Recently, the Alberta Medical Association issued a statement against restrictions of cross-sex hormones and surgeries for teens. We should expect no less from the AMA, not because what they are saying is true, but because medical associations were co-opted by woke causes long ago.Activists have confronted, then invaded medical institutions for more than fifty years. Ronald Bayer’s book Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis, documented how the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association was hijacked by homosexual activists when it was held in San Francisco in 1970.“Guerrilla theater tactics and more straightforward shouting matches characterized their presence,” Bayer wrote.Dr. Irving Bieber, an authority on “transsexualism and homosexuality” stepped up to speak on a panel on the subject. A protester said, “I’ve read your book, Dr. Bieber, and if that book talked about black people the way it talks about homosexuals, you’d be drawn and quartered and you’d deserve it.”Later, Australian psychiatrist Nathaniel McConaghy was in a crowded room to discuss “aversive conditioning techniques” to treat sexual deviation. He was drowned out with “shouts of ‘vicious,’ ‘torture,’ and ‘Where did you take your residency, Auschwitz?’” The protestors even demanded, “We’ve listened to you, now you listen to us.” Instead of calling the police, the meeting was suspended. Activists told any psychiatrists who stuck around to listen that, as Bayer described it, their profession was “an instrument of oppression and torture.”Annual meetings in Washington, DC in 1971 were also disrupted. Activist Frank Kameny grabbed the microphone and exclaimed “Psychiatry is the enemy incarnate . . . Psychiatry waged a relentless war of extermination against us. You may take this as a declaration of war against you.” As Bayer explained, “intimidation, invective and growing chaos” characterized the convention.By 1972, the annual APA meeting showed full-on appeasement. Kameny was on a panel discussion alongside lesbian activist Barbara Gittings and three other panelists sympathetic to homosexual causes. By 1973, Henry Brill, head of the nomenclature committee, sought to restrict the APA’s definition of “mental disorder” to conditions that included “subjective distress” and “generalized impairment.” This would downgrade homosexuality to “a form of irregular sexual development.”Psychiatrist Robert Spitzer called for the APA to remove homosexual behaviour from the disorder list. He deemed it “less than optimal” but called for the elimination of all laws against homosexual behaviour between adults, a motion carried unanimously. Homosexuality was removed as a disorder from the DSM-III manual, though the APA did add Sexual Orientation Disturbance to the DSM to legitimize conversion therapies if the patient was distressed over their orientation. In 1987, that was removed as well.Privately, many psychiatrists thought otherwise. A survey of 2,500 psychiatrists published in November 1977 by Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality found that 69% agreed that "homosexuality was usually a pathological adaptation as opposed to a normal variation." While 18% disagreed, 13% were unsure.Remarkably, Spitzer published a study in 2003 that suggested sexual orientation could be changed. He interviewed nearly 200 people who self-reported such reorientation and wrote the following:“Almost all of the participants reported substantial changes in the core aspects of sexual orientation, not merely overt behavior. Even individuals who made a less substantial change in sexual orientation reported that the therapy was extremely beneficial in a variety of ways. This study provides evidence that some gay men and lesbians are able to also change the core features of sexual orientation.”Spitzer recanted these findings in 2012 as he faced a tide increasingly against his earlier conclusions. The APA dismissed reorientation therapy as neither needed nor reliably helpful, causing a role-reversal where self-proclaimed “ex-gays” protested outside of APA meetings. An increasingly ostracized body of medical professionals still offers such therapies and offers evidence from studies in its defence. A similar progression happened at the American Psychological Association, a different APA. Dr. Nicholas Cummings successfully introduced the motion to drop its classification of homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975. In 1979/80, Cummings was APA president. He was also Chief of Mental Health with Kaiser-Permanente Health Maintenance Organization for 20 years.At Kaiser-Permanate, Cummings saw more than 2,000 patients who had concerns regarding their homosexuality and his staff saw an additional 16,000. At most, 10% said at the outset they wanted to change their orientation, while most attended with concerns over the fleeting nature of their relationships, disgust or guilty feelings about promiscuity, fear of disease and the wish to have a traditional family. Among patients, two-thirds reported satisfactory outcomes and 2,400 reported becoming heterosexual.In a 2012 interview reported in LifeSiteNews, Cummings said the American Psychological Association had abandoned the Leona Tyler principle that said public positions of the organization had to be supported by scientific evidence.“By the mid 1990s, the Leona Tyler principle was absolutely forgotten [and] political stances seemed to override any scientific results. Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA,” Cummings said.Cummings said the APA was all about diversity, and, “If I had to choose now, I would see a need to form an organization that would recruit straight white males, which are underrepresented today in the APA.”When the AMA claims, “The doctor-patient relationship is inviolable and sacrosanct,” it is also cherry-picking, since it doesn’t condemn governments banning therapies or medical colleges that persecute doctors who prescribe ivermectin. The national ban on conversion therapy is so thorough that medical professionals cannot even help a patient curb a gay porn addiction.The AMA also condemned bans on transgender surgeries and therapies for teens for creating “stigma” that will drive them over the edge. It also blamed stigma for the mental health problems and suicidal ideation of these teens. That’s a debatable interpretation. Besides, did banning alcohol purchases by teens stigmatize drinking in general?The AMA also asserts that administering transformative amounts of cross-gender hormones and puberty blockers is safe. That, too, is debatable, were scientific evidence the only factors brought to bear. Then again the message of “safe” is needed for public acceptance to be “effective.” Alas, we have seen this movie before.
