Dr. Michael Brown Comments on His Recent Appearance on The Tyra Show
Filed under News, Revolution & Justice on February 18th, 2010 by M. FrenchDr. Brown appeared on the January 27, 2010 edition of The Tyra Show entitled “We’re 7 & 8 Years Old and Know We Are Transgender.” The show featured a discussion on the topic of transgendered youth and how to properly handle their issues between Dr. Brown, Kim Pearson, Executive Director of TransYouth Family Allies, and Dr. Marci Bowers, a specialist in transgender surgery and a transgendered individual himself/herself.
The segment was posted on YouTube, and generated a lot of discussion concerning these heated topics.
After receiving both positive and negative feedback on his part in the segment, Dr. Brown decided to provide some further thoughts on the show and the responses he’s received since it aired. The video is below:
[Link to Video]
Some of the quotes used in the video are below for reference:
“I hold that interfering medically or surgically with the natural development of young people claiming to be ‘transgendered’ is a form of child abuse.”
“Surely, the fault is in the mind, not the member.”
“It is not obvious how this patient’s feeling that he is a woman trapped in a man’s body differs from the feeling of a patient with anorexia nervosa that she is obese despite her emaciated, cachectic state. We don’t do liposuction on anorexics. Why amputate the genitals of these poor men?”
- Dr. Paul McHugh
“Sure, it strikes us as the most horrid malpractice when
a doctor amputates healthy body parts, such as a pair
of legs. But, then, should we call it something else just
because those healthy body parts are between the
legs?”- Selwyn Duke
Tags: Dr. Michael Brown, the tyra show, transgender, transgendered children, youtube
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Change from the inside out. Couldn’t have said it better Dr. Brown.
The issue is not between the legs, the issue is in the heart. I pray for real loving relationships in all these peoples lives!
Thanks for posting.
“Technology will not tolerate any judgment being passed on it. Or rather: technologists do not easily tolerate people expressing an ethical or moral judgment on what they do. But the expression of ethical, moral and spiritual judgments is actually the highest freedom of mankind. So I am robbed of my highest freedom. So whatever I say about technology and the technologists themselves is of no importance to them. It won’t deter them from what they are doing. They are now set in their course. They are so conditioned. For a technologist is not free. He is conditioned. By his training, by his experiences and by the objective which he must reach. He is not free in the execution of his task. He does what technology demands of him. That’s why I think freedom and technology contradict one another.”
-Jacques Ellul “The Technological Society”
Thank you Dr Brown exposing the darkness in the 21st century is no easy task. True Christians and soon to be True Christians need to know how to identify false christians and this helps. Anytime someone promotes transgender or any lifestyle like that just because they have a talk show or are popular on tv or music and say they are a christian now True Christians can spot a false christian in the media and know they are from the dark side and there god is the god of this world, satan. Dr Brown that was a brave thing you did on that show. I commend you my friend. Duane.
First, I don’t agree that “inside out” is the best. “Outside in” would also work. One problem – our medical technology is not good enough to make the “Outside in” perfect. It results in sterility, and also requires constant medical intervention.
Second, Dr Zucker’s views take no account of the massive amounts of evidence showing a neurological cause. His theories are based solely on the theories of psychiatry an psychology.
Thirdly, Dr McHugh’s views are not just fringe, they’re pseudo-science. He came to his conclusions before gathering evidence, based solely on his religious and political views, then manufactured experiments guaranteed to give data to suit his views, regardless of the facts.
Fourth – some of the evidence. I’ll quote from Sexual Hormones and the Brain: An Essential Alliance for Sexual Identity and Sexual Orientation Garcia-Falgueras A, Swaab DF Endocr Dev. 2010;17:22-35
With respect, Dr Brown, we are talking about an Intersex condition here. That’s what the MRI scans say. That’s what the autopsies say. The resistance against this idea is entirely from psychologists and psychiatrists with no expertise in neurology – and from religious groups.
