University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, a man, has smashed records and shocked sensibilities. Thomas’s performance illustrates the effects and absurdity of denying differences between the sexes, especially men’s obvious bodily advantages in sports.
Thomas presumably fulfilled the NCAA’s policy requiring trans athletes to suppress testosterone levels for a designated time before competing on the woman’s team. In January, the NCAA tweaked the rules to place sport-specific limits on testosterone levels. The policy still falls short by ignoring the unchanging enhanced muscle strength and endurance amassed during male puberty.
Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce), an elite Olympian athlete, weighed in on the Thomas controversy, saying him competing as a woman isn’t fair to women athletes. Jenner says his physical advantages are still apparent many years after transition.
“In Lia Thomas’s case, I don’t care about her testosterone levels now for the last year or two,” Jenner said. “Honestly, I care about her testosterone levels for the first 16, 17 years of her life. That’s what we are fighting against here.”
As a man who formerly identified as a woman, I now clearly see — with the benefit of 30 years of hindsight and reflection — a similar flaw in my thinking that led me astray. Like the people setting NCAA policies, I neglected to consider that it was categorically impossible to biologically change my internal male morphology: my skeletal structure, body mass, muscle strength, and myriad other sexually determined attributes.
This flawed and foolish thinking results in real-life consequences. Changing sexes is a myth and trans folklorists who promote it are harming people, especially children vulnerable to believing fairy tales can come true. Here are some of these trans myths at play in the Thomas story.
Myth 1: Sex and Gender Are Separate and Assigned
The entire folklore of transgenderism rests on the artificial construct that gender is separate from biological sex, and that sex doesn’t matter, gender identity does. It’s a house of cards built on the flimsiest of foundations, a feeling. Feelings can, and do, change.
Who we are cannot be separated from our bodily reality. We live our lives in our bodies. Our identities are rooted in our bodies. The whole body is organized around either being male or female, a sexual binary. Who we are is not based on a feeling but rooted in physical reality.
Sex does not come from an ideological vending machine filled with multiple choices. Starting at conception, sex is absolute, innate, and immutable: male or female.
During intercourse, approximately 250 million sperm cells start the journey from the testes of the man to the fallopian tube of the woman, where one lucky sperm cell joins the egg in the hours or days following sexual intercourse. The sperm and the egg each contain mitochondria and DNA. When the sperm fertilizes the egg, the nuclei from each fuse together, and a baby is conceived. The baby’s sex revealed in the DNA is fixed for life.
Now we’re told sex is “assigned at birth.” This phrase popped up out of nowhere and now has infiltrated everywhere. No one has ever had his or her sex assigned at birth. It’s fixed nine months before birth, at conception.
The truth since the dawn of time is that a look at the baby’s genitalia reveals his or her sex. With today’s ultrasound technology, parents can know the sex of the baby during pregnancy. Sex is innate and unchangeable, not assigned by a doctor after the baby exits the womb.
The deceitful language creates the foundation for an even bigger lie: Because sex is “assigned” at birth, it can be “reassigned” later.
Myth 2: Hormones and Surgery Can Change Men into Women and Women into Men
Transitioning is a myth. It’s not possible. Sex is unchangeable. That is not a transphobic smear; it’s biological fact.
No amount of female hormones forced into a man’s bloodstream can transition him biologically into a woman, or vice versa. Sure, each can identify as the other if they want, but they do not magically become the other sex. Thomas did not magically change bodies, replacing male with female, by suppressing testosterone and ingesting estrogen.
The same goes for surgery. Surgeons may use their operating prowess to fashion a convincing replica of a man or a woman, but their efforts are feckless to change anyone’s biological sex. I have thought for years that lawyers should be having a field day jumping all over the medical fraud that has been perpetrated by surgeons who claim they have changed a person’s sex. That’s an outlandish lie of biblical proportions.
