Transgender issue needs more voices heard

Editor:

They’re still protesting, almost two months after Danielle Smith announced restrictions on transgender procedures. But the activist fringe is not on the winning side of this argument.

Katie DeLucia-Burk (March 22) seems to assert morphology is guided by selfimage: “they’re not fighting against their body, their bodies (sic) working with them.” The body actually grows according to its biological process. Hormone infusions intentionally alter that. If self-image truly governed growth, would transgenderism need WPATH?

Journalist Michael Schellenberger reports the World Professional Association for Transgender Health actually acknowledges,

“transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.”

Working from a leaked internal discussion forum, Schellenberger learned that doctors knew testosterone therapies produced hepatocarcinomas and liver tumors. Doctors admitted neither dysphoric minors nor their well-meaning parents understood the damage treatments had on growing bodies.

Yet the prevailing WPATH attitude remained that suffering patients “should have known what they were in for.” Schellenberger

concludes, “The WPATH files are a picture of people single-mindedly committed to the hammer of gender medicine, seeing every patient as a nail.”

France will now ban transgender surgeries for minors, describing so-called gender affirming care as “one of the greatest ethical scandals in the history of medicine.”

It follows a UK National Health Service decision to stop prescribing puberty blockers for minors. Denmark, Finland, and Sweden also chose to restrict treatments – as have Saskatchewan and New Brunswick.

Activist arguments use the young and vulnerable; they ignore those same persons who realize, years later, what a mistake it was. By then, the damage is often permanent. Consider Lois Cardinal: transitioned from male to female at 19 under pressure from an Edmonton gender clinic about to lose funding. His vaginoplasty left Cardinal in 15 years of chronic pain “that cannot be reversed.” Cardinal, who applied for MAiD and was declined, supports the UCP legislation. Detransitioners and trans-regret need to be essential voices on this topic – and they’re the ones most ignored. Does the United Church (March 15) think affirmation a kindness? A piece of pie won’t amend for this harvest of regrets. A reading of 1 Corinthians 5:11 might serve instead. Tom Yeoman

Lethbridge