The moral of this story is clear: failure to achieve informed consent is a failure on the part of the clinician, a failure of imagination and flexibility, not a recognition that some patients — whether because of age or mental illness or intellectual disability — will simply not be able to consent.
On WPATH’s private forums, clinicians occasionally express reservations about what they’re being expected to do, such as the social worker who wondered whether she should write letters for surgery for “several trans clients with serious mental illness… Even though these clients have a well-established trans gender identity, their likely stability post initiation of HRT [hormone-replacement therapy] or surgery is difficult to predict. What criteria do other people use to determine whether or not they can write a letter supporting surgical transition for this population?”
Her colleagues quickly put her in her place: “My feeling is that, in general, mental illness is not a reason to withhold needed medical care from clients,” an “affirming, anti-oppressive” gender therapist responded. “My assumption is that you’re asking this question because you’re taking seriously your responsibility to care for and guide your clients. Unfortunately, though, I think the broader context in which this question even exists is one in which we, as mental health professionals, have been put inappropriately into gatekeeper roles. I’m not aware of any other medical procedure that requires the approval of a therapist. I think requiring this for trans clients is another way that our healthcare system positions gender-affirming care as ‘optional’ or only for those who can prove they deserve it.”
Another gender clinician referred dismissively to the recommendation that mental illness should be “well controlled” before initiating hormonal and surgical interventions: “I am personally not invested in the ‘well controlled’ criterion phrase unless absolutely necessary… in the last 15 years I had to regrettably decline writing only one letter, mainly [because] the person evaluated was in active psychosis and hallucinated during the assessment session. Other than that, everyone got their assessment letter, insurance approval, and are living [presumably] happily ever after.” Everything hinges on that “presumably”.
For years, gender clinicians have reassured patients and parents that the evidence would eventually bear out the lofty promises of transition: that transition is life-saving; that psychotherapeutic approaches to gender distress don’t work and instead constitute unethical “conversion therapy”. But as the data starts to come in, transition appears unlikely to live up to these high expectations.
During the Ireland conference, researchers bracketed discouraging findings with upbeat statements of belief such as: “We all know gender-affirming care is effective.” A Swedish researcher who found that psychiatric hospitalisation increased after patients initiated puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones told the audience that she was “really concerned”, not about the results themselves, but “about how results will be interpreted” because, “as you all know, there are improved mental health outcomes following puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones” — even when the research can’t find those benefits.
“There’s an expectation that gender-affirming hormones will improve somebody’s mental health problems,” Johanna Olson-Kennedy, one of the leading US gender clinicians, said on the opening night of the Denver conference. Why? Because “they improve gender congruence”. In other words, if a patient doesn’t want breasts and a surgeon removes her breasts, the treatment was a success, even if her mental health deteriorates and even if she experiences regret down the road. Clinicians dismiss detransition as one of multiple possible “attenuations” of gender identity, alongside “elf”, “fairy”, and “friendly non-intimidating woman”. If a patient changes her mind later, clinicians can simply treat this new manifestation of gender incongruence by the same means: no harm, no foul.
Meanwhile, gender clinicians speak with remarkable frankness about overcoming their reservations, including the plastic surgeon who recounted the alarm he felt the first time a patient requested gender nullification surgery: an intervention that involves removing all external genitalia to create a “smooth” Ken doll-like appearance. But this surgeon soon conquered his hang-ups: he now performs “a lot” of these surgeries and promotes the procedure to his more cautious colleagues. These kinds of stories frame doubt as something to be vanquished, not investigated.
And if doubts persist, there’s always emotional blackmail. In Denver, an obese patient berated the plastic surgeons in the audience, telling them “you wouldn’t be hearing from me today” had the patient not found a surgeon willing to bend the rules and perform a double mastectomy: “I had contacted over a dozen plastic surgeons in the state of Colorado, all of them telling me they refused to do surgery on me. The surgery I so, so desperately needed so as to not kill myself. Only because of my BMI.”
So if a clinician dares to enforce standard medical practices or exercise her professional judgment, she may drive her desperate patients to suicide. The most questionable sessions end with no questions at all.
But what about the rest of us? What are we entitled to know about this bold new frontier in medicine? In Denver, public-relations specialists cautioned clinicians to spare reporters, policymakers, and parents the details of what “gender-affirming care” entails. In fact, even the use of the term “gender-affirming care” is discouraged: “When [people] hear it, they think ‘trans kids in the driver’s seat,’” health policy expert Kellan Baker said. “Many of us here, we all support trans kids in the driver’s seat because it’s their bodies, their lives. But when you think about folks who don’t know trans people, they are very scared by the idea that young people are making irreversible decisions and that nobody else has any oversight over these decisions. The term “medically-necessary care” is better, he said. “Essential medical care. Prescribed medical care.”
Presenters also recommended that gender clinicians avoid specifics. Avoid ages (“this care is highly individualised and age-appropriate”). Avoid giving information about the effects of puberty blockers and hormones. Avoid discussing the ins and outs of surgeries. In practice, “holding [the public’s] hands and helping [them] understand” looks more like covering their eyes and telling them whatever they need to hear to feel at ease. “The dinosaurs are scared,” Baker deadpanned.
This is how an entire field of medical practice became committed to virtuous obscurantism. Gender-affirming clinicians feel misunderstood by their critics. They don’t trust outsiders to put the work they do in the right light. There’s always a risk that someone will look at life-saving reconstructive chest surgeries for transmasculine minors and see the wrong thing: doctors performing breast amputations on troubled teen girls. Therefore, in order to defend the “life-saving” work they do, they must dissemble, obscure, or practise other forms of “heavenly deception”.
Critics of gender-affirming care fall somewhere along the spectrum of transphobia — with dinosaurs at one end, genocidaires at the other. In Ireland, a keynote speaker described “the gender-critical movement [as] a totalitarian and genocidal force that targets not just trans people but all institutions that uphold democracy and individual human rights”. In Denver, a state legislator announced that policymakers passing restrictions on youth gender transition “will kill children. Not with their own hands. But they will.”
The result of this Manichean worldview is that there is no possible dialogue with critics and no room for serious dissent within the movement itself: “If we are fighting amongst ourselves the forces of oppression have won,” as outgoing USPATH president Maddie Deutsch put it. No one, at any conference, discussed the risks and unknowns around puberty blockers and their possible effects on brain development, or the evidence that suggests blockers may change the course of a child’s life by turning what may have been a developmental phase into a permanent condition.
In one of the most extraordinary moments in Ireland, outgoing EPATH president Jan Motmans said: “We respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but we choose not to listen to it.” The auditorium burst into applause. But the speech they’re choosing not to listen to is the mounting evidence that something has gone wrong in the field of gender medicine.
The conviction of being on the right side of history is why criticism doesn’t stick. Clinicians don’t see themselves reflected in critiques. They are, for the most part, decent people, capable of feeling genuine horror when they accidentally say “hey guys” instead of “hey folks”. Their best impulses — their empathy, their humility in the face of what they don’t understand, their sincere desire to help distressed patients — have been hijacked by an ideological movement within medicine. In the process, they have lost sight of what they do.