Trans folklore requires us to ignore the ample, obvious evidence of physiological and structural differences between males and females, suppress any intellectual rational discussion, and swallow whole the lie that cross-sex hormones and surgery can flip sex. Reality goes out the window and we enter a world of Orwellian dystopia, where language gets distorted and free speech is dumped in the trash. Skeptics are bullied. Good people are canceled, and careers are ended by the slightest infraction in speech or thought.
Lawmakers, medical societies, and school boards disregard these biological facts and therefore make nonsense policies. Opportunistic males cloaked in cross-sex identities are permitted to invade women’s spaces and sports, threatening women’s safety and undoing the level playing field women have fought so hard to attain.
The truth is: God makes male and female; surgeons and hormone dispensaries don’t.
Myth 3: And They Lived Happily Ever After…
The media paint a rosy picture of a transgender person’s life after the so-called “change of gender.” Life will be rainbows and lollipops, they convey; everyone lives happily ever after. The trope they disseminate implies no one has ever regretted it. This myth leads gender-distressed individuals to think, “Why not go for it? What do I have to lose?”
The truth is, they have a lot to lose. I’ve heard countless heartbreaking stories from people who lost years of their lives trying to erase who they are in a futile attempt to become someone they can never be. People need to hear the truth. Regret is not rare. My book, “Trans Life Survivors,” features the experiences of 30 such survivors, told in their own words. I could have included hundreds, perhaps thousands.
Regret can hit months, years, or decades after surgery. The survivors come to realize that a surgically fabricated and hormonally induced persona didn’t cure what ailed them, and they want help to go back to living in authentic biological reality.
Gender discomfort exists, but like any pain, its purpose is to alert you of something wrong.
It used to be that a counselor’s job was to methodically pinpoint the probable cause and work through it. That’s no longer the case. People who want to reclaim their lives tell me therapists diagnosed them with gender dysphoria after one or two visits, then encouraged them to transition socially, take cross-sex hormones, and undergo surgery. Parents report similar sessions with their children’s therapists. The therapist considers nothing else.
Yet gender distress is a symptom of other difficulties: adverse childhood experiences, or psychiatric or psychological issues such as panic disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression, bipolar disorder, eating disorders, dissociative disorders, and substance abuse. None of these benefit from cross-sex hormones and surgery.
For me, the desire to escape my male existence was the result of years of cross-dressing at the hands of my grandmother starting at age four, after which I was molested by my uncle. Deep psychological pain caused me to want to be female.
My transgenderism was a hiding place until I received proper psychotherapy, then set my sights on God. Slowly but steadily, God’s love healed the pain of childhood experiences and redeemed my life, and the desire went away. I no longer needed a hiding place.
Today, due to the successful efforts of transgender folklorists, successful talk therapy like I received is against the law in 20 states and the District of Columbia. Affirmation is the only treatment allowed for patients who utter the magic phrase “gender distress.”
It especially crushes my heart to see children and teens ensnared in this ideology. The American College of Pediatricians, one of the few medical associations not given over to woke indoctrination, has spoken to the experimental nature of transgender intervention for children and the many ways it impairs their mental and physical health.
Panicked parents contact me. One mother succeeded through loving intervention to divert her 10-year-old daughter from going down the transgender path. Other parents want to reach their older teenagers who are blind to the difficulties awaiting them with hormones and surgery. I hear from those teens after transition, in their later teens or early 20s when reality has dashed their dreams of living happily ever after.
Women bemoan their permanently lowered voices and scarred chests. Men mourn the loss of potency and prospects for future romance. From my experience and the testimonies of the thousands who have written me, I know these myths harm innocent people and that the path to freedom starts with acknowledging the truth.
No therapist, no doctor, and no surgeon has been effective in biologically changing anyone’s sex, full stop. Sex is not assigned at birth and cannot be reassigned later. Regret is real. Harm is done, no matter what trans folklorists claim.
Therein lies the hope for people who want to go back: you never really changed.
