Toronto city officials will be erecting in one of its parks a permanent memorial to people identifying as transgender after city staff cleaned up a brick wall vandalized with a chalked tribute to deceased people who identify as “trans.”
City councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam has not only apologized on behalf of the city staff who were cleaning the former Cawthra Square Park in preparation for the park being renamed to Barbara Hall Park — in honor of the former city mayor and current Ontario Human Rights Commissioner who identifies as an “LGBTQ ally” — but has promised a permanent memorial.
The Toronto Star reports:
The erasure was an honest mistake by city staff just doing their job, says Wong-Tam, who apologized to members of the community at the unveiling of the park’s new name on July 16.
“I don’t think that there would have been a rush to remove it had the city staff recognized what it was,” says Wong-Tam.
Prominent Toronto psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Berger argues, however, that from a medical and scientific perspective there is no such thing as a “transgendered” person. He stated in 2013:
From a scientific perspective, let me clarify what ‘transgendered’ actually means. I am speaking now about the scientific perspective – and not any political lobbying position that may be proposed by any group, medical or non-medical.
‘Transgendered’ are people who claim that they really are or wish to be people of the sex opposite to which they were born as, or to which their chromosomal configuration attests to.
Some times, some of these people have claimed that they are ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ or alternatively ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’.
Scientifically, there is no such a thing.
Therefore anyone who actually truly believes that notion, is by definition deluded, psychotic.
The medical treatment of delusions or psychosis is not by surgery.
On the other hand, if these people are asked to clarify exactly what they believe, that is to say do they truly believe whichever of those above propositions applies to them and they say ‘no’, they know that such a proposition is not true, but that they ‘feel’ it, then what we are talking about scientifically, is just unhappiness, and that unhappiness is being accompanied by a wish – that leads some people into taking hormones that predominate in the other sex, and even having cosmetic surgery designed to make them ‘appear’ as if they are a person of the opposite sex.