Monday, August 22, 2016

Transgenderism and the Culture Wars

Camille Paglia called it a sign of cultural collapse. She was referring to the current mania over transgenderism. Boys who believe they are girls and girls who believe they are boys were previously thought to be suffering from a delusional belief. If not a delusional belief, a childhood confusion that would eventually pass.

Nowadays, psychiatrists have caved to social and political pressures and have decided that someone who thinks he was born in the wrong body—that is, that God made a mistake—must be taken at his word. He does not suffer from a delusional belief but has a body that is not his true gender identity.

His true gender identity is what he believes it is. At the least, he is suffering from a mind/body problem. Thinking makes it so, as the bard said, because if you think you are a kangaroo you must be a kangaroo. And if you think that your left leg is far longer than your right leg surgeons must immediately amputate. Unfortunately, I did not invent the latter example.

In the transgendered ideologues have found fertile ground for promoting their narrative. And they have exploited these sad cases to detach people from reality. In the end reality must yield to belief. If you don’t think that this is dangerous, you need to learn how to think.

David French offers an excellent synopsis of the current state of the debate.

In his words:

Human experience simply doesn’t conform to ideological models, and the far worse damage is done when we try to impose radical ideology onto the complexities of individual, troubled lives. In reality, people are far more vulnerable to suggestion and fashion than the Left lets on. Rather than affirming an immutable identity, our culture is ratifying and rendering permanent what often amounts to little more than a troubled youthful phase — one that is subject to all the whims of fashion that mark any other cultural trend.

Keep in mind, Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh did the important research on this matter many years ago. He summarized the results in the Wall Street Journal. 

Since the vast majority of children who believe they are transgendered change their minds, McHugh persuaded Hopkins to cease performing gender reassignment surgery. Today, he would naturally be called a bigot. A child who declares himself to be transgendered will now be subjected to hormone treatments and even mutilating surgeries. If this is not a sign that the nation has gone off the cultural rails, I do not know what is.

French explains:

Let’s be clear: The vast majority of kids who experience a period of discomfort with their biological sexual identity eventually desist. Indeed, the number may well be over 90 percent. In other words, kids who are growing and learning about life and themselves sometimes endure a period of confusion. This should shock exactly no one. What is shocking, however, is the insistence that this period of confusion should be treated as a period of confirmation — and that medical intervention is the logical and tolerant next course.

The medical profession is now more interested in ideology that it cares about the well-being of its patients.

French continues:

But we live in a world where if a troubled girl wants to become a man — to begin immediate hormone treatment that will dramatically alter her physiology, with the immediate hope of undergoing painful, life-altering surgery – she is encouraged, even celebrated. In this world, education professionals will stand by her side against reluctant parents. (Some parents have encountered teachers who simply refuse to call their child by her given name.)

And you know what is coming. French predicts that when parents refuse to consent to the mutilations involved in so-called “treatment” their children will be removed from the home.

In French’s words:

We’re not far from the day when a child will be taken from a loving home simply because the parents refuse to believe that their little girl is actually a little boy. We’re already living in the days when telling your girl child that she shouldn’t undergo treatments that will render her infertile and painfully mutilated is deemed to be intolerant. And we refuse to believe that such behaviors are at all influenced by peer groups or social trends. Instead, your daughter is simply “trans,” just as she is either black or white.

6 comments:

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

"... God made a mistake..."

God??? What's God got to do with anything? Are you trying to impose your values on ME???"

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Guns are the preferred method of suicide. We should ban guns, and it will reduce instances of suicide. Yes, let's ban guns.

Boys feel they are girls. Feelings are very important. But the suicide rate is much, much higher for boys who actually become girls through gender reassignment surgery. So, by all means, let's encourage our boys to follow their feelings.

Our society is sick. Very sick.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

Since I identify as a British person, I must drive on the left side of the road. That's what British people do in Britain, and I believe Britain is where I live. No, no, no... you can no longer say the "wrong" side of the road, you bigot! And you must change all your traffic laws to accommodate me. These are my feelings, and feelings are important... that's MY truth, and you can't take it away from me. So all of you now have a duty to drive on the other side of the road to accommodate my feelings. Obama says so. And Target is accommodating me. And the City of San Francisco will pay for it. So there!

Trigger Warning said...

One of the most bizarre aspects of this "transgenderism" thing are reports of "married" lesbians with boy-children submitting the boys to hormone therapy to retard sexual maturation and dressing them up as girls.

Anyone even marginally familiar with modern psychopoopery knows that forced "feminization" of boys by sadistic adult women is a durable and reliable fantasy among the femdom demographic. "Panty-boys" is, I believe, the operative slang (but is perhaps archaic in the Age of Xe).

While there's nothing new about the feminization fantasy in fringe erotic literature, what is new is involvement of the State (e.g., CA) in giving lesbian couples little boys to play with.

Ares Olympus said...

French: We’re not far from the day when a child will be taken from a loving home simply because the parents refuse to believe that their little girl is actually a little boy.

That is a good fear from conservatives, although the current reality is more horrid, where self-declared gender-experts convince parents by mere persuasion that their child will only be happy if they believe "God made a mistake".

Life would be simpler if you could just take blood test or something and determine your sexual orientation and correct genders, in all their permutations.
http://nonbinary.org/wiki/List_of_nonbinary_identities

Even better, we could pretend such a test existed, and test the placebo effect in action - what happens when you try to convince a child they are the opposite gender their biology tells them. Although such experiments actually exist, in true cases where god or destiny fails to choose properly consistent sex by DNA and appearances.

Well, this case suggests genetics should win over appearances, while only being 1 of 2000 births suggests indeed a mania right now.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/intersex-children-pose-ethical-dilemma-doctors-parents-genital/story?id=13153068
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Jim Bruce was born with XY male chromosomes but ambiguous genitals. Doctors couldn't be sure if he had a large clitoris or a small penis and were convinced he could never live a "satisfactory life" as a man.

So shortly after his birth in 1976, Bruce's external organ and testes were surgically removed and he was raised as a girl.

He struggled for years, preferring "rough and tumble" play and being attracted to girls.

"I was unhappy, but it was really difficult to ask questions," said Bruce, now a 34-year-old writer from California.

When he was 12, Bruce was given female hormones so his body would feminize. Then, at 18, he prepared for a vaginoplasty -- "designed to allow me "to have sex with my husband."

But he knew something was wrong and, battling depression, sought his medical records when he was 19.

"I knew that I wasn't a girl," he said.

What Bruce discovered was horrifying. "I was sterilized at birth -- and no one ever told me," he said.

An estimated 1 in 2,000 children born each year are neither boy nor girl -- they are intersex, part of a group of about 60 conditions that fall under the diagnosis of disorders of sexual development (DSD).

Once called hermaphrodites, from the handsome Greek god who had dual sexuality, they are now known as intersex.

Standard medical treatment has been to look at the genitals, determine the gender and then correct it surgically.

But now, many are challenging the ethical basis of surgery, knowing that gender identity is complex, and doctors can sometimes get it wrong, not knowing how a child will feel about their gender assignment when they grow up.

Advocates argue that surgery is irreversible and can have tragic consequences. In Bruce's case, he has been rendered infertile.
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