As with a suspicious halt of a legal investigation, it’s generally true that those stifling scientific inquiry fear what such may uncover. This appears the case with Sexual Devolution (LGBT) activists who are now trying to ban research into so-called transgenderism.
It wasn’t always this way. Sexual devolutionaries once encouraged such science in the belief that uncovering an innate basis for “gender dysphoria” (GD) — the sense that you’re “stuck” in the body of the wrong sex — would legitimize the Made-up Sexual Status (MUSS or “transgender”) agenda. The idea is that “you can’t question how someone was born.” (Actually, you can. Asserting otherwise is the dangerous mistake of biological determinism.)
But this has recently and radically changed. While researching GD might “greatly benefit medical personnel in helping effectively treat transgender patients,” as the Federalist puts it, sexual devolutionaries have now become the three “hear, see, and speak no evil” monkeys on the issue. As the site reports:
The University of California at Los Angeles’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior was preparing a National Institute of Health-backed study to better understand brain structures and responses among people living with gender dysphoria. The study was titled, “Gender identity and own body perception — implications for the neurobiology of gender dysphoria.” Its researchers were seeking transgender participants when LGBT activists demanded the study be shut down.
… [The] executive director of the local activist group Gender Justice LA objected, claiming the study “opens the door for advancing the highly disregarded and dangerous practice of conversion therapy.”
… They asserted that because the study could be used “for the creation of therapeutics to treat gender dysphoria as one would treat anorexia” it could be used as a method of conversion therapy.
The California LGBTQ Health and Human Services Network circulated a letter to local LGBT communities urging transgender and gender-nonconforming people to stay away from the “dangerous” study.
“We object to the view that transgender people have an aberrant body image condition or that brain imaging of traumatic response could ultimately ‘help’ trans people,” the group wrote in the letter. “It is suggestive of a search for medical ‘cure,’ which can open the door for more gatekeeping and restrictive policies and practices in relation to access to gender-affirming care. At a time in which trans lives are under attack, we find this kind of research to be misguided and dangerous.”
Of course, this perspective is indifferent to how there are many, many MUSS individuals who desire freedom from their woes; as one whose comment I read online put it, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”
Greater knowledge on GD could help such people, yet confusion reigns — even at the Federalist. The site quite innocently mentions the claim that MUSS individuals have brain structures more congruent with those of the opposite sex and cites studies to that effect. Yet these studies may very well be unreliable.
Consider the work of Eric Vilain, a non-agenda-driven pediatric geneticist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has long studied the MUSS phenomenon. “One of Vilain’s projects involves scanning the brains of male-to-female transsexuals for evidence of these ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain regions,” reported Ozy in 2016. “He hasn’t found anything compelling so far — and neither have other researchers. Although he can’t rule out the possibility yet, Vilain remains skeptical.”
And what follows may explain sexual devolutionary obscurantism. Vilain’s “lips tremble nervously, and he stares into his Greek yogurt, grasping for the precise words, aware of their weight,” Ozy continues. “The idea of gender identity as something innate — I’m not sure it exists,” he says. “It may simply be a reflection of how others perceive our gender, which suggests that ‘transgenderism might not exist.’”
As I’ve long maintained, it doesn’t exist; not, that is, as a legitimate state of being. “Transgender” is not a bona fide scientific or medical designation. It’s a political one — and this may provide insight into MUSS activists’ fears.
Whatever science would find could scuttle their agenda. If an innate GD basis were discovered, further research could eventually bring a remedy. Moreover, identifying the issue in the womb could lead to afflicted babies being aborted (which would be morally wrong).
Yet if no innate basis were found, the conclusion would be the common-sense default: GD is a psychological issue. This would mean the remedy was to change the afflicted’s minds, not their bodies.
Either way, the MUSS agenda won’t be served. As its activists said in the letter the Federalist quoted, they want a MUSS viewed as a “normal” deviation from the norm (sort of like being left-handed).
Moreover, the political “transgender” movement is robbed of legitimacy if viewed as defined by a disorder. And “curing” the MUSS affliction — whether via genetic, chemical, hormonal, or psychiatric intervention — would end the movement completely. No “transgenders” = no “transgender” lobby.
This reality is unacceptable to many because political movements become akin to career fields: Not only do people have their lives, energies, minds, and hearts invested in them, but some also derive power and income from activism. It’s just as how racial hustlers such as Al Sharpton don’t want blacks to lose their grievances “because they do not want to lose their jobs,” as Booker T. Washington put it. So forget about “following the science” — follow the money.
Thus do we hear something that harms not only society but MUSS individuals themselves, many of whom have “sex-change regret”:
Converting them to normalcy is bad. Converting their bodies to an opposite-sex pale copy with shots and surgery is compassion.
