The sex change industry is built on lies and suffering

The story told by our guest Patrick Hahn of how the medical industry has taken advantage of people who wish they had been born a different sex is appalling, heartrending, and a lesson from the extremes to which modern medicine can become perverted against the very people it is supposed to serve. Anyone who thinks they were mistakenly born into the wrong body has a tragic story to tell about how they became alienated from themselves while growing up. Instead of helping people recover their identity as a male or female human, in all its glory, and with all its complications, modern medicine is making billions of dollars by taking advantage of this vulnerability and pretending that the proper approach is to medically attempt to change their sexual identity by mutilating their bodies through highly dangerous and permanent surgical and medical interventions.

In an especially tragic twist, the sex change industry has now targeted children, some as young as toddlers, beginning with indoctrination and leading to “puberty blocker” hormones to prevent the natural maturation of the individual. These early medical interventions often lead to surgery to remove breasts, vaginas, or penises as if in collaboration with the psychological demons that these individuals need to overcome.

It’s gotten so bad that Minnesota has just authorized interchangeable body parts in an “anatomically correct” doll to be used in public school sex education. The US Department of Education has launched an inquiry.

The industry of so-called “gender affirmation” continues to be a “third rail”—dangerous to touch in any critical manner. People are stifled publicly and privately from speaking about this issue in a critical manner because they have been told they will cause so much pain and prejudice if they do. But the real suffering is being perpetrated by medical professionals, hospitals, and therapists who encourage the fantasy that one can change their sex to improve their quality of life. The reality is quite dismal in terms of outcomes.

In every area in which our guest Patrick Hahn addresses the real science behind medical and psychiatric interventions, including his most recent book on the sex change industry, Patrick Hahn writes the most comprehensive, interesting analyses available. Where our books dovetail with his, and they often do, we nonetheless learn a great deal from him. If you’ve never heard him speak before, listen to this show simply for the pleasure of hearing one of the most brilliant and thoughtful critical researchers in the field of medicine and psychiatry today.

This week on The Breggin Hour, Patrick Hahn joins us to discuss his powerful new book, Irreversible. Patrick is a careful researcher and a clear writer who has spent years documenting the medicalization of ordinary human suffering. His latest work traces how the obsession with “sex change” moved from a tiny fringe subculture to a multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States alone—and how that industry rests on a mountain of lies and deceptions.

Patrick does not mince words. “There is nothing good about this industry. Nothing,” he told us. “The whole industry is based on lies.” In biology and medicine, he reminds us, nothing is more certain than this: there are two, and only two, sexes. It is impossible to turn a man into a woman with a surgeon’s knife. When an entire medical enterprise begins with that lie, the rest of the story unravels into incoherence. Activists insist that “trans women are women,” then demand fantastically expensive surgeries and lifelong cross-sex hormones precisely so those same individuals can resemble women. If they already are women, why the need for the knife and the drugs?

The most comprehensive long-term study ever conducted, from Sweden (one of the most “trans-friendly” countries on earth), found that after surgical transition the suicide rate was elevated by a staggering nineteen times compared with matched controls from the general population. Not nineteen percent higher—nineteen times as many suicides. There is no credible data showing that these procedures reduce suicide risk. The “transition or die” claim pushed on desperate parents is itself a lethal lie. As Patrick put it, “Trans and die” would be more accurate.

Most gender-distressed children simply outgrow the distress if they are allowed to go through natural puberty. That is why the industry is so eager to block puberty. The “cure,” as Patrick observed, is puberty itself. When clinics rush children onto blockers and then hormones, they are manufacturing lifelong medical patients out of young people who would otherwise have resolved their confusion.

How did this twisted field get its beginning? The founding figures—Harry Benjamin, John Money, the early directors of the Johns Hopkins clinic—were often more candid than today’s activists about the role of childhood trauma, family dynamics, and social rejection. The first gender clinics in the United States and Europe eventually closed after their own research failed to show meaningful improvement. Those early practitioners had the intellectual honesty to admit failure. Their successors had a simple self-serving answer: if adults do not improve, start younger.

The human toll in the sex change medical industry is incalculable. And the financial remuneration is staggering. An industry estimate of two billion dollars a year in the United States is almost certainly a gross undercount; it leaves out hormones, blockers, the cascade of complications, the “affirming” therapy that keeps families compliant, and the repeat surgeries required to repair damage from previous ones. Projections of five billion by 2030 still understate the true cost—human as well as monetary.

