A dad in Bristol, UK, grapples with the unscientific basis for transgender medicine, and the ideological lens through which only one pathway emerges – medical and surgical transition.
This story was originally on PITT, and to protect anonymity, it was read by another parent.
Transcript
I’m a dad in Bristol.
When my son came to me saying he felt he was trans, my first inclination, being a scientist, was to dive into the research. I wanted to understand from a medical and scientific perspective, what was going on with him. I figured the science was settled, that there would be evidence-based studies I could reference. I thought that I was capable of understanding what my son was going through, if I could just understand the science. As his dad, I was determined to accomplish this, for him and for our family.
It didn’t take long for me to discover, however, this was simply not going to be possible. I’m now convinced that trans is not based on science, it’s a fundamentalist religious ideology disguised as science. And not only that, because the entire field is being represented as science when it is, in fact, a belief system, information about extremely harmful side effects is being suppressed. And research efforts are completely subverted, because the ultimate goal is to support the ideology at all costs.
What’s maddening about the whole affair, is that the science is out there showing that the risk-benefit balance is way off when it comes to transgender medical interventions, but medical professionals and researchers are not looking at the data because they don’t want to know. So it’s left parents like me to do the heavy lifting and become the experts. This is clearly wrong.
From my own experience with my son, it’s clear to me that these children do feel deeply that they have issues with their body. That is not in question. I know my young teen son believes he feels like a woman. I also know that there are likely other underpinning reasons why he feels this way, other than that he is literally a woman trapped in a male body. And I think he’s aware that he is not actually a woman, a situation which causes inherent cognitive dissonance. But through today’s rigid ideological lens offered to him from the Internet chorus, there is only one possible treatment, trans medicine, meaning puberty blockers, cross sex hormones and surgery.
This one size fits all approach is a recent phenomenon. Even when transgenderism was mainly an adult medical field and quite rare in its presentation at clinics, studies have shown that depending on the presentation, differential diagnosis led to different treatment pathways to produce the best possible outcome for the patient to relieve their symptoms.
Unfortunately, the results from the existing studies available, show that the effects of so-called transgender medicine are horrible. Gender ideologues say that taking oestrogen feminises the brain. It does no such thing. What it appears to do is change blood flow, reduce the size of the brain, interfere with executive function and lead to early-onset dementia and high risk of stroke. These are all alarming effects, from a scientific basis we should not be giving males oestrogen. It’s as simple as that.
It’s imperative that we prioritise other ways to address gender distress, because introducing cross sex hormones is not safe. It is at least clear that the balance of risk versus benefit for these serious medical interventions merits discussion and consideration. Unfortunately, this is not happening. The open disregard of scientific evidence of harmful effect of hormones on the brain and other organs, shows that transgender medicine is more akin to a fundamentalist religious movement than to a well debated, questioning, scientific research process.
I fear that 1000s of young people are going to pay a lifelong price for this ideological experiment.