The Locker Room Controversy and the Threat to Your Child’s Health

An Obama Administration ruling that a school must allow a transgender “girl” with male parts full access to the girls’ locker room, or lose federal Title IX funding, sparked a revealing exchange between Megyn Kelly and school superintendent Daniel Cates on Fox News.

Kelly tried to entrap an uncomfortable official, who seemed to be reciting a memorized script in an effort to escape the wrath of parents, bureaucrats, and lawyers on both sides. Their discussion about “balancing rights” to “privacy” and “nondiscrimination” ignored serious health issues. Though both profess concern for the vulnerable transgender child, they seem blind to the fact that he (“she”) is being used as a pawn in a political/cultural war. They imply that parents’ objections are solely about their girls’ seeing body parts different from theirs.

Both are accepting seriously flawed assumptions.

First, both Kelly and Cates seem to believe the ACLU’s assertion that a transgender (in this case male-to-female) person truly is a female “through and through”—and “as a matter of science.” Cates says that the district “respects and honors” transgender students. Both Cates and Kelly refer to the student as a “girl” and use feminine pronouns.
In fact, the science cannot be clearer. There are two sexes. Leaving aside rare conditions such as congenital adrenal hyperplasia, this is absolutely plain at birth, and not a matter of arbitrary “assignment.” A person with a Y chromosome is through-and-through male in every cell in his body. If Caitlyn Jenner’s skeleton is dug up a few hundred years from now, it will unequivocally be identified as male.

Second, they both assume that it is possible to convert a male into a female, and that doctors are helping a patient affirm his true identity by so doing.

In fact, it is possible for a male to become a eunuch or female impersonator, but he will never be able to be somebody’s natural mother. And what do we do to a boy to try to make him appear female? Do we have any information about the long-term effects of female hormones starting in childhood? Maybe we will eventually, if we follow today’s experimental subjects—who are too young to consent and are likely not having the possible consequences spelled out. If castrated, they will lose forever the prospect of having natural offspring. And what will genital surgery do to urinary continence? How will hormones affect their risk of breast cancer? What about blood clots and strokes? And osteoporosis and fractures as they age? If adult athletes are forbidden to “dope” with steroids, why is it acceptable for children?

And what will happen to strength and lung capacity? Men have 40 percent greater body strength and 25 percent greater lung capacity. I doubt that transgender males will lose enough strength to completely cancel their advantage over girls. My 9-year-old nephew, still quite small, could easily handle a full-sized wheelbarrow filled with cement. But how much of their potential will they sacrifice? And what is the risk of injury to girls playing with them on the athletic field?

In psychiatry, it is generally taught that the doctor should not affirm a patient’s delusions. Eventually, the transgender child will have to confront reality as an adult. He may well change his “self identification,” but his chance to fully develop as a man may be irrevocably taken from him.

There are excellent reasons not to have boys and girls undressing in front of each other, and a transgender “girl” is just a wedge. The real agenda is to further the sexual and cultural revolution: to undermine the family, to stigmatize the Christian faith and indeed all traditional morality, and to break down all resistance to a totalitarian state that dictates belief and behavior.

Cates and Kelly are effectively on the same side, although Kelly is an aggressor and Cates a seemingly impotent substitute for real opposition. Public schools will neither fully protect your daughter as federal policy enables sexual predators in the locker room, nor shield your sons and daughters from a morally corrupt environment, nor allow you to defend them from dangerous medicine.

If your school district will sacrifice your sons and daughters to comply with the agenda of the Obama Administration, run for the nearest exit. Their physical, psychological, and spiritual health is at risk in a radical social experiment.

Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989. She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. Since 1988, she has been chairman of the Public Health Committee of the Pima County (Arizona) Medical Society. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fourth editions of Sapira’s Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis, published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins. She authored books for school-children, and Professor Klugimkopf’s Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Professor Klugimkopf’s Old-Fashioned English Grammar, Neomorts and Moonshine.  More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and nonhazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.