This blindness sets in more or less the moment a patient sets foot in a gender clinic — when a distressed girl transforms into a “boy” in need of affirmation. Gender clinicians see empowerment in overlooking a patient’s limitations. They have come to believe that medical responsibility to their patients requires them to dismantle the guardrails that stand between vulnerable patients and life-altering interventions.
Nothing illustrates this more clearly than a session on “neurodiversity-affirming gender-affirming care” in Denver, which overflowed with suggestions for clinicians working with autistic patients to achieve their surgical goals. To make autistic patients more comfortable, clinicians should dim the lights, keep an assortment of fidget toys on hand, drop the small talk, don’t try to make eye contact, avoid open-ended questions. If a patient won’t — or can’t — speak, the clinician should ask for a thumbs up or thumbs down. A good gender clinician helps patients anticipate the sensory reactions they might have to injections, surgeries, stitches, blood, and pain.
Over and over again, I’m struck by the realisation that these clinicians have thought of everything. Everything, that is, except: what if they’re wrong?
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SubscribeWhat can one say but that these people are monsters. They are members of a sick cult that should never be allowed to practise medicine ever again.
We’ve been here before with medical profession. The “progressive” zeal with which clinicians took to undertaking lobotomies to treat mental illness – but who took little interest in what happened to their patients subsequently.
Only when others started to look at the human wreckage strewn behind those mangling people’s brains with ice picks, was the full horror apparent.
It just seems unbelievable that these catastrophic medical malpractice scandals can still happen in plain sight in the modern age.
When truth is abandoned, the devil (evil) takes control.
exactly ‘the sleep of reason brings forth monsters’
Monsters? Well, it’s easy to dehumanise them in that way, but it’s not helpful for us, for them or their patients.
I’d say this is a classic example of groupthink. Everyone agrees with everyone else, and they are reassured in their self-righteousness because they are so self-evidently nice people. They put their patients first, above everything else – even the medical rules. (But then they think the rules don’t apply to them, because they are nice people.) No one’s in if for the money (at least, not obviously so), or the glory.
Mondegreen puts her finger on exactly what is wrong: the absence of self-doubt.
From my experience, those who are (superficially) nice are the the greatest projectors in the greatest denial and the most likely to be controlled by their shadow side. Evil delights in parading as good. This is precisely why Jung believed it was imperative people delved deep inside themselves, identified and incorporated their shadow so at least if they were controlled by their dark side, they knew it, thereby reducing the chances of another holocaust (assuming most people would not knowingly do evil).
Unfortunately, there are very few people who are willing to look at their dark side. Leonard Cohen’s poetic “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” doesn’t always apply. It’s more like what R.D. Laing said: “You must break down to break out”.
I think this assessment must be right.
The idea of such well qualified, supposedly intelligent people really believing these ideas, and explain them as if they are genuinely true is mystifying.
However, this must have been embedded by the ‘professional’ bodies they are associated with.
Also, as long as you have a government that supported this, the worse it will become.
These people are suffering from hubris: they think they know better. To excuse them is to excuse others who as part of a group, maybe a nation, have committed atrocities with the blessing of the government.
Oh. I think there’s self-doubt, alright, but it’s denied and repressed. That’s why the practitioners of this industry are so defensive. I find it so strange why no one seems to question why there is this explosion of gender confusion. What’s it all about? Something in the water?
The confusion stems from confusing the terms sex and gender. Gender being associated with roles. Hence the stereotypical views of the opposite sex of the gender confused. It’s impossible to be born in the wrong body as you are born in the body you are born into. The belief in a gendered soul suggests the gender confused believe there is some power who infuses sexed bodies (male and female) with souls of varying degrees of masculinity and femininity and there is often a mismatch between the gendered soul and sexed body. Claims gender is assigned (randomly) at birth is just claiming the professional assigning the gender doesn’t know whether the newborn will prefer blue or pink in future years, when, in fact, the professional is just recording the sex of the newborn. The intention of propagandists is to confuse and confound in order to position themselves as experts to be deferred to.
David, money plays a huge part in this industry. May I suggest this article: https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/rich-white-men-institutionalizing-transgender-ideology/
Dr Mengele probably considered himself a nice person.
No. “Monsters” is correct. It’s nothing to do with self-righteousness. It IS utterly evil.
Auschwitz, the meaning of pain
The way that I want you to die
Slow death, immense decay
Showers that cleanse you of your life
Forced in like cattle, you run
Stripped of your life’s worth
Human mice, for the Angel of Death
Four hundred thousand more to die
Angel of Death
Monarch to the kingdom of the dead
Sadistic, surgeon of demise
Sadist of the noblest blood
Destroying without mercy
To benefit the Aryan race
Surgery with no anesthesia
Feel the knife pierce you intensely
Inferior, no use to mankind
Strapped down, screaming out to die
Angel of Death
Monarch to the kingdom of the dead
Infamous butcher
Angel of Death.. etc etc
please note that aside from a few “POC” hangers on all ts advocates are guerros
Not all of the lobotomies were done to treat mental illness, especially for women. Francis Farmer was a beautiful actress who drove the directors and producers crazy. She demanded that she would only take roles if she played interesting, complex women. Add to that, she was a loud and proud communist. They needed her to shut up. She was lobotimized against her will. And we all know what happened to Rosemary Kennedy. She, too, was hard to control.
While Frances Farmer was undoubtedly treated appallingly, she was not lobotomised. That was fiction – Wikiipedia and other sources online all say the same, and the person who wrote, as fact, that this had happened later revealed that he had made it up.
Thank you for that information. I’m glad it wasn’t true.
The movie about Frances Farmer called ‘Frances’ was very moving.
Most aren’t monsters. Idiots, deluded, naive perhaps.
Not monsters.
But guided by monsters.
As a member of the legal profession my deepest regret is that I’ll probably be retired by the time the great lawsuit bonanza that will relieve all these ‘doctors’ of everything they have, right down to their underwear. comes along.
But it will come too late for many.
When the lawsuits begin, and some have already started, I will be cheering on the victims and their advocates. What these so-called medical and clinical professionals have done in the name of gender ideology is nothing less than criminal.
So will I, Andrea!
Hugh, I too cannot wait for that great reckoning! As I am only in my 40s, I imagine that I will live to see the day. I am not a member of the legal profession, but I will be a committed spectator.
I have made that comparison many times, even here on Unherd.com. I still believe it’s valid, but there is another element to this: a desire to change society, to play God; to upend facts, logic, and biology. As dreadful and devastating as lobotomies were, the motivation was to heal. As far as I can tell, the goal was not to create Frankenstein-like creatures and to mould the world to fit a perverted ideology.
I’ve likened it to the epidemic of Multiple Personality Disorder diagnoses in the US in the 90s (brilliantly chronicled by Joan Acocella in ‘Creating Hysteria’).
