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LONDON, England, August 9, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – British homosexual actor Rupert Everett has warned parents and clinicians against encouraging children who believe they should be the opposite sex.
Speaking from his own experience as a boy, Everett said, “I really wanted to be a girl. Thank God the world of now wasn’t then, because I’d be on hormones and I’d be a woman. After I was 15, I never wanted to be a woman again.”
Everett’s comments support not only medical evidence but also the psychotherapeutic theories that got Toronto child psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker fired last December from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. They also go against the LGBT lobby that insists gender dysphoria is an inherent, medically neutral condition, not a mental illness.
Everett made his comments to the Sunday Times, acknowledging that in his own childhood he wanted to be a girl and dressed as such all the time. Had the medical-therapeutic community’s current support for transgenderism prevailed then, along with its willingness to provide hormone blockers at an early age and cross-gender hormones in late teens, Everett says he probably would be living as a woman today.
“It’s nice to be allowed to express yourself,” he told the Times, “but the hormone thing, very young, is a big step. I think a lot of children have ambivalence when they're very young to what sex they are or what they feel about everyone. And there should be a way of embracing it” short of doing permanent damage.
Everett was also critical of Bruce Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist-turned-Hollywood personality who after fathering several children now lives as a woman and goes by Caitlyn. Jenner, Everett told the Sunday Times, had “no clue” about living as a transgender.
Everett’s comments — and his homosexuality — support the research done by Zucker, who was fired under pressure from the LGBT community late last year. Zucker treated 500 transgender individuals in 30 years. Zucker and his associates at the CAMH believed that gender dysphoria — the idea that one’s gender is the opposite of his or her biological sex — is a mental illness with psychosocial roots.
As Jesse Singal explained in a New York Magazine article on Zucker’s ouster, Zucker and like-minded clinicians “believe that messages from family, peers, and society do a huge amount of the work of helping form, reinforce, and solidify gender identities, and that at young ages these identities tend to be quite malleable. There’s great potential for confusion.”
Research independent of Zucker’s indicates between 75 percent and 90 percent of gender dysphoric children come to self-identify with their biological sex if their gender confusion is not encouraged with hormones and they are not mutilated with surgery. Zucker’s own findings were that the majority of these young people would grow up with homosexual or bisexual inclinations.
Zucker and his fellow therapists advised parents to broaden their child’s play and toys to include those favored by their biological peers, while counseling the children to reframe their own cross-gender feelings as mere preferences in terms of clothes or pastimes, and not proof they were “born in the wrong body.”
Zucker is not the only scientist to suffer persecution by the LGBT community. J. Michael Bailey, the former head of the psychology department at Northwestern University, was the target of an effort to get him fired for unprofessional conduct after publishing a book on the different theories of gender called The Man Who Would be Queen. Dr. Bailey agrees with Zucker that homosexuality and gender dysphoria are learned and not innate. Northwestern dismissed the accusations against Bailey.
Dr. Joseph Berger, a prominent Ontario psychiatrist and vocal advocate of the traditional psychiatric view that transgenders are merely depressed in most cases and psychotic in a few cases, was also the target of a spurious attack from LGBT activists. It was quickly dismissed by his professional organization.
Pressure is mounting from the transgender lobby and political liberals to allow cross-gender hormones in the early teen years in order to ease a transgender youth’s full transition. Cross-gender hormones begin the development of cross-gendered characteristics such as breasts, facial hair or gender-appropriate bone structure in early teen years.
But a group of conservative doctors has condemned this approach. In a forceful statement, Dr. Michelle Cretella, president of the American College of Pediatricians, called cross-gender hormone treatment on teens “wholly morally unconscionable” because “even older adolescents are not cognitively mature enough to provide informed consent for treatments that will result in long-term, irreversible, life-altering effects, such as permanent sterility.”
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