The first ten or fifteen minutes after waking, before the caffeine has fully kicked in and the brain is able reboot itself, aren’t the best time for linear thinking. “Let me have my coffee before you ask me to think” is how most of us feel at 7:00 a.m. And yet, there is sometimes a different sort of lucidity, more right-brained than left-brained, a thinking untainted by ideology or confirmation bias. We may say to ourselves, “This is not what I thought it was” or “This is not my beautiful house.”
And so it was in my befogged mind when I clicked on a New York Times email link reading Texas Legislature Bans Transgender Medical Care for Children. I clicked because, well, it was highbrow clickbait and I am part of the NYT’s target demographic. I have been since long before it was clickable. I’m a fast reader, so I skimmed down the article with its predictable and comforting center-left slant, nearly rolling right over the following paragraph:
The bill, expected to be signed into law by Texas Gov. Greg Abbot, a Republican, would prohibit a doctor from performing mastectomies or surgeries that would sterilize a child or remove otherwise healthy tissue or body parts, or from prescribing drugs that would induce transient or permanent infertility.
It was only a few beats after reading this that I paused, lit a cigarette, and experienced a 7:15 a.m. satori. I’ll get to that, but first, a plea for suspension of judgement—at least until you finish this piece. I want to understand, I really, truly do. I’m not a person whose heart can harbor prejudice. I met my first trans person in 1970, working a summer job at the Western Electric factory in Cicero, Illinois. In those days, Phaedra, as she called herself, was known as a transsexual. Over that summer, we became friends. But even Phaedra might have difficulty understanding how an innocuous term like gender affirming care can encompass removing the breasts of a sixteen year-old girl.
To appreciate the “Newspeak” element of that NYT story, imagine the paragraph excerpted above printed on a movable timeline. It now sits just above May 18, 2023, the dateline of the story. Now imagine further that this timeline has a feature that allows you to grab and drag the text into the past or the future to see how it sits against the backdrop of another time. We can pull it back ten years, twenty years, or a half a century, and it doesn’t work. But when we get to the notch between Nov 20, 1945 and Oct 1, 1946, the period of the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals, it may suddenly pulse with meaning. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who was known at Auschwitz as Uncle Mengele (he always had a pocket full of sweets) to the pubescent and pre-pubescent children upon whom he performed his horrific experiments, wasn’t in the dock at Nuremberg, having evaded capture and later fleeing to Argentina. But his spirit hovered over the trials, because in some ways he, even more than the gas chambers, embodied the Nazi thesis in practice.
In pursuit of evidence of Aryan genetic superiority, Mengele amputated limbs, removed vital organs and practiced vivisection without anesthesia, injected toxic chemicals into eyeballs, opened up the living wombs of pregnant women, induced sterility, and on a single night killed fourteen twins by injecting their hearts with chloroform. His specialty was genetic modification, his goal a sort of proto-transhumanism, his favorite subjects of roughly the same age as those affected by the Texas law.
Now revisit the language of the law passed in Texas: would prohibit a doctor from performing mastectomies or surgeries that would sterilize a child or remove otherwise healthy tissue or body parts. Mastectomies on an adolescent? Surgeries that would sterilize a child or remove otherwise healthy body parts? In what kind of topsy-turvy world can the New York Times characterize such procedures as “care?” In what kind of society can the protection of children from such butchery not be seen as a pretty righteous act? And what exactly is being cared for? The answer we are given is gender dysphoria, a disorder that did not come into clinical existence until 1974. It’s an internal sense of gender miscasting that, like most things that roil the adolescent psyche, manifests with pressing urgency. At fourteen, every thing is the most important thing. Gender Affirming Care is an anesthetic for the pain of feeling psychically out of joint with one’s biological self, and its application, which escalates from puberty blockers to sex hormones to surgery, is strongly endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics. The problem is that, unlike adolescence, much of it is permanent.
The comparison I’ve drawn here will no doubt strike many as grossly exaggerated, even outrageous, and some will probably label it transphobic. They will say that there is a night and day difference between involuntary mutilation and mutilation by consent. But think about it. What is consent? How can a child of thirteen, or even sixteen, now deemed in most western countries to be incapable of consenting to sexual activity, possibly be capable of consent to the removal of sex organs?
I can’t speak from your lived experience, nor can I speak with the authority of a child psychologist, but it has always seemed to me that most pre-adolescents and adolescents who aren’t either in serious denial or somehow endowed with zero chromosomal “float” and a motherlode of either estrogen or testosterone, experience gender identity issues of some sort. That’s what adolescence is. It’s a time of becoming, of moving into our bodies. I had moments of gender confusion at twelve and thirteen. But that didn’t mean I wanted my testicles scooped out. By the time I reached fifteen, a full seven years after many children are now prescribed puberty blockers, I was comfortable in my natal sex, and with what would become my reproductive role. What if that maturation process had been abruptly aborted by a hip-to-the-moment pediatrician who decided I “needed more time” to figure out what I was.
