IT'S NOT A PHYSICAL PROBLEM:

One of the first scholars to raise questions about the original study was Mark Regnerus, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin.

Writing at Public Discourse (the Journal of the Witherspoon Institute, which I edit), Regnerus praised the study for having such a robust dataset. But he pointed out oddities in the way the authors presented the results to the public, and which results the media touted.

For example, Regnerus highlighted that "the study found no mental health benefits for hormonal interventions in this population."

He also pointed out that in a dataset of 9.7 million people, the results of the original analysis the authors put forward hinged on the outcomes of just three people:

The study's trumpeted conclusion may hinge on as few as three people in a data collection effort reaching 9.7 million Swedes, 2,679 of whom were diagnosed with gender incongruence and just over 1,000 of whom had gender-affirming surgery.

Furthermore, Regnerus noted how small the impact of any given surgery was, that a clinic would need to perform 49 surgeries before they could expect a patient to benefit--hence the plural in the original paper's title: surgeries.

As Regnerus put it, "the beneficial effect of surgery is so small that a clinic may have to perform 49 gender-affirming surgeries before they could expect to prevent one additional person from seeking subsequent mental health assistance."

Given all of these concerns, why the media celebration of the study? Why the "consensus" among the medical elite that transitioning benefits patients? Why the claim that it's the only acceptable treatment?

Why are children being "transitioned"? And why are parents being told puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries are the only way to treat their children?

As I pointed out two years ago in my book, "When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment," the best therapies focus on helping people accept and embrace their bodies. Rather than attempting to do the impossible--"reassigning" bodies to line up with misguided thoughts and feelings--we should at least attempt what is possible: helping people to align their thoughts and feelings with reality, including the reality of the body.

It shouldn't surprise us that the results of this most recent study--and its correction--show that hormonal and surgical transition procedures don't bring the promised benefits. Even the Obama administration admitted that the best studies do not report improvement after reassignment surgery.

In August 2016, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid wrote that "the four best designed and conducted studies that assessed quality of life before and after surgery using validated (albeit non-specific) psychometric studies did not demonstrate clinically significant changes or differences in psychometric test results after GRS [gender reassignment surgery]."

What does that mean? A population of patients is suffering so much that these patients would submit to amputations and other radical surgeries, and the best research the Obama administration could find suggests that these surgeries bring them no meaningful improvements in their quality of life.

And sadly, such surgeries can have deadly consequences. In a discussion of the then-largest and most robust study on sex reassignment, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services pointed out: "The study identified increased mortality and psychiatric hospitalization compared to the matched controls. The mortality was primarily due to completed suicides (19.1-fold greater than in control Swedes)."

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