We heard heartbreaking stories of families torn apart in court when one parent seeks to medicalize a child, and the other resists. We discussed the strange cultural power of celebrities who treat their children’s bodies as fashion statements. And we noted the encouraging signs that the political tide is finally turning– federal funding streams are being cut, and people are less afraid to speak the obvious truth.

Patrick’s larger point is one we have long shared. The sex-change industry is only the sharpest edge of a broader medicalization of life. Once institutions stop caring whether people are productive and start treating them primarily as consumers of medical interventions, almost any human distress can be turned into a lifelong customer base. The damage done to children in the name of “gender affirmation” is irreversible. That is why the book is titled as it is.

We urge you to read Irreversible. It is thorough, carefully documented, and written with genuine compassion for the people caught in this industry. You can find it, along with Patrick’s earlier books on psychiatric drugs, ADHD, COVID policy, and genetic determinism, at patrickhahn.net.

A comment on anti-life solutions by Peter R. Breggin MD:

It is hard to think of analogies to this process of trying to fulfill a person’s compulsions about wanting an opposite sex body. It bears some resemblance to the euthanasia movement in which a person in good physical health wants to die and finds a doctor to help them achieve their goal. To risk an even more controversial analogy, consider a pregnant woman who believes that she would be so much better off without her unborn child that she wants to kill it and then finds a doctor to fulfill her wishes. Euthanasia, sex change operations, and abortion share these circumstances of physicians affirming a person who feels overwhelmed by the situation in which they find themselves, and then agreeing to do something physically irreversible and destructive in the hope of helping them.

As a young psychiatrist, I wrote letters for women that enabled them to receive legal abortions in the State of Maryland for psychiatric reasons. In retrospect, I simply had not thought deeply enough about the problem, and we now have more evidence about how abortions can cause grief and other negative outcomes for women. In regard to euthanasia, abortions, and sex change operations, we must look more deeply into how we view life in general and whether, as physicians in particular, we need a set of pro-life values that in the long run will better serve our patients than the pragmatic approach of seemingly making life easier for them in the short term.

When I was a young doctor, I somehow knew that damaging the brain with drugs, electroshock, or lobotomy was anti-life. But I would have been afraid to apply that term to my activities because I thought of myself as a “liberal” and wanted the approval of other liberals. But I have to conclude today that I am a pro-life psychiatrist, and I want to help my patients learn how to triumph over the greatest stresses in life without compromising their higher values or health and well-being.

We did not discuss these broader issues with our guest on the air, so we don’t know our guest’s views. But in retrospect, we felt the need, as we were writing this article, to comment on the common thread of anti-life solutions that our Western medical establishment continues to promote.

Transcript Summary of this podcast episode

America is being asked to surrender common sense in the name of compassion. The latest casualties are the ideas that biological sex is real, that children need protection, and that medicine should first do no harm.

The transgender industry sells itself as care. In practice, it often begins with confusion, fear, and wounded children who want love, safety, and a way out of pain. A child who feels rejected, bullied, or neglected may come to believe that changing sex will fix what family and culture broke. That belief is not truth. It is marketing.

The medical response has become grotesque. Puberty blockers delay normal development. Wrong-sex hormones alter bodies that are still growing. Surgery follows, then more surgery, then lifelong dependence on drugs, follow-up care, and damage control. The bill is measured in billions, but the real cost is harder to tally. Sterility. Sexual dysfunction. Regret. Depression. Broken families. Suicide rates that remain frighteningly high after the so-called treatment.

We have seen this pattern before. Medicine can become a machine that protects its own ideology long after the evidence has failed. When doctors and institutions profit from a falsehood, they do not retreat gracefully. They double down. They call dissent hateful. They tell frightened parents that if they do not comply, their child will die. That is not medicine. That is coercion.

The most heartbreaking part is how many of these children might have healed with time, boundaries, and unconditional love. Many would have outgrown their distress. Instead, they are rushed toward irreversible decisions before adulthood has even begun.

A sane society would pause. It would stop pretending that mutilation is mercy. It would restore honesty to biology, humility to medicine, and authority to parents who still know that children are not experiments.

We owe the young better than this. We owe them truth.

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[Editor’s note: Many of our columns and videos prior to mid-2022 have not appeared on Substack. We will be featuring the occasional earlier columns here. This column, spotlighting crimes against patients during the early COVID days, appeared first on AmericaOutLoud.news, February 6, 2022.]