This was a fantasy promoted by medics and therapists that had specialist units springing up almost overnight. Thousands of women had their lives, and those of their families, ravaged.
The mayhem was only stalled when insurance companies stopped funding ‘treatments’ that never ended and made patients worse.
Presumably some of these ‘professionals’ believe that ‘affirming’ clients in their delusions is a kindness of sorts. But how any Ethics Committee in any area of medicine ever sanctioned the mutilation of healthy bodies is a complete mystery.
Once you’ve cut off someone’s perfectly healthy d*ck & balls, or sliced out their perfectly healthy uterus, then you don’t have any choice but to spend the rest of your life convincing yourself that it was a clinical virtue not a barbaric insanity. I have no doubt at all that every single person at these conferences does think about ‘being wrong’. But they back away from the idea in terror, fast, because…what else can they do? This is a binary proposition. It’s either medicine, or it’s butchery, to pump healthy bodies full of chemicals and perform amputations on healthy functioning organs.
This period of insanity will end soon, and it will end with thousands of permanently broken young men and women, and their bereft and guilty parents, and a conspicuous silent void where once the arrogant, narcissistic advocates of this grotesque cult could be found.
Nah. It will soon end right enough – when the geriatrics who are terrified of everything they don’t understand die out.
You won’t be missed, Jackie boy.
You sound exactly like the sort of psychopath who wouldn’t give a second thought to performing a double mastectomy on a physically healthy 16 year old girl. But would Marx and Lenin really be proud of you?
What a thoroughly unpleasant individual you are. Narcissistic, neurotic and deeply inadequate. I would actually start to pity you, but you have enough self pity as it is.
Incel, perhaps? Still living in the basement of Mommy’s house?
Or it’s just a wind-up.
Bingo, Liz. Please let us all simply ignore himherthemit.
Is there nothing so utterly, insanely stupid and evil that you won’t defend it in the name of your demented progressive bullshit?
Chortle, chasing the flagellating frisson of accumulated down-clicks again I see, ‘Champagne Socialist’. It’s one way of standing out, I guess. Farting loudly during a funeral is another good ‘un. But OK…I’m bored and can’t sleep, I’ll bite. Who’s ‘terrified’, though? You’re the one cowering behind an e-hood. Why the need to play titular dress-ups? Presumably you hate your natural-born name or summink. Come on, troll, join the big leagues, whack your real name up there in lights. We all know you wannabe a SM Influencer, deep down. Chortle.
You can’t troll me, fellah. (You’re a bloke, of course). Why, I’m a cheerfully earnest comedic straight man with not a shred of arch internet irony in m’bones. Your tone and (thin) content is however a useful launch-pad-of-convenience, calling to mind as it does the nastier end of the ‘trans lobby’: a bullying, misogynist, reactionary men’s sub-movement of repressed-gay narcissists who closet their homophobic self-loathing in frocks and lipstick. It’s a tiny, dysfunctional, aggressive and disproportionately policy-powerful cohort which has thoroughly hijacked the entire non-orthodox-sexuality rights agenda, plus a good chunk of the feminist one, too. Like all vindictive men’s movements, it deploys passive-aggressive victimhood, usually anonymous and drenched in dubious and untestable ‘factual’ assertions, and all laced with just enough physical intimidation to stampede weak and opportunistic politicians, public health officials and media figures into policy expedience and the neutered language of the corporate platitude. Well done, t’lads!
Obviously I can have no idea whether or not you’re part of that bulldozing little gang yourself, Champ Sock, but these angry, unhappy and usually sexually flailing very few dud men are the real gender-and-sexuality stereotyping (through caricature) ‘dinosaurs’ in this debate, and they are encouraging and abetting the premature chemical and surgical mutilation of our vulnerable young, including legal minors incapable of consent, as a projected expression of their own unexamined self-disgust and civic impotency. They drown out every sane and reasonable voice in this debate, including those trans humans who, in fully mature adulthood, have made the private, properly consenting and genuinely autonomous decision, after much thought and sustained psychosocial agony and in full awareness of all the clinical implications, to alter their born biological states to live as their non-natural gender, including for some with chemicals and surgery. This even smaller ‘trans community’ cohort have had any chance of living the dignified, equal and societally loved lives that is their right contemptuously trashed, by their unwanted press-ganging by bullies who claim transgendered kinship, into contrived fights they have no need or desire to join much less win, such as absurdly pointless demands to compete in women’s sports, manspread their way into every last woman’s space that exists, and even steal the entire language of being female. The small and fast-dwindling number of biological women who think they support this odiously misogynist bullying are stupid, weak and/or merely cynical. Some, too, are socially dysfunctional self-loathers. I wish them all well but they are the last allies the LGBQ lobbies or feminism need.
Now these naturally are all merely my subjective views on ‘gender issues’, Champ, which future history might indeed reveal as dinosaurian. I’ll be dead so I guess I won’t care much about identity mislabels by that stage, will I. But I do hope my opinions continue to inspire your (fairly inept, frankly) trollery in the here and now. They’re intended to. I’m looking for an argument, matey. I don’t want a ‘liberal, reasonable, middle ground consensus’ with you. Because I think your ilk are gutless, destructive, full of sh*t tyre-kickers. The ‘trans lobby’ I describe above couldn’t care less about the genuinely gender dysphoric. Contra, most of the civilised, progressive world, which…does. Meaning we want our health legislators and expert clinicians to take the professional time and care to make sure they f**king diagnose this very very rare human affliction accurately, before resorting to potentially counter-productive, irreversible clinical treatment options.
Once they start doing that again, based on proper medical best practice, my alternative historical instinct, as I noted much more pleasantly and briefly just up the page, is that the healthy body poisoning & butchering cult you evidently want regarded as unchallengeable ‘first option’ clinical orthodoxy when it comes to addressing gender uncertainty in the still-formative young, will be re-recognised by all sane and decent grown-ups, with in many cases belatedly dawning regret and horror, as the barbaric opposite of proper medical best practice that many of us have long regarded it to be.
While the historical jury does remain out, Champ, I think that voices of your kind in this debate, whether actively engaged in ‘trans advocacy’ or (more likely, and even more risibly), guilty merely of craven path-of-least-resistance faux-progressive acquiescence (and occasional fits of anonymous internet church-fartery), need to be argued into f**king oblivion, or at least a million miles away from any place of influence over practical health policy, and kept firmly there.
Alas, there being no omnipotent umpire these days, I guess we’ll both have to troll and counter-troll merrily away, and wait to see which gang of humans historically prevails, won’t we. Call me a dinosaur – label me whatever identity you like, Champ, your ilk clearly have a taste and flair for it – but I’m with those who think that chemically altering and surgically cutting bits off physically normal, healthy bods is, usually, not the way to make the peeps living in them feel happier, be healthier and engage with the material world we all share with a fuller, richer and fairer sense of their own included humanity.
Cheers,’Champagne Socialist’.
