Transgender study retracted

A psychiatric journal made a big mistake about transgender surgery

By Andrea Widburg

A year ago, a massive study of transgender surgeries in Sweden claimed that people with body dysphoria who had the surgery were psychologically more healthy than those who did not have surgery.  The same journal that published that finding just retracted it.

Over the years, in large part because I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I met several people who had taken hormones and had surgery to turn themselves into a rough and stereotypical version of someone who was the opposite of their biological sex.  Consistently, they were the most unhappy people I had ever met.

That was a small and unscientific sample, but it was pretty clear to me that fulfilling their desire to present to the world as the opposite of their biological sex did nothing to make the people I met happy.  In retrospect, I realize that I was looking at the type of people Walt Heyer talks about in a fascinating interview with Candace Owens.

Like the people I had met, Heyer also thought he would be happier if he could have surgery and hormones that would "transform" him into the opposite of his biological sex.  The fact that he had male DNA did not stop him from thinking modern science could fundamentally change him.

The medical establishment didn't bother giving Heyer psychotherapy to see if his body dysphoria was a sign of a deeper issue.  Instead, his doctors put Heyer on estrogen and scheduled surgery.  Once on the estrogen, Heyer felt happier.  What he didn't know is that estrogen is something of a mood-tranquilizer or suppressor.  If women didn't have estrogen, they'd probably kill their babies (and I do not mean that figuratively; I mean it literally).

After the mutilating surgery, which removed Heyer's male sex organs and created a weird simulacrum of women's external sex organs, the doctors backed him off the high estrogen doses.  Suddenly, all the feelings of deep unhappiness that the drugs and surgery were supposed to fix came flooding back.

Contrary to accepted wisdom in the medical world, the damage done to Heyer's healthy male body did nothing to make him happier.  Heyer has since done whatever he could to heal his male body and now works to help people who regret having gone through the same process.

Heyer presented to his doctors decades ago, at which time increasing numbers of physicians and therapists were going with the flow.  There was no science to justify their belief that every person with gender dysphoria had to be "converted" into the opposite sex.  Instead, the science boiled down to a whole lot of assumptions, including relying upon a childlike book put together by non-scientists.

That seemingly changed in October 2019, though, when the American Journal of Psychiatry published what it claimed was a study that proved that "gender-affirming surgeries" reduced mental health problems in the post-surgical population.  This impressive assertion was supported by the fact that the study's authors reviewed a dataset comprising 9.7 million people, 2,679 of whom were diagnosed with gender dysphoria, with 1,000 the latter having surgery.  It was those 2,679 dysphoric people that the study relied upon to reach the conclusion about surgery's benefits.

Not long after, Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas in Austin, noticed that the numbers were funny.  It turned out that the study's entire conclusion turned on the outcomes of just three people.  Regnerus was right — the study was hinky.

This past weekend, the journal issued a correction.  Ryan T. Anderson explains how significant a correction it is:

Well, over the weekend, the editors of the journal and the authors of the paper issued a correction. In the words of the authors, "the results demonstrated no advantage of surgery in relation to subsequent mood or anxiety disorder-related health care."

But it's actually worse than that. The original results already demonstrated no benefits to hormonal transition. That part didn't need a correction.

So, the bottom line: The largest dataset on sex-reassignment procedures—both hormonal and surgical—reveals that such procedures do not bring the promised mental health benefits.

I could have told them that.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth.  Many people who claim to be transgender prove instead to have suffered deeply traumatic events in their childhood or to have been raised by mentally ill caretakers who thrust transgenderism upon them.  I also wonder, based on nothing but instinct, whether women who get pregnant while on the Pill or shortly after going off the Pill bathe the in utero infant in an unnatural wash of hormones.

The logical thing to do with these troubled souls would be to give them hormones that align with their biological sex and therapy that helps them accept who and what they are.  Our leftist-dominated social institutions, however, are waging war on normalcy wherever and whenever they can.  If that means chemically sterilizing or castrating healthy young bodies and giving them mutilating surgery, they will.

For the left, anything that upsets the old order and makes way for the new is worth destroying lives.  After all, what's one individual's happiness when balanced against a socialist paradise?