Bill Browning on Facebook posted this image about how republicans will enact a synthetic panic over gender affirming care for trans kids, but are just fine with actual gender reassignment surgery on intersex babies…

Intersex people are born with reproductive anatomy, chromosomes, or hormones that don’t fit standard definitions of male or female. It happens in about 1.7 percent of births. That’s more common than being a natural redhead. Beginning in the mid-20th century, doctors started performing surgeries on intersex infants to make their genitals appear more “normal,” driven by the view that without surgery, these children would not be able to have a normal marriage or sex life. Doctors cut first and asked questions never.

The intellectual foundation came from a psychologist named John Money. His theory was simple and wrong: gender identity was malleable, and surgeons could assign intersex newborns to whichever sex the doctors preferred. That theory justified thousands of surgeries on children who never asked for them. His star patient was David Reimer, a boy raised as a girl without his knowledge or consent. Money published the case as a success. He was lying. Reimer struggled his entire childhood, reverted to living as a male when he finally learned the truth, and later died by suicide.

The medical establishment believed Money’s lies for decades.

He raises a good point, but I have another. I watched a documentary about the boy mentioned there, David Reimer, who had this gender reassignment surgery after a botched circumcision, and was raised as a girl. David was not born intersex, he was surgically made female because at that time it was easier to do than reconstruct his damaged penis. His parents then took him to Money because Money believed gender identity was malleable and that David could be successfully raised as a girl. I saw an interview with David’s parents after David was told the truth about what happened to him (read the Wikipedia article…it’s just horrific), and during that interview they made one of those little aside comments where you see a deeper truth.

They said they had a lot of difficulty when David was very young, getting him to stop trying to pee standing up.

And there it is. Money was wrong. Tragically, horribly, categorically, wrong. Gender identity is not malleable. But that is not to say it always agrees with the body.

That casual aside is one of those things I count as a personal proof that transsexualism is a real thing, because that wasn’t the boy’s body telling him to do that, it was his brain. He had gender reassignment surgery, had been told all his life up to that point that he was a girl, but he still had that male brain. And it was telling him something about his body, despite the gender reassignment surgery he’d had, but didn’t know about then.

And if you can admit that the brain has anything at all to do with how gender is perceived, that it’s not simply a matter of the body you were born into, or made into, then I think in all intellectual honesty you have to also admit that there can be times when a child is born with a mostly male body, but a mostly female brain. There’s gender dysphoria.

It’s a real thing. I have a story I should tell on this blog someday about the time I met a trans man at a gay bar and how that opened my eyes.