Gender Ideology as Abuse

Matthew Hanley reports on the descent of medicine, including psychiatry, into a kind of criminal insanity about “gender issues.” It has turned healers into abusers.

The return of football and crisp autumn air is welcome, even if being a fan of some teams (such as my San Francisco 49ers) requires an act of supernatural faith again this year. But for Bennet Omalu, the “concussion doctor” (so dubbed for his role in casting a spotlight on the issue), it is a melancholy time of year. The Chief Medical Examiner in San Joaquin County, he recently speculated that letting youth play football will soon prompt a DA somewhere to prosecute because football, as he put it, “is the definition of child abuse.”

With so much real abuse to contend with, such an over-the-top contention strikes a false note, even if there is something to be said for not allowing very young people to bang heads. But the curious crusade against football is being taken quite seriously. Almost as seriously as the crusade in favor of normalizing “gender fluidity.”

I recently came across the Summer 2017 edition of Stanford Medicine News. Its feature story was: “Young and Transgender: Caring for Kids Making the Transition.” In it, a pediatric endocrinologist is lionized for her efforts to “help” these kids – by means of puberty blockers and the like. Blocking puberty is now health care? “As you treat transgender teens with hormones,” she says, “you’re affirming who they are.” Going under the knife is but another means of affirming that their body is getting it wrong by maturing normally.

I don’t mean to single out Stanford. Kowtowing to the transgender agenda is now epidemic. The most recent DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) replaced the longstanding diagnosis of “gender identity disorder” with gender “dysphoria.” Since – voilà – there is no longer any “disorder” to treat psychiatrically, the proper course necessarily becomes mutilation (via hormones and surgery).

The American Psychiatric Association, taking leave of its senses, flatly asserts that transgender transitioning involves no real delusion or impairment in judgment – delusion being defined as “a false belief or wrong judgment held with conviction despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.”

Click here to read the rest of Mr. Hanley’s column . . .

Matthew Hanley

Matthew Hanley is senior fellow with the National Catholic Bioethics Center. With Jokin de Irala, M.D., he is the author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, which recently won a best-book award from the Catholic Press Association. The opinions expressed here are Mr. Hanley’s and not those of the NCBC.

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