The transgender distortion of medicine

This afternoon the Ohio State House of Representatives overrode the veto by Gov. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) of House Bill 68. This bill, should the Ohio Senate support the House, will, among other things, forbid doctors to mutilate surgically, or poison hormonally, any child under the age of 18 (officially a “minor individual,” or simply “minor”). These “medical interventions” are two of the three broad categories of transgender medicine. (The third consists of mental-health counseling to accept as valid the notion that someone was born into the wrong sex.) Transgender medicine is one of the worst distortions of medicine anyone calling himself a physician has ever invented. But the transgender distortion goes beyond medicine – because other distortions of the good in our society allow it. HB 68 is a noble attempt to straighten out the distortion. But society must do much more, and re-awaken some proper, God-given sensibilities.

Elements of transgender medicine and jurisprudence the bill addresses

One can read the full text of HB 68 here.

HB 68 addresses not only transgender medicine but also transgender jurisprudence, even before its obligatory definition section. Transgender jurisprudence refers to that body of case law, precedent, and judicial practice in the family courts of a society (including ours) that favors opting a child in for transgender medicine. In the very first paragraph, this bill forbids judges to prejudice themselves against parents who opt out of transgender:

1. Child-rearing,
2. Medicine (including puberty blockers, other hormonal treatments, and surgery), and/or:
3. Mental-health counseling.

Then, after laboriously defining certain terms (including “minor”), the bill forbids doctors to perform transgender medicine on a minor. The bill then forbids a doctor to “engage in conduct that aids or abets [such] practices.” This obviously means referring the minor patient to an out-of-state doctor who will practice such medicine. Obviously to avoid federal First Amendment action, the bill does not forbid a doctor to advocate such medicine generally.

Furthermore, no mental-health professional may offer transgender counseling without:

1. The consent of at least one adult responsible for the child’s well-being, and:
2. First screening the child for:
   1. Conditions that might cause “gender dysphoria,” including “depression, anxiety, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, [and] autism spectrum disorder,” and
   2. Physical, mental, sexual, or emotional abuse, or any event (called trauma, the Greek word for a wound) that might have similar effect.

Exceptions

HB 68 offers all the exceptions a doctor of good heart could ask for. (Your editor, having had medical training, can tell the difference.) The bill says any physician who has begun such treatment before the bill takes effect, may continue it if, in his judgment, stopping it would cause more harm than good. Any patient suffering from an infection from prior treatment along this line may get treatment for that infection. Other than that, such treatment is still available for cases of:

• Ambiguous genitalia in which no one can genuinely tell a boy from a girl,
• Chromosomal abnormalities or sex-steroid non-production or insensitivity.

Any doctor learns the classic sex-chromosomal abnormalities, including the Turner (XO) and Klinefelter (XXY) Syndromes, in medical school. In addition, doctors learn about testicular feminization. These are chromosomal males in whom testosterone has no effect. The body then turns testosterone into estrogen, producing an outwardly female form. Sadly, nothing will avail except removing the gonads before they turn cancerous. And sometimes a baby presents with an organ having both testicular and ovarian tissue.

Sensibly, nothing in HB 68 forbids a doctor to offer the classic treatment for any of these conditions. It merely forbids subjecting a genotypical and phenotypical male or female – a normal child – to such treatment.

Penalties and other prohibitions

The law deems any professional who breaks it, guilty of unprofessional conduct, with which the proper licensing board must deal. Such professionals would be subject to private malpractice or other legal actions, or State legal action.

Medicaid will not cover such surgical mutilation or hormonal poisoning as this law forbids.

Males shall not compete against females in female-only sports divisions. If a girl thinks she can “cut it” against male athletes, she may. (Notice, however, that they never do, because whenever they try it, the biological males always outclass them.)

Schools may maintain separate men’s and women’s (or boys’ and girls’) divisions in any sport, without anyone suing for discrimination. And: any athlete “blowing the whistle,” or any school trying to do the right thing, may sue for injunctive relief against anyone who retaliates against him, her, it, or them.

