It’s “just devastating to, especially from a young age, to be lied to by adults at school and by medical professionals and told that your body is wrong, you need to change it, you need to get hormones, you need to get surgeries.” So said Helena Kerschner, 23, who lived several years taking cross-sex hormones and claiming to be male. Yet she was fortunate, Kerschner states, because she emerged from her delusion medically “unscathed.”
Not so lucky was Nathaniel (last name withheld), who had “bottom surgery” a month after his 18th birthday. Regretting the decision less than a year later, he called the operation a “Frankenstein hack job” that caused him to reflect. “I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn’t one,” he lamented in 2019. “I feel as though I have ruined my life.”
Unfortunately, instead of heeding the object-lesson warnings Nathaniel and other such teens issue, the Biden administration has decided to roll out a MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender”) policy that endorses the life-rending interventions in question. This is even as more liberal countries, such as Sweden, France, and Norway, are abandoning MUSS meddling, having recognized its folly.
Thus warned Suzy Weiss, sister of former New York Times reporter Bari Weiss, in a Substack article last week titled “The Testosterone Hangover.” In it, she chronicles the woes of MUSS teens who underwent so-called “gender affirming care,” but, as with Kerschner and Nathaniel, later regretted the malpractice visited upon them. Weiss contends that these youths simply needed “a little time to grow up,” and, in fact, science bears this out:
Data show that insofar as sexually confused adolescents go, upwards of 80 percent of girls and more than 90 percent of boys will outgrow their “gender dysphoria” — if left alone.
Weiss opened her piece with the story of a girl who wasn’t left alone, Chloe; in fact, the teen was given puberty blockers and testosterone and had a double mastectomy at 15.
“Chloe, who lives in California’s Central Valley, always hated her body,” Weiss relates. “She spent a lot of time on Tumblr and learned words like ‘pansexual’ and ‘bigender.’ She remembers when she was 12, sitting on her bed, thinking, ‘Maybe I’m meant to live as a boy.’”
Of course, it’s “completely normal for not only young girls but often young boys to feel uncomfortable with themselves, uncomfortable with their bodies,” Kerschner told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in a recent interview. Yet, today, MUSS medical “professionals” prey upon this normal adolescent discontent.
We “have this ideology that is especially prevalent online that says that if you have those feelings, that means you’re trans,” Kerschner explained to Carlson. “I mean, there are literally people who say if you don’t even like your voice on a recording, that’s a sign of gender dysphoria, and you need to go see a medical professional because you’re trans” (video below).
Hence was Chloe, four years ago at age 14, already taking the puberty blockers and testosterone. The mutilative “top surgery” was performed two years later, in 2020.
“Chloe was the beneficiary of what transgender activists call ‘gender-affirming care,’ which means all the adults in her life — doctors, nurses, social workers, teachers, parents — actively supported her decision to become the person she believed she was meant to be, even if that person required an elective mastectomy in high school,” states Weiss.
“In this, Chloe is also the poster child for the Biden administration’s recently announced transgender policy,” the writer also informs.
“Gender-affirming care, the president’s spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, explained at a recent press conference, was ‘best practice and potentially lifesaving.’ The point was: If trans kids weren’t able to transition, not just socially, but medically with cross sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries, they might well kill themselves.”
(Note: True “sex-affirming care” — the term “gender” should be reserved to grammar — means encouraging a person to accept his actual biological status of being male or female.)
Yet Psaki is wrong. In fact, a Yale University School of Public Health study ultimately showed that MUSS mutilation surgery offered no advantage “in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety-related health care visits,” reported Kerschner in an extremely literate 2020 New Discourses essay.
Moreover, this may greatly understate the reality. Just consider the testimonial of Dr. Paul McHugh, former chief of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital and distinguished service professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. “The most thorough follow-up of sex-reassigned people — extending over thirty years and conducted in Sweden, where the culture is strongly supportive of the transgendered — documents their lifelong mental unrest,” he explained in “Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme” in 2015. “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.”
Translation: Mutilative MUSS surgery actually leads to far worse psychological outcomes.
This is the not-surprising result of prescribing biological interventions — i.e., hormones, surgeries — in response to a diagnosis made on a psychological basis. That is, a “gender dysphoria” determination is essentially self-diagnosis, made solely based on feelings. It’s also why Dr. McHugh has said in reference to MUSS victims, “We psychiatrists … would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”
As for the wider population, it perhaps need to fix the government. As mentioned earlier, nations such as Norway, Sweden, and France are now following the science and abandoning counterproductive MUSS treatments. In contrast, the Biden administration is following the politics — of a minuscule group of noisy activists. In fact, given how unpopular the MUSS agenda is among the general public, some do wonder regarding the November midterms: Is this the hill the Democrats want to die on?
For sure is that because of the scientific obscurantism the Biden administration has embraced, countless youths are dying — emotionally, psychologically, and sometimes literally — on that hill right now.
