viernes, 12 de agosto de 2016

MercatorNet: Mutilating femininity isn’t just a Third World issue

MercatorNet: Mutilating femininity isn’t just a Third World issue



Mutilating femininity isn’t just a Third World issue

Allowing a teenager to have her breasts removed to transition to being a male is just as abusive
Michael Cook | Aug 12 2016 | comment 

On no cause on the face of the planet are nations so united as the wickedness of female genital mutilation. Young girls on the cusp of puberty in the Middle East and Africa submit to the partial or total removal of their external genitalia. It is universally denounced as barbaric and anti-woman.
The fact that many of the young women undergo the primitive and painful operation voluntarily or even insist upon it is dismissed as irrelevant. Mutilating a girl’s body is wrong, period. Even if it’s hygenic. Even if it’s painless. Even if she wants it. It's always wrong. 
Except if the girl wants to become a boy. Then it’s OK. Not really a big deal.
That’s the message coming from Australia, where the Family Court has allowed a 15-year-old girlto have a double mastectomy so that she can live as a boy. Although she has been dressing as a boy since she was four, she refused to have hormone therapy to suppress female puberty. Now, said the Court, she needs the surgery, or otherwise she will look grotesque, “with a beard, hairy chest and an E-cup bust”.
From the sketchy accounts of the case in the media, it appears that the girl, known only as Quinn, has a “history of anxiety, depression and self-harm”, allegedly as a result of gender dysphoria. She insists on having her large breasts removed.
An unnamed psychiatrist told the Court that he was “reluctant” to encourage her to take this irreversible step but a more amenable psychologist testified that her mental health would improve if gender dysphoria was no longer an issue.
The court’s decision goes against international guidelines, which recommend that transgender surgery should not be carried out until children have reached the age of 18 and “lived continuously for at least 12 months” as the opposite gender.
The guidelines are obviously right. Even at 18, many people are still not mature enough to make a decision which will change their lives irrevocably. In Australia under-18s cannot vote, cannot marry, cannot get a tattoo, and cannot buy cigarettes.
But they can obliterate their femininity.
Why is it regarded as progressive to allow children to be mutilated in the name of transgender activism?
Obviously Quinn has serious psychiatric issues. Exactly what they are is up to the mental health professionals. But something is terribly wrong if the solution for depression is a scalpel. If a 15-year-old girl from a Somali background requested a clitoridectomy because she was experiencing severe cultural dysphoria, she would be referred to a shrink, not asked to fill out a consent form. A double mastectomy for a 15-year-old Australian girl is no less mutilating.
According to the psychiatrist’s bible, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 98 percent of gender confused boys and 88 percent of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after passing through puberty. There is every chance that Quinn will work through the pain barrier and emerge relatively well-adjusted.
Furthermore, long years of taking possibly carcinogenic hormones lie ahead of her. A Swedish study from 2011 found that the suicide rate amongst transgenders was 20 (that’s right, 20) times higher for people who had sex reassignment surgery. That is just the figure which stands out among higher levels of cancer deaths, accidental deaths, violent crime, heart disease and substance abuse.
The consequences of allowing children and teenagers to transition to the opposite sex with hormone therapy and even surgery are uncertain. There have simply been too few robust studies. Instead of rushing ahead to satisfy Quinn’s demands, we should be applying the precautionary principle.
As a society, we’ve been here before. We silenced the alarm bells and raced ahead because of lobby groups and complacency. Remember asbestosis? According to UNESCO, a Dutch study estimated that if asbestos had been banned in 1965, when the link with the lethal cancer mesothelioma was plausible but unproven, instead of in 1993, it would have would have saved the Netherlands 34,000 victims and 19 billion Euros in clean-up and compensation.
How much compensation will the mutilated victims of the transgender revolution demand for their stunted lives 30 years from now?
Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet. 


MercatorNet

How long did slavery last in America – two centuries? How long will legal abortion last there, or any place that has decided that the unborn child has no rights in the face of a woman’s desire to be rid of it? Will it take another 200 years for the powerful “reproductive rights” movement to dissolve before the plain fact that what is destroyed by abortion is a human being, with same intrinsic rights and dignity as any other?
These are the questions raised by Miles Smith’s powerful essay showing the striking similarity between the mentality of die-hard defenders of slavery in America and that of the organisations and individuals that today are urging women to “shout their abortions” and their absolute right to decide whether a child they have conceived is to live or die.
That Hillary Clinton is their flag-bearer is the reason why her probable election will be, not a victory, but a colossal moral defeat for women and America.
Also today: Michael Cook has a pointed comment on one of the crazy applications of the “my choice alone” principle shaping individual lives and society today; Marcus Roberts has an update on international adoptions; and Mary Cooney concludes hertips on sibling squabbles.
If you are American and haven't done the How will you vote? survey, you might consider doing it now. 


Carolyn Moynihan
Deputy Editor,
MERCATORNET



Abortion as a positive good: How the abortion movement echoes radical slavery rhetoric
Miles Smith | FEATURES | 12 August 2016
'Safe, Legal, and Rare' no more.
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Mutilating femininity isn’t just a Third World issue
Michael Cook | CONJUGALITY | 12 August 2016
Allowing a teenager to have her breasts removed to transition to being a male is just as abusive
Read more...
 
Star Trek’s version of time travel is more realistic than most sci fi
Lloyd Strickland | POPCORN | 12 August 2016
A philosophical assessment of the latest Star Trek films.
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The rapidly declining practice of international adoption
Marcus Roberts | DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY | 12 August 2016
But is this best for potential adoptees?
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What kids can learn from sibling squabbling
Mary Cooney | FAMILY EDGE | 12 August 2016
Each fight can be a teachable moment.
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