Category: Health Care

Posted on

Speaking for the Body: Medicine, Identity, and the Voice of the Flesh

What is medicine for?

This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of a fierce debate currently playing out in courts, clinics, and the conscience of a culture. A recent case—U.S. v. Skrmetti—confronts this head-on. The lawsuit challenges Tennessee’s law banning medical gender transition procedures for minors. But beneath the legal arguments lies a deeper philosophical fault line:

Is medicine the art of healing a disordered body, or the tool of sculpting a desired identity?

Two Models of Medicine

During oral arguments, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson asked provocative questions: If a teenage girl says, “I don’t want breasts,” is that enough to justify medical suppression of puberty?

That question exposes two competing visions of medicine:

  • The Service Provider Model: The physician delivers treatments to match the patient’s internal sense of self.
  • The Restorative Model: The physician diagnoses and treats real pathologies based on the body’s design and function.

If patient discomfort becomes the metric for medical intervention, anything can be labeled disease—including normal puberty.

Desire Is Not Diagnosis

In her article on Fairer Disputations, Leah Libresco Sargeant argues clearly: wanting something gone does not make it a disease.

A young girl may dislike her breasts due to dysphoria—or due to social pressure, trauma, or confusion. The physician’s job is to discern the difference. A culture that teaches self-avoidance should not be allowed to weaponize medicine against the body itself.

“A good doctor must attend to the body, not simply the feelings about it.” – Leah Libresco Sargeant

Feelings matter, but they are not the final diagnostic authority. Medicine must balance compassion with truth.

Listening to the Body’s Voice

Sargeant reflects personally on her own medical journey. As a teenager, signs of PCOS1PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) is a common hormonal disorder affecting women of reproductive age. It involves a combination of symptoms related to hormonal imbalance, metabolism, and ovarian function. were dismissed as normal. It wasn’t until later—after multiple miscarriages—that the condition was diagnosed.

Her body was speaking clearly. No one listened.

This isn’t just a case of delayed treatment. It’s a paradigm failure. Medicine did not fail to affirm her identity—it failed to honor her body’s reality. True healing requires both discernment and humility.

Medicine Must Be Rooted in Reality

When medicine drifts from diagnosis and healing into affirming personal desires, it risks becoming a mirror of cultural confusion rather than a defender of bodily truth.

We see this elsewhere:

  • Athletes pushed toward surgeries or eating disorders.
  • Cosmetic procedures driven by media-filtered ideals.
  • Adolescents offered radical interventions in response to passing anguish.

The question isn’t just what someone wants—but why they want it. And whether medicine should say yes.

Final Word: Healing, Not Hacking

The body is not a blank canvas. It is not raw material for existential expression. It is a living testimony, created with meaning and wisdom. Our job—especially in medicine—is to listen, learn, and heal.

When medicine speaks for the body, it fulfills its sacred calling.

When it speaks against the body, it becomes something else entirely.

SOURCE: “Speaking for the Body” by Leah Libresco Sargeant on Fairer Disputations.

+++

Stay Human, Speak the Truth

Posted on

Supreme Court Judges ‘Transgenderism.’

Today’s Supreme Court case hopefully will expose a medical scandal of significant proportions, where minors are subjected to irreversible treatments without sufficient evidence of their benefits and without proper informed consent.

The Court’s ruling (due in June ’25) should call for a desperately needed reevaluation of these practices to ensure the protection and well-being of vulnerable youth.

At least, one can hope, and pray.

Tyler O’Neil is on the case.

It’s hard to wrap your head around just how grotesque it is that many medical associations and the federal government have adopted the idea that it’s healthy to sterilize children in an attempt to “affirm” a stated transgender identity. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will shed much-needed sunlight on this medical scandal of epic proportions.

Tennessee Solicitor General Matt Rice will explain how activists conspired to flip the Hippocratic Oath on its head. Meanwhile, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Chase Strangio—a female who says she identifies as male—will argue that Tennessee’s law banning Frankensteinian medical experiments on kids violates federal law by discriminating on the basis of sex.

The Supreme Court is hearing the case because of this discrimination argument. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit upheld Tennessee’s law, finding that it doesn’t entail discrimination. But the Biden-Harris administration appealed that decision, and the Supreme Court took up the case—now known as U.S. v. Skrmetti after Jonathan Skrmetti, the Republican attorney general of Tennessee.

Read the whole thing.

+++

Embrace, Don’t Affirm

Posted on

Biological Sex and DSD’s

Sex is ordinarily determined at fertilization. Our genetic code, either the presence of an XX or XY chromosomal composition, determines our sexed body. With extremely rare disordered exceptions the human organism begins down a road of male or female bodily differentiation.

Back to our Gender Unicorn for a moment.

You will notice under the section “Sex Assigned at Birth” a blue dot for “other/intersex.” In the past, what used to be called a “disorder” is now called by many a “difference.” In our decidedly ‘post-modern’ moment, a moment designed to disrupt the very concept of normal or the fact that a natural order exists, we are told by Gender Identity Ideologues that there are a variety of ways that humans can develop. Normal and abnormal categories are obsolete and quite frankly hurtful to those who have developed differently.

Of course any sensitive person is going to treat someone who has one of these rare disorders with love and respect. But we should not ignore the obvious for the purpose of advancing a gender fluid philosophical agenda. Christians can’t do that.

Also, it’s bad science.

Clinics are being pressured to reclassify “Disorders of Sexual Development” as “Differences of Sexual Development.” Some have adopted the new terminology over a concern about stigmatizing people.

But the distinction between order and disorder is operative everywhere in science and medicine. These categories are indispensable for understanding and directing treatments toward human well-being.

Disorders of sexual development (DSDs) occur in roughly one out of every 5,000 births. These disorders can result in ambiguous external genitalia and the incomplete development of reproductive organs. Chromosomal or hormonal defects produce these abnormalities. They are rightly regarded by most medical experts as pathologies in the development and formation of the male and female body. They are exceedingly rare.

But Gender Identity Ideologues use the fact of these rare disorders as a reason for positing a “third sex” “fourth sex” etc., along a spectrum of possibilities. They argue that because of these “differences” the old-fashioned male-female sex binary is obsolete. Some people are just non-binary, they say. As I wrote in a previous post this move is nothing more than the normalization of disorder for the purpose of pushing a gender expansive ideology. (At root this irrationality emanates from an ideology called Queer Theory.)

Remember the staff trainer, Elly Barnes? Here’s the graph from my post about Rev Randall :

In 2018 Rev Randall attended a staff seminar at Trent College, entitled “Educate and Celebrate.”  He raised an objection when the leader, Elly Barnes, instructed the staff to chant ‘smash heteronormativity.’  For his anti-celebratory concerns he became a marked man at the college.

Barnes’ ideological, dare I say religious, fervor leaves little wiggle room for those like Reverend Randall and myself who believe God made us “male and female.” We don’t believe heteronormativity is oppressive and something to be “smashed.”

***

If you haven’t already added your email to my list, do so and I’ll let you know when the blog is updated. 

Email: blog@blueridgemountain.life