Gender Activists Playing God

If you strip away political talk about gender redefinition, affirmation, denial, and the twisted concept that positive things emerge from school-driven gender changes of children and State control over parents’ decisions about a child’s upbringing, you get down to a fact: Gender activists aim to play God.

Before you say mine is just another value judgment, or demonstrates some awful bias, or follows someone’s ideology, please know that this assessment comes after much reading and thinking.

The National Institutes of Health, despite recent controversies, are largely non-political. While many of their positions and physicians align with non-religious or secular thinking, they are distinguished by doing clinical studies, including into so-called “gender dysphoria.”

To be crystal clear, even NIH assesses this as a mental health condition, which amounts to a boy or girl, man or woman – usually adults are studied – experiencing “psychological distress” from being who they were genetically, biologically, and empirically born.

A review of more than 1400 medical papers, of which 20 contained “full inclusion criteria” or great rigor, revealed enormous confusion and obvious politicization of this issue. Several findings popped up. Gender dysphoria is a mental health condition involving “dissonance” with who one is, problems “interfacing” with “society,” and trouble “processing…rejection” – all mental health conditions.

While acceptance, accommodation, counseling, and other “treatments” for psychological distress are generally available, the wide universe of possible underlying causes is often dismissed, and seldom discussed.

The truth is that gender dysphoria, like all mental health disorders, has many causes. At least two dozen causes are discussed in the literature, from PTS to ADHD, sexual trauma to Munchausen Syndrome, personality disorders to peer pressure, and social encouragement.

Instead, clinical assessments are made on self-reporting, and – in this highly charged moment – the conversation quickly pivots to hormones and surgery. If this distress were viewed the way other psychological aberrations are, the broad universe of underlying causes would be first considered.

More to the point, the way a person’s psychological distress is typically treated and resolved for permanent change is seldom altering physical characteristics. Causes are treated, not symptoms.  As the feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote rhetorically, “Do you try to treat cancer sores or the cancer itself?” 

Put differently, altering a person’s genitalia – remaking a fundamental aspect of how God created them – to attempt resolution of underlying “psychological distress” is, at best, the long way around the barn.

More darkly, in children and cognitively impaired adults, that kind of radical, irreversible, life-changing action – taken by others – looks more like coercion and abuse, patently offensive to human rights, than anything matching the spirit, meaning, or words of the Hippocratic Oath, a pledge to “do no harm.”

One added point. Studies of “gender dysphoria,” a subgroup of the larger body of people suffering “psychological distress,” are not like finding a broken bone on an X-ray. They are not empirical but inherently subjective.

They do not collect, assess, and track neurological data by EEG, or identify some part of the brain as malfunctioning, or defend life-altering surgeries with anything but subjective reporting.

All this should give pause to anyone taking up the fight for administering gender dysphoria hormones or life-altering surgeries on behalf of others – especially children and psychologically distressed adults.

All this is before we debate how this departure from treating mental health will affect – already is adversely affecting – the rights, privacy, dignity, safety, uniqueness, and opportunities in sports and elsewhere of biological girls, important to anyone who is one, has one, is a sibling of one, or was born of one.

In short, this issue is important to all of us. What has happened is that politics shoved its nose under the tent, and is trying to redefine not only what counts as science, but how we understand biology, genetics, psychology, and medicine – what defines us as people. In a phrase, gender activists are playing God.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.