Memo to Zoey Tur: Ben Shapiro’s Right, You Have a Mental Disorder

Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur, left, threatened Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro, right, on HLN’s “Dr. Drew On Call” over Caitlyn Jenner’s receipt of ESPN’s Arthur Ashe Courage Award.

Inside Edition reporter Zoey Tur threatened Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro during a panel on HLN discussing the merits of Bruce Jenner receiving the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. Tur, a transgender, took issue with Shapiro asserting that the transgender debate is ultimately about whether we — as a society — are willing to accept delusion and mental illness as the norm, let alone deem it worthy of celebration.

“You better cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance,” Tur said to Shapiro with a firm hand behind his neck. After the taping, Shapiro alleged that Tur further threatened him, saying, “I’ll see you in the parking lot,” which the reporter did not deny. In fact, Tur doubled down on the threat the very next day, stating he would like to “curb stomp” Shapiro.

Despite the leftwing panel’s attempt to marginalize the Breitbart News editor’s comments that sparked the downright violent reaction, Tur not only diminished her intellectual position but actually proved Mr. Shapiro correct. So, just in case Tur and others need clarification, Ben Shapiro is right: The Inside Edition reporter and other transgender men and women suffer from a mental disorder, and Tur is a textbook case.

Prior to the threats and acts of aggression, which have now been reported to the police, Tur and Dr. Drew attempted to make a quasi-scientific argument that basically holds “feelings” matter more than physical and biological realities. Tur and Drew were making what is known as a solipsistic argument based on a philosophy of subjective idealism. Solipsists believe that the self is the only existing reality and that all other reality, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self, and have no independent existence. Empirical evidence or absolute truths, are not only irrelevant but truly non-existent.

In other words, none of you PPD readers or subscribers truly exist, you are just the result of PPD’s subjective reality. By the way, thanks for your subjective dollars to pay for our subscriptions that, in fact, really don’t exist outside the Editorial Board members’ minds.

Just to be clear, this theory is not the medical consensus on the transgendered — or any other topic for that matter — but rather a fringe one absent the support of related scientific research and aggregate understanding on the topic.

What is the scientific consensus, one which is backed by decades of research and empirical data? Who better to reference on this question than Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital and the author of Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind.

“This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects,” Dr. McHugh wrote in a recent and widely ignored op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. “The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.”

According to Dr McHugh, who actually relies upon science and evidence, the transgendered suffer a disorder of “assumption” not unlike those in other, more well-known disorders such as anorexia and bulimia nervosa. However, obviously in the case of the transgendered, the disordered “assumption” is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature — particularly one’s maleness or femaleness.

“For the transgendered, this argument holds that one’s feeling of ‘gender’ is a conscious, subjective sense that, being in one’s mind, cannot be questioned by others,” the former Johns Hopkins head, author of six books and at least 125 peer-reviewed medical articles said. “The individual often seeks not just society’s tolerance of this ‘personal truth’ but affirmation of it.”

Because Shapiro challenged Tur’s own subjective reality, he solicited a violent — yet predictable — textbook reaction from an individual unable to cope with reality and truth. In reality, Tur’s own fabricated truth — and the hoped-for endgame, that is, state-sponsored and socially accepted “sex changes” — isn’t at all healthy to either the mind or the physical being of transgendered persons.

A study at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic that tracked children who reported transgender feelings who did not receive medical or surgical treatment, found 70%-80% of them “spontaneously lost those feelings.” In the 1970s, Johns Hopkins University, the first American medical center to tackle “sex-reassignment surgery,” conducted a study comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Despite most of the surgically treated patients reporting to be “satisfied” with the results, their subsequent mental conditions proved no better than those who didn’t undergo the surgery.

Based upon these results, Hopkins stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery. And as Dr. McHugh noted, considering follow-up research, it “now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one.” He cites the new results of a long-term study conducted at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. The Institute, which followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery, revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, “the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties,” including but not limited to a suicide mortality that rose roughly 20-fold above the comparable non-transgender population.

We always find the abundance of “progressive” causes that ironically ignore science, mildly humorous. Religiosity is strongly associated with mental health, physical health, self-reliance and general behavioral characteristics most conducive to a free, self-governing society? We better ignore, or better yet, bury that little tidbit. Babies feel pain after 20 weeks when Planned Parenthood kills them to harvest their organs? Let’s not circulate that unfortunate piece of news.

And never, ever, face reality and admit you’re wrong even if the science says otherwise, particularly when it goes against the philosophies and interests of relative statism. Better yet, it’s best to double- or triple-down on your ignorance and attack it, just as Tur did during a radio interview with KFI AM 640’s Bill Carroll on Tuesday.

“He comes from a very misogynistic cult anyway, where women are treated differently, they’re not allowed to touch men,” Tur mocked. “So maybe that’s the battery. Maybe a woman touched him, and put her hand on his shoulder or the back of his neck, and that’s prescribed in the ultra-Orthodox religion, maybe that’s the battery he’s talking about.”

Except, with all undo respect for Tur, it was a man — not just in his mind but in reality — who inappropriately grabbed Mr. Shapiro on the back of his neck, not a women. Therefore, decency and generally accepted societal norms, not his religion, serve as the foundation of his understandable insult.

“At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. ‘Sex change’ is biologically impossible,” Dr. McHugh warns. “People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.”