Dr. Hillary Cass, former president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health at Great Britain’s national health service NHS, conducted the most thorough science-based study to date about the treatment of transgender children.
“This is an area of remarkably weak evidence, and yet results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress,” Cass writes in the foreword of the study.
And yet, until quite recently, Western nations treated trans kids with hormones and mental health interventions that addressed only their gender distress. Meanwhile, what was happening in these children’s heads had little to do with “gender confusion.”
Up to 70% of adolescents who report symptoms of gender confusion also suffer from comorbidities, including anxiety disorders, depression, self-harm, and eating disorders. And yet, the transgender medical community insists on treating these kids with hormones that may or may not be reversible.
In short, real science, instead of politically motivated science, is lacking.
The belief that transgender people commit more mass shootings than other groups is not born out by the facts. One study by Politifact determined that seven out of 4,147, or 0.17%, of mass shootings since 2018 were committed by trans people. Even if you believe that Politifact is hopelessly biased against the right, it’s an infinitesimally small number.
But because of the explosive nature of the subject, there has not been a serious scientific study that has “analysed the available data to produce an estimate of the per-capita rates of mass shootings among trans people versus other demographics,” as UnHerd reports. The sad fact is, no one wants to take the political heat, no matter what the findings are.
Interpreting these research findings to address the question of any greater potential for violence moves into the realm of speculation. Tishelman raised the question of whether there is a certain stratum of people who are indeed prone to violence and who profess to be transgender but who are not in fact genuinely trans. The Minneapolis shooter, after all, confessed in a diary entry shortly before the incident to regretting transitioning.
This line of thinking rests in part on the fact that the profile of youth with gender-related distress has undergone a sea change. A generation ago, cross-sex identification among minors was very rare, and the youth who presented to mental-health professionals with what was then known as gender-identity disorder had lower rates of other psychiatric diagnoses than what is seen today, according to research by Canadian psychologist Ken Zucker and his colleagues.
With almost 65% of trans youth abandoning their new “identity” after five years, it’s virtually impossible to determine whether an individual who carries out a school attack is transgender, gender confused, or being driven by some other mental illness. Several recent studies have shown “a high rate of resolution of gender non-contentedness, and significant rates of medical detransition (10-30%),” according to the Society of Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM).
“What’s totally unhelpful and unproductive, not to say petty and just false, is to say that anybody who identifies as trans is inherently a threat, and should be regarded as such,” claims Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute. “To focus only on the people who actually pull the trigger, and not on all the systemic causes that enable and encourage that type of behaviour, seems to be totally unhelpful,” Sapir said.
That may be true. But with no significant science to buttress the case for or against transgender people being more prone to violence, it’s a subject that needs to be examined fearlessly and without bias.
That may be difficult, with the trans lobby getting hysterical anytime someone challenges their near-religious belief that “once a trans, always a trans” and other myths perpetrated by those who see controlling the trans narrative as paramount.
Help PJ Media continue to tell the truth about the trans narrative. Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership.
