Gay British actor warns against sex change for children
British homosexual actor Rupert Everett has
warned parents and clinicians against encouraging children who believe they
should be the opposite sex.
Speaking from his own experience as a boy,
Everett said, “I really wanted to be a girl. Thank God the world of now wasn’t
then, because I’d be on hormones and I’d be a woman. After I was 15, I never
wanted to be a woman again.”
Everett’s comments support not only medical
evidence but also the psychotherapeutic theories that got Toronto child
psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker fired last December from the Centre for
Addiction and Mental Health. They also go against the LGBT lobby that insists
gender dysphoria is an inherent, medically neutral condition, not a mental
illness.
Everett made his comments to the Sunday
Times, acknowledging that in his own childhood he wanted to be a
girl and dressed as such all the time. Had the medical-therapeutic community’s
current support for transgenderism prevailed then, along with its willingness
to provide hormone blockers at an early age and cross-gender hormones in late
teens, Everett says he probably would be living as a woman today.
“It’s nice to be allowed to express yourself,”
he told the Times, “but the hormone
thing, very young, is a big step. I think a lot of children have ambivalence
when they're very young to what sex they are or what they feel about everyone.
And there should be a way of embracing it” short of doing permanent damage.
Everett was also critical of Bruce Jenner, the
Olympic gold medalist-turned-Hollywood personality who after fathering several
children now lives as a woman and goes by Caitlyn. Jenner, Everett told the Sunday
Times, had “no clue” about living as a transgender.
Everett’s comments — and his homosexuality —
support the research done by Zucker, who was fired under pressure from the LGBT
community late last year. Zucker treated 500 transgender individuals in 30
years. Zucker and his associates at the CAMH believed that gender dysphoria —
the idea that one’s gender is the opposite of his or her biological sex — is a
mental illness with psychosocial roots.
As Jesse Singal explained in a New
York Magazine article
on Zucker’s ouster, Zucker and like-minded clinicians “believe that messages
from family, peers, and society do a huge amount of the work of helping form,
reinforce, and solidify gender identities, and that at young ages these
identities tend to be quite malleable. There’s great potential for confusion.”
Research independent of Zucker’s indicates
between 75 percent and 90 percent of gender dysphoric children come to
self-identify with their biological sex if their gender confusion is not
encouraged with hormones and they are not mutilated with surgery. Zucker’s own
findings were that the majority of these young people would grow up with
homosexual or bisexual inclinations.
Zucker and his fellow therapists advised
parents to broaden their child’s play and toys to include those favored by
their biological peers, while counseling the children to reframe their own
cross-gender feelings as mere preferences in terms of clothes or pastimes, and
not proof they were “born in the wrong body.”
Zucker is not the only scientist to suffer
persecution by the LGBT community. J. Michael Bailey, the former head of the
psychology department at Northwestern University, was the target of an effort
to get him fired for unprofessional conduct after publishing a book on the
different theories of gender called The Man Who Would be Queen.
Dr. Bailey agrees with Zucker that homosexuality and gender dysphoria are
learned and not innate. Northwestern dismissed the accusations against Bailey.
Dr. Joseph Berger, a prominent Ontario psychiatrist
and vocal advocate of the traditional psychiatric view that transgenders are
merely depressed in most cases and psychotic in a few cases, was also the
target of a spurious attack from LGBT activists. It was quickly dismissed by
his professional organization.
Pressure is mounting from the transgender
lobby and political liberals to allow cross-gender hormones in the early teen
years in order to ease a transgender youth’s full transition. Cross-gender
hormones begin the development of cross-gendered characteristics such as
breasts, facial hair or gender-appropriate bone structure in early teen years.
But a group of conservative doctors has
condemned this approach. In a forceful statement, Dr. Michelle Cretella,
president of the American College of Pediatricians, called cross-gender hormone
treatment on teens “wholly morally unconscionable” because “even older
adolescents are not cognitively mature enough to provide informed consent for
treatments that will result in long-term, irreversible, life-altering effects,
such as permanent sterility.”
