The slogan on the picture above is untrue. It is not all about love, there is much more to it than that. Gay Pride is the noisy, colourful, brazen sharpened edge of a movement to turn a once stable society into something unrecognisable to previous generations. A society in which science and biology are removed from the investigation of what seems to me a crime against humanity; one which sets itself up as an icon of modernity and enlightenment. Offering a tainted choice of lifestyle which cause mutilations of the human body of such gravity, they would be serious crimes in any other context. Transgendering is a medical process which leads to infertility. Those who have chosen this path can form families in many ways, including via donor sperm / eggs, foster care, or adoption. But transgender people who undergo surgical transition can end up infertile. This is often irreversible, depending on the medical processes undertaken. That unhappiness caused by feelings of living in the wrong body is real and deserves sympathy and help is obviously true. There is no doubt about that, but is this confusion a matter caused primarily by disturbances in the mind? Is it psychological?

Dr. Joseph Berger, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada has stated that from “a scientific perspective,” being “transgendered” is a psychological issue, “emotional unhappiness”and “cosmetic surgery” is not the “proper treatment. These were the headline quotes from a statement made before the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights. This committee was considering Bill C-279 which was proposing to “include gender identity as a prohibited ground of discrimination.”

On June 15, 2017, the Transgender Rights Bill C-16 passed the third reading in the Senate of Canada, with a 67-11 vote. It certainly defends Transgender rights, making objecting to the transgender ideology a potential hate crime. The proposed legislation prohibits discrimination against the transgendered. In the bill Gender Identity is defined as “the individual’s deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex that the individual was assigned at birth. The Canadian Human Rights Act protects people in Canada from discrimination when they are employed by or receive services from the federal government, First Nations governments or private companies that are regulated by the federal government such as banks, trucking companies, broadcasters and telecommunications companies. In amending the Act, the Gender Identity Bill would affect all of these industries, in that they would be explicitly prohibited from discriminating against trans people, as well as bear an obligation to proactively ensure that trans people are treated equally. This is the same obligation that such entities already bear based on similar grounds as race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, etc. The Gender Identity Bill would also amend the hate propaganda and hate crime sentencing provisions of the Criminal Code. That last provision means when there is evidence that a crime was motivated by bias, prejudice or hatred based on gender identity, a judge would be required to increase the sentence for the crime to account for this aggravating factor. Another form of discrimination against those that oppose a bill which enforces a doctrine known to be without a shred of actual evidence. Proposing that our sexual identity can be just changed at will, one way or the other on one day and reversed on another. Something known to be false according to the only accurate measures: genetics, biology, and all previous human experience.

During the prior consultation period Dr Berger made the following statement to the Canadian House of Commons in 2013. It obviously went down badly since it was ignored. An example of how expert evidence is always trumped by an ideology.

‘It appears to me that this bill requests that some special allowances or attitudes or possibly even ‘rights’ be given to people who identify themselves as being ‘transgendered’. From a scientific perspective, let me clarify what ‘transgendered’ actually means. I am speaking now about the scientific perspective – and not any political lobbying position that may be proposed by any group, medical or non-medical. ‘Transgendered’ are people who claim that they really are or wish to be people of the sex opposite to which they were born as, or to which their chromosomal configuration attests. Sometimes, some of these people have claimed that they are ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’ or alternatively ‘a man trapped in a woman’s body’. Scientifically, there is no such a thing. Therefore anyone who actually truly believes that notion, is by definition deluded, psychotic. The medical treatment of delusions or psychosis is not by surgery. On the other hand, if these people are asked to clarify exactly what they believe, that is to say do they truly believe whichever of those above propositions applies to them and they say ‘no’, they know that such a proposition is not true, but that they ‘feel’ it, then what we are talking about scientifically, is just unhappiness, and that unhappiness is being accompanied by a wish – that leads some people into taking hormones that predominate in the other sex, and even having cosmetic surgery designed to make them ‘appear’ as if they are a person of the opposite sex. The proper treatment of emotional unhappiness is not surgery. Cosmetic surgery will not change the chromosomes of a human being. Cosmetic surgery will not make a man become a woman, capable of menstruating, ovulating, and having children. Cosmetic surgery will not make a woman into a man, capable of generating sperm that can unite with an egg or ovum from a woman and fertilise that egg to produce a human child. These are the scientific facts. There seems to me to be no medical or scientific reason to grant any special rights or considerations to people who are unhappy with the sex they were born into, or to people who wish to dress in the clothes of the opposite sex – which I believe is not illegal. I have read the brief put forward by those advocating special rights, and I find nothing of scientific value in it. Words and phrases are used that have no objective scientific basis such as “the inner space”.

The committee examining these proposals should be aware that there are indeed some quite rare examples where the sex of a baby at birth is uncertain. Two particular conditions are well recognized. One is where the child is a boy, but the testes have not descended into the testicular sac, but remain somewhere ‘stuck’ in the abdomen. The other well-recognized condition is where the child is a girl, but because of some abnormal hormonal levels as the baby was growing in the mother’s uterus, the clitoris of the baby girl is unusually large, and might at first be mistaken for a penis. Both these conditions are now diagnosed earlier, chromosome testing to confirm the genetic sex is widely available. They should not nowadays lead to any confusion about the real sex of the baby. Other than these and possibly even rarer abnormalities, the so-called ‘confusion’ about their sexuality that a teenager or adult has is purely psychological. As a psychiatrist, I see no reason for people who identify themselves in these ways to have any rights or privileges different from everyone else in Canada.’

Dr Joseph Berger is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada and Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Examiner from 1977-2005 for the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in the Board Examinations to become a Board Certified Psychiatrist. Past Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. University of Toronto. Past President. Ontario District Branch of the American Psychiatric Association. Representative for Ontario 2002-2010 to the Assembly (parliament) of the American Psychiatric Association. Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association. Author and Presenter, numerous medical and academic Papers at Conferences, Seminars, and in Medical Journals.

Love does not mean taking a permissive view on all things that now appear under the heading Love. It must have boundaries otherwise all sorts of expressions from sado-masochism to engaging sexually with multiple partners without a thought of commitment falls into what was once a well understood concept, love has rules which if broken breaks relationships, and on the large scale can poison entire societies. The breaking of these boundaries and abandoning any sense of order and restraint is leaving society in a state of bewildering chaos. Children who have little idea of a stable relationship, unsure who their biological parents are, with rising levels of anxiety disorders, health issues and suicides. Loosening the moral order has had catastrophic results which are going to greatly increase when the current generation of our youth begin to have children of their own. These topics are discussed below by a mother speaking about her experiences of loving her daughter through the transgender process. Her grief is apparent throughout. Emotional unhappiness is not confined to a person undergoing the process of transgendering, other members of a family may be hurt, confused and reduced to a state  of mental and physical distress of a type hard to comprehend and from which they may never recover.