Batting For The Other Team

Liberal MP Warren Entsch says he's opposed to Prime Minister John Howard over the PM's opposition to homosexual marriage because he used to know a male who became a woman.

Entsch clearly doesn't know his own backside from his elbow.

Transsexuals are not homosexuals - unless you count the fully 'transgendered' male to female transsexuals who become pseudo-lesbians because in the end they find they really still like women and vice versa with the female to male types.

The Brisbane Sunday Mail reports:

MACHO Liberal MP Warren Entsch has explained why he is taking on John Howard over gay rights: one of his knockabout mates in the far north of Queensland became a woman.

The intro is somewhat misleading. The person who Entsch recalls was not a 'knockabout mate', which translates from the vernacular as a rough and tumble buddy, but, says Entsch later in the article: "He'd always knock about with us" which means he'd hang around.

It led to Entsch feeling somewhat protective of a person "who was clearly very very feminine and very very gay" so "I used to watch over him in pubs and the like in case anybody picked on him." It probably didn't do Entsch's pursuit of the man's female cousin any harm.

But once again, Entsch confuses homosexuality with transsexuality.

Not that they don't have anything in common - transsexuals have aligned themselves with homosexuals under the 'Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual/Transgender' GLBT banner and are reaping the benefits of association with a powerful lobby group with a proven track record in changing social policy.

But many transsexuals rail at suggestions they are homosexual. They prefer to see themselves as one gender 'trapped' in a body of the other gender.

Entsch shows he has a vague grasp on this concept after recalling that his girlfriend's cousin 'went to Sydney and had a sex change operation' one Christmas.

"It just drove home to me the struggle he had trying to be a male."

It's happy ending time:

"Just seeing the difficulty he had and having the courage to go through with it and I saw he finally released himself. I found it amazing."

One wonders if Entsch has any idea how much trouble the man had trying to be a woman:

"...in the final bit of irony, after surgery my new genitals were non-orgasmic (like 80% of my TG sisters)." - Danielle Berry

"Surgical outcome was disappointing, and only one-third of the patients where a vaginal construction was carried out had a functioning vagina... only one-third were judged as having a fair or good sexual adjustment after sex reassignment." - Long-term follow-up of sex change in 13 male-to-female transsexuals.

Further:

In 1960, Johns Hopkins was the first U.S. medical facility involved in sex reassignment procedures. The program was discontinued in 1979 after Dr. Jon Meyer published his long-term follow-up report of adult transsexuals treated at Johns Hopkins. None of the post-operatives showed measurable improvement in their lives.

"Sex re-assignment surgery confers no objective advantage…" Meyer concluded.

Dr. Paul McHugh, chairman of the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry, criticized the procedures as "the most radical therapy ever encouraged by 20th-century psychiatrists," comparing it to the discredited frontal lobotomy.

Entsch continues his ill-informed fantasy about homosexuals and transsexuals:

"The rest of us should be saying, 'Thank Christ we got the gene balance right'. But for those who didn't get it right, that doesn't make them any less of a person."

Gene balance? Oh, yes - that lie:

In the April 27, 1998, edition of Time magazine, gay scientist Dr. Dean Hamer, whose 1993 chromosomal study was widely mispublicized as the discovery of a 'gay gene', admitted that he was unable to find one. Scientists have not produced a single study showing the existence of a 'gay gene'. The few studies that indicate even a possible correlation have not been replicated, which is crucial for establishing scientific validity.

The push to make homsexuality and transsexuality 'genetic' is simply a weapon in the GLBT campaign. It adds an aura of medico-scientific respectability.

This follows the way in which the psychiatric profession has been brought on board:

Elliott says that “anyone with a rudimentary familiarity with the history of psychiatry cannot help but be struck by the way that mental disorders come and go... conditions like social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, gender identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, anorexia, and chronic fatigue syndrome were once seen as rare or nonexistent, then suddenly they ballooned in popularity. This is not simply because people decided to “come out” rather than suffer alone. It is because all mental disorders… have a social component.”

Once the ‘condition’ is well launched, soon it is being “discussed in journals and at conferences.” Then clinicians start to “diagnose the disorder more and more commonly,” the condition is talked about in support groups, therapy sessions, Internet venues, etc. Then, thanks to the status and authority of mental healthism, “patients begin to reinterpret their own psychological histories in light of what they hear, and their behavior changes to match what is expected of people with the condition they believe they have.”

So it is with the conditions of ‘homosexuality,’ ‘gender identity disorder,’ and ‘body integrity identity disorder.’ Patients often “diagnose themselves and decide on the proper treatment.” That is, the professionals follow the lead of the mad and vice-versa — the ultimate in self-fulfilling prophecies.

Thankfully, some shrinks realise they have been going wrong:

"But they were no better in their psychological integration or any easier to live with. With these facts in hand I concluded that Hopkins was fundamentally cooperating with a mental illness. We psychiatrists, I thought, would do better to concentrate on trying to fix their minds and not their genitalia." - Paul McHugh

The likes of Warren Entsch need to catch up quickly.

-- Nick