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Surgical Fantasy
Robert Hart on Biblical Compassion for Sex-Change Confusion
God is not the author of confusion, but of peace, as in all churches of the saints. (1 Cor. 14:33)
The invention of a new "civil right" is being forced upon us. I believe that if the great martyr of genuine civil rights could see what is being done in the name of his cause, he would be displeased—that is, if the things he actually believed in his lifetime are taken into account. In recent months the world has been subjected to the sight of Bruce Jenner on the cover of Vanity Fair, calling himself Caitlyn and appearing like a woman.
Meanwhile, in Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins Hospital is bucking the trend. As CNS News reported on June 2 of last year:
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a "mental disorder" that merits treatment, that sex change is "biologically impossible," and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.
He also reported on a new study showing that the suicide rate among transgendered people who had reassignment surgery is 20 times higher than the suicide rate among non-transgender people.
Johns Hopkins, one of the finest hospitals in the world, used to perform such operations, but does not do so anymore. The CNS story continues:
Dr. McHugh also reported that there are "misguided doctors" who, working with very young children who seem to imitate the opposite sex, will administer "puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous—even though the drugs stunt the children's growth and risk causing sterility."
Such action comes "close to child abuse," said Dr. McHugh, given that close to 80% of those kids will "abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated."
To actually change one's sex, one would have to change every cell in the body, as well as brainwave patterns. The frontal lobe of the brain would also have to be transformed.
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Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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