Monday, July 21, 2014
Transgenderism: 9 Things You Need to Know
Transgenderism has been a frequently
discussed topic over the past few weeks.
On May 30, the U.S. Department
of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for
the "reassignment" surgery sought by the transgendered. A few
days later Time magazine's cover story on the "transgender tipping
point" declared the social movement is "poised to challenge
deeply held cultural beliefs." And last week, the Southern Baptist
Convention, America's largest Protestant denomination, overwhelmingly passed a
resolution titled “On
Transgender Identity."
Since the topic will be coming up
for some time to come, here are nine things you should know about transgenderism.
1.
Transgenderism is an umbrella term for the state or condition of identifying or
expressing a gender identity that does not match a person's physical/genetic
sex.
Transgender is independent of sexual
orientation, and those who self-identify as transgender may consider themselves
to be heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, polysexual or asexual.
Approximately 700,000 individuals in the U.S. identify
as transgender.
2.
Transgenderism differs from intersex, a variation in sex characteristics
including chromosomes, gonads or genitals that do not allow an individual to be
distinctly identified as male or female.
Intersex is a physical condition
while transgender is a psychological condition. The vast majority of people with intersex conditions
identify as male or female rather than transgender or transsexual. (The term
"hermaphrodite" is now considered outdated, inaccurate and offensive as a
reference to people who are intersex.)
3.
The terms transgender, transsexual and transvestite are not synonymous.
Transsexual is a narrower term used
to refer to people who identify as the opposite of their birth gender
designation, regardless of whether they have undergone or intend to undergo
hormone replacement therapy and/or sex reassignment surgery. A transvestite is
a person who cross-dresses, or dresses in clothes of the opposite sex, though
they may not identify with or want to be the opposite gender. All transsexuals
are transgender, but transvestites do not necessarily fall into either of the
other categories.
4.
The LGBTQIA
community considers gender to be a trait that exists along a continuum.
Transgenders can thus be bigender (move between
feminine and masculine gender-typed behavior depending on context), trigender (shifting between
male, female and a third gender), pangender (all genders at
once), genderqueer (a catchall for people who consider themselves any of the
subsets of transgender, such as genderless, pangender, etc.).
5.
The term cisgender is used
to refer to individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned
at birth, their bodies and their personal identity.
Cisgender is often used within the
LGBTQIA community to refer to people who are not transgender.
6.
In the 1960s, Johns Hopkins University became the first
American medical center to offer "sex-reassignment surgery."
But they later stopped performing
the procedure after a study on transgendered people in the 1970s. The study
compared the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the
outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients
described themselves as "satisfied" by the results, but their
subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn't have
the surgery.
As Dr. McHugh, former psychiatrist
in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, explains, "At Hopkins we stopped doing
sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a "satisfied" but still
troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal
organs."
7.
When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or
surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic,
70-80 percent of them spontaneously lost those feelings.
Some 25 percent did have persisting
feelings, notes
Dr. McHugh, but what differentiates those individuals remains to be
discerned. Despite such studies, several states—including California, New
Jersey and Massachusetts—have passed laws barring psychiatrists, even with
parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a
transgender minor.
8.
A 2011
study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden followed 324 people who had
sex-reassignment surgery (191 male-to-females, 133 female-to-males) from 1973
to 2003.
The overall rate of death was higher
than expected, with suicide being the leading cause. Those who had the
sex-change surgery were almost 20 times more likely to take their own lives
than the nontransgender population. They were also more likely to seek in-house
treatment for psychiatric conditions.
9.
At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered,
says McHugh.
"'Sex change' is biologically
impossible," he adds. "People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do
not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men
or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and
encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote
a mental disorder."
Joe Carter is an editor for The Gospel Coalition and the
co-author of How to Argue Like Jesus: Learning Persuasion from History’s
Greatest Communicator.
More from Joe Carter or visit Joe at thegospelcoalition.org
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