Commentary by Susan Brinkmann, OCDS

The American Medical Association (AMA) is taking an official stance on transgender bathrooms, saying denial of private facilities to people suffering from gender identity issues could cause them “severe mental health repercussions.”

According to Heatstreet.com, the nation’s largest association of doctors and medical students in the U.S. passed a resolution at their annual meeting in Chicago last week in which they support the use of private facilities according to gender identity rather than biology.

“Laws and policies that restrict the use of public facilities based on biological gender can have immediate and lingering physical consequences, as well as severe mental health repercussions,” said Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH, member of the AMA Board of Trustees.

“To protect the public health and to promote social equality and safe access to public facilities and services, the American Medical Association is opposed to policies that prevent transgender individuals from accessing basic human services and public facilities in line with their gender identity.”

The association also approved two other resolutions on transgender issues, one of which asserts that gender identity is “incompletely understood as a binary selection” and encouraged members to work harder to educate the medical community on “the medical spectrum of gender identity.”

Another resolution called on the AMA to lobby the Food and Drug Administration to look at reproductive health as a gender-neutral issue. “The idea is to take the focus away from gender identity and place it on reproductive potential,” an AMA Wire summary of the measures said. “That is because there are patients who identify as male who may be taking medication that puts them at risk for damage to their biologically female reproductive systems.”

The delegates also recommended that members avoid holding meetings in cities, counties and states where transgenders are prohibited from using the bathrooms of their choice.

The reason behind this is because, as the resolution claims, transgender people who live in states with discriminatory policies have “statistically significant increases in mental health and psychiatric diagnoses.”

It’s wrong to submit any demographic of the population to hurtful discrimination, whether we agree with their lifestyle or not. But that’s not the point of protests against these dangerous bathroom policies.

It’s not the transgenders who commit the crimes, it’s the people who pretend to be transgenders and use these laws as an excuse to access facilities where they endanger the safety of women and children that are the problem.

This is a real threat, even though the LGBTQ community and the  mainstream media typically resort to their straw-man argument about how statistics show that transgenders don’t commit assaults in bathroom. They do so while ignoring the plethora of evidence supporting the fact that these crimes are indeed taking place across the country.

By dismissing these facts, the AMA and other supporters of these policies are putting the public health of a minority of citizens above the public safety of the rest of us.

Untenable positions such as this could explain why the AMA’s influence has been waning over the years.

“Even at the height of the Obamacare debate, the AMA represented only 17 percent of physicians in America. Of those members, about one-third are in training (residents or students) and a number are retired or in academic medicine,” reports the Daily Signal.

Compare this to the 75 percent representation they enjoyed in the 1950s.

Although it was originally formed “to promote the art and science of medicine and the betterment of public health,” many members believe the AMA has become much too political and are opting to join more doctor-patient centered organizations. As a result, the influence of this once powerful organization has been greatly diminished.

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