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May 17, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — While I have written many times in this space that the transgender ideology will badly hurt children, I will admit that a story published yesterday by NBC titled “Blurred lines: A pregnant man’s tragedy tests gender notions” caught me off guard. Just last week, I wrote a column detailing the recent trend of so-called “pregnant men,” something that would have once been picked out by eagle-eyed science fans as not a thing, as the kids say these days. But as NBC has reported, the trend of biological women presenting as men while pregnant can have heartbreaking and tragic consequences:

When the man arrived at the hospital with severe abdominal pains, a nurse didn’t consider it an emergency, noting that he was obese and had stopped taking blood pressure medicines. In reality, he was pregnant — a transgender man in labor that was about to end in a stillbirth.

It is tiresome to continually point this out, but as I’ve said previously, the mainstream media have veered so sharply away from reality that one needs to actually translate what they publish in order to get to the truth of the matter. The “man” being referred to here is actually a woman, a fact that can be readily discerned by the fact that she is pregnant. Because she was presenting as a man, a nurse, quite reasonably, thought she was simply obese rather than a “pregnant man.” This is sadly understandable. Medical practitioners work in the real world, not in the queer studies department.

Of course, the media are presenting this awful case, detailed earlier this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, as an example of “larger issues about assigning labels or making assumptions in a society increasingly confronting gender variations in sports, entertainment and government.” A baby actually died because of confusion surrounding transgender labels — in the medical records, she “was rightly classified as a man,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Daphna Strousma of the University of Michigan, said obliviously — but the response of these blind ideologues is to suggest that medical professionals all need retraining.

In fact, Strousma actually says that although the reason for the baby’s death was the fact that the woman was identified as a male and “that classification threw us off from considering his actual medical needs,” a female displaying the same symptoms “would almost surely have been triaged and evaluated more urgently for pregnancy-related problems.” It pains me to point out here that the medical professionals were dealing with a female, despite great efforts being taken to disguise that fact by both the media and the authors of the study.

In fact, the 32-year-old patient did tell a nurse that “he was transgender” — that is, female — upon arrival at the emergency room, but this information still did not give the medical staff enough information. Women attempting to transition to male frequently use testosterone or have surgeries involving removal of the womb, and so the attending nurse did not even consider pregnancy an issue until later:

The 32-year-old patient told the nurse he was transgender when he arrived at the emergency room and his electronic medical record listed him as male. He hadn’t had a period in several years and had been taking testosterone, a hormone that has masculinizing effects and can decrease ovulation and menstruation. But he quit taking the hormone and blood pressure medication after he lost insurance.

A home pregnancy test was positive and he said he had “peed himself” — a possible sign of ruptured membranes and labor. A nurse ordered a pregnancy test but considered him stable and his problems non-urgent.

Several hours later, a doctor evaluated him and the hospital test confirmed pregnancy. An ultrasound showed unclear signs of fetal heart activity, and an exam revealed that part of the umbilical cord had slipped into the birth canal. Doctors prepared to do an emergency cesarean delivery, but in the operating room no fetal heartbeat was heard. Moments later, the man delivered a stillborn baby.

Re-read those paragraphs for a moment and consider just how thoroughly our society has lost its grip on reality. At times, you almost have to pinch yourself: Did I just read an article from a mainstream media outlet telling the story of a man giving birth? Yes, you did. And although the obvious lesson to be learned from this incident is that a woman listed on medical records as a male, thereby inhibiting the ability of medical professionals to operate with the correct and necessary information, badly hurt the woman and resulted in the death of her baby, that is not the lesson the mainstream media and the transgender activists want us to learn.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Dr. Tamara Wexler, a hormone specialist at NYU’s Langone Medical Center, stated that this tragic incident was a sign that medical professionals need to catch up with the times: “Medical training should include exposure to transgender patients[.] … A lot of doctors who are practicing didn’t have that in their training.” Nic Rider, a “transgender health specialist” from the University of Minnesota, said that not even new training is enough. “There are implicit biases that need to be addressed,” Rider said. Another transgender activist said the health care problem is a much larger one, as transgender people often run into issues with cervical cancer and prostate cancer screenings (after all, if your medical records list you as male, you are unlikely to be offered a screening for cervical cancer).

The thing about denying biological reality is that it is incontrovertible. Nature doesn’t care about your ideology. The transgender lobby can force the politicians, the academics, and even broad swathes of the medical community to play along with their delusions. But at the end of the day, the cold, hard facts do not change. Instead, people will get hurt. Some people, like the poor baby, will actually die. As it turns out, the fact that you cannot change from male to female no matter how hard you try and no matter how extensive your surgeries will impact your entire life.

“Truth is incontrovertible,” Winston Churchill once pointed out. “Panic may resent it. Ignorance may deride it. Malice may distort it. But there it is.”

In this episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon van Maren and Lord Conrad Black have a conversation specifically about Donald Trump, starting with the most obvious question: “What made you write a biography about President Donald J. Trump?” Lord Black is best known for being the former publisher of The London Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Chicago Sun-Times, and The Jerusalem Post and the founder of Canada’s National Post. A commentator on both TV and radio, he has been one of the primary defenders of President Trump.

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Jonathon Van Maren is a public speaker, writer, and pro-life activist. His commentary has been translated into more than eight languages and published widely online as well as print newspapers such as the Jewish Independent, the National Post, the Hamilton Spectator and others. He has received an award for combating anti-Semitism in print from the Jewish organization B’nai Brith. His commentary has been featured on CTV Primetime, Global News, EWTN, and the CBC as well as dozens of radio stations and news outlets in Canada and the United States.

He speaks on a wide variety of cultural topics across North America at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions. Some of these topics include abortion, pornography, the Sexual Revolution, and euthanasia. Jonathon holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in history from Simon Fraser University, and is the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

Jonathon’s first book, The Culture War, was released in 2016.