By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor
CORRECTED JUNE 10 TO CLARIFY INFORMATION ABOUT DR. AZ HAKEEM IN PARAGRAPH FOUR.
BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) – In a stunning interview on Louisiana Public Broadcasting, Dr. Az Hakeem, who was identified as “the only psychiatrist in the UK to specialize in working psychotherapeutically with gender dysphoria patients, which he has done for 23 years,” declared, “Gender ideology is made up. It’s a social construct. It’s a cult belief.”
The interview was conducted, May 12, by André Moreau, an Emmy-winning journalist who anchors the half-hour LPB television newsmagazine “Louisiana: The State We’re In.”
Moreau only asked two questions during the six-minute segment, inquiring about what had prompted the change in numbers of children who were transitioning, and what the statistics about transitioning procedures looked like.
TRUTH
Hakeem, whose testimony helped catalyze the National Health Service of England to commission the Cass Review which advises the country’s medical community about the transgender crisis in the country, said the surge is “a current form of youth subculture, you know, like punks and goths.”
“The worst thing we can do is presume it’s a medical condition,” he emphasized, adding, “and it’s not.”
MYTHS
Hakeem also debunked three myths being spread by transgender activists.
“So, one myth is that people are born in the wrong body,” he said. “There’s no evidence that that’s the case. Brains of people with gender dysphoria are exactly the same as people without.
“Nobody is born in the wrong body,” Moreau continued. “There are lots of psychological conditions where people are very unhappy with their body, whether it’s anorexia, body dysmorphia. But we always treat those psychologically. We never collude with the anorexic and say, ‘Yes. You need to be thinner.’ We never collude with the body dysmorphic, saying, ‘Yes. Your body is all wrong.’ “
He also warned about the permanence of current treatments.
“There’s a myth that the medications that we call ‘puberty blockers’ are reversible,” Hakeem said. “They’re not. ‘Puberty blockers’ is a sanitized term for chemical castration.
“If you’re uncertain or not sure about your physical sex, then at least going through puberty will reinforce what you are,” he explained. “The risk is if you’re not certain about your sex, and then you don’t go through puberty, then that just reinforces that you’re not really a boy or a girl. “
He said that sort of situation is “unhelpful.”
He also addressed the argument by transgender advocates that transitioning procedures are “lifesaving.”
“There’s another myth that if you don’t give these children puberty blockers, they’re at a high risk of suicide. That’s a myth,” Hakeem said. “There’s no evidence of that whatsoever.”
FACTS V. FANTASY
Hakeem said he found that 100 percent of the males he treated “were on the autistic spectrum.” Meanwhile, female patients had either “a high incidence of trauma, often sexual trauma” or “a degree of homophobia … lesbophobia” in their social circles and so transgenderism “was a way of escaping from that with a fantasy solution.”
Consequently, he has concluded that gender ideology “is the current new religion. It’s part of social justice theory, all those other things. Gender is a social construct.
“We have sex. We have male and female sexes. And some people are hermaphrodite, a very small number,” Hakeem advised. “But gender is a social construct. The idea that gender ideology is replacing biological sex is very unfortunate. It’s not helpful because it doesn’t exist.”
DATA AVERSE
Finally, Hakeem repudiated the lack of data given the severe rise in gender dysphoria among England’s youth.
“So, if you go to hospital for a minor procedure, like a fingernail operation, there’ll be tons of outcome data along that,” he pointed out. “For some reason, giving children chemical castration and cross sex hormones, there is no data.
“So, the big criticism of the main clinic in the UK, the Tavistock GIDS [Gender identity Development Service] Clinic,” Hakeem said, “was ‘Why aren’t you collecting data?’
“But there seems to be a resistance to collecting data, which is very, very suspicious,” he said.
LAGNIAPPE
Only two weeks after the segment with Hakeem aired, Louisiana Public Broadcasting announced, May 25, that Moreau would be retiring, with his final broadcast scheduled for the next day. LPB described that last show as a “look back at Moreau’s impressive 40-year career in broadcasting that led to a prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award from the Louisiana Association of Broadcasters.”
