TRUMP’S BAN ON GENDER TRANSITIONING HAS TURNED THE TIDE ON AN INDEFENSIBLE CULT
Change happens, according to the famous Hemingway quote about his bankruptcy, “gradually, then suddenly”. The same could now be said of the dismantling of gender ideology. Its moral bankruptcy, a decade of sterilizing and mutilating children’s bodies, looks to be over.
In the flurry of executive orders that Donald Trump has signed since re-entering the White House, here is the big one: prohibiting gender transitions for people under the age of 19.
“It is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” reads the executive order, entitled Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.
This means no more puberty blockers, no more operations, double mastectomies, castration, “facial feminizations” and all the rest of it. No more irreversible “gender affirming care”.
The Democrats, still apparently stunned into stupor, appear to have no understanding of how this issue affected their loss in November’s election, and continue to defend the indefensible. All of this will now be fought out in court cases and arguments over Medicaid and insurance.
How did we get to this? How did anyone think that telling children that they were born in the “wrong body,” and that those bodies could be surgically and chemically rearranged was sensible? But this is hardly the first time medics have caused horrific harm.
Lobotomies, for instance, don’t get good press these days. Severing the connection between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain left many patients incontinent, unable to walk, communicate or feed themselves.
More than 40,000 of these operations were carried out in the US between the 1940s and the 1970s before they were stopped. They were carried out on people with depression, OCD, schizophrenia, aggressive tendencies and learning difficulties.
In the United States, a particularly keen neurologist called Walter Freeman invented a quicker method of lobotomy where ice picks were hammered into the brain through the back of the eyes. This was done without the usual anesthesia, just some electric shock treatment first. He operated on 3,500 patients including 19 children, the youngest of which was four.
The doctors who did this thought of themselves as progressive, not as sadistic. They thought they were helping otherwise hopeless people.
It’s important to remember this, when one reads the gory details, of trans surgery phalloplasties that have gone severely wrong. Or the creation of “neo-vaginas” that have to be dilated as the body tries to close the wound.
Those who hand out puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children with the promise that their mental distress can be fixed through being mutilated and medicalized may also believe themselves to be doing the right thing.
For in the end, gender ideology is a belief system, a cult, a religion. It is entirely faith-based. Science and reality do not figure. Yet as this belief system starts to crumble, how do those who believed in it walk it back?
They believed above all that they were the good people, that sex was a spectrum, not a binary. They believed that legitimizing the fetishistic behavior of middle-aged men was the new civil rights movement. That this group had little in common with ever-increasing numbers of deeply unhappy teenage girls who did not want to grow into adult women was obvious. Except to the cultist.
Trans became an umbrella with its own language, and the righteous modernistas took it to be the one true faith. As did the entire liberal media, the Democrat Party, the entire art world, and academia – in other words, the cultural elite.
Now, though, cult members need to be fully deprogrammed, and the belief systems so embedded in our institutions – in our schools and hospitals – will take some time to root out.
It should not have taken Donald Trump to declare that there are two and only two sexes, man and woman, for everyone to breathe a sigh of relief. One of his other new executive orders, entitled Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, promises to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”.
For ordinary Americans this was always most visible in sport, where biological males were taking prizes from women. This is still being defended by the Democrats. They are still in deep denial.
Those who have got their jollies discrediting “Terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) will simply find another cause. For their cause was always misogyny, a refusal to accept women saying no, and never actually about trans people at all.
The days of the “No debate” are over. The pretense that sex can be changed is over. But still many of the great and the good are pumping out lies and disinformation. These people are science deniers. But strangely, they are the same folk who want us to believe the pseudo-science of climate change.
They cannot see the contradiction, because cult membership means self-identifying as a morally superior person.
Few will admit they were wrong or misled. They will simply rewrite history. Just like those who sought to relieve the agonies of deeply depressed patients through an ice pick in their brains, they will say their experimental treatments did help some, that they were at the forefront of a new kind of medicine.
Those who cheered this horror on will keep quiet while they scrabble in the dirt for the next civil rights battle. They picked the wrong one. It would take actual bravery to say this in public. Their silence is deafening.
Suzanne Moore writes for various publications on the rights of biological women.