Through the 1970s a handful of prestigious American medical institutions offered medical and surgical sex-change procedures to patients diagnosed with transsexualism. The Cleveland Clinic had such a unit. Along with the sultans and potentates who flew in to have their dubious tickers fixed, a few men suffering severe disruption in sex identification quietly came to Cleveland to have well-trained doctors treat them in ways that would facilitate their living as if they were women.

These transsexual treatment programs in general hospitals have all closed down. Transsexual medicine traveled the same path as abortion services. It started out being provided in general hospitals in the 1970s, but as society sobered up from the dreadful trip called “choice,” both abortion and transsexual treatment were shut out of hospitals. This is because both kinds of treatments amount to inflicting sickness and systemic failure upon healthy bodies, and both without scientific knowledge of the long-term effects of such “healthcare.” Through the 1980s the abortion and transsexual markets were taken over by specialty clinics such as Planned Parenthood, where providers are political zealots, not healers, and don’t trouble themselves about first doing no harm.

The transsexual unit at the Cleveland Clinic vanished without a trace many years ago. But I know it was there because I was too. I did an internship at that clinic in 1976. I bopped around the clinic lugging my bookbag, wearing a clownishly large white coat. Nobody mistook me for a doctor, or a nurse, or even a grown-up. Of the clinics I rotated through, the most interesting to me was the transsexual unit. This was not because of some lurid curiosity. It was because of all the psychological disorders, the ones that have to do with radical aberrations in identity, called the dissociative states, most remind us of how little psychology knows about what is really going on in this life.

In the vast literature that comes to us from the Greeks, to cite one example, there are reams of stories about sane men doing terrible things they wouldn’t want to tell their mommas, especially when they are having sex with her. But there are no representations of an otherwise mentally sound man so certain he was a woman he had his penis cut off. In fact, across world cultural or medical literature, tales of the mentally sound transsexual are missing. There are endless chronicles of every kind of deviation of sexuality, transvestism and paraphilias beyond imagination. There are also many accounts of mentally ill persons mutilating themselves. But there is a dearth of literature that describes the current concept of transgenderism (sic), which is of a perfectly sane man, the fellow next door perhaps, a husband and father, who has his penis cut off because he just happened to discover he was a woman after all. The gender fanatics will blather it is fear of persecution that these stories didn’t get told. But that doesn’t ring true. If even a fraction of 1% of rational men were “transgenders” throughout human history, we would have heard more about it.

The medical term "transsexual" did not appear in the DSM until 1980. The “trans” terminologies -- transsexual, trans woman, trans man – are in themselves problematic because the purpose of all therapies, mental and physical, is to restore homeostasis and stability to mind and body. The “trans woman” never becomes a true woman, but is forever in transition, permanently rowing against the tide of biology. But the diagnosis "transsexual" wasn’t meant to last long. By 1980 in American politics the bold vanguard of homosexual empire building needed a new outpost to plant their flag. The mental disorder "transsexualism" was fast-tracked to become a non-disorder, just a happenstance of mind called transgenderism. The DSM IV published in 1994 introduced the term ‘gender identity disorder’. Then in the DSM V in 2013, the process of normalizing a gross abnormality in the most fundamental psychological identification of human experience, i.e. whether one is a male or a female, was completed. Transgenderism stopped being an identity disorder at all. It became merely a “dysphoria” or an unpleasant feeling.

When transsexualism became transgenderism, scientific inquiry regarding the condition was banned as political heresy. The advancement of knowledge regarding etiology, onset, degrees or types of transsexuality was halted. It now costs the career of a social scientist who dares question a monolithic view of transgenderism. LGBTQ dogma authorizes only the narrative of the courageous, marginalized transgender whose only cure is “gender transition.” But there are so few transsexuals, to get any political traction from this nanominority, homosexual crusaders had to up trans numbers. They did this first by inflicting mass confusion through “non-binary gender theory,” and then by placing a glamorous, vestal victim transgender upon a shiny new cultural pedestal. The shift from transsexualism to transgenderism constituted a terrible moral degeneracy regarding personal responsibility. Transgenderism means Mike’s disordered thinking that he is a woman is not Mike’s problem, it is your problem. Big, burly Mike takes some pills, slather’s a ton of make-up on his stubbly face, and if you don’t honor his womanhood, if you dare to call him sir even by accident, you are a phobic bigot. Mike has a right to teach you a lesson you won’t forget, to sue you, to slander you, even to destroy you, all for the LGBTQ cause. Oh, yes and Mike has the right to beat the tar out of your daughter at sports, if you are foolish enough to let her compete against a boy.

Let’s say the world hadn’t gone mad, people didn’t require a parade down main street for committing sodomy, and there were no cultural overlords called LGBT needing to weaponize a rare mental disorder. In that world, it might be seen that the loss of natural, true sex identification fits rather well into the category of dissociative mental disorders. Dissociative disorders involve a disruption of normal memory, awareness, and especially identity. They may be acute, lasting a few hours or chronic, lasting many years. Dissociative identity disorder, which used to be called multiple personality disorder, involves complete loss of personal identity, which is taken over by different personalities other than one’s own. There are also dissociative amnesias when the patient may suffer complete identity amnesia for a time. They may appear normal but have actually forgotten who they are. Depersonalization disorder is a condition of extreme detachment from oneself described as feeling “unreal.” Just as genetics dictate a real sex for everyone, the dissociative disorders presuppose a “real” self from which the mind dissociates. The theory underlying dissociative disorders is that they are caused by severe trauma, past or present. In fact, it is recognized that dissociative disorders develop in the absence of identifiable trauma.

If transsexualism was recognized as dissociative sex identity disorder it might open fields of understanding and protection for such patients. They could explore their unique history, thought, feelings, and vistas of life possibilities without being fast tracked to irreversible artificial resexuation.

Sex identity is the most profound and definitive identification of human life. What are the forces so great as to overset this identification? Is it becoming more prevalent? Is sex identity disorder a defense against the dehumanizing din of a world gone mad, an escapist repository of broken dreams, or just plain attention seeking? Are environmental toxins in play? Shall we be cosseted by words of prophesy about twilight times, and not even attempt to understand this condition? Will learned men be allowed to try?