Section 2 of HB 68 summarizes a plethora of legislative findings, all of which any doctor of good heart would accept as valid. To summarize, such surgical mutilation and hormonal poisoning has complications. This section also acknowledges that patients wanting transgender transforms “often” have something else wrong going on with their minds. This medical degree holder would replace often with always.

Why did the governor side with transgender medicine?

As mentioned, Gov. DeWine vetoed HB 68 on Friday, December 29, 2023. He waited until the last minute – the “eleventh hour” – so to act. Before the day was out, reports surfaced that Gov. DeWine has received more than $40,000 in political donations from children’s hospitals that support transgender medicine.

These donations, over more than five years, all went to the Mike DeWine and John Husted Transition Fund. A transition fund, according to Ohio’s campaign finance handbook,

may pay “transition team” salaries and expenses, and for inaugural festivities. An influencer named Parker Thayer dropped this thread expressing his outrage – and giving the sordid details.

Mr. Thayer also dropped a “mention” to Riley Gaines.

An obviously left-leaning physician sarcastically asked:

Well, maybe Hillsdale College should “go for” university status and establish a school of medicine! That sort of “parallel medical academy” would be more than appropriate. Perhaps they could graduate their students with Medical Baccalaureate services, at which the graduates swear the Oath of St. Luke.

In any case, the governor, a week later, thought better of what he had done. He signed an Executive Order banning the surgical mutilation but not the hormonal poisoning. His order also proposed that anyone seeking any kind of transgender medicine first see a team comprising, at least, an endocrinologist, a bioethicist, and a psychiatrist.

Ohio’s legislature passed HB 68 initially on December 13, with lopsided margins: 24-8 in the Senate and 61-27 in the House. Today’s override vote in the House was 65-28.

What is wrong with our society?

The text of HB 68, and Gov. DeWine’s actions on it, clearly show something very wrong with the laws, morals, and mores of our society today. (Mores are customs, of thought or action. The word derives from the Roman mos, moris a body of customs – the mos majorum, or “customs of the majority.”)

Why does any part of our jurisprudence even countenance transgender medicine as appropriate? Does anyone truly believe that a person can have been “born into the wrong gender”? CNAV disputes that. So why does any hospital offer such regimens? Money. Follow the money. Money talks. And sometimes money tells lies. That explains those hospitals paying $40,000 in bribes to Gov. DeWine.

What shall we say of any governor who takes stands of this kind? As a former physician, your editor finds transgender medicine in violation of the Oath of Hippocrates. It does a patient no good – and even does harm – to sympathize with such an erroneous notion as “having been born into the wrong gender.” It is a lie, agreed-upon, either for money, or to serve a twisted end. This could be the end of a parent who wanted a child of a different gender. It is definitely the end of certain transnational organizations who want a lower population. The funder of the Georgia Guidestones called for a population of half a billion people, down from seven billion. A few days ago someone started raising funds to rebuild them – after lightning struck them.

How to repair society

Aside from that monument to one-world-ism, our society clearly needs a spiritual reawakening. To begin with, transgender jurisprudence generally appears in the context of divorce. A family-law reform like covenant marriage would go far to solve the basic problem.

HB 68 took one good step toward curtailing transgender counseling. It requires screening for things that lead to “gender dysphoria,” the usual prerequisite for transgender transformation. Actually those screening procedures should detect an adverse “soul-wound” event in all cases. The bill’s sponsors would do well to consider making that a legislative finding, not simply a screening requirement. Particularly when “mental-health professionals,” having signed on to the transgender ideology, would simply “look the other way.” They wouldn’t want to find depression, anxiety, hyperactivity, autism, or an abuse history.

More to the point, transgender medicine is bad medicine. But only an already distorted society would allow it. Indeed the two distortions each make the other worse.

Whether an adult has the right to fund his own transgender transform – or some of the other more ridiculous transforms one hears about today – is debatable. What should never be debatable is whether to allow anyone to so transform a child. The answer is NO. N-O, NO.

Mary Shelley warned against such distortions and perversions of medicine – but gave an incomplete warning. How she would shudder, or even shriek, to behold what modern medicine has now become! Perhaps if her novel were required reading in medical school, our society would not be in its present absurd position.