When science nutters attempt to propagate mental illness (via Twitchy)
Editorial: The US Department of Health and Human Services proposes to establish a legal definition of whether someone is male or female based on the genitals they are born with. This proposal has no foundation in science and should be abandoned. https://t.co/GakJypiEED
— Nature Portfolio (@NaturePortfolio) November 20, 2018
From the article
The proposal — on which HHS officials have refused to comment — is a terrible idea that should be killed off. It has no foundation in science and would undo decades of progress on understanding sex — a classification based on internal and external bodily characteristics — and gender, a social construct related to biological differences but also rooted in culture, societal norms and individual behaviour. Worse, it would undermine efforts to reduce discrimination against transgender people and those who do not fall into the binary categories of male or female.
As Twitchy notes “So gender is a social construct … that doesn’t sound like science.” Exactly. So, Nature is not writing about science anymore, and should just give up. It plays into the whole “gender is not biological” push, that it is more a state of mind. Which leads to this Daily Mail piece
…
I have been a psychotherapist for more than 30 years and, in that time, I have worked with a small but significant number of patients who wished to change gender.
For everyone’s sake, I believe that surgery – which is irreversible – should only ever be a last resort. We should always begin by working to help the mind fit better with the body before we start altering the body to fit the mind.
Yet in today’s NHS, professionals are enabling hundreds – possibly thousands – of teenagers to have major surgery to change their gender.
It is being done, almost unchallenged, in the name of transgender rights. But in 20 years’ time, I believe we will look back on this folly as one of the darkest periods in the history of modern medicine.
We will question why we failed to challenge their belief that they were born in the ‘wrong’ bodies.
We will ask why we so readily ignored the clanging alarm bells that many were autistic, or had mental health problems.
There is a lot more in this piece, too much to excerpt. And Dr. Withers is exactly correct: this is being pushed willy nilly, and anyone who urges caution or objects will get massive pushback, and protests. Mental health professions are now afraid to actually do their jobs properly.
Yet the debate on this issue has been silenced by transgender activists who label as ‘transphobic’ anyone who dares to challenge their dogma.
This blind adherence to ideology has real, dangerous consequences.
In my field, for example, many psychotherapists are now afraid to properly question a patient who identifies as trans: afraid to explore their past, ask questions of their sexuality, or look into their mental health. They won’t go there, for fear of being struck off.
If an adult wants to go for it, that’s on them. Pushing this on children is a bad idea. But, SJWs have suddenly made this a big issue, and push people to be gender confused. And they do not want to listen to mental health professionals, and now science is pushing that science no longer applies to gender.