You really are garbage. Can’t wait for the civil war.
All Marxists should be ki11ed.
I bet you found that really funny to write. There is a place for you and everybody else here knows where it is.
I always like to mention that the country in the world performing most gender reassignment surgeries is… Iran
Ah yes … Iran – Girls who become boys remain girls so that’s OK: boys who become girls are … well … girls so that’s OK. Certainly reduces the executions for homosexual acts.
Yes, I do wonder if a lot of ‘reassignment’ has more to do with gay confusion and family/societal pressure than true dysphoria. although one of the biggest factors for teens is the whole attention thing. Adults who think teenagers have the same reasoning abilities and motivations as themselves are foolish indeed. I would bet that very few practioners in the gender business have raised their own teenagers.
A Harvard study several years ago found that something like 95% of “trans” teens outgrew those feelings by the end of puberty, and many of them became happy homosexual adults. This absolutely is a removal/erasure of gay kids; the difference between Iran and the West is that in Iran they know it, and openly acknowledge it.
It is a sterilisation programme designed to weed out the autistic and homosexual from the population. I have zero proof to back up my theory.
I have three transsexual (M2F) friends who grew up in the USA Bible Belt in the 50s and 60s. Two of them had pastors for fathers. The other grew up in a religious family. When they came out, they were sent to South America to become “the women they should have been born as”. They met in Scotland in the late 60s. As they say now as slightly deranged auld biddies ( their description not mine), they would have been happy auld queens if circumstances had been different. They are honest about who and what they are and decry those who push transition on children and young people who are confused about who and what they are. They also support women who are gender critical. Why? They know what life could have been like if laws and attitudes had been different. Nobody in the trans movement wants to hear from them as they will not pander to the myth that men can become women. .
I find what you have written to be very confusing.
It’s not that confusing – it’s about a group of men who were ‘affirmed’ early on when they were in the midst of their delusion & encouraged to believe not only that they should ‘become’ women, but that they actually could. And now they realise that they were gay & should have been allowed to just be that. And children should never be led down this path.
Can’t be much fun for them living in Scotland though, the way they’re erasing gay people these days…
Why? It seems perfectly clear to me. He knows three men who had cosmetic surgery to make them look like women, and who quite rightly oppose such treatment being inflicted on children.
Almost like a surreal dream. And why Scotland? Am I the only one thinking some sort of space/time portal might have been involved?
It was. Is it still, though? There are about 200 gender clinics in the US now; ten years ago there were 3.
Sounds like it’s quite the industry. It must be making huge profits one way and another.
What??!!! That’s news to me, I will check it out.
This is not the beginning of the end. How can it be when the entire third sector with its titans of human rights are completely enthralled by the ideology and furiously fighting their enemies? The media, academia, celebrities, medical establishment are fully behind these organisations. The SPLC released this hysterical document 2 days ago.
https://www.splcenter.org/captain/foundations
We can only hope that one day at least some of these fools recognize that the trans movement is more anti-LG–is certainly doing far more active harm to gays and lesbians–than any fantasy of the “right-wing zealot” they can imagine.
And it’s hilarious that they talk about “pseudoscience” when there is zero science to support *any* of the claims or beliefs of trans advocates/the trans movement.
(I also like how they describe Dr. Paul McHugh as being “affiliated with” a conservative group, and quote a few of his statements, without mentioning that he became “affilited” with those groups and made those statements after running the gender-transition clinic at Johns Hopkins for years, and realizing through analysis of the clinic’s data that they were not actually helping people, but were harming them. But sure, ignore all of that and act like Dr. McHugh is just a bigot with no personal experience of knowledge in the subject.)
The entire Third Sector do not support trans ideology. I have worked in what is called the Third Sector most of my life and the majority of organisatiins I know in Scotland at least, have no truck with gender ideology and the trans movement. Where I work now, we dont use pronouns in our emails and very few of those organisations we comnunicate with allow their staff to out their pronouns in their correspondence. They are not allowed to wear rainbow lanyards or any other thing that says “I support the alphabetti soup” brigade. We do regular training on inclusion and diversity and only once ir twice have we been asked why we dont spend more time on the “vulnerability of trans people”. Our answer is “how are they vulnerable as a group?”. None who ask the question can answer ours. That is all the answer they need.
Hallelujah that’s good to hear! I recently moved from Higher Education to the third sector and boy what a relief. No pronouns in emails or the even worse as part of their name online. Working with much more disadvantaged groups but they just get on with it instead of the performative sheep like element.
How very refreshing!
Welcome to the post-truth world. So certain in their beliefs that they are unwilling to expose them to possible falsification by confounding evidence. The caring totalitarians.
Agreed. In this instance, I’m a proud dinosaur, and they are insane unicorns.
It’s of a piece with saying that the economy is doing just fine, or that political opponents are “dangerous extremists,” or that the Biden family hardly ever does any influence peddling at all.
One would think Ukraine has Russia on its knees, that we’ll soon be dead from warmer weather, but can be saved by electric cars and windmills, that immigration policies, the free market, & policing are irredeemably racist, that discrimination is in fact diversity, equity, and inclusion, and countless other postmodern reframings.
Reality is completely malleable, consisting entirely of nothing more than an infinite and utterly amorphous lexicon.
Therefore, some women have penises.
Did you manage to get all your pet peeves in?!
Excellent essay. Thanks for the up close and personal account of the derangement that has gripped gender clinicians.
These people are just a subset of cosmetic surgeons. Once upon a time they’d have been arguing that a teenager should be allowed to do what they like with their face, no matter how happy or upset it may make them. Trans based surgeries are just a new market for the industry, needed now that Ozempic is trashing the weight loss focused customer base.
Doctors and surgeons – who want to actually heal people – are not at these conferences.
Exactly.
Good article describing what these so-called doctors are. I’m interested in understanding why they are like this. What worldview leads these clinicians to think that cosmetic surgery is the correct treatment for a mental illness? I get the impression that it stems from the belief that there is no objective truth or reality; instead each of us has our own personal truth based on what we believe. If someone believes something that is creating cognitive dissonance because it flagrantly contradicts the reality they can’t help but see, then reality must be changed to align with their beliefs. I struggle to see how this can be helpful to people in the long run.
Getting out of this situation is going to be difficult. I know lots of ordinary people who agree with the ideas of gender ideology. They lazily equate gender dysphoria with homosexuality and see gender reassignment as enabling children to become their “authentic selves”. In their minds, questioning gender ideology is no different than homophobia. The trans-lobby was very clever to propagate the false idea that a non-affirming approach to gender dysphoria is the same as gay conversion therapy. As long as there is this reservoir of well-meaning but ultimately stupid people who go along with this fantasy, it will be difficult to change course. These people think they are being compassionate, and we see how thoughtless compassion more-often-than-not results in disaster. I feel sorry for the children who suffer as a result. They really need help and they are being betrayed.
Nice coining of the phrase Thoughtless Compassion!
