PROVIDENCE — A medical doctor who is a leading critic of the ideology behind transgenderism drew a large crowd, as well as some protesters, at a lecture at the St. Pius V Church in Providence last Thursday aimed at uncovering the dangers of affirming transgender identities in children and teens.
In a detailed slideshow presentation, Dr. Michelle Cretella, the president of the American College of Pediatricians, marshalled the latest medical science and the latest research to warn that transgender-affirming therapy and medical treatments are based upon a misrepresentation of the fundamental sexual identity of persons and effectively amount to experimentation on children.
Her talk, which was sponsored by the St. Pius V Young Adults, attracted a crowd of more than 100 people to the basement of the church, according to the group’s own estimate. It also drew approximately two dozen protesters outside the entrance of the Church.
But Cretella’s talk began by embracing common ground between the two sides of the transgender debate, addressing the issue of bullying in schools. Cretella said fostering a culture of respect for the dignity of persons and promoting character education was the answer to bullying. The key, she said, is respect, not mandating adherence to “correct attitudes,” particularly in the case of sexual identity.
“It’s not necessary to affirm specific sexual identities or specific sexual behaviors to defend every student’s human dignity and their right to learn without fear of harassment,” Cretella said, citing a publication on bullying issued by the Smart and Good Schools Initiative.
In other words, affirming a boy or girl’s sense that they are really a different gender is not the solution to bullying, according to Cretella. Cretella defined transgender ideology as being “based on the assumption that people have a “‘gender identity that may or may not match the sex they were assigned at birth.’”
This assumption, she said, is contrary to both science and common sense.
“Sex is not assigned,” Cretella said. “It declares itself in utero.”
Sex, she said, is determined by XX chromosomes in females, or XY chromosomes in males. That cannot be changed by behavior, hormonal drugs, or surgery, Cretella said. Eight weeks into gestation, the testes in a male fetus begin producing testosterone that “masculinizes every tissue of his body” even brain tissue, marking a fundamental distinction between male and female in the womb.
Sexual difference is not limited to the XX and XY chromosomes. More than 6,500 genes are “expressed differently” in men and women. In addition, there are a number of sex-specific genes in each person, according to Cretella. Sexual difference permeates the whole body, affecting every organ, system, and even explaining how men and women respond differently to illness, medication and pain, according to Cretella. For example, the symptoms of a heart attack are not the same in women as they are in men.
“If you have two Xs the brain develops different language visual and auditory pathways. Spatial processing is different. Emotional and social processing pathways develop differently,” Cretella said, adding that ultimately there is also a difference in psychology and behavior.
“It’s not that girls can only do certain things and boys can only do certain other things. It’s they get there in different ways oftentimes,” Cretella said, citing the work of child psychologist Leonard Sax. “This is the irony: the failure to acknowledge sex differences can reinforce damaging sex stereotypes … like ‘boys are bad at art’ and ‘girls are bad at math and science.’”
To affirm, then, that a child has a gender identity that is different than their biological sex is to mislead children, Cretella argued.
And that, she warned, could end up harming children. A puberty blocker like Lupron, she said, slows brain development in boys and could lead to obesity and testicular cancer in men. For women, there is the risk of brittle bones. Both sexes face the potential of cognitive decline in adulthood, according to Cretella.
Furthermore, such interventions may be ultimately unnecessary as a way of resolving gender dysphoria — the term used to describe the intense discomfort transgendered persons feel over the biological sex of their bodies. An estimated 75 to 95 percent of children who have gender dysphoria before puberty end up identifying with their biological sex by the time they reach adulthood, when they do not receive therapy or medications that affirm their alternative gender identity, according to Cretella.
“This is just an experiment that is going on full-bore now on our children,” Cretella said.
In a letter from May 16, 2017, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops offered an explanation of the Church teaching on transgender issues, quoting Pope Francis in his 2016 exhortation Amoris Laetitia.
“The young need to be helped to accept their own body as it was created” (Amoris Laetitia [AL], no. 285).
The bishops of England and Wales recently raised concerns over the rise of gender ideology, saying it is creating confusion among people about the truth of human nature, according to Catholic News Service.
In a statement issued at the end of their April 16-19 bi-annual plenary meeting in Leeds, the bishops said the notion that gender was a social construct rather than a biological fact ran counter to the intuition of most people.
“The idea that the individual is free to define himself or herself dominates discourse about gender. Yet our human instinct is otherwise,” they said in the statement.
Tyler Rowley, a member of the steering committee for the St. Pius V young adults, said the group decided to invite Cretella to “explain the truth to people about gender dysphoria so that as a society we can better protect children from the harmful practice of ‘transitioning’ them to the opposite sex.”
He said the young adult group had always planned on opening the event up to the public. When organizers learned that there would be protesters they didn’t consider canceling; instead, they invited them to the talk. In his introduction to Cretella, Rowley said all were welcome to the talk, including non-Catholics and those who did not agree with the Church’s teaching on gender and sexuality.
About 20 protesters ended up coming inside for the talk, according to Rowley. Just one person actually interrupted Cretella’s lecture. She promptly left. Providence police were on hand but no one else had to be removed.
Many of Cretella’s detractors reserved their criticism for a testy question-and-answer period that followed. “At what point do you give up on this distortion in order to stop making children suicidal?” asked one local child psychiatrist, David Savitzsky.
Cretella denied that she was distorting the data. “It is just as likely, and some would say more likely, that underlying either mental illness or dynamics in the family or the child’s life is causing both the depression and suicidal thoughts and the gender dysphoria,” she said.
Melanie Dupont, a Democratic state Senate candidate, asked Cretella how many transgendered persons she had consulted in creating her presentation. Cretella said one. “I consulted the literature. This is the scientific literature,” she added. Another questioner said it was better for a parent to hear that their child was “trans” than to get a call from a hospital after a suicide attempt.
Not all questions were hostile. “Do you think we’re getting to a point in society where we are no longer able define what is disordered?” asked Tim Fargent, of Newport.
Cretella said that has happened in the shift from describing transgendered persons as having a gender identity disorder to gender dysphoria, which focuses on the distress they experience over the apparent mismatch between their biological sex and their perceived gender identity. “The disorder became not the discrepancy between thought and reality, but the distress. So whatever alleviates distress is considered … adequate treatment,” Cretella said.
Cretella also compared people with anorexia to those with gender dysphoria, suggesting that in both cases that what is at issue is how thoughts inaccurately reflect the reality. (Anorexia is an eating disorder that causes people to think they are overweight when they are not, leading them to eat less than they should and endangering their health.)
Given the turnout — estimated at more than 100 people — the organizers considered the event a success. “That’s a huge success for any Catholic event to get to speak directly to the people you think need to hear your message the most. This was not simply speaking to the choir,” Rowley told the Rhode Island Catholic.
“I think it went extremely well and was unprecedented in my experience. I’ve never seen two sides who are so polarized sitting side by side and respectfully listening to a very controversial talk. After the talk the conversations between the two sides continued for over an hour,” Rowley said.