Regarding GID in childhood – the evidence is that only 1 in 3 children who express cross-sexed behaviour are transsexual; the rest though, with few exceptions, are gay or bisexual. That is a significant omission. Another significant omission is that should the behaviour persist to age 10, all of those are transsexual. A third omission is that the alternative therapies proposed by Dr Brown simply don’t work. They’ve all been tried.
Zoe,
Thanks as always for your comments. I’ll respond briefly.
1) Helping someone from the inside out does not require reconstructive surgery (or would some would call genital mutilation) and a lifetime of hormone therapy. It is clearly the preferable solution.
2) Dr. Zucker is in serious interaction with other scientists and therapists who share the POV you represent here, and his conclusions differ from yours. That is not because of ignorance but because of professional disagreement.
3) You somewhat disqualify yourself when you describe the views of a highly-respected scholar, chairman of the psychiatric department of John Hopkins as “fringe” and “pseudo-science.” So, we believe you and dismiss him as not worth listening to? I mean no insult here, but again, it’s difficult to take such comments seriously.
4) I have asked top professionals their opinions about the intersex argument, some of them people who actually recommend sex-change surgery, and they say there is no conclusive evidence to back the claims that you make. The jury is still out on this, they would argue.
5) Your closing comments, in part, back up what I was saying: Parents of little children (especially under 10!) have no business sending their kids to school cross-dressing, etc. They are reinforcing something that, in most cases, probably isn’t even there.
More importantly, and totally contrary to your claim that ALL children who persist in this behavior past are transsexual, not only do recent studies still indicate that about half of girls and the majority of boys who want to cross-dress before puberty no longer want to do so after puberty, but I personally know people (some of them very well) who absolutely identified as transgender, who lived out a homosexual lifestyle and/or were about to have sex-change surgery, but through the power of the gospel (which included much deep, soul transforming) are now well-adjusted, much happier heterosexuals.
What can you say to that? I would hope you would rejoice on their behalf and realize your statements, although well-intended, are narrow, overly dogmatic, and ultimately, incorrect. (Again, I mean you no offense but am simply trying to be clear and helpful.)
Dr B… thank you as always. Yes, a lot of this is about professional disagreement. I’ll try to take your points one at a time:
It is my understanding from Dr Zucker’s work that if the cross-sexed behaviour persists to age 10 then the child is TS: before then, it’s 1 in 3. He claims to be able to lower that to about 1 in 4 using coercive therapy, but the results are unclear, and there are definite sequelae in some children so treated. Suicidal ideation, substance abuse etc are not good outcomes, even if the person no longer desires surgery.
Frankly, he’s experimenting. But as has been pointed out to me by Dr Milton Diamond, who I suggest you also contact, so are those in the opposing camp. We have no data to show that anything we do can alter the 1 in 3 ratio. Regardless of rearing, the child appears to have an inborn sex. Rear a gay boy as a girl, and he’ll grow out of it at puberty.
As regards Inside-out vs outside-on. With our current level of medical technology, inside-out is vastly preferable for medical reasons. We face ethical problems about interfering with a child’s personality, but we do in day to day life with education anyway. Interfering with an adult personality is another matter.
I think if the “inside-out” approach involves such therapies as torture via electric shocks to the genitalia, administration of mind-altering drugs that cause profound and permanent neural dysfunction, and destructive brain surgery, that they are even worse though. I think also that you’d agree there, though many psychiatrists would not. All have been and continue to be tried, in the quest for Dr McHugh’s “Holy Grail” of a psychiatric cure.
My criticism of Dr McHugh is based on his own works, in particular his book “Psychiatric Misadventures”. He makes it clear that he started from his ideological conclusions, and then set out to gather evidence to support them. The study that he commissioned marked a transition as “unsuccessful” the case of a lawyer who was able to retain her career, because she was not in a “gender-appropriate” job such as legal secretary or beautician. The course of therapy at the time required all contact with family to be severed, and a new life to start. If the patient persisted in having familial contact with children, that too was downchecked as a “failure”. By this means, he was able to show that there was no significant improvement from therapeutic intervention. Frankly, he cooked the books, and his results have never been replicated. Science is not there to prove you’re right; it’s a tool to help you change your ideas to become right.