“They are, for the most part, decent people……” States the author, referring to the clinicians, (whose work I admire and respect) but on this she is clearly wrong. No decency here. Deluded people, greedy people, devoid of any sense of true patient care.
Though they are people convinced of their own decency.
As were the butchers at auschwitz-birkenau.
I think she is perhaps describing how they see themselves. Maybe the WPATH gathering is something they all need to do, to convince themselves and reinforce their belief in extreme surgery as a cure rather than as permanent damage.
They do protest too much, methinks.
The evidence for this isn’t just solipsistic, onanistic gatherings like this, but in the hysteria of “we have to remove this teenager’s testes, or (s)he will commit suicide.”
But there is nothing specifically trans in this. It is based in central woke ideas of multiple personal “truths”, the trumping of reality by lived experience, and the abandonment of any idea of normality except as a form of oppression (as in “heteronormativity”).
The real questions are how such ideas – essentially fringe ideas, belonging to fringe groups – became so mainstream, when this happened, and is there any route back?
can be traced back to Thomas Paine (Rights of Man) and the French revolution and probably even further to Machiavelli. In the 20th century, Gramsci’s version of Marxism, Laing with Death of the Family, and writers such as Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Foucault, and others I can’t remember the names of!
I’m with back to Rouseau and the enlightenment figures, but what would be the philosophical from Machiavelli. I’m genuinely fascinated by the lineage of ideas.
“The conviction of being on the right side of history” is a common characteristic of many idealists (Hitler, Staline, Beria, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Mao,…)
Don’t forget Truss
You appear to have chosen the one example who is being proved right through having NOT been allowed to proceeed with their ideas.
That weathervane of a politician would’ve said whatever kept her in power, letting someone else take the fall.
Those who believe they are on the right side of history are playing God, as for mere mortals, the future is hidden behind a veil. Though holding onto truth and rejecting that which reasoned debate exposes as false is probably a better strategy for those who are concerned with positioning themselves on the right side of history. Except contemporary historians claim their is no truth in history, that history is written by the victors (history is basically propaganda and they themselves are propagandists), so it is possible that the pro-transgender mob will triumph and write history (propaganda) and will consequently be on the right side of written history (propaganda).
They seem to be a psychotic sub-medical cult who have come out of the culture of plastic surgery, but whose ‘positive transgressions’ have now been affirmed by a mainstream culture that obsesses about ‘mental health’ and the validity of every single individual who pathologises suffering from the experience of not encountering perfection in their lives.
That’s a heck of an excellent paragraph
One name comes to mind – Josef Mengele!
The Island of Dr. Moreau
I am certain that he would be an enthusiastic proponent of these experiments if he were alive today!
Dr Transmengele will see you now.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=transmengele
There is a tsunami of de-transitioners coming. It’s going to be very interesting how this plays out.
another lawyers’ gravy train I suspect
If you lurk on places like Detrans you will see that there is already a large torrent. Most of them are female sexual abuse victims in their early 20s that spent too much time on Tumblr, Deviantart and Twitter and so learned to hate themselves, the colour of their skin and their sexuality. There are thousands of these people.
Oh yes! If I were a savvy barrister, I would place advertisements looking for victims whose lives have been destroyed and offering my services as their legal representative.
In the United States, where juries often award victims vast sums of money, there are a number of lawsuits underway, and I for one hope that proverbial heads will roll! The ideologically motivated abuse and mutilation of vulnerable patients has all the hallmarks of medical malpractice, which needs to be dealt with accordingly.
https://thehill.com/opinion/4284777-matthews-here-come-the-gender-detransitioner-lawsuits/amp/
and
https://www.dailywire.com/news/exclusive-american-academy-of-pediatrics-named-in-bombshell-detransitioner-lawsuit
I can’t help but feel that any clinician so extremely defensive of performing what amounts to sexual mutilation upon people who are unable to defend their own interests, must be doing this because they themselves are sick.
I agree with you, John. No disrespect for the profession as a whole, but everyone I’ve known that’s become a ‘therapist’ has had their own mental issues. The fact that, during training, they had to attend mandatory sessions with other therapists or psychiatrists speaks volumes. It’s a case of ‘physician, heal thyself’.
It is quite common, yes, for people who become therapists to do so because the first exposure they ever had to therapy was through their having need of it themselves. I think we have to be fair here though, and allow that in general, such people become therapists because the therapy actually worked and they are no longer unwell once they qualify and start practising.
I’m referring here to the possibility that any clinician who regards it as acceptable to perform permanent sexual mutilation upon people who do not possess the ability to give – or withhold – adult consent, could well be doing so out of an undiagnosed active mental disorder, which is entirely different.
The mental gymnastics that they perform in order to earn a few quid are extraordinary.
Michael Shellenberger (Genspect, November) stated this is his next focus and lawsuits are now incoming. This will bring a dose of sunlight to this subject. Will it improve anything? Well in the UK following the Cass review and Tavistock debacle, presciptions for puberty blockers have gone UP. I believe there is a philosophical shift happening in medecine aligned ti the transhumanism/ meat suit approach to himanity. I don’t believe this ends well.
Yes. You’re not alone in seeing a big historical coincidence of transhumanist ideas with gender modification. As if the one is opening the gates to the other. Nor is it the first time that an ostensibly left wing ideology has opened the doors to the next phase of capitalist development – making things acceptable that would once have been resisted.
I’m resistant to conspiracy theories, but it’s hard not to see some sort of historical mechanism at work here.
Nicely put. I also see it in the frameworks as well. What is the WHO pandemic treaty and mass vaccination programmes if not mechanism. Same approach in agriculture which is foundational to health I am sufficiently concerned that I have gone back to “food as medecine”, second opinions, and reading the scientific papers (although the latter increasingly problematic). A combination of sociopaths rising to the top and “on the spectrum” tech bros does not inspire confidence. Planning for the worst and hoping for the best.
There IS a conspiracy. It all boils down to money.
https://suedonym.substack.com/p/inauthentic-selves-the-modern-lgbtq
Is “himanity” a new category? If so there should be “hermanity” as well.
I can just about buy into the idea of a woman in a man’s body, or a gender identity which is at odds with one’s sex. Even someone whose sense of self is weak and vacillating. But surely someone who wants the above simply has something wrong with them mentally by definition. I would argue further that their enablers have something wrong with them too. A belief that all moral qualms are soluble in a thick solution of dollars.
Hmmm. I actually can see the desire to remove all sexuality as more rational than changing sexuality. For many people, young and old, the incredibly sexually transactional world in which we live is frighteningly barren of emotional connection and overtly hostile to those who don’t meet the current standard whatever it may be. When bombarded by the hyper-sweepstakes savagery of the social media environment where many of these feelings gestate the idea of taking oneself out of the competition altogether must seem attractive. Particularly to those who know, either consciously or not, that they don’t fit in, so their chances of winning are nil. And this survival flight reaction shows up in many other places as well (excessive gaming, hermetic substance abuse, hiding in one’s parent’s basement as a 35-year-old, etc.). I completely agree “that their enablers have something wrong with them” when instead of helping these people develop tools and perspective so they can achieve personal success they just hack and chop and then proclaim, ‘Job Well Done!”.
