Dr. Quentin Van Meter: How Faulty Research by a 1950s ‘Sexual Revolutionist’ Guided the Modern Transgender Movement

transgender schooling
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A “sexual revolutionist” sowed the seeds of transgenderism in the 1950s at Johns Hopkins University, says Dr. Quentin Van Meter, who studied in one of the school’s training programs.

Van Meter revealed to Breitbart News during an interview how psychologist and “sexual revolutionist” John Money ultimately created the “preamble” to the current-day transgender movement.

“Money came to Hopkins under the auspices of a very noble cause, and then he went off on a tangent because his whole purpose was to be a sexual revolutionist,” Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist who practices in Atlanta, Georgia, said.

He added that when he began his training, the program at Hopkins saw rare cases of babies who had been born with ambiguous genitalia so that their sex could not easily be determined. Later, however, it developed in a different direction.

“Knowing Money personally as I did, there is just no other way to describe him,” he said. “He and [sexologists] Harry Benjamin and Alfred Kinsey were colleagues together in developing the beginning of ‘Let’s just say biological sex just doesn’t matter anymore — you can pretty much be anything you want to be.'”

Van Meter described the beginnings of “gender ideology” at Hopkins.

“In the 1970s Money coined the term ‘gender’ and used it as a term to describe an internal sexual identity that might not be in sync with biologic sex,” he explained. “That’s when ‘gender’ was applied to human beings for the first time. And what was proven by the mistakes John Money made was that biologic sex was concrete and that when you try to fool the patient into a new gender – because you can never change their sex – when they grew up, they went right back to their biologic sex when they got old enough to understand what was going on.”

Money, who taught at Hopkins for more than 50 years, died in 2006. As his obituary in the New York Times observed, he “coined the terms ‘gender identity,’ to describe the internal experience of sexuality and ‘gender role’ to refer to social expectations of male and female behavior.”

The psychologist also advocated for sex reassignment surgery for individuals who experienced discomfort with their biological sex.

“This was the preamble, if you will, to the transgender movement,” Van Meter said, adding, nevertheless, that the Hopkins program closed down because “it was basically a failure.”

Van Meter explained that in 1966, the parents of a little boy whose penis was accidentally burned off during a botched circumcision with inappropriate equipment decided to raise their son as a girl after consulting with Money.

“In 1973, Dr. Money reported that the child, who had been castrated and furnished with dresses and dolls, was doing well, and had accepted the new identity as a girl,” the Times reported in Money’s obituary.

The report continued, however:

But in a 1997 report in The Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, a pair of researchers provided a detailed follow-up: the boy had repudiated his female identity at age 14 and had even had surgery to reconstruct his genitals.

The report caused an uproar, and Dr. Money was criticized in news reports and in a book on the case.

In 2004, the man who had reclaimed his sex committed suicide. His family blamed the effort to change his sex.

“He understood without knowing what it was that something was really off,” Van Meter said about the boy. “It wasn’t an issue that he had a gender identity – he had a biologic sexual identity that was not in sync with what had been his assigned gender.”

“When that story hit the papers, that was the end of Money completely,” he explained. “All of his theories – all of which were just in his head – he had no biologic basis for them; he just had a perverted mind. He convinced any number of people that this was a valid way to proceed.”

Van Meter, who had a 20-year career in the Navy, said transsexualism was “pretty much buried by the mid 1980s – in the United States at least.”

He explained that in the Netherlands and Sweden, however, physicians continued with what Money had done in the United States. They were actively using affirmation and hormonal manipulation in child patients, though they did not perform surgeries until adulthood, he said.

“In the meantime, in Toronto, psychologist Kenneth Zucker was treating patients who came to his clinic with issues of believing they were born in the wrong body,” Van Meter continued, adding, “He had about 560 cases that he chronicled over a period of about 30 years. And he worked with these kids – from little kids of ages three, four, and five, and all the way up to adolescence. And he discovered that the undercurrent issue was significant psychological maladjustment to adverse childhood experiences – things like divorce, death of a sibling, sexual abuse – things the kid had internalized and used to escape their future role as a male or female for any number of reasons, such as avoidance or protection.”

“Zucker found this pathology, and he helped the parents understand where it was coming from – and a lot of times it was the parents who were essentially the cause,” he said. “But he worked with these kids, and 98 percent of the boys ultimately were fine with their biologic sex, and over 80 percent of the girls.”

“So this is a cure, essentially,” Van Meter asserted. “As Zucker himself said, it’s ‘delusional to believe you’re born into the wrong body.’ If that is a persistence that goes throughout your life, then you are living in a delusional state with a delusional disorder. Zucker coined the term ‘gender identity disorder’ for those people who basically persisted. He was doing this therapy sort of quietly, but he published literature and wrote textbooks and was essentially the world expert on this whole subject.”

