Is the Tide Turning against Transmania?

In the world of mainstream media the New York Times article about treating transgender children caused something of a stir.

So much so that Andrew Sullivan suggested that the tide is beginning to turn against transmania, against the notion that anyone who doubts the truth of a trans belief must be canceled and destroyed. (Via Maggie's Farm) For once, it appears Abigail Shrier and J. K. Rowling are not alone, crying out in our cultural wilderness.

The issue defines an important front in this culture war. Trans activists want to have the right to brainwash and to mutilate children, without parents having any say in the matter.

We recall, to our chagrin, the Canadian man whose fourteen year old child was allowed by a court to begin transitioning, even when the parents objected. And we also recall that when said father refused to call said child by its new pronouns, he was thrown in prison for having committed a hate crime.

If this is not madness, the term does not mean anything.

Heaven only knows why it has become controversial to question the use of puberty blockers on adolescents, or even on pre-adolescent children. Why are we even discussing this.

Sullivan summarizes the Times article:

Some of the drug regimens bring long-term risks, such as irreversible fertility loss. And in some cases, thought to be quite rare, transgender people later “detransition” to the gender they were assigned at birth. 

Given these risks, as well as the increasing number of adolescents seeking these treatments, some clinicians say that teens need more psychological assessment than adults do.

I would think that, just as a general rule, minors making permanent, life-changing decisions should receive more psychological treatment than adults. How on earth is this not the default? In what other field of medicine do patients diagnose themselves, and that alone is justification for dramatic, irreversible medication?

Now, Sullivan continues to measure the simple fact, demonstrated by Brown university researcher Lisa Littman, that transgenderism has become a social contagion. One notes that Littman has been shut up and shut down. 

And, as Shrier herself pointed out most new transitioners are girls wanting to be boys. It's a war against girls, based on the notion that there is something wrong with being female.

The NYT doesn’t give you the data for the “increasing number” of transitions because it’s hard to find in the US. In the UK, however, the data show a 3,200 percent rise in adolescents seeking transition over a decade — 70 percent of whom are girls seeking to become boys, a break from historical norms where boys/men were much more likely to seek transition. 

Unfortunately, the Times does not offer any information about the increasing number of adolescent transitioners who change their minds and who want to return to their chromosomal gender.

Nor does the NYT give any data for “detransitioners.” But any brief look online suggests they are not exactly “quite rare.” They are, in fact, becoming a small but recognizable and tenacious part of the trans landscape. 

As Shrier pointed out, it’s the title of her book, giving puberty blockers to children produces irreversible damage.

And among the risks of puberty blockers that the NYT does not mention are neurological damage, bone-density loss, and a permanent inability to experience sexual pleasure. And in almost every case (98 percent in one report), puberty blockers are never reversed.

We agree with Sullivan that this has nothing to do with rights. It’s about gaslighting the culture, forcing people to believe something that has no real basis in fact. 

What the trans movement is now doing, after this comprehensive victory, is not about rights at all. It is about cultural revolution. It’s a much broader movement to dismantle the sex binary, to see biology as a function of power and not science, and thereby to deconstruct the family and even a fixed category such as homosexuality. You can support trans rights and oppose all of this. But they want you to believe you can’t. That’s the bait-and-switch. Don’t take it.

He calls it an assault on nature, on science and on bodily integrity.

The radicalism of this assault on nature, science and bodily integrity is not hidden. Just before Christmas, for example, New York Magazine ran a first-person cover-story that celebrated “an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina.”

His hatred of his natal femaleness stemmed in part, he says, from being groomed to “live as a sexually available cute-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies” as part of “patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation.” He insists that he has always had a “native penis, which some people call a clitoris.” Now, surgeons have carved out flesh from his thigh to create a simulacrum of a non-native dick:

Weeks before my procedure, I got a block of clay and sat meditating and molding by feel, letting my body answer. The resulting phallus was the exact size I’d been requesting. For days, I lay on the floor on and off in the sunlight coming into my living room, asking my ancestors and transcestors for guidance. Some people might kill for this kind of access and choice. Certainly many, many, many, many people have died in the fight for it. One night, I woke up from a dead sleep, and all I heard was: Take the big dick.

Just in case you were inclined to feel somewhat optimistic after reading about the Times article, this piece of nonsense, printed in New York Magazine, will wipe the optimism out of your mind. I have put the patient's words in boldface, for obvious reasons.