But you can opt out of the sexual rat race – if that’s how you see it – without have your bits removed so you look like a sexless doll.
In other times, they’d have ended up in monasteries or convents.
So true.
If you research gender nullification surgery, you will quickly learn that it is not about evading sexuality altogether. Patients requesting this are male, and retain their prostate. I’ll leave you to figure out the rest.
Well, they need the prostate to be healthy, don’t they?
Well said.
What isnt mentioned is that many of the WPATH leading lights are trans themselves and are very invested in creating more trans children rather than less. These trans clinicians are never challenged because it is political and career suicide to do so. A literal case of the insane running the asylum.
Or the wolf guarding the hen house.
“The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” by Edgar Allen Poe. It was written as an absurd and dark comedy tale; now, we’re living it.
To want a “smooth” Ken doll-like appearance is to want to be nonsexual, androgynous. So that’s a new letter to add to the alphabet folk.
“We respect everyone’s freedom of speech, but we choose not to listen to it.”
Brilliant comment – I shall be employing it myself a lot in the future – but probably in a very different context………..
Excellent article, thank you, if absolutely horrifying.
If you had attended a symposium for extremist members of the Spanish Inquisition, it would probably not have felt all that different. It must have been troubling being a heretic hiding in plain sight among the true believers.
To be fair, that’s the one thing they’re saying that actually makes sense. Freedom of speech necessarily comes with the right to respond in any reasonable way to other people’s speech, including not responding at all.
It’s a stupid basis upon which to excuse oneself from the requirement to be able to defend one’s beliefs and actions of course: freedom of speech doesn’t mean you get away with acting irrationally or with harm to others.
You raise an interesting point. I think there is a world of difference between the Voltairean approach “I disagree with what you say, etc.” and saying “I am not listening to you” which is just immature and frankly rude. Particularly if you set yourself up as occupying the moral high ground. Not responding is OK – not listening is not.
But you can’t not listen if someone is speaking to you unless you use earplugs. So it’s actually not responding.
I think the traditional method of not listening is to put your fingers in your ears and say “La la la not listening” very loudly.
Seriously, though, you are quite wrong. On many occasions my wife will be speaking to me and I only notice when she says “You ‘re not listening are you?” That is why every husband has the ability to repeat the last five words of his wife’s last statement, without having any idea what preceded those five words!
I think in this case it’s more that this isn’t a freedom of speech issue at all. What’s at issue here is whether the actions of these people are right or not, and whether those actions ought to be legal or not. External criticism of these people’s actions is being deflected with this vague reference to freedom of speech, but in fact it’s nothing more than a poor deflection having no relevance to the real issue.
Good analogy.
God, I wish this piece could be published in the NY Times, The Times UK, and every other major news outlet. People need to know the reality of this sick cult.
“a good gender clinician knows how to secure consent even in the trickiest cases”
These malignant narcissists have to be stopped.
No one is trans
The problem is that this statement is true, but a vast medical industry, the gender clinician, does not believe that this statement is true. More importantly, the gender clinicians make a huge amount of money due to their fealty to this false belief.
There are variations on this theme, but here is one formulation:
If a person asks me to stab them, and I severely injure them whether physically or mentally, do I have a defence in that they said it is OK and signed a waiver form?
There is a real conflict of interest in that the doctors who are going to benefit financially should not be the ones to decide if surgery or hormone tratment is really necessary.
Maybe – but that applies to pretty much all surgery. Years ago four times as many Germans had their appendixes removed as brits. Why? Money for the surgeons.
That’s an interesting point.
There was a case in the news a few years ago about a ‘body modification practitioner’ who cut off a customer’s ear at his request. Full deliberated consent by an adult. As I recall, there were no medical complications from the procedure.
Practitioner said he was only doing what the customer wanted (as with tattoos, piercings, and so on)., and thought he had been acting legally.
He was sent to prison.
Difference from what’s going on in the article (with minors, note) is what exactly?
There was also this case: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/04/germany.lukeharding
Apologies for linking to the Grauniad, but it was the first link that popped up.
Isn’t this a more deranged version of the vaccination programs which we are still being told were ‘safe and effective’, when they were clearly neither.
How will we all ever face up to the realisation that it was all a charade (with some practitioners doing it with the best intentions) and deal with the fallout?
Austrian health officials have now published data for the whole country showing that Covid boosters make no difference whatsoever to outcomes even for the very old. So the whole thing has been an enormous but very profitable scam driven by fear and greed.
Surely something is very wrong with our societies when the same pattern emerges repeatedly in different circumstances.
These ‘decent’ people belong in either a lunatic asylum or prison.
Involuntary lifetime commitment to the Insane Asylum. With “meds” administered on the hour by Nurse Ratchet
Thank you for the giggle. I like your approach.
This will only stop when the lawsuits pile up and insurance stops covering gender medical interventions for minors—a prospect that seems likely.
But I’m also concerned about irreversible medical decisions being made by “adults” —college students in their late teens. It seems to be a trend among young women to identify as trans men and obtain testosterone from student health centers on US campuses. Parents have nothing to say about it because these students are nominally adults. They are then obtaining double mastectomies, presumably covered by their parents’ insurance. These young women have no experience yet in the real world. I foresee a huge wave of regret coming for them as well.
A kid may say he feels like a woman but how can he know what being a woman feels like?
Also feelings are transient. Being a woman is a fact not a feeling. If being a woman was dependent on feeling like a woman, when the feeling ceased, the woman would would cease to exist.
The level of self-delusion and self-aggrandizement in all of these wings of the far-left cult is astonishing…It’s a perverse gnostic form of utopianism that insists that their secret path (available only for those in the know – the good people) will lead to a humanistic redemption. They are all saints without a God. From here it’s a very short way to the Killing Fields.
And yet the more transparent their duplicity and ideological blindness the greater the commitment of those vengeful humanistic evangelists. What exactly would it take for American and Canadian doctors to open the doors to an honest discussion? What exactly would it do for Harvard faculty to recognize short comings not only of their CEO, but the process that led to her coronation?
And why the hell to conservatives – Pierre Poilievre, Rishi Sunak, most mainstream Republicans, Fianna Gail – refuse to kick down this open door. It’s already hanging off its hinges….What is wrong with them? What are they scared of?
What a horror show, and congratulations to the courageous author for exposing this grotesque assault on human nature. These fools have really swallowed the notion that “identity” comes from within, emerging like a glorious blossom in victims heroic enough to translate their confusion and distress into the sparkling sunshine of the liberated soul. Butler has a lot to answer for. The transgenderist scandal will certainly come to be compared with the fashion for lobotomisation from the 1930s to the 1960s. Meanwhile, what can be done to criminalise those who profit from such a horrible, immoral travesty of medical care?
