So where did this all begin?
Medical “sex change” interventions are often advertised as the latest best practice, developed in response to a better scientific understanding of gender identity. In fact, they are neither new, nor particularly scient…
So where did this all begin?
Medical “sex change” interventions are often advertised as the latest best practice, developed in response to a better scientific understanding of gender identity. In fact, they are neither new, nor particularly scientific.
Inspired by Hirchfeld’s sex change work over a century ago in Berlin, Henry Benjamin began to experiment with hormones in post-war America which, even though it was controversial, was developed into actual practice in the John Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic where John Money applied the principles to children for the first time. After little more than a decade, the clinic was shut down and the claimed benefits of “sex change” widely discredited. Despite this, those who still believed in it formed the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, which later became the Worldwide Professional Association of Transgender Health.
“The WPATH Files” confirm that clinicians associated with this organization are ignoring known serious harms associated with medical sex-trait modification procedures. The model of care pioneered by WPATH which has given rise to a significant expansion of a formerly niche field of medicine is now found by the Cass Review to “lack developmental rigor” and rests on “shaky foundations”
“The WPATH Files” argue that WPATH’s “approach to medicine is consumer-driven and pseudoscientific”, that its members “appear to be engaged in political activism, not science”, that “sex-trait modification procedures on minors and people with mental health disorders, known as ‘gender affirming care’, are unethical medical experiments” causing “harm without justification” and that “its victims are some of society’s most vulnerable people”.
Arguably, transexual and transgender medicine has been flawed from the start. The theory of identity that underpins these interventions keeps shifting and the suicide narrative that proponents use to justify it has been debunked. It’s time for all Australian..
