Ryan Anderson on how to tell the truth about gender & sexuality in a loving way.
Ryan T. Anderson — William E. Simon senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation — has written a new book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, that addresses many of these important issues with compassion.
.. The transgender moment may turn out to be fleeting, but that doesn’t mean we should expect it to fade away on its own. We need to insist on telling the truth, and on preventing lives from being irreparably damaged.
.. Why is the work of Paul McHugh important, and why and how can it become more mainstream?
.. Why is the work of Paul McHugh important, and why and how can it become more mainstream?.. Hormones and surgery cannot actually transform a man into a woman or a woman into a man, McHugh argued. His colleagues responded by introducing him to patients they claimed had successfully transitioned. They thought that if he met enough sexually reassigned people, he would come to see the benefit. But as McHugh recalls, “none of these encounters were persuasive.”..Meyer found that only a few of the patients he tracked down some years after their surgery actually regretted it, yet most did not appear to have benefited psychologically...After studying the evidence, McHugh decided that sex-change surgery was bad medicine and was “fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness.” Psychiatrists, he thought, could better help patients with gender dysphoria by “trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia.”.. this transgender perspective on sex and gender has deep roots. Chapter 7 of the book traces our cultural gender confusion to its roots in gender theory and in certain strains of feminist thinking about our embodiment... First-wave feminism was a campaign to liberate women from an overly restrictive concept of gender, so they could be free to fulfill their nature, but it gave way to a movement seeking to make women identical to men... This means that women should not be forced to live, work, and compete as if they were men.. there are signs of defensiveness among its advocates, as if they realize that their claims are contrary to basic, self-evident truths.” When you wrote those words, did it worry you that it might harken back to same-sex marriage opponents who believed that arguments for traditional marriage would inevitably win the day?.. there are signs of defensiveness among its advocates, as if they realize that their claims are contrary to basic, self-evident truths.” When you wrote those words, did it worry you that it might harken back to same-sex marriage opponents who believed that arguments for traditional marriage would inevitably win the day?.. But he cares very much about what affects his kids. He doesn’t want his daughter coming home from school to say that a boy who thinks he’s a girl is sharing a locker room with her. He doesn’t want his son to announce that he’s “gender-fluid.” Average parents of various political stripes are not on board with “gender identity”–access policies or school lessons about gender ideology.