Sadly, like every profession, it’s all about money.
Once upon a time, there was even focus on people who wanted their limbs amputated because they were healthy other than their belief they should be amputees. Has that business thrived? I’d assume so under these conditions.
This article calls into suspect the entire role of any physician. They like to laugh at patients who Google their diagnosis, but it seems to be what’s taken at face value. If I Google my issue and go in with a treatment plan, they must obey.
But I guess the plastic surgery and pharmaceutical professions paved the way for this. It’s sure easy to be a doctor now when patients come in with a laundry list of what they need. You don’t even need a blood test to get medication for issues you may not even have. What a scam!
What classes do physicians take these days? Do they study medicine or do they study sales techniques?
I’m embarrassed this is where medicine has taken us. The world’s ills could probably have been solved by now, but instead, we’re to act as our own diagnosticians without the paycheck, and doctors and pharma reap the rewards.
They study “social justice”, I’m told.
Thank you, Eliza, for this important article.
Lawsuits will fix this. In a few short years all those people who were incapable of making rational, objective decisions about their own mutilation, will be part of a wave of lawsuits. It’s started already.
In the 90’s there was a fad for diagnosing “repressed memory syndrome” which “uncovered” parental sexual abuse. The first major lawsuit put an end to the diagnosis.
This will coincide with many public figures/politicians/celebs frantically deleting old tweets in support of “gender-affirming healthcare,” when the reality of what that means becomes more obvious.
The Internet doesn’t forget, and I personally have hundreds of screenshots to ensure that their deletion spree will not have the desired effect. I believe in accountability and justice. Strange concepts in today’s world, I know.
In a speech to his officers carrying out the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler said that theirs was a terrible burden that many people would not understand if they knew, but future generations would appreciate that what they were doing was right and necessary.
Some gay activists have observed that the trans ideology is embarked on a genocide of gay people, by preventing the young who exhibit such tendencies from growing up “that way.” That is somewhat hyperbolic, but not entirely wrong.
I will also observe that in the Islamic Republic of Iran, being gay will get you killed, but as the Koran is silent on the subject, changing your sex is approved.
No comment!!!!
Thank you for writing and sharing this. It demonstrates again for me, how people can be led to act in ways that are contrary to their natural reactions.
How horrific.
I am not an Evangelical Christian, but I have serious concerns about this movement. The fact that these extremists consider people with questions as extremists on the other side, is very telling. There is not moderate ground.
And wait a minute….Eunuchs of the past WANTED to be castrated?
Huh. I’m always the last to know.
I think it’s because they could then keep the beautiful singing voice they had as a young boy and have a career in the church choir.
‘When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’
G.K. Chesterton
Nothing’s changed.
That observation is not true.
It is also all too easy to see it in the opposite – after all, if you are willing to believe in things you’ve never seen, that no one has ever see; in fantastical ideas for which there is not a miligram of evidence, and which are curiously conveniently useful as emotional reassurance and political/power machinations….well, that really sounds like you are capabale of believing in anything.
Good article
When a conservator works on an oil painting to clean and repair a masterpiece whatever they do has to be reversible.
And when any patient it choosing to have voluntary surgery or other treatment which changes them- it would be best if what they chose was reversible.
Only someone very stupid or worse ever enters into any course of action that has no exit route .
They do it for money . Thats it .
Money, influence, acceptance…all forms of power.
I think “demonic” sums up the whole situation.
Angel of Death – copywright J Hanneman et al – kind of sums up these “clinicians”
They sound like a certain Austrian painter ranting and raving in a bunker before reality begins to set in and the phantom divisions are moved off the map in the war planning room.
Wow, top 10 most important pieces I’ve read on the subject
The transgender phenomenon is what happens when a mental illness becomes a civil rights movement. The physicians who participate in this madness are in effect criminals and belong in jail.
As a poet says, we pine for what is not.
Yes, it’s sweet yearnng. That’s the artistic temperament.
These people are just as bad as the witch hunters of old. Their ideological fervour is on par with the Spanish Inquisition. In their quest to do “good” and to “help” they will continue to destroy bodies, minds, and lives.
Thank you for this important article. I hope you can get similar into the mainstream media with bigger circulation.
I cannot really believe that a doctor was able to say “I’m not aware of any other medical procedure that requires the approval of a therapist” with a straight face and clear conscience. Surely all medical treatment requires approval/advice of the appropriate practitioner. Tragically these specialists are deranged.
Yes, they are deranged, but also motivated by money and power. Allow me to quote from an article which was recently published on thehill.com:
“Gender-affirming care is becoming big business. Revenue from sex reassignment surgery is currently about $2.5 billion, and is estimated to grow to $5 billion by 2030. And that’s just for surgery.”
I have no words to describe these people. Mengele is all I can come up with.
When discussion ends and critical thinking is driven from the room science is over and all we have left is the ideology of the true believer. That this is presented as medicine is a scandal that will leave a long trail of casualties in its wake.
Sorry, Eliza. Today “guys” is a term equally used with groups that do include female persons and those without. In the US, anyway, it is not sexually restricted.
Unless a “trans woman” is being addressed, in which case saying “guys” is “literal genocide”. I wish I were exaggerating
Yup, it misgenders the men who identify as women.
Isn’t that Eliza’s point?
Exactly! The irony was lost.
Hmm.This simple-seeming example of language use demonstrates a lot. It seems that wherever you look, confused thinking, or non-thinking has become pervasive. Sowing confusion is a useful tool when you want to deny any possible criticism. When definition is forbidden any idea becomes valid for those who want to believe it. ‘Humpty-Dumptyism’ is taking over. To find its origins will require challenging the sexual progressives, but few dare to say so, or act against their beliefs. ‘Equality’ has turned out to be much different than was ever imagined by the merely kind-hearted.
I was chatting to a nurse in a hospital about the gender issue and pronouns and she said it’s a nightmare. I said it could be really dangerous in surgery to refer to the patient as a different gender than they biologically are!
Is that really a photo of you, Paul? Was that a wise choice?
“They are, for the most part, decent people”
And yet almost every word of this lengthy article indicates the opposite. Why has society become so uninterested in morality? Why cannot it be said simply that these people are wrong, and therefore must be prevented from doing wrong?
They are, for the most part, decent people, capable of feeling genuine horror when they accidentally say “hey guys” instead of “hey folks”.
??????????????????????????????????????
We welcome freedom of speech – but we choose not to listen… Amazing
My gender, assigned shoddily by a doula called Nefertiti, fell off at the age of four.
But since 2016, i am free!
We don’t need a gender anymore.
Because Brexit means Brexit.
What?!!
I stopped reading at “medicines modest brief”. You can pretend we live in a world where the pharmaceutical industry isn’t one of largest in the world but it wouldn’t be true. Why can’t people just accept that they are ill informed. Modern medicine was developed too deal with a new phenomena called the population. It has nothing to do with healing at all, this is it’s major difference from natural medicine that was based on the idea of healing. Now it is based upon normativity which is obvious by the way this author keeps obsessing over the abnormal.