It is important to realise that his article “Surgical Sex” was in a conservative catholic religious journal, not a medical one. He has never had a paper on the subject in a medical or psychiatric journal. Hence my labelling him as being “on the fringe”.
Perhaps I should mention that as scientific advisor to the Vatican on matters of sexuality, he was solely responsible for the Church’s policy regarding priestly paedophilia – that it was “all in the head” and curable through psychiatric analysis if they just tried hard enough. That compassion and psychiatry was appropriate, and sanction not.
One thing I must give him credit for. His campaign to stop the surgical mutilation of Intersexed children. That’s a cause dear to my heart. To him, it’s because they are born either male or female at birth, that’s unchangeable on spiritual and religious grounds, though he regards chromosomes as a touchstone. To me, it’s because they’re either male or female at birth, and that’s unchangeable due to congenital neurology, an chromosomes, while a good guide, are not infallible, any more than appearance at birth is.
Finally, let’s venture into troubled waters. Those people who identify as Transgendered as opposed to Transsexual. If my thesis is correct, then the sex-identity binary model is just as flawed as the biological sex binary model. It’s an approximation. There are degrees – there have to be, as biology is fuzzy and messy. My studies of Intersexed people whose bodies naturally change indicate that, broadly speaking, 1 in 3 are unalterable male, one in 3 unalterably female, and 1 in 3 can to some degree “go with the flow”. The same appears to be the case for Intersexed children surgically altered in childhood, though certain Intersex conditions change these percentages somewhat.
It seems to me to be a “cop-out” dismissing all cases that you report as “misdiagnosis”, but I’ve yet to see a case that was not, and obviously not, due to diagnostic criteria not being followed. The diagnostic criteria in the DSM-IV-TR, when followed exactly, don’t appear to give more than 2% false positives (so there must be some cases I’m not aware of – 2% is not 0%). They may give false negatives though, and that’s where we have problems. If we relax the criteria too much, we will be giving major surgical treatment to those who don’t absolutely require it. There I agree with you that this is a very undesirable situation. But if we relax them too little, the patients kill themselves.
Finally – something to ponder:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Jm8ibENceo
Zoe,
As always, thanks much for your well thought-out comments. I’ll just comment briefly in response to a couple of points.
God forbid that I refer to these things when I say “inside-out”! In fact, my primary emphasis for God to change people by the power of His Spirit, whatever their issue or problem may be, and that’s how most of the people changed that I know personally. As for professional therapies, I certainly do not mean anything coercive.
My bigger problem, of course, is that once you open the door, you can’t stop what comes through, and I’ve talked with enough so-called transgenders (and read enough literature) to know that there are plenty of sexual perversions and personal preferences mixed in with those genuinely troubled by their gender. Sadly, GLBT advocates want us to accept that anything goes, which I cannot and will not agree to.
That’s it for now. Much more to talk about, for sure, and I’ll check out the video link.
You cannot compare transgender to that of an anorexic or any other type of illness you described because they are not the same thing. Just because the American Psychiatric Association defines transgender as Gender Identity Disorder does not mean its a disorder or a mental illness that needs fixing through therapy that makes no sense at all because its stereotypical with genders. There is still a lot of work needing to be done with what the American Psychiatric Association defines it as, and know that they used to define homosexuality as an illness, and its not anymore. There have been studies that suggest that there are chemicals in the brain that cause this. Also I have noticed a trend with people who think transition is wrong…You are all religious in some form or way. That says a lot.
Just something to think about also. If you feel that the surgeries preformed are so wrong and if you are going to compare it to people who are aneroxic or whatever…think about the people who get plastic surgery such as nose jobs. Why are you allowing them to do it, when they have a perfectly functioning nose?