Focus On The Family Lies Again

I see that Focus On The Family has once again opened its yap about matters pertaining to Transsexuals, and they are lying about it:

Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, who treats children and adults suffering from gender identity disorder in his practice in Pennsylvania, said the government is doing transgender people a disservice.

“It’s totally treatable and the issue can be resolved,” he said, noting that some therapists have an 80 percent success rate in helping people accept their biological gender.

“The problem is when you get sex-reassignment surgery, one of the major principles (of medicine) is ‘First, do no harm.’ With gender-reassignment surgery, you’re surgically mutilating a healthy body. And you’re supporting a delusion. Poor body image is a huge cause of it, and severe psychopathology in parents is a huge cause of it. That’s the mental health perspective.

The first thought that went through my mind was "who the heck is Dr. Fitzgibbons?"  Sure enough, a brief bit of searching on the web turns up that he is not really an authority on transgender/transsexual people per se, but instead one of the talking heads that NARTH likes to put forward to create the illusion of legitimacy.

He's written papers with NARTH's founder Joseph Nicolosi, Dale O'Leary and others which largely repeat the standard nonsense arguments about transsexuality that have been long since disproven.

His comments here about causes of transsexuality are a good example of the kind of silly arguments that we routinely find on the web talking about transsexuals:

Poor body image is a huge cause of it, and severe psychopathology in parents is a huge cause of it. That’s the mental health perspective.

This is completely backwards.  He's partially correct, transsexuals often do have major body image issues.  However, those issues are not a cause of transsexuality, but are in fact caused by being transsexual. 

As for drawing a link between psychopathology in parents and transsexuality in their offspring, that's just ridiculous.  Superficially, you can find a lot of people in any population who have screwed up parents.  Transsexuals are no different in this regard.  However, if 'screwed up parents' were a cause of transsexuality in general (and I have no idea how such a link could possibly occur), then how does someone like Dr. Fitzgibbons explain those transsexuals who come from perfectly normal, stable family structures?  Unless he has substantial population statistics that show that normal, stable family structures in the upbringing of transsexuals is somehow "unusual" (which I very much doubt), then it would seem to me that the doctor is quite frankly talking through his hat.

As for the argument about Gender Surgery and the "do no harm" aspect of things, I will turn to the recently released 7th Edition WPATH Standards of Care, on page 55 we find the following statement:

It is important that health professionals caring for patients with gender dysphoria feel comfortable about altering anatomically normal structures. In order to understand how surgery can alleviate the psychological discomfort and distress of individuals with gender dysphoria, professionals need to listen to these patients discuss their symptoms, dilemmas, and life histories. The resistance against performing surgery on the ethical basis of “above all do no harm” should be respected, discussed, and met with the opportunity to learn from patients themselves about the psychological distress of having gender dysphoria and the potential for harm caused by denying access to appropriate treatments.

In other words, there is often greater harm being done by denying transsexual patients access to surgery.  The harm may not be physical damage, but it is the more insidious psychological harm, something which Dr. Fitzgibbons should not only understand but respect far more than any surgeon.

His claims that there are therapists out there with 80% success rates "getting people to accept their bodies" is unsubstantiated, and I can find no papers which suggest any such thing.  Further, it is important to recognize that transsexuality is a fairly rare condition compared to conditions such as crossdressing.  The professionals I have talked to about such things have consistently expressed that only a small percentage of transgender people who approach them for treatment ever pursue medical and surgical aspects of transition.  So, while Dr. Fitzgibbons may well be correct that 80% of people who come forward to mental health practitioners with cross-gender concerns are not transsexual, that's quite a different matter from saying that 80% of transsexuals can be "taught to accept their bodies as they were born".

That Focus on the Family is daft enough to quote someone like Fitzgibbons is no surprise, but it doesn't make their argument any more substantial.  It's still firmly rooted in lies.