Board index ‹ LGBT: Gays, Lesbians, Bisexual, Transgender, and Homosexuality

[Grimace]

What does a Christian think of transgender people? From a Christian perspective, this seems like a pretty big mess up on God's part. People born with the wrong genitals.

[jimwalton]

It's not necessarily a "mess up on God's part. Science doesn't support popular views of sexuality. The media reports it as if it's a done deal and as proven as the rising sun (People born with the wrong genitals!), but science begs to differ.

Lawrence Mayer, a biostatistician, and Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist, both from Johns Hopkins University, examined over 200 leading, peer-reviewed studies from the disciplines of social science, psychology, and biology, and found science does not support what the media is telling us and what the population is believing about homosexuality and transgenderism. (Their review appears here: http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati…/number-50-fall-2016)

Homosexuals are not necessarily born that way. Mayer and McHugh found no compelling evidence that sexual orientation is innate. Studies found some minor differences between the brain structure and functioning of heterosexual and homosexual people, but the findings shed no light on whether those differences were inborn or the result of environment and psychological factors. In other words, there was no scientific proof that people were born with same-sex attraction.

Gayness is not necessarily lifelong. Longitudinal studies of adolescents showed sexual orientation often changed over time. One study found 80% of male adolescents who reported same-sex attractions no longer did so as adults.

A man cannot be trapped inside a woman's body or vice versa. Scientific evidence does not support this claim. Studies comparing brain structures of transgender with nontransgender people did not find evidence for a neurological basis of cross-gender identification. "The consensus of scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports the proposition that a physically and developmentally normal boy or girl is indeed what he or she appears to be at birth," the researchers wrote. There is also no evidence that sex-reassignment surgery improved an individual’s mental health.

In light of their discovery that in the majority of cases childhood gender identity issues did not persist into adulthood, Mayer and McHugh were particularly troubled over the way in which medical interventions such as puberty blockers for elementary school students and hormone therapy for high-schoolers who display gender identity issues are often promoted. "We are disturbed and alarmed by the severity and irreversibility of some interventions being publicly discussed and employed for children," they wrote.

McHugh told The Daily Beast, which published an article criticizing his work as anti-LGBT, that politics and popularity mattered less to him than scientific fact. "I believe [my work] is motivated out of an understanding of what science does and does not say," he said, adding, "This is not the first time I've been contradicting traditions and, in these areas, I am saying that they do not have evidence-based medicine on which to back their prescriptions."