The End of Transmania?

 

Was it the beginning of the end? We like to think that Wednesday’s Supreme Court decision, aka Skrebetti, will help put an end to child mutilation in America. Emily Yoffe reports in the Free Press: In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that states can restrict the ability of minors to get transition treatment. It’s long overdue. The Supreme Court found that restricting the ability of minors in Tennessee to medically transition “does not violate equal protection guarantees.” (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images; illustration by The Free Press) In a 6–3 decision handed down today, the Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the ability of the states to ban or restrict so-called “gender-affirming” medical care for minors. This landmark decision will help bring this medical scandal to a deservedly ignominious end. Dare we say that transmania, as I am wont to call it, was one of the craziest cultural moments in our history. It felt like a return to pagan practices of mutilating children, this time, supposedly in the name of science. Yoffee explains that it became a mania. Or, better yet, a social contagion: Since the earliest days of The Free Press, we have been documenting this movement that claimed it was providing lifesaving medical treatments to young people suffering from gender dysphoria—that is, distress at their biological sex. In less than two decades, what was once an extremely rare diagnosis became so common that at least 100 clinics in the U.S. opened to provide medical interventions intended to help children pass as members of the opposite sex. The number of young people in the West seeking such treatments has exploded. And, in a break with history, in which a small number of boys expressed the desire to change sex, this rise was fueled by adolescent girls, many who had never expressed previous gender distress. In the U.S., between 320,000 and 400,000 minors received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria or related diagnosis between 2017–2023, according to an analysis by the Manhattan Institute. The UK reported a twentyfold increase over a decade. Of course, the Supreme Court decision merely allows states to ban child mutilation. Some states, however, still allow the practice:

The Court’s ruling is narrow; it says that a state has the right to regulate the practice. States, mostly blue, that still allow youth gender transition aren’t affected. But the decision will likely lend weight to the arguments to people who want to end the practice nationwide. And it will likely help the legal efforts by “detransitioners”—that is, young people who say they were pressured into life-altering treatments they now regret – to get compensation. Surely more such lawsuits will now be filed. 

With any luck, the court decision will lead to more lawsuits against those clinics that still allow this barbaric practice:

Gender transition clinics will likely be under far more scrutiny: This Free Press story describes the cases of two such young women who were given prescriptions for testosterone after about a 30-minute appointment at Planned Parenthood.

Again, the contagion took hold in the scientific world, of all places.

The idea that biological sex is not a fixed reality but a social construct took hold so quickly that, seemingly overnight, children in preschool were being instructed they could easily change their sex if they felt they were in “the wrong body.” In June 2020, the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine ran an article championing the idea that when a baby is born we can’t know if the infant will come to “identify” as male or female, so we should only tentatively designate what the child is “assigned at birth.” The authors also said sex designations on birth certificates serve “no clinical utility.” This is only one of many examples of how profoundly this ideology has captured powerful institutions.

When we suggest that this might be the beginning of the end, we are obliged to remark with Yoffe that American physicians, by and large, support child mutilation. So much for their dedication to science:

The Court’s ruling notwithstanding, the U.S. medical establishment remains firmly behind the practice. 

In a more advanced countries, like England and Scandinavia, the practice has been banned:

Compare that to England, where a rigorous and independent report, the Cass Review, concluded that the evidence for pediatric transition is “remarkably weak.” Finland, Norway, and Sweden are among the other Western nations that have joined the UK in moving away from this treatment.

The ultimate horror concerns the simple fact that serious medical associations in America have embraced the practices:

Critics of the Supreme Court decision will argue that our major medical associations, from the American Academy of Pediatrics, to the American Medical Association, to the Endocrine Society, have all given support to this new branch of medicine. This is true. It is also true that these organizations or similar ones once supported lobotomies and eugenics. Just as that is a source of shame today, it is to be hoped that their vehement support of medically transitioning vulnerable young people will be a source of shame in the future. These medical societies have failed in their most basic duty of care to their patients by embracing a model that has so little evidence and such profound lifetime consequences.

Surely, it counts as a colossal failure, to the shame of American physicians.