“You Can't Fool Nature”: Why Attempts to “Cure” Gender and Sexual Orientation Fail

In the 19th century, researchers first attempted to explain the nature of sexuality through the concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity,” turning personality traits into medical diagnoses for 70 years. In the 20th century, scientists harmed children in an attempt to prove that sex was merely the result of upbringing.

A video has been released on the YouTube channel “Albert” a wonderful video titled “Trans People: What's Going On in Their Heads?” was released. In the video, the host explained how the tragedy of Bruce Reimer, the phenomenon of the village of Las Salinas, and findings from neurobiology proved that an innate identity cannot be forcibly rewritten.

How a Gay Rights Advocate Accidentally Created a Medical Diagnosis

In the mid-19th century, German lawyer Karl Ulrichs sought to end the criminal prosecution of gay men by persuading judges that they simply had a “female soul” in a male body. However, the concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity” that he proposed became tied to biological sex, turning feminine behavior in men into a medical diagnosis for the next seven decades.

Common stereotypes about what is “masculine” and “feminine” often contradict both historical facts and biology:

• History: Excavations of nomadic Scythian burial sites revealed that one in every three graves containing weapons belonged to a woman, while in 19th-century West Africa, women's battalions made up the fiercest third of the army.
• Neurobiology: Исследование мозга 1500 человек показало, что стереотипно «мужской» структурой мозга обладают только около 10% мужчин.

John Money's Experiment and the Tragedy of Bruce Reimer

In the 20th century, psychologist John Money promoted the hypothesis that there is no innate gender identity and that gender is determined exclusively by upbringing and environment. In 1967, a medical error during circumcision burned off eight-month-old Bruce Reimer's penis. Money persuaded his parents to have the remaining tissue removed and raise the boy as a girl named Brenda.

Money publicly presented the experiment as a triumph of science, but in reality the child resisted being made to live as a girl, tore dresses, got into fights, and refused to undergo surgery to create a vagina. At 14, after learning the truth from his father, he reclaimed a male identity and took the name David; he later married and adopted three children. Money's deception did not come to light within the scientific community until 1997.

A similar attempt to “correct” the effeminate boy Kirk Murphy through a system of punishment for “girlish” behavior left him with a profound sense of being “broken,” and he died by suicide at the age of 38.

“Testicles at 12”: What the Las Salinas Mutation Teaches Us

The phenomenon found in the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic clearly disproves the illusion that upbringing is all-powerful. Because of a deficiency in the enzyme that converts testosterone into dihydrotestosterone, boys are born with genitalia that appear female and are raised as girls until puberty. At age 12, however, a surge of hormones causes their bodies to masculinize, turning the “girls” into young men (locals call them güevedoces — “eggs at 12 o’clock”).

Phantom sensations and state-enforced transition

Modern hypotheses link identity formation to processes in the womb: the development of the sex glands and the differentiation of brain regions occur at different times, which can lead to discrepancies between them. Disrupted connections in the cerebral cortex also cause other rare phenomena—for example, “body integrity dysphoria,” in which otherwise perfectly healthy people experience an overwhelming desire to have a limb amputated (most often the left leg).

Nowhere in the world has medicine ever learned to “correct” homosexuality or gender identity through therapeutic intervention:

• In Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by law, the state officially refers gay men for and subsidizes sex reassignment surgery, regarding surgical correction as the only “treatment.”
• At the same time, scientists emphasize that a person’s environment can intimidate or suppress them, but it cannot alter an innate biological and neural pattern.