Dr. Breggin Hour 8-12-26

The story told by our guest Patrick Hahn of how the medical industry has taken advantage of people who wish they had been born a different sex is appalling, heartrending, and a lesson from the extremes to which modern medicine can become perverted against the very people it is supposed to serve. Anyone who thinks they were mistakenly born into the wrong body has a tragic story to tell about how they became alienated from themselves while growing up. Instead of helping people recover their identity as a male or female human, in all its glory, and with all its complications, modern medicine is making billions of dollars by taking advantage of this vulnerability and pretending that the proper approach is to medically attempt to change their sexual identity by mutilating their bodies through highly dangerous and permanent surgical and medical interventions. In an especially tragic twist, the sex change industry has now targeted children, some as young as toddlers, beginning with indoctrination and leading to “puberty blocker” hormones to prevent the natural maturation of the individual. These early medical interventions often lead to surgery to remove breasts, vaginas, or penises as if in collaboration with the psychological demons that these individuals need to overcome. It’s gotten so bad that one state has just authorized interchangeable body parts in an “anatomically correct doll to be used in public school sex education. The industry of so-called “gender affirmation” continues to be a “third rail”—dangerous to touch in any critical manner. People are stifled publicly and privately from speaking about this issue in a critical manner because they have been told they will cause so much pain and prejudice if they do. But the real suffering is being perpetrated by medical professionals, hospitals, and therapists who encourage the fantasy that one can change their sex to improve their quality of life. The reality is quite dismal in terms of outcomes. In every area in which our guest Patrick Hahn addresses the real science behind medical and psychiatric interventions, including his most recent book on the sex change industry, Patrick Hahn writes the most comprehensive, interesting analyses available. Where our books dovetail with his, and they often do, we nonetheless learn a great deal from him. If you’ve never heard him speak before, listen to this show simply for the pleasure of hearing one of the most brilliant and thoughtful critical researchers in the field of medicine and psychiatry today. This week on The Breggin Hour, Patrick Hahn joins us to discuss his powerful new book, Irreversible. Patrick is a careful researcher and a clear writer who has spent years documenting the medicalization of ordinary human suffering. His latest work traces how the obsession with “sex change” moved from a tiny fringe subculture to a multi-billion-dollar industry in the United States alone—and how that industry rests on a mountain of lies and deceptions. Patrick does not mince words. “There is nothing good about this industry. Nothing,” he told us. “The whole industry is based on lies.” In biology and medicine, he reminds us, nothing is more certain than this: there are two, and only two, sexes. It is impossible to turn a man into a woman with a surgeon’s knife. When an entire medical enterprise begins with that lie, the rest of the story unravels into incoherence. Activists insist that “trans women are women,” then demand fantastically expensive surgeries and lifelong cross-sex hormones precisely so those same individuals can resemble women. If they already are women, why the need for the knife and the drugs? The most comprehensive long-term study ever conducted, from Sweden (one of the most “trans-friendly” countries on earth), found that after surgical transition the suicide rate was elevated by a staggering nineteen times compared with matched controls from the general population. Not nineteen percent higher—ninet