgender male youth minister is guilty of dozens of counts of sexual abuse of a 9-year-old girl.

·         A man was arrested for multiple counts of indecent exposure was dressed as a woman in the women’s section of a Walmart.

·         A prisoner guilty of second-degree murder and beating up women decided he was a woman during his 28-year sentence and has been paroled.

·         A 6’3” 280-lb. martial arts expert decided he was transgender. A woman questioned his presence in a women’s bathroom and he knocked out five of her teeth.

·         A man was caught twice on voyeurism charges in a women’s bathroom of a public library.

These last eight are among many more compiled on a 23-minute video. There are plenty of examples, not for the squeamish.

“Transgendered” individuals are an extremely small subset of society—an estimated 3 per 1000, while women who are victims of sexual predators in their lifetime are estimated to be about 20%, and those who feel uncomfortable when subjected to possible voyeurism is almost universal. We ought to be able to come up with an agreeable practice that doesn’t ignore the concerns of half of the population and those who care about them. I believe we had one until agenda-driven activists started imposing this unacceptable new LGBT “right.”

The American College of Pediatricians recently called it child abuse to submit children to gender reassignment, since 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty[ii]. Of adults who have gone through surgical and hormonal reassignment suffer 20 times greater rates of suicide than those who don’t undergo a chemical and/or surgical change.[iii]

It is possible, even probable, that “transgenderism” is more accurately a mental illness. It was put like this, by Michael Brown, in an “open letter to Bruce Springsteen,” who has decided to boycott North Carolina over the issue, while not worrying about much greater violence to LGBT people in other parts of the world:

First, how do you know if someone is really “transgender” or not? Is it determined entirely by how they feel about themselves? If so, do you think that it might be hard to make laws based entirely on how people feel? Did you ever stop to consider that?

Second, what’s the difference between someone with “gender dysphoria” (or, as it used to be called, “gender identity disorder”) and someone, say, with schizophrenia or “multiple personality disorder” or some other psychological condition? In other words, if a man is a biological and chromosomal male but believes he is a woman, is he actually a woman, or does he have a psychological disorder?...

Since you don’t like HB2 — indeed, your guitarist called it an “evil virus” — what’s your plan to keep the predators out? How can we tell the difference between a “genuine” transgender person and a sexual predator?

I like his final question to Springsteen—about the irony:

When you booked the concert in Greenboro, the laws in North Carolina were just as they are today: In public facilities, people had to use the bathrooms and locker rooms that corresponded to their biological sex. Why, then, did you agree to come in the first place? Why cancel the concert when things today are just what they were six months ago?

I suggest that the answer is a knee-jerk assumption. By definition, they believe anyone who disagrees with their currently trendy yet ironically illiberal political correctness couldn’t possibly have any motive for their beliefs except hatred and bigotry. And they hate those different believers for it; they will not tolerate opposing beliefs or the people who hold them.

I do not accept their definition of hate.

I can tell I’m not hating. I’m calm; I’m feeling compassion toward all sides. I’ve considered the arguments on all sides and come down where I think God is guiding me to believe, which happens to be also where the scientific evidence is leading.

I think my belief is more compassionate all around. And when I find old friends who believe otherwise, I don’t throw away years of positive interactions to call them hateful sinners. Only the real haters do that.

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[i] This detail was in error. I had misread some information on Wikipedia. Later I learned that the last Republican mayor of Houston was James Joseph McConn, from 1978 to 1982. My basic point still holds; the city has rarely had a Republican (even a moderate Republican) mayor in its long history.

[ii] American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Arlington, VA, American Psychiatric Association, 2013 (451-459). See page 455 re: rates of persistence of gender dysphoria.

[iii] Dhejne, C, et.al. “Long-Term Follow-Up of Transsexual Persons Undergoing Sex Reassignment Surgery: Cohort Study in Sweden.” PLoS ONE, 2011; 6(2). Affiliation: Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Division of Psychiatry, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. Accessed 3.20.16 from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885.