On his first day in office, President Joe Biden signed an executive order ostensibly aimed at "preventing discrimination" based on "gender identity," a term that has become increasingly common in recent years, writes former Senior Advisor to the FDA Commissioner of Drug Safety and FDA Science Policy, Dr. David Gortler in an article for the Washington Examiner.
Yet current claims about gender identity - non-binary genders, gender fluidity, and even a gender 'continuum' with indeterminate and unrestricted genders - are at odds with biology and science.
They are extremely rare - only about 500 observable cases in history - chromosomal mutations in which humans are born with male and female chromosomes and/or tissues. But rare hermaphroditism clearly does not justify the manipulation of a healthy person's sex to conform to his or her gender identity. Despite rare congenital chimeric disorders, science knows of no other categories of humans (or any other mammals, for that matter) other than men and women.
Indeed, the largest available textbook on transgender medicine - even with its bloated, non-medical, idiosyncratic chapters is still well under 500 pages. By comparison, one textbook on cardiovascular medicine contains more than 3,400 pages.
Today, almost every academic medical school, the most prominent professional medical organizations in the United States, and the Biden administration are all in favor of both drugs and serious surgery, including removal of healthy tissues and organs in children, adolescents, and adults. Planned Parenthood makes it easier than any health insurance company, advertising gender euphoria services with drugs prescribed and delivered after a remote 30-minute telemedicine session, starting at $59 a month.
The problem is that they all ignore basic biology and make unsubstantiated claims without the compelling long-term clinical safety data otherwise required for all other types of medical or pharmacological interventions.
Today's Orwellian demands on doctors include giving up data from your eyes and ears. But the science is clear: A person's sex, female or male, is indelibly determined at the moment of conception, when the egg is fertilized by an X or Y sperm. After conception, the divergent pathways of male and female are immediate, substantial and diverse, down to the level of cellular DNA. And these divergent pathways will persist throughout a person's life.
Each individual healthy nucleus cell in the human body has 46 sex XY chromosomes (denoting male sex) or XX chromosomes (denoting female sex). These nuclear cells, in turn, have sex-specific functions that determine their development and biological function. Biological sex is more than that; it persists down to the microscopic cellular level, designated in each of the 100 trillion (or so) cells of the human body.
It is always possible to make someone more masculine or feminine through cosmetic changes. But you can't change sex, no matter how many gallons of hormones you inject them with or how many surgeries you perform on them.
You don't have to be an FDA drug safety expert (like me) to know that using pharmacology to combat the innate biological programming of trillions of nuclear cells of a particular sex in the human body would have serious medically and physiologically devastating consequences.
The FDA has warned that therapy that blocks puberty can cause life-threatening brain swelling, headaches, vomiting, multiple visual impairments (including blindness) and/or tumor-like masses in the brain.
Although the term "transgender" has taken hold in modern parlance, surveys show that more and more people believe that gender identity is assigned at birth. This trend runs counter to other once controversial topics, such as same-sex marriage.
People are born (not assigned) male or female. No amount of self-image, self-identification, or "affirmation" can ever change that.
Science dictates a commitment to male (XY) and female (XX) genders based on biology, despite any politically correct narratives that contradict this.