What?!!
Sadly, this is probably an accurate view of the debate. There are plenty of people on both sides of this debate who have simply dug their heels in and won’t listen. Those, for example, who want to dismiss the whole thing as dirty old men getting their rocks off by wearing frocks (autogynophilia) are not helping – and are just indulging their own loathing of men.
Whatever the causes – and they may be multiple – we are faced with a serious social issue here which needs serious consideration, not mutual handbag bashing.
David, there are no two sides. Cutting away healthy tissue or reproductive organs in children is usually a very permanent solution to what is in almost all cases a very temporary problem. I notice you post a lot comments defending this issue and wonder what is your personal involvement. Are you or someone close to you struggling with their sexual identity? If so, please consider other options.
A member of my family went MTF about 25 years ago, and he absolutely was an autogynephile. He sadly died about eight years ago now, and nothing will *ever* convince me, or our other family members who loved him, that the hormones and surgery did not seriously contribute to the decline of his health and his death.
We love him, we miss him, and we think of what could have been if, instead of going to a therapist for a first visit and walking out with a prescription for female hormones and the phone number of the foreign surgeon who operated on him barely a year later, he had walked out with an hour of actual therapeutic treatment under his belt and a plan for more, to help him accept himself as he was. Even being told he was an autogynephile, and having that explained to him, might have helped. Instead he was told that sure, he could and should become “the woman he truly was inside,” and doing so would solve all of his problems. (Surprise, it did not.)
So yes, I absolutely agree with what you’ve said, and join in urging anyone reading this, any person struggling with their identity, to consider other options, and talk to some people they love and trust–people who will not simply leap to the phone to set up an appointment with Doctors Hormone Dispenser and Cut-it-off.
It seems more men want to become women than vice versa which I find interesting.
Not true amongst teens where in the UK it is 6 girls to every 1 declaring they are trans. One third of whom.are on the autistic spectrum and many of whom are probably lesbians. The numbers as you know have sky rocketed and not in favour of girls….
A big issue here: what you are saying (without really realising it) is that a significant number of adult women currently living as lesbians might well have interpreted themselves as trans if that frame of interpretation had been available to them.
I suspect that that is the case, and that the conceptual distinction between sexual orientation and sexual identity is only that, a conceptual distinction. In reality we are looking at overlapping and related phenomena – we just don’t have the genetic and neurological information to identify and understand them.
Clearly some lesbians masculine identify, and some gay men are effeminate. There is something transsexual about these people.
I say live and let live. If an adult wants to transition, go ahead and do it. Just leave the children alone and don’t impose your ideology on others.
But preferably not on my taxes!!!!
I LOVE men. I adore men. I think men are fantastic; I am extremely grateful to all of the men who have created the world and nation in which I live today, and who fought to defend it. I’ve rarely met a man I didn’t like, and I strongly support men’s rights and men’s groups, especially those fighting against the current societal wave that harms and blames men and boys for being themselves.
I also recognize that the vast majority of straight men (i.e. men who call themselves “lesbians” after “transition,” not men who are attracted to men) who are suddenly “becoming women” are autogynephiles. Spend even a few minutes in any online forum for MTFs and you will see that truth, as well as the depths of perversion to which some of them happily go (you must see what they say to each other, not the sanitized nonsense they say to the rest of the world).
In saying the above, I am not “dismissing” these men or the entire issue. On the contrary, this is one of the (many) reasons why the trans ideology is so harmful, and it’s one that must be acknowledged if we are ever going to stop this dangerous insanity.
What on earth are you doing hanging out on these sites? Isn’t that a bit – prurient, not to say bizarre.
Research?
You’ve rarely met a man you didn’t like. Where do you live?
The usual transphobia extremism. What would Unherd be without it?
In the meantime, a Texas mother of two is being forced to carry a fetus, with no chance to of living, to birth to satisfy the insane religious mania of the suckers who despise women so much that they demand complete control over their bodies.
I know who is sick, and it ain’t the kids or the doctors who try to help them….
It is actually possible for two extreme positions to be wrong at the same time! In fact, that is probably the norm.
That’s equally horrific, but whataboutism is not an argument.
Seems to me quite a different issue (and, fir what it’s worth, I agree with you about the Texas story.
Ssssoo, a human being who has a health issue should be killed before he can be born and live his natural life, whatever length that lifespan can be? Do you believe that the legalized euthanasia of pre-born humans will be limited to just the preborn, if Texas were to change its abortion laws to admit exceptions? You know what would happen then? Suddenly the number of pregnant mothers carrying babies diagnosed severe illnesses in the womb would increase, leading to more babies being killed in utero . . . . Ostensibly to be kept from dying once born into this world, but really so that the mother who wants an abortion can get one without having to leave our state. You do realize that killing this baby in the womb, this baby at issue in this current Texas case, to prevent his being born and then dying is illogical. Either way he’s dying, either by matricide (abortion) or from natural causes. And ALL humans die eventually, some younger, some older, but all die. So killing a baby’s because he’s going to have a shortened lifespan makes no sense because many humans die young. If a parent has a toddler who is diagnosed with a terminal illness, should that parent be allowed to have that toddler euthanized because he’s sick and he’s going to die soon anyway? And killing him would solve some problems caused by his illness? How about an elderly person who is suffering a critical illness. Should that person be killed because he’s going to die soon anyway? And killing him would solve a lot of problems for a lot of people? Look at Canada, the Netherlands, Brussels – look at the expansion of the euthanasia practices since the inception of their supposedly limited euthanasia laws. We must have compassion for the family in this situation and offer the mother all the support we can, morally and financially if need be, but allowing the baby to be killed just because the baby isn’t perfect is unacceptable in a decent, humane society. And this issue is related to the above article in that we have doctors and mothers (and fathers) willing to kill babies as a solution to a perceived problem caused by the babies’ lives instead of finding solutions to the problem that don’t involve an irreversible action.
Oh, shut up with all that ignorant rubbish.
I would advise everyone to ignore this professional troll. He lays out a bunch of elephant dung here and enjoys your outraged reaction to the disgusting smell
I think he is repeatedly trying for the award for ‘most downvotes ever on an Unherd comment.’ He gets my (down)vote !
You’re peddling in lies once again.
Your tired arguments and slanderous comments don’t prove anything. This matter is not about despising or controlling women. A court examined the woman’s case and decided against it, because the assertion that her child’s life was unviable was made by an unqualified person. This unsubstantiated assertion is, however, still going the rounds with the ‘pro-abortion community’, who are still promoting it as true, for their own purposes. Be careful what you believe.
What women do with their bodies has nothing to do with the government any more than you would hate to be told you couldn’t use Viagra because it’s unsafe.
I’m not anti abortion, but that is a really silly comparison. First because taking viagra is nothing like having an abortion. And second, because the government does in fact ban lots of things it considers unsafe.
One can care about many things at the same time.