Once known as “the greatest athlete in the world,” Bruce Jenner (shown) now calls himself Caitlyn, because he contends he is no longer a man, but a woman. The liberal American media accomodate Jenner, celebrating “her” as the most famous “transgender person” in history.
Jenner burst onto the American scene after winning the gold medal in the men’s decathlon event at the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics. He became only the second athlete to grace the famous cereal box as a “Wheaties champion.” After the Olympics, Jenner turned to a career in movies and television. After a rocky start, in which his appearance in Can’t Stop the Music was criticized as the worst acting performance of 1980, Jenner was cast in several movies and TV shows, including Grambling’s White Tiger and several episodes of CHiPs. He also had a brief auto-racing career.
His marriage to the ex-wife of lawyer and O.J. Simpson friend Robert Kardashian garnered him some continuing attention, as Kris and her daughters are no strangers to the papparazzi. The couple divorced recently after more than 20 years of marriage.
The former Olympic champion then burst back into public attention in April, when he told 20/20 hostess Diane Sawyer that he was now a woman. He explained to her and the audience that he had wrestled with “gender dysphoria” since his youth, and had cross-dressed for several years, having begun hormone therapy in the 1980s. He said he quit the therapy after meeting and marrying Kris Kardashian.
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A recent Vanity Fair cover featured Jenner as a woman in a one-piece swimsuit, sporting the new name Caitlyn. In a Twitter message, Jenner announced, “I’m so happy after such a long struggle to be living my true self. Welcome to the world Caitlyn. Can’t wait for you to get to know her/me.”
Predictably, Jenner’s announcement that he was now a woman was simply accepted as an established fact by the liberal media. It has even been announced that he will receive the Arthur Ashe Courage Award next month, because “she [sic] has shown the courage to embrace a truth that had been hidden for years, and to embark upon a journey that may not only give comfort to those facing similar circumstances, but can also help to educate people on the challenges that the transgender community faces.”
Comfort in thinking he is a woman is the last thing that Jenner needs, according to Johns Hopkins psychiatrist-in-chief Dr. Paul McHugh, who argues that transgenderism is a “mental disorder,” and that sex change is “biologically impossible.” Those who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder, he charges. He contends that this disorder is extremely serious, because, citing a new study, the suicide rate among those who have had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender individuals. Surgery is not the solution for those who suffer this “disorder of assumption,” he says — the notion that a person’s maleness or femaleness is different from how he or she was born.
McHugh said those who persist in promoting transgenderism as normal “are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending, rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment, and prevention.” He explained that this belief of “sex misalignment” does not correspond with physical reality, and can cause great harm to the person. McHugh, who has authored six books and over 125 peer-reviewed medical articles, compared the delusion to a person who is suffering from anorexia, but sees himself or herself as overweight.
“Sex change is biologically impossible,” Dr. McHugh said. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women.”
The great harm that this liberal ideological fanaticism can lead to is illustrated by the case of David Reimer. As a very young child in 1963, Reimer lost his entire penis in a botched circumcision. His parents took him to Johns Hopkins University, where Dr. John Money convinced them that the best course of action was to conduct a surgical sex change on the unfortunate child. Money performed genital surgery and prescribed several years of hormonal therapy, combined with socialization of young Reimer as a girl. As it turns out, the boy that they tried to make a girl rejected the program when he was 12 years old, refusing to take any more estrogen pills. At 14, he underwent a double mastectomy, a phalloplasty, and began a regimen of male hormones. Despite horrific emotional problems, Reimer eventually married a woman, and adopted her children, and lived the rest of his life as a man.
Interestingly, before Reimer refused his hormone replacement therapy, he was cited for years in medical literature as an unqualified success. Time magazine reported in 1973 that his case “provides strong support … that conventional patterns of masculine and feminine behavior can be altered. It also casts doubt on the theory that major sex differences, psychological as well as anatomical, are immutably set by the genes at conception.” Though the facts of the Reimer case proved Time wrong, liberals seldom worry about facts when they are promoting one of their pet causes, regardless of the great harm their misguided theories can perpetrate on individuals.
