RUTHFULLY YOURS

Conservatives are pre-canceled in the debate about transgenderism. I get the sense that we’re not even participating in it directly at all. All the journalism and essays by Madeleine Kearns, Douglas Murray, or Abigail Shrier are ignored by our woke opponents. They are used only to inform the permitted antagonists: centrist “Nones” such as Bill Maher and Bari Weiss, or TERFs like Lierre Keith or J. K. Rowling, who take some, but not all, of our arguments into the arena.

The recent opening of real debate in formerly closed spaces — whether in Irish media or the news section of the New York Times — suggests that many liberals feel uneasy about the woke orthodoxy on gender identity and at least want to air a debate before the medical-malpractice lawsuits start rolling in.

We have grown used to the idea that ideologues want to tell the public that “gender is fluid.” But now the White House is proclaiming that it only flows one way. Away from biological sex and toward anything else, with the assistance of hormone therapy and surgery.

There is no debate that there is currently a social explosion of young people experimenting with gender identities. Children are responding, in a rash of social contagion, to their peers coming out with these new identities and to the all-but-open solicitation of this behavior among schoolteachers, psychologists, and especially digital peer groups.

But if the Biden White House has its way, there will be no debate about what to do about this fact. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Do not engage in talk therapy or “watchful waiting.” Go directly to the puberty blockers, declare your new pronouns, and start thinking about surgery. That’s the import of a new executive order from the White House, which wades heavily into the medical debate.

It’s hard to credit the intervention or enterprise as “scientific” in any real sense. For several reasons. The first is that once you’re familiar with the worldview of the gender-identity movement, you can predict with absolute certainty which study conclusions they would approve and disapprove. The correct pro-trans response is to disbelieve all studies that show massive amounts of desistance in gender dysphoria without social or surgical transition. The pro-trans response is to disbelieve all studies showing that suicidality increases after “gender-affirming” surgery. When a highly profitable pharmacological and clinical industry springs up, the studies to support their work will begin to come in. Scientific proof comes on-demand these days.

Secondly, the trans phenomenon’s own account of itself is contradictory. Gender is fluid and changeable, but pro-trans people fear and hate the phenomenon of “de-transitioners” — people who say they regretted their social or surgical transition and have readopted the identity that matches their biological sex. If gender was really fluid, this phenomenon would neither surprise nor threaten the trans movement.

The trans movement holds that gender is “just a performance,” but its demands are adamantine. And of course, the trans idea, especially as it’s communicated to young people, is full of metaphysical assertions about being “born in the wrong body.” Or that there is a truer, inner self that is at odds with the body that contains it. Why should anyone credit this talk? It is not scientific or all that rational. In this world we do not ever encounter selves apart from their bodies. For those who are literate in metaphysical ideas, the transgender movement is just Gnosticism repackaged. Why should the White House have any truck with it? By what right could it possibly impose these views across the medical community, or on any public institution at all?

Surgically inverting or removing a penis is called “gender affirmation surgery.” Gender-affirming care is the preferred care of the White House, and all other forms of treatment are reclassified by the White House as “conversion therapy.” Traditional talk therapy or “watchful waiting” in the belief that most cases of gender dysphoria desist over time, as adolescents eventually come to accept and appreciate their maturing bodies, is now chucked into the same bin as praying the gay away. By doing this, the White House is signaling that these forms of non-affirming therapy have the same low status as religion. For many skeptical psychologists and therapists, this is a very low blow indeed.

And anyone who lacks the instinct to simply obey authoritative pronouncements from the White House or the Atlantic magazine might naturally ask, why isn’t “affirming care” considered a form of conversion therapy? After all, it’s likeliest to be performed on gender-nonconforming young people, the kids who used to be considered tomboys, or fey young men. That is, it seems most likely to be inflicted on young people who are attracted to the same sex. That would make our practice of these surgeries consistent with what is done in Iran, which performs sex-change operations to make gay people invisible again. The White House executive order asks for the Department of Health and Human Services to come up with “an action plan to promote an end [to conversion therapy] around the world.” So would that mean the U.S. approves of Iran as one of the major global hubs of transgender reassignment surgery, or deplores it?

Anyway, it hardly matters. If you had told me the day after the Obergefell decision that just seven years later, a moderate Democratic president’s White House would be this far around the bend on gender identity, I would have laughed. “Oh, I believe in slippery slopes, and in demons, and in a God whose wrath gives us over to our worst idiocies, but surely upwardly mobile liberals aren’t going to be handing over their kids to surgeons.” I was wrong. Now all we have to do is wait and watch it all end in overflowing rivers of tears.