Sarah Wilder gives an excellent summary in the October issue of “the medical industry’s consensus on sex changes” with a realistic conclusion that lawsuits will likely decide the issue (“How the Medical Industry’s Consensus on Sex Changes Fell Apart” October 2024 Chronicles). 

However, like most who write on this subject, she avoids the fundamental issue that draws the medical profession into sex-change procedures while claiming it to be evidence-based medicine. There can be no scientific consensus because there is no disease. 

Erik Erikson, who invented the term “identity crisis,” was a psychoanalyst, not a medical doctor. The diagnosis of gender dysphoria, like most of the labels listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-5), have no objective criteria (there is no biopsy, blood test, or physical abnormality that indicates one’s gender identity does not match one’s sex). The diagnosis is made entirely on the basis of subjective symptoms and is therefore open to all sorts of interpretations and so-called treatments.

Our medical profession in 2024 has the same problem as does the rest of Western civilization. Sin and salvation have been reinterpreted in the context of the ill-defined concepts of mental illness and mental health. Our problem is religious and will be solved neither by medical procedures nor by laws and lawsuits.

As Paul wrote in 2 Timothy 3:1-7: “But understand this, that in the last days …people will be lovers of self … having the appearance of godliness, but denying the power … always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the Truth.”

—Dr. Carol K. Tharp

Winnetka, Ill.

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Sarah Wilder replies: 

Dr. Tharp, 

I believe you are correct in pointing out that the purveyors of gender ideology are offering a medical “solution” to a disease that is more mental than physical. It is even worse, then, that organizations like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the American Medical Association are recommending irreversible surgeries and hormonal drugs to children. Transgender ideology has created a massive mental health crisis.

Even the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which you mention in your letter, appears to have fallen under the spell of that ideology. The DSM-5 has reclassified gender dysphoria from a sexual disorder to a category of its own. While I didn’t deal with this subject in my article, the woke institutional capture of the world of psychology is doing perhaps just as much harm to self-described “transgender youth” as medical practitioners. It is through a letter of recommendation from a psychologist that many young people are first offered cross-sex hormones or sex change surgeries. Psychologists who do anything less than immediately affirm their young patients’ delusions are accused of “conversion therapy” and risk losing their licenses. 

It is my hope that detransitioners’ legal victories against these medical organizations will help transgender-identified children get the mental health counseling they need, rather than be placed on a path of medicalization and irreversible damage.