Doctors group slated for calling trans people ‘counterfeits’

The intersection between healthcare, religion and human rights was highlighted recently when Doctors for Life International issued a statement denouncing a call by queer activists for South Africa’s government to improve healthcare for transgender people.

The statement labelled transgender people as “counterfeits” and “impersonators of the sex with which they identify”.

Issued by the group on July 11, the statement said it was responding to lesbian, gay, bisexual, trangender and intersex (LGBTI) nongovernmental organisations that have called on the South African government to make health facilities available to transgender people for hormone treatment and surgeries.

The NGOs also said that any policy that excludes transgender or homosexual persons could be challenged and invalidated.

Quoting Dr Paul McHugh, the former head psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Maryland in the United States, Doctors for Life said the idea that one’s sex was fluid and a matter of choice was “extremely damaging … to families, adolescents and children, and should be confronted as an opinion without biological foundation wherever it emerges”.

Linking queer communities to paedophilia in a recent Facebook post, the group also said: “There is a reason why we instinctively feel alarmed when a creepy man watches our children because it causes us to protect our children from being molested and traumatised — the LGBTI pushing to have us accept them wanting to have sex with our children.”

According to its website, Doctors for Life is made up of “medical doctors, specialists, dentists, veterinary surgeons and professors of medicine from various medical faculties across South Africa and abroad, in private practice and in government institutions”.

“We bring together medical professionals to form a united front to uphold the following three principles: the sanctity of life from fertilisation till death, sound science in the medical profession [and] a basic Judeo-Christian ethic in the medical profession.”

Membership offers medical practitioners “a credible mouthpiece to air their views, a platform to live out their convictions in society, and scientific arguments on important issues (such as abortion, cloning, euthanasia, pornography [and] prostitution).”

Chief executive Albertus van Eeden says the organisation has “approximately 1 500 members, of which three-quarters are in South Africa and the rest abroad”.

Anastacia Tomson, a transgender woman and medical doctor, says: “It is concerning that the organisation represents so many South African doctors, especially considering that finding a healthcare provider who is competent in caring for transgender patients, and who does so with sensitivity and respect, is already difficult.”

Calling the Doctors for Life statement “shameful”, she said: “This group is propagating harmful ideas that actively damage an already marginalised group.”

In response to questions posed by the Mail & Guardian, Van

Eeden said: “We are merely quoting the work of scientific scholars. McHugh was … one of the most respected medical and psychiatric authorities on transgender [sic] [and] Michelle Cretella [was] president of the American College of Paediatricians.”

Tomson counters this. “McHugh has been widely discredited by his colleagues and professional medical bodies. Several respected organisations, including the American Psychological Association … explicitly oppose McHugh’s position.”

A letter signed by 600 LGBTI health experts criticised McHugh’s report, Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological and Social Sciences. The nonpeer-reviewed report was published in 2016.

The report, the letter stated, “misleads readers about the state of scientific research and evidencebased clinical practice guidelines addressing the health of people who are LGBT and queer. As researchers with expertise in gender and sexuality, and/or as clinicians who serve LGBTQ people, we are called to correct the record. A substantial body of research points to stigma and its consequences as contributing to the mental and physical health disparities among LGBTQ people.”

McHugh’s report, it added, does “not reflect current scientific or medical consensus”.

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