Transgender and Humpty Dumpty

In my blog on the question of whether a ‘trans man’ can give birth, I mentioned how the transgender ideology has penetrated even into The British Medical Journal. Now we find it seeping into areas of ordinary discourse as well. We’re in the fantastical world of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, (the sequel to Alice in Wonderland), where Humpty Dumpty says: ‘When I use a word…it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ Examples follow.

I recently needed to engage in correspondence with a well-known publishing house in which a person with a female name and who sounded like a woman when we spoke on the phone, signed herself thus:

Best wishes,
Chloe
Chloe Smith she/her

Another instance is shown by the trans ideologues appropriating Latin prefixes in neologisms to make a pointless distinction between so-called trans people and ordinary people. It seems it won’t do to call myself a man: I need to be a cis-man.

(The terms ‘trans’ and ‘cis’ are used in chemistry to refer to the position of atoms within molecules. Cis means on the same side; trans means on the opposite side. You may have heard of trans fats which are supposed to be bad for you as opposed to cis fats which aren’t.)

It is in the area of pregnancy and childbirth, however, where transgenderism is particularly likely to raise problems. Here is a quote from the Trans Pregnancy Survey (2022) of an organisation called the LGBT Foundation:

The language used within maternity services is almost entirely centred on the assumption that anyone accessing care will be a cis [sic] woman.

Of course it is. What is a midwife supposed to do or think when her next patient has had her breasts removed, calls herself a man, and wants others to use masculine pronouns for her? Is the midwife expected to take it all in her stride? What about this kind of pregnant woman having some respect for the sensibilities of the midwife? How should a midwife feel if she is expected to refer to a pregnant or post-partum woman as a man? The transgenderists would have her say, for instance: ‘He has just given birth; birthing person and baby are doing well.’

Instructions for the human body
An article in the distinguished journal, Nature (April 2019), declares: ‘The largest study involving transgender people is providing long-sought insights about their health.’

It’s about one Benita Arren who ‘wishes that the human body came with instructions.’ But it does! It’s called the brain and we can access it through our thoughts and feelings, among other ways. Nonetheless, we learn that, although he was ‘designated male at birth, she [sic] had secretly dressed in her [sic] mother’s clothes.’

As I have repeatedly pointed out, babies are not designated anything: they are recognised at birth as either male or female (apart from rare cases of disorders of sexual differentiation). The article continues:

Arren sought the closest thing she [sic] could find for a handbook for the human experience: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a compendium of mental illnesses used by psychiatrists.

What a pity Arren turned to this controversial 947-page tome for guidance in his dilemma! A compendium in the normal sense, such as a compendium of British butterflies, describes entities found in nature. The DSM-5, on the other hand, is derived from the deliberations of committees of psychiatrists. The book mainly consists of lists of symptoms which are arranged according to number and duration to fit pre-defined diagnoses of what are called mental illnesses – 297 of them to be precise. An entirely arbitrary and subjective exercise.

Back to our Arren. He found that ‘The DSM described what she [sic] was going through, but to her [sic] dismay, indicated these feelings were not going to change.’ So then what did this poor man do? He found a ‘gender clinic’ at Ghent University where he joined a study into the outcomes of hormone treatment in transgender people. The study is ongoing.

Wrong body
Is there really such an entity as a boy or man in a girl’s or woman’s body, respectively, and vice versa? Although there are various theories including genetic and hormonal influences, and adverse childhood experiences are likely important in gender confusion, no objective evidence so far as been discovered to support the idea of transgenderism. It appears, nonetheless, to a manifestation rooted in someone’s psychology, like homosexuality. As the Australian group countering transgenderism, aptly called Binary, puts it: ‘No child is born in the wrong body.’

Accepting one’s reality
I propose that all efforts at supporting such a person, if requested, should go towards helping him or her come to terms with and accept his or her reality: ‘Yes, I’m unhappy because I’m a girl and I wish I were a boy, but the truth is I am a girl and I’ll try to make the best of it!’

But no. Some doctors and surgeons are willing – even enthusiastic – participants in a Frankenstein-esque experiment: by hormonal manipulation and surgical mutilations we’ll try to transform the appearance of your body, in so far as this may be possible, into the opposite sex. Thereby, even though you’ll face a lifetime of hormone treatment and need to be monitored for side effects including enhanced risks of cancer and other problems, we hope you’ll be happier!

Not only is the physically healthy body thereby irreversibly injured, but the English language is likewise distorted: a trans man, that is, a woman, is called a man and a man can give birth; normal women are to be known as cis-women; and one’s preferred pronouns need to be declared and respected.

Text © Gabriel Symonds

Picture credit: Peter Newell on Wikimedia Commons