The Tyranny Of Transgender Ideology
Surprise, surprise:
A transgender man sued a Roman Catholic hospital on Thursday, saying it cited religion in refusing to allow his surgeon to perform a hysterectomy as part of his sex transition.
Jionni Conforti’s sex and gender discrimination lawsuit comes as new regulations hailed as groundbreaking anti-discrimination protections for transgender people are under legal attack from religious groups.
Conforti had scheduled the surgery at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson in 2015. He says a hospital administrator told him the procedure to remove his uterus couldn’t be done because it was a “Catholic hospital.
“I felt completely disrespected,” said Conforti, whose transition began in 2004. “That’s not how any hospital should treat any person regardless of who they are.”
The hospital said Thursday it follows ethical and religious directives from the U.S. Conference of Bishops in making decisions about care and treatment. The directives say procedures judged “morally wrong” by the church don’t have to be performed.
Madness. You cannot dissent from what they want; you’ve got to give them everything, or they’ll do what they can to destroy you.
You’ve probably heard by now about National Geographic‘s celebratory “everything’s coming up trans!” issue. Writing in The Public Discourse today, Andrew T. Walker and Denny Burk eviscerate author Robin Marantz Henig’s report from the magazine Excerpts:
First (and most problematic): Henig offers no substantive argument for why one’s internal, self-perception of his or her “gender identity” ought to determine one’s gender or have authority greater than one’s biological sex. The essay offers testimonies of people who say that their gender identity is at odds with their biological sex. But testimony is not sufficient. Asserting a claim does not demonstrate the authenticity of that claim. Readers are given no explanation for why we ought to regard the claims of one’s gender identity as reality rather than a subjective feeling or self-perception.
Indeed, this is the crux of the matter that plagues the transgender movement. It is based not on evidence, but on the ideology of expressive individualism—the idea that one’s identity is self-determined, that one should live out that identity, and that everyone else must respect and affirm that identity, no matter what it is. Expressive individualism requires no moral argument or empirical justification for its claims, no matter how absurd or controverted they may be. Transgenderism is not a scientific discovery but a prior ideological commitment about the pliability of gender.
More:
The final page of Henig’s article celebrates the mutilation of minor children with a full-page picture of a shirtless 17-year old girl who recently underwent a double mastectomy in order to “transition” to being a boy. Why do transgender ideologues consider it harmful to attempt to change such a child’s mind but consider it progress to display her bare, mutilated chest for a cover story? Transgender ideologues like Henig never address this ethical contradiction at the heart of their paradigm. Why is it acceptable to surgically alter a child’s body to match his sense of self but bigoted to try to change his sense of self to match his body? If it is wrong to attempt to change a child’s gender identity (because it is fixed and meddling with it is harmful), then why is it morally acceptable to alter something as fixed as the reproductive anatomy of a minor? The moral inconsistency here is plain.
And:
Henig makes a surprising and startling admission near the end of her essay: “Biology has a habit of declaring itself eventually.” On this, Henig is right. Humanity cannot escape the limits inscribed upon it. It is impossible to transgress biological boundaries stamped on human nature without the basic categories of human existence unraveling. If the National Geographic story tells anything, it tells of a society going down a path of self-willed experimentation that will lead to misery and a denial of human telos. In truth, this movement born of effete academics and progressive mythology is nothing more than dressed-up barbarism.
Read the whole thing. It is a detailed and systematic demolition of Henig’s piece.
On a number of occasions over the past few years, I’ve cited a lecture I once attended in Cambridge, delivered by the literary critic Dame Gillian Beer. She spoke about the way various elements within Victorian society seized upon Darwin’s findings and claimed them as scientific evidence for various ideologies to which they had a prior commitment. Abolitionists claimed that Darwin clearly showed why slavery was wrong, because deep down, we’re all the same. Imperialists claimed that Darwin clearly showed why it was the destiny of Europeans to rule over “lesser” races in the colonies, because survival of the fittest. And so on. Dame Gillian’s point was that the findings of science are always received within a particular cultural milieu that bends our interpretation of them, and that we must take great care to make ourselves aware of the difference between what is true scientifically, and what is a non-scientific conclusion to which we wish to make the facts conform.
Last February, New York magazine’s Jesse Singal wrote a frankly terrifying piece about how militant transgender advocates bullied a cowardly Canadian clinic into firing Dr. Ken Zucker, one of the world’s top researchers in the transgender field, because he, though a public advocate of accepting transgenders, did not believe that the science justified some of the more radical claims trans activists were making. If you missed it back then, read it now. This actually happened, and it’s going to keep happening, until people push back hard.
The stakes for all of us could hardly be higher. From an important interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian <del>psychiatrist</del> clinical psychologist who is being persecuted for his refusal to use the new panoply of Orwellian pronouns:
We’re teaching university students lies, and pandering to them, and I see that as counterproductive.
There’s even an anti-psychology program at OISE [Ontario Institute for Studies in Education]. It started when they got rid of [Ken] Zucker, and you don’t stop with one person. Zucker was a more than credible psychologist. He ran a very good program for people who had gender dysphoria, and he was conservative. Zucker’s attitude was that if you’ve got a kid who is complaining about their gender, you follow them up, and you see what happens, and you derive your conclusions from the research. Eighty percent of them declare themselves as homosexual, ninety percent settle into their biological identity as adults. His logical conclusion is to keep the goddamned surgical knife sheathed, and don’t bring out the hormones too soon. Well that’s all gone – it’s illegal now for doctors to question the decision of a three-year old child that he is a she. And if the parents want to start biological transformation, it is illegal for the doctor to reject that.
Did you see that Lauren Southern got identity as a man from the Ontario government? That shows you what the law has done to the physicians. That physician couldn’t question her because it’s illegal. So now Lauren Southern has government identification as a man. She went to the Service Ontario kiosk in high heels and makeup. She didn’t expect to get the god damned ID. That also means that the government is so tangled up in this mess that they’ll actually sacrifice their own ID. Think about that – think about what will happen to our society if people’s identification became unstable.
