PrintTransgenders: The Real Numbers
The other day I came across a piece of information that puts the entire transgender craze into about as much perspective as it is ever going to require.
This is actually something I knew from years ago, but that I’d let slip thanks to a conviction that, obvious as it was, it certainly must have arisen in the debate already.
Well, it turns out that it never has, and that the transgender debate has been careening across the public square in a completely fact-free manner. Which, in light of previous debates concerning COVID, “global warming,” and radical feminism, fails to surprise me.
Gender dysphoria, which is the medical syndrome upon which the transgender movement is based, is actually one of a cluster of similar disorders. Among these is Body Integrity Dysphoria:
Body integrity dysphoria is a psychiatric condition characterized by a persistent desire to acquire physical disability (e.g., amputation, paraplegia). Body integrity dysphoria is also termed as body integrity identity disorder, amputee identity disorder, and xenomelia.
In Body Integrity Dysphoria, the victim is convinced, beyond any doubt or debate, that one or another of his bodily appendages – hands, feet, fingers, etc. – is actually an alien appendage that does not belong to him at all and is doing physical harm simply by being attached to him. No amount of argument can convince the patient that the organ in question – say, the hand – is in fact a natural element of his being, is exactly where it belongs, and should be accepted and left alone. No – that hand is harmful and it has to go. Victims typically contact one doctor after another in the hope that one will agree to amputate. Some have gone so far as to mutilate the offending member in order to force the issue, and some have attempted self-amputation, with the expected ghastly results. Most doctors, of course, refuse any such action. It was only in 1997 that the first attempt was made, by a doctor named Robert Smith, who reported good results, including patient satisfaction.
(There’s also a claim that a related disorder, apotemnophilia, exists in which individuals seek amputation for sexual gratification. It seems that most of the “evidence” for this comes from porn magazine readers' forums, which are largely fictional – I knew several people who were making money writing “letters” for those forums back in the early 80s. Interestingly, one of the researchers pushing apotemnophilia was John Money, who also played a key role in the mainstreaming of transgenderism.)
Research has discovered that BID patients suffer from brain damage in the right hemisphere, along with abnormalities in the white matter of the brain. So the disorder is no myth. Serious treatment involves antidepressants to reduce anxiety and stress. Little can be done to rid the patient of the amputation fixation.
Comparing Gender Dysphoria to Body Integrity Dysphoria, we find:
- A delusion that there exists a grievous flaw in an individual’s body, sex in the case of Gender Dysphoria, “alien” appendages in Body Integrity Dysphoria.
- Denial of any claim that the flaw does not exist, no matter how much evidence is presented.
- An obsessive frame of mind, in which the delusion becomes the central, controlling factor of existence.
- Depression and anxiety in response to the obsession.
- Efforts to “correct” the problem by means of body mutilation.
- Resistance to any other type of solution.
Clearly, Body Integrity Dysphoria is essentially identical to Gender Dysphoria, the only difference being the body element(s) acting as the focus.
So how many victims of Body Integrity Dysphoria are there? The answer is straightforward: two hundred. That’s not two hundred in the U.S., or two hundred worldwide, or even two hundred in the 21st century. It’s two hundred total, in the entire medical record since the disorder was first noted in 1977. That’s about 3.6 per year. Clearly, BID is not only “extremely” rare, it’s vanishingly rare – one of the rarest mental disorders on record.
When we once again compare this to gender dysphoria… well, it’s obvious where we’re going here. I can’t recall the exact number of gender dysphoria “victims”– whether it’s 750,000, 1.5 million, or whether it’s broken into the eight digits, and there’s no point in wasting time to look up bogus numbers. One thing we can say without fear of contradiction is that it ain’t 200. It is, in fact, several orders of magnitude greater than 200.
So here we have two mental disorders that are identical in their characteristics, development, and mode of expression. Yet one affects a couple of hundred victims, and the other something on the order of 750,000. What is wrong here? What’s the explanation for this?
Of course, we all know what the explanation is. Mass Gender Dysphoria is a hoax. We need not ask why – every single effort engaged in by the Left for the past thirty years has had one goal: the absolute degradation and destruction of American society and the civilization on which it is built. Drug legalization, legitimization of criminal behavior, support for Jihadism, mainstreaming of child abuse, radical feminism, “global warming” and what have you all share the same goal: degrading, crippling, and finally bringing down the United States. Gender Dysphoria, which attacks social cohesion, the family, individual health, both physical and mental, and the very nature of reality itself, is about as perfect a leftist weapon as can be envisioned. If it didn’t exist, they’d have had to… well, they did invent it, didn’t they?
It's clear at this point that transgenderism was a bridge too far for the Left. That little pink battleship has hit the reefs of open hostility and is slowly being battered to pieces by waves of indignation, disgust, and contempt. Bud Light is circling the drain. Target is hysterically trying to avoid the same fate. The Dodgers’ Los Angeles “Pride Day” has cost them the affection of many devoted fans. Girl athletes, having got over their shock at, for the first time in their lives being backstabbed by their institutions, are at last standing up to bogus “females” trying to infiltrate their sports. Laws protecting children from LGBT exploitation, with particular emphasis on transgenderism, are being passed or proposed in Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, South Carolina, and elsewhere.
Even the great spokescreature Dylan Mulvaney has gone public to state that he now wants to “move on” from his girlhood.
The discrepancy between Body Integrity Dysphoria and Gender Dysphoria is yet another log to add to this auto-de-f.é . First there’s the numbers. The claims being made by activists are bogus on their face. There aren’t 750,000, there aren’t 75,000, there aren’t 700. In truth. there are thousands of adolescents bent on making pests of themselves, as adolescents have done for decades, if not millennia. This is fine. They can make spectacles of themselves any way that they like. But they should not be allowed to rend the basic elements of human biology to do it.
As for commiserating in public about “people who actually suffer from Gender Dysphoria.” The ‘people who actually suffer” would scarcely fill a bus, and are being used simply to cloud the issue. We need to offer our sympathy and then leave them to their therapists.
Finally, clear confirmation that gender dysphoria numbers bear no relation to reality is a matter of fact, and as such, a matter of evidence. It needs to be featured in every lawsuit, every court case, every brief, every paper, and every other related document, official or otherwise. All those who have benefitted from the hoax -- the activists, the doctors making big money from worthless and harmful “reassignment” treatments, the political hyenas, and not least the self-styled “victims” themselves -- must be made to answer for it. Facts, as the man said, are stubborn things. They need to get more stubborn still.
The Left has made an art out of setting the grounds for “debate” and forcing everybody else (in particular groveling conservatives) to respond on their terms. Transgenderism, defying the basic elements of reality itself, is probably the peak expression of this. This needs to end, and the collapsing “transgender” movement offers the best opportunity to make it so.
Image: Ted Eytan
