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.