Crosstalk: August 10, 2016

Michelle Cretella is a medical doctor and president of the American College of Pediatricians. She is a board certified general pediatrician who retired after nearly 20 years of group practice. She has been a dedicated pro-life and traditional values advocate for more than 25 years.

Earlier this year the Department of Education along with the Department of Justice issued guidelines for school districts to help them create a safe and supportive environment for transgender students. Why would the American College of Pediatricians be concerned about this?

Michelle noted that coming to know whether you are male or female is at the core of our identity. The DOJ and DOE are basically telling the schools to lie to children about this core biological portion of their identity. Michelle believes this is child abuse.

She went on to explain that everyone is born with a biological sex. No one is born with questions as to whether they are one sex or the other. Our gender identity is not 100% ingrained into our genes. Bonding to the mother and father is normal. So by the time a child reaches the age of 3 or 4 a little boy knows he's a boy and a little girl knows she's a girl. That is typical, normal, healthy psychological development. In other words, most complex, human behaviors are due to a combination of nature and nurture.

Thinking that is not in touch with physical reality is either confusion or at worst, a psychological delusion. So if we're going to have public schools telling all children that thinking that is not in touch with physical reality is something we should accommodate (your biological sex) then why should we believe anything?

Can a person be born with a brain of someone from the opposite sex? Michelle noted that this is physically impossible from a genetic standpoint. She cited a study that looked at images of adult brains of transgender adults vs. adults that identify as the biological men or women that they are. Some brain studies have shown that the transgender brains look more similar to the brain that is somewhere between a masculine brain and a feminine brain.

That would seem to indicate that transgenders are born that way. However, what we do know is that lifestyle alters the structure and appearance of the brain. For example, she cited a study that looked at brain scans of cab drivers in London. The scans indicated an enhanced area of the brain that is concerned with navigation. This does not mean that they had such navigation capability when they were born and thus were destined to become taxi-cab drivers. Instead, their brains changed according to their lifestyle. So if you want to prove that someone is born as a transgender, you'd have to study the brain scans of newborns.

Michelle admits that genetics matters, but if you want to know how much it contributes to a particular type of behavior, you have to look at identical twins. Identical twin studies of trans-sexual adults have shown that if genes or prenatal hormones determined whether you'd become transgender, 100% of those twin pairs (both) should be transgender. Instead, the largest study we have shows that only 20% were both transgender.