According to Van Meter, since the transgender movement has developed, every patient who has come to him claiming to be in the wrong body “has come from a totally dysfunctional family.”

“There’s nothing normal about the environment where these children are brought up,” he said. “There are emotional traumas left and right. It is so obvious that what we’re doing is painting over the trauma.”

Van Meter’s comments come as the Times has reported the Trump administration is preparing to “establish a legal definition of sex under Title IX” that would ensure individuals’ recorded sex corresponds to their actual biology.

Transgender ideology, however, demands the federal government enforce rules that help people easily switch their legal sex, regardless of biology.

“It is high time that governmental agencies at the national and local levels return to valid science, which reveals that there are two biologic sexes, and only two: male and female,” Van Meter, now president of the American College of Pediatricians, said in a comment to Breitbart News. “Gender identity is a social construct, not a biologic one, and gender-specific rights have no place in regulation or law.”

Van Meter explained that, despite Money’s embarrassing failure, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which was launched by Money and Kinsey in honor of their colleague Benjamin, began pushing a political agenda for gender ideology without scientific evidence for their cause.

“To be a member in WPATH, you only need to have an interest in transgender issues,” Van Meter said. “There is no professional degree required, no training specifically, no certification. If you want to be a member, all you need to do is pay your dues.”

WPATH states it offers “full professional membership” at $210 annually in the U.S. and at a reduced fee for individuals ‘residing in least developed countries.’ However, “supporting members,” those who are not professionals, but who ‘have an interest in the organization,’ also pay $210.

“This is not a scientifically based organization,” Van Meter stressed. “It’s essentially a pseudo-professional group of people who are pushing an agenda and have been since the beginning.”

Van Meter said the political drive to undermine the science of human biology is “an epidemic of insanity.” He observed also that guidelines published last year by the Endocrine Society “are essentially a rubber-stamped version of the WPATH guidelines.”

The Endocrine Society’s guidelines state children under 16 years of age who claim to feel uncomfortable with their biological sex may benefit from hormone treatments early to transform their bodies to the opposite sex.

While the organization does not recommend hormone treatment for gender-dysphoric children who have yet to reach puberty, the group says such treatment can commence as puberty begins, which, for some children, could be as early as nine years of age.

Van Meter said the Endocrine Society guidelines were developed with the help of Dr. Joshua Safer, who is currently the executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery.

“WPATH essentially infiltrated, and the guidelines, published by the Endocrine Society in 2009 and then revised in 2017, had very minimal scientific basis,” he said.

“The basis in science that was present concerned the adverse effects of the hormone therapy and, in the revision, concerns about permanent sterility that needed to be discussed with the patient,” he explained. “All the other recommendations about counseling, affirmation, cross-sex hormones, and blocking puberty were all based on essentially no science whatsoever. But they were published because there was a social agenda that took over scientific thought.”

In a recent policy statement, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) showed that group has also followed along with the notion that biological sex is merely “assigned at birth,” while “‘gender identity’ is one’s internal sense of who one is.”

AAP has espoused the “gender-affirmative care model” which, the group claims, “is oriented toward understanding and appreciating the youth’s gender experience.”

In contrast, the policy statement of Van Meter’s organization, the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), asserts children expressing discomfort with their biological sex should first be assessed for psychological issues related to gender dysphoria, followed by “watchful waiting, or family therapy with an eye toward facilitating comfort with the child’s biological sex.”

“Shamefully, the AAP has misrepresented science in order to promote a political agenda, fostered by AAP leaders of the transgender movement, at the precious cost of children’s health and well-being,” ACPeds said in a press release.

Van Meter observed that even a National Institutes of Health protocol appears designed to demonstrate the success of gender-affirming hormone treatments in children.

“There’s no control group – which is a must if you’re going to be following ethical research guidelines,” he explained. “And the researchers excuse themselves from having one by saying, ‘What are we supposed to do: let these kids kill themselves with no therapy?’ And the answer is the control group would have been what Kenneth Zucker did, which was intense counseling because the majority of these kids have undercurrent problems.”

Van Meter said transgender activists want to keep buried the serious mental health issues within their community and have even influenced 14 state legislatures to pass laws making it illegal for therapists to explore with their child patients the reasons why they may be uncomfortable with their biological sex.

“This is the recruitment of a cult,” Van Meter said. “It is so scary, and I am so overwhelmingly worried about the welfare of this population of people 30 years out.”

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