Tough news for "transgender activists."

Paul McHugh, University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, concludes with respect to "gender reassignment surgery" that "[w]e have wasted scientific and technical resources and damaged our professional credibility by collaborating with madness rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it."

But there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable.

Further Thoughts: The deep "paradigm" of the academic elites, to which McHugh was referring when he observed that "there is a deep prejudice in favor of the idea that nature is totally malleable," is the topic for dissection in George Will's column on the social pressures that have forced former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers to grovel for suggesting that there may be innate differences between the sexes which could account for different aptitudes or interests in math and science. Will writes:

The vehemence of Hopkins's recoil from the idea that there could be gender differences pertinent to some cognition might seem merely to reflect a crude understanding of civic equality as grounded shakily on a certain identical physicality. But her hysteria actually expresses the left's ultimate horror: the thought that nature sets limits to the malleability of human material. Summers should explain this to her, over lunch, when he returns from camp.

I don't know if Summers' recanted hypothesis has merit, but I think we all know that science is not well-served by functioning as a handmaiden for political ideology.