It’s getting crazy out there. Komodo Health, a health technology company, compiled private and public insurance data for Reuters, showing “a sharp increase in the number of children ages 6 to 17 diagnosed with gender dysphoria, from about 15,000 in 2017 to around 42,000 in 2021. During that time, 4,780 patients with that diagnosis were put on puberty blockers, with new prescriptions growing each year.” And whereas the stats for hormone treatment once favored MTF (male-to-female) transition, the National Institutes of Health PubMed site now affirms that “the sex ratio has changed dramatically: most transitioners are now natal females,” (FTM) girls who wish to be boys, and this may be the most disturbing stat of all, because these little girls are choosing to abdicate their wombs.
Puberty blockers, which have now been convincingly shown to reduce bone density dramatically (you might have the bones of a sixty year-old at thirty) can be prescribed for a child as young as 8 with the full support of the AAP, followed by hormone treatment as early as 12 or 13. This is where we begin to see irreversible effects on fertility and sexual health. But the truly radical procedures, the ones that called my groggy morning mind back to Dr. Mengele, begin at mid-adolescence, as early as 15 depending on the “age of consent” deemed appropriate by the presiding medical authorities. “Top surgery,” also known as subcutaneous mastectomy, on trans-boys (natal females) flays the chest and may or may not be “nipple-sparing.” According to the Associated Press, genital surgeries, including womb and testicle removal, may commence at 17, full consent having been given by someone who is not yet old enough to vote, and who, we were recently informed by #MeToo spokespersons, isn’t mature enough to consent to sex. In the case against the Tavistock Center’s Gender Identity Development Service, a U.K. High Court ruled that “children under 16 with gender dysphoria are unlikely to be able to give informed consent to undergo treatment with puberty-blocking drugs.”
We may not know for many years, but a number of prominent psychologists have opined that these children, if left alone, would eventually have come into themselves as gay or lesbian in a society that now largely accepts these identities, and many would have passed through the Scorch Trials with natal gender identity intact. But they are not being left alone. All too often, they are being actively encouraged, by peers, by social media, by organizations like WPATH, and even by their parents and doctors to take the leap. Perhaps one of the most notable trans-influencers out there is Transgender To Transhuman author and SiriusXM Radio founder Martine (formerly Martin) Rothblatt, who in 2018 became the top-earning executive in the biopharmaceutical industry as CEO of United Therapeutics.
Rothblatt fairly gushes at the possibility that we may soon be able to hack our very existence, even unto the point where we cease to exist as biological creatures at all. In her estimation, the womb is an impediment to the advancement of our species (and why wouldn’t she subscribe to that oldest of misogynies? She was born without one). In our glorious future, she asserts, children may be born of the union between a fleshly human and one that exists only as data on a thumb drive. This may seem the stuff of a Philip K. Dick novel, but one has to wonder if we are slouching toward the fabrication of a new mutant sub-group within the human community, a brave new world endorsed by the American Society of Pediatrics. Even in the most generous view, these gender-altering procedures can only be called highly experimental. Mengele would understand. He’d appreciate the mission of using medicine to make a new world. And he’d no doubt have a lollipop in his pocket for the “patient.”
Looking again at that moving historical timeline, its very hard to square the progressive enthusiasm for gender affirming care with the pedophilia hysteria of the 1980s or the moral panic of #MeToo, which, among other things, branded a middle-aged judge in the south a pedophile in light of his fondness for seventeen year-olds (granted, he was an asshole) or condemned Jeffrey Epstein to self-execution for soliciting erotic massages from apparently consenting (and mercenary) teenaged girls. If these were children in those circumstances, then they are children in this one, too. If we grant that these social uprisings targeted behavior unbefitting modern humans, how much more should we now be exercised over the possibility that our daughters might have their reproductive systems pulled out with the assent of a single pediatrician? If the clear message of movements like #MeToo (not to mention the pro-choice movement) is “leave our bodies alone,” how is it that we are now willing to see our kids treated in ways that foreordain that they may never have kids themselves?
The aspect of the the transmania currently stirring in the U.S. and U.K., abetted by the bullhorn of social media, that troubles me most is the spike in girls and young women wishing to abandon their nature. Yes, oh yes, all progress in gender equality aside, it is still probably easier to be a boy. No muss, no fuss. The ultra-feminist Andrea Dworkin once wrote that all penetration was rape, and these days that once fringe view seems to have taken hold among a growing number of adolescent girls. Pregnant? Not me. Never. Female? Forget it. In the faddishness of all this, I’m reminded eerily of the famous “fasting girls” of the Victorian era, recently dramatized in the Netflix film The Wonder. They, too, wanted to escape the biological imperative, though under the cover of potential sainthood. Like latter-day Cathars, they were leaving the body by ignoring its existence, and many of them died.
As a man who has long looked to woman as the “better half” of humanity—or at least, by virtue of her power as creatrix, the true steward of our species, I grieve. Neither conventional feminism, rooted as it is in equity issues, nor militant feminism, as strident in its church pew moralism as Cotton Mather, seems to have done a very effective job of telling girls why it’s great to be a woman, and why being so, in a massively fucked up world, is tantamount to a sacred charge. If some zeitgeist-powered admixture of transgenderism and transhumanism leads us to forsake the divinity that is implicit in the womb and that flows through all of our reproductive organs, we may all soon find ourselves in the black box.
For the love of children, let them grow up.