NEW YORK CITY, January 15, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) – A homosexual advocate research team now admits that transgenders who have served in the U.S. military have a disproportionately high percentage of physical and psychological diseases.
The gay journal LGBT Health analyzed data from the Veterans Health Administration regarding transgender veterans and found that transgender vets are overwhelmingly more likely to have serious physical and mental health issues, such as HIV, major depression, alcohol abuse, serious mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation/attempts, and other health problems.
“Transgender veterans were found to have global disparities in psychiatric and medical diagnoses, compared to matched non-transgender veterans,” the researchers stated. “Transgender veterans were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with all of the included psychiatric and medical conditions, except breast cancer and cirrhosis.”
No analysis was done as to the cause of physical and psychological problems, and no analysis was done as to whether the ailments were pre-existing. Although LGBT Health assumes that the high percentage of health issues is from discrimination and other external factors, no analysis was done as to whether transgender vets' health problems come from gender confusion.
The research concluded that transgender vets were six times more likely to contract HIV, four times more likely to be diagnosed as having major depression, and two times more likely to abuse alcohol.
Family Research Council senior fellow Peter Sprigg told LifeSiteNews, “I do not doubt that veterans who are transgender (like any population of transgender persons) are likely to have elevated rates of physical and mental health problems. This is consistent with all the research and evidence on what is now referred to as 'gender dysphoria.' The question is whether these health problems are a cause of gender dysphoria, a result of it, inherently correlated, or correlated via some other factor not measured.”
The VHA is the largest health care system in the United States. It began keeping electronic health records in 1996. The study compared 5,135 transgender vets with normal vets of the same age, race, and health care facility from 1996 to 2013.
The study also found a ten-percent or higher increase among transgender vets for military sexual trauma, mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, obesity, and tobacco abuse.
Sprigg noted, “Although the authors admit that their study 'cannot provide the deeper understanding of the sources of these disparities,' they proceed to speculate only that it may result from social factors such as 'discrimination,' 'bias,' or 'fear' and 'distrust' of an 'unwelcoming environment' in the health care system.
“I believe it is far more logical to believe that the mental health disparities are a result of an inherent correlation, because believing that you are or should be the opposite of your biological sex at birth is itself a mental illness,” Sprigg explained, “and the medical health disparities (such as HIV) are because transgender persons engage in high-risk behaviors.”
The study did not identify people who did not disclose their transgender self-identity to the VHA. For this reason, Medical Daily concluded that the study “is likely underestimating the amount of people who would fall under the wide-ranging category of transgender.”
“The solution,” Sprigg concluded, “is to encourage mental health treatment for gender dysphoria and associated mental illnesses, which has the goal of overcoming gender confusion to make patients comfortable with their biological sex, rather than indulging such confusion through gender reassignment surgery.”
