By Rob Meyne
- April 15, 2024
- 3-min read
If you had traveled forward in time from 1990 and were suddenly plunged into contemporary America, you would find it very difficult to believe what you hear. Men can have babies, there are more than a hundred genders, men should use women’s bathrooms, it is OK when boys expose themselves to girls in a locker room, and you can get fired if you don’t call a boy who wants to be a woman “she or her.” People have lost their jobs for that.
“Misgendering” is considered harassment in some circles. “Misgendering” doesn’t mean you used a wrong term based on biology; it means you used the accurate term. By the same token, surgery that is gender “affirming” refers to one that CHANGES one’s genitals to more closely resemble what the patient THINKS they should be, not what the science shows to be true.
Patients have taken over the asylum.
This just in: you cannot change your sex. Sex isn’t “assigned” at birth. Sex is determined by the physical, scientific proof available to health care professionals. It is a question of scientific proof. It isn’t a guessing game. If you have two X chromosomes, you are female. If you have an X and a Y, you are male. It IS that simple.
Tom Slater, writing in Spiked, has done some excellent reporting on this. See pieces from him on April 12, and April 11, both available at Real Clear Politics. Great stuff.
Slater discusses a ground-breaking review by Dr, Hilary Cass. It appears to be the most comprehensive, and best-resourced, overview of these subjects extant. Cass, a top pediatrician in the UK, worked for four years, reviewing a vast array of research. Cass concludes trans interventions are seldom a good idea, are not proven beneficial, and do more harm than good. Slater: “It is a stunning piece of work: a 400-page triumph of reason over unreason.”
Based on this study alone, reason would suggest the current mess of gender confusion, surgeries, medical interventions, and finger-pointing should recede in favor of science and common sense. Perhaps our world will slowly return to sanity. Yet, as long as people pay a substantial price, either professionally or personally, for opposing this woke nonsense it will be hard to turn things around.
(On a related note, a Canadian man has taken the government to pay for surgery that will give him a vagina, or “mangina,” as it has been called. This is in addition to his penis which was, at last report, still present and accounted for. The best thing you can say about that case is that, if he is able to emerge from it all with both a mangina and a penis, it presents dozens of temptations to tell him to go f**k himself.)
Is there any wonder younger people are confused, unhappy, even suicidal, considering the number of things that are clearly true but are today routinely rejected by people in authority?
There is a huge difference, of course, between telling a child they can be whatever sex they wish, on the one hand, and telling them, on the other, that we love them, respect them, and will support them if they choose to live their lives in some unconventional way. I like it when people are happy. If my son or daughter wants to live their lives claiming they are a Ficus tree, well, o k, I guess I’ll stock up on plant food instead of Chick-Fil-A. This isn’t about respect or approval; it is about coercion to toe the party line. We can respect people all day long, and vigorously defend their rights, without pretending their decisions make sense or are rooted in reality.
We do not have to agree with every mental or emotional decision made by others. It does not make us hateful when we don’t. If my neighbor Dave wants to say he is a girl, I hope that makes him happy. I hope he would not expect me to say “Yes, you’re a girl.” Saying something does not make it so.
Back to Cass. Her study has concluded, more convincingly than any previous scholarly work, that in general sexual interventions, medical or surgical, do not improve a person’s overall health, mental or physical; they do not reduce suicides; they do not make people happier; they can ruin, irreversibly, a person’s plans on having children; and they are not without horrible and painful side effects. In short, messing around with a young person’s genitals, before they even understand sex, is a really bad idea.
The best way to deal with a child who has gender dysphoria is to support, comfort, educate, understand, and love them, but to not do anything to them that is damaging or irreversible. Let them grow up. Then, as informed adults, they can make a responsible decision.
