Austin Ruse: Trans in Military Is Based on Fake Science

Transgender soldiers rally (Justin Sullivan / Getty)
Justin Sullivan / Getty

President Trump did the right thing in overturning the Obama policy of allowing the gender confused in uniform to defend our country.

First and foremost, there is no scientific evidence that transgenderism is a real thing, except insofar as someone feels or thinks they are the wrong sex. There are no reputable studies that show any physical reality that leads someone to believe they are the wrong sex. There is no transgender gene, no part of the brain that is different in such a person.

Certainly, there are scientific claims, but claims do not equal truth.

Writing in the NYU Department of Applied Psychology’s online publication OPUS, Elizabeth Glaeser says, “Currently, there is a significant lack of neurological evidence that defends or disputes the idea that the brain is sexually dimorphic, and if so, where exactly ‘gender’ and ‘sexual’ identities are located.” What she means is there is no brain proof for or against the notion that there are two sexes. Something that even children know is somehow beyond this academic. Though she goes on to admit there is no blood test, MRI, or answers to questionnaires that are capable of making a diagnosis.

A researcher in Vienna found a “polymorphism of the CYP17 gene related to sex steroid metabolism is associated with female-to-male but not male-to-male transsexualism.” Seven geneticists published a study in the Journal of Biological Psychiatry claiming to have found “a likely genetic component to transsexualism…”

The Official Journal of the International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology published a paper from the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich that found male-to-female transsexuals have similar second and fourth finger lengths to biological women.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky claims that neuroimaging shows the brains of transgender adults are similar in small but important ways to those whose gender identity matches their biological sex. Sapolsky argues that some males may have female brains.

Spanish researcher Giuseppina Rametti studied the “white matter microstructure of specific brain areas” and claims to have found that female-to-male transsexuals, those who have not yet been treated with testosterone, had brain structures more similar to those of males than females in three of four areas of the brain.

Researchers in Taipei had transsexuals watch dirty movies and then asked who in the movies they most identified with and found they identified more with their desired sex than their biological sex.

There are dozens of studies that purportedly demonstrate that transgenderism is in the genes, or the brains, and in that one case, the fingers.

Drs. Paul McHugh, former head of psychiatry at prestigious Johns Hopkins University, and noted statistician Lawrence Mayer looked at all of these studies and determined that none of them are methodologically sound. They specifically point out, “There are inherent and ineradicable methodological limitations of any neuroimaging study that simply associates a particular trait, such as a certain behavior, with a particularly brain morphology.” One simply cannot know if a slight difference in someone’s brain is the cause of certain desires and behavior, or the result or such desires and behavior.

All of this is fake science ginned up to advance a certain ideology.

Dr. McHugh draws an important analogy between anorexia and transgenderism. He says an anorexic may look in the mirror and see a fat person staring back. The anorexic is not fat but she believes she is. Fatness is based on her subjective feelings, which are based in reality. In the same way, a so-called “transgender” person may look in the mirror and see the opposite sex staring back. Again, this is based on subjective belief, on what the person feels: also, not based on reality.

McHugh points out that the anorexic needs therapy in order to work past her lack of reality and, in the same way, so does the person who thinks he is in the wrong body. It does not help our military readiness to have people serving who are, for lack of a better word, delusional. What’s more, studies show, even in trans-friendly Sweden, that the gender confused are twenty times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. We do them no favors putting them in such stressful situations as combat.

Without any sound science to back up his order, President Obama imposed the transgender ideology on the U.S. military. What Trump has done in his policy of disallowing the gender confused to serve in the military is to stand against fake science and in favor of real science.

Austin Ruse is president of the Center for Family and Human Rights, and the author of Fake Science: Exposing the Left’s Skewed Statistics, Fuzzy Facts, and Dodgy Data (Regnery Publishing).

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