Coming of age as a young woman in a man’s world has always brought challenges. The track record of the psychology and psychiatry professions attempting to deal with these challenges has not been pretty. But never before have we seen the therapeutic community so eagerly inflict surgical mutilation on pre-pubescent girls struggling to accept their emerging womanhood, an assault on the body as harsh as the clitorectomies performed by fundamentalist imams.
How did we get to the point where chopping off the breasts of disturbed young girls diagnosed with “rapid-onset gender dysphoria”—that is, gender dysphoria that arises primarily due to social pressures rather than mental illness—became the standard of care? Who is responsible? How can these poor girls get the help they need to accept themselves and their maturing bodies, rather than fall victim to the agenda of a political and social movement that has gone off the rails?
The root problem is endemic to an unbounded progressivism that admits no limiting principle.
The progressive march to extremism plays out in many different areas. It is invariably propelled by the momentum of an ever-shifting Overton window as cultural elites clamor to maintain their leadership status by righting new wrongs, finding old injustices to cure, and concocting novel ways to make the world a better place. Social media, the pathologies of cancel culture, and the cowardice of professionals unwilling to stand up and say, “have you gone mad?” created the perfect environment for the present gender genocide. Recognizing the tragedy and understanding where it came from is the first step toward alleviating it.
This particular descent into madness began with a noble goal: teaching society to accept homosexuality, an integral part of the human condition from time immemorial. Ending the discrimination, marginalization, and denigration experienced by people who had same-sex intimate relations took a generation, a victory properly claimed by progressives. Pushing the Overton window until the benefits of legal marriage could be granted to homosexual couples, diverting at least part of the community from the bathhouse excesses that led to the death of tens of thousands, was a genuine accomplishment.
But progressivism can never rest on its laurels, nor pivot to conserve what it has achieved. It must push ever forward toward some conceptual utopia. This is done by staking out the next frontier of “injustice” that can be leveraged to focus the energy of acolytes. And that’s what drove us off the trans cliff.
[Related: “Why the Trans Issue is Much Bigger than Bathrooms, Sports, and Fragile Feelings”]
Yes, some men like to dress up like women and some women like to dress up like men. Live and let live; it’s a harmless form of self-expression that has long provided an outlet for such odd proclivities, as well as entertainment for normal adults. A very small number of people, after years of discomfort, decide to surgically alter themselves to help psychologically conform to a gender they feel they weren’t born into. Chopping off body parts doesn’t turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man, but if it alleviates their distress and allows these poor souls to live happier lives, who has the right to deny them? Again, kudos to the progressives for their role in destigmatizing this.
Then, they went after the children.
They did this across a broad front—educational, cultural, and therapeutic. K–12 trans education initiatives began triggering cluster outbreaks of rapid-onset gender dysphoria, the vast majority of cases involving young girls encouraged to come out as boys. Aided and abetted by parents who had either drunk the progressive Kool-Aid, were cowed into silence, or were kept in the dark by school authorities, the pharmacists and surgeons seized the opportunity. Before long, puberty blockers were being administered and teenage girls were lining up for “gender-affirming” mastectomies.
Oh my god, what have we done?
A backlash is underway as alarmed parents desperately try to reassert control over the activist propaganda schools feed their children. These attempts are being fought tooth-and-nail by the progressive politico-media complex, armed with justifying ideology provided by the gender studies professoriate that dominates the academy. Being progressive means never having to say you’re sorry, so the fight will be vicious, especially against liberal apostates and sane homosexuals who want no part of this mutilation madness. There is a general sense that trans extremists are trying to defend a bridge too far. Perhaps we will see evidence of that come the November midterms, when the political party supporting this insanity has to pay the price.
The ultimate outcome is certain even though the timing is not. We will one day look back on gender genocide with the same kind of horror that we look back on the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, with its forced sterilizations, and the mid-century lobotomy craze.
But what will progressives say to the angry army of childless, breastless, middle-aged women demanding answers?
Image: cunaplus, Adobe Stock
Progressive is a euphemism for leftist. So what will these leftists say to the angry army of childless, breastless, middle-aged women demanding answers? Why nothing at all. They don’t believe any answers will be necessary, let alone required.
Some Europeans–Finland and England, among others–who were all in on transitioning children have pulled back. It has become clear to them that this is extreme child abuse. Some American states have also acted to block it. But, as you say, the competition among “progressives” to be ever more extreme will not be hindered by human casualties, who are only collateral damage to the central progressive goal of virtue signaling.