Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 21:2 (Fall 2016)
Article: Feeling The Transgender Experience
Author: Thomas White

JBMW 21:2 (Fall 2016) p. 5

Feeling The Transgender Experience

Thomas White

President, Cedarville University
Cedarville, Ohio

“But I don’t feel like it, Dad,” said my 5-year-old son, Samuel, in a high-pitched whine.1 Memories of my father’s response echoed in my head just before the words came out of my mouth. “It really doesn’t matter what you feel like, son. You have to take a bath.”

My sinfully sweet son responded by drooping his shoulders and eyes. “But that will make me sad, and if I’m sad, I’ll cry.” Feeling the mix of emotions between laughter at the reminiscence of my own boyhood mischievousness and sadness at forcing the child I love to do something against his will, I controlled my expression and said resolutely, “You still have to take a bath. We can’t always do what we feel like in life.”

I found myself reflecting upon those words as I recently examined the transgender movement sweeping across our culture. This movement finds its foundation not in facts but in feelings, not in truth but in experience. Let me demonstrate.

Paul McHugh, university distinguished professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, wrote an article published in 2014 in the Wall Street Journal titled “Transgender Surgery Isn’t the Solution.” In the 1960s Johns Hopkins was the first American medical center to venture into sex-reassignment surgery. A study in the 1970s demonstrated that the patients “were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery.” He writes, “So at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery.” He concludes his article by stating, “At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. ‘Sex change’ is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to

JBMW 21:2 (Fall 2016) p. 6

women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is a civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”

McHugh also notes a 2011 long-term study at Karolinska Institutet, a medical university in Sweden, that followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study found that about 10 years after surgery, those with transsexualism had an increase in psychiatric inpatient care and almost a 20 percent increase in suicide attempts.

Most recently the American College of Pediatricians issued a 2016 statement titled “Gender Ideology Harms Children.” That post includes the ...