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Made to Care: The Illiberality of LGBT Politics
The subtitle to this piece could have been: We Told You So.
We marriage defenders said, “You can either have religious freedom/freedom of conscience or same-sex ‘marriage,’ but not both.” You may be asking, “Why is she bringing that up again? Does she want to restart the SSM wars?” It’s because the Culture Wars are back in the news, and not just in the US, but throughout “advanced” (beyond the truth) societies of the West.
Here at home, the Colorado baker is going to have his day at the Supreme Court. It only remains to be seen if Justice Anthony “Obergefell” Kennedy will decide in favor of the First Amendment or his own misguided redefinition of marriage. Even if he decides the baker gets to keep his freedom of conscience, he may do so on very narrow grounds that the baker has freedom of “creative expression” as an artist, and not so much freedom of association as implicitly guaranteed by the First Amendment.
And then there’s Rocklin Academy. Even kindergartners must be made to conform to the ascendant transgender confusion. Their teacher read I am Jazz and Red: A Crayon’s Story before the big reveal of their classmate as a trans-girl. Neither the teacher nor the administration thought it important to inform the students’ parents before teaching the kids that blue is red, or boys can be girls, if they feel like it. Notice a trend here?
LGBT politics isn’t about “marriage equality” or transgender rights. It is an attack on objective truth and an empowerment of authorities at all levels to coerce speech and thought. Marriage has always been a legitimization of male/female conjugal unions because it is in the interests of individuals and society to attach the naturally occurring offspring of such unions to their parents in family units. That was widely understood as the truth of marriage – the accepted social reality. Up until Obergefell (and, leading up to it, gay adoption), we, as individuals and as a society, were allowed to remain indifferent to naturally sterile relationships between homosexuals. No more. We are being forced to care.
It’s the same with the minuscule fraction of people with gender dysphoria. While their condition is tragic for these individuals and the people who love them, their impact on society was negligible until now. Now laws are being passed to compel speech in the form of “preferred pronouns” (ref: Jordan Peterson, Canada), and children are having their world turned upside down by the revision of what is so obviously true: a person with a penis (and XY chromosomes) is a boy, and a person without a penis (and XX chromosomes) is a girl. One might even say, “it’s science!”
These are just isolated anecdotes, you say? Ha! Let’s look at what happens when a nation caves to the LGBT agenda.
In Great Britain, the slide into unreality moves apace. The “Ministry of Equality” has expressed support for a proposal to allow gender reassignment surgery without any medical consultation as building on the “progress” of same-sex “marriage.” Also from an “equalities” minister: “I feel we’ll only have proper equal marriage when you can bloody well get married in a church if you want to do so, without having to fight the church for the equality that should be your right.” The leader of the Liberal Democrats was forced to resign despite voting for SSM, because his Christian belief that marriage is between a man and a woman is intolerable in politics and must be publicly denounced. Further, Christians are being excluded from foster parenting because, “The equality provisions concerning sexual orientation should take precedence.” You can’t make this shtuff up. So now homosexual couples will be able to foster and adopt, but people of religious conviction won’t. “Family” is now anything but a man and a woman loving their children in a faith-filled home.
We live in such stupid times.
Published in Culture
The thing is, some do have genetic faults and others just “feel” it.
I think the ADHD “epidemic” and drugging of boys on ritalin carries a lot of parallels to my views on this issue. So does the use of birth control to treat various hormonal imbalance issues in women, but ADHD is easier to parallel…
Some kids do have ADHD, but it has been so massively overdiagnosed that we don’t really know who. And Ritalin is such an easy fix, that no one questioned its use for a very long time. It is used less now, but how many boys in American classrooms were treated to detrimental diagnosis for something they actually didn’t have? And how many had very real problems masked by the use of ritalin that then went unaddressed for many years? Dyslexia, color blindness, and various other issues are masked by ritalin use and were frequently diagnosed as ADHD because they are hard to diagnose in children.
Except in transgender application, you are dealing with a rabid political culture that shuts down inquiry in to actual effectiveness of accepted treatment and anyone who questions the wisdom of this current age. See Bath University and Mr. Caspian.
AD(H)D, like depression, describes a set of altered behavior that has multifactorial causes, some endogenous, some exogenous. For example, a child may fidget and be distractible because of chronic discomfort of some kind – if the child cannot articulate the discomfort in a manner that adults find plausible, and if giving the child Ritalin helps, then the child “has AD(H)D”. This is similar to how caffeine may be used for any number of reasons, for wakefulness, for focus, for migraine or other pain treatment. Chronic discomfort is chronically distracting, and arguably, measures that help someone in chronic discomfort to not get so distracted by it are a reasonable therapeutic measure. So yes, Ritalin is a band-aid for a lot of genuine problems, but a reasonable band-aid in several scenarios (obviously, I’m not including scenarios like “is a boy” or “doesn’t get enough time to run around outside”).
Oral contraception is interesting. One reason it’s used to treat hormonal imbalance, dysmenorrhea, etc, is because it’s much trickier to find hormone cocktails that allow a woman to remain fertile without the cocktail harming the baby she might conceive while fertile. Or at least that’s what I gathered from discussing the matter with my doctor. I have this little theory that having gender-dysphoric postpubescent girls try oral contraception for a while to see if it makes them less dysphoric might be worth a shot. Fertility suppression aside, there are any number of reasons oral contraception could make being a postpubescent girl less miserable – since any number of problems can be exacerbated by hormonal fluctuations which include an inflammatory phase (the ovulation itself) and an injury-prone phase (menstruation). Would it be nice to have an inexpensive, easy-to-use treatment that could address these things without suppressing fertility? Yes. But I’m not surprised oral contraceptives have proven to have so many (legitimate, I think) off-label uses.
I understand this and I may be limited by my inability to see into labs countrywide that may be studying hormonal balance issues more thoroughly, but I frequently think the availability of easy solutions is a crutch to not try better.
Innovation stagnates in the presence of “good enough”.
But again, that isn’t what is stifling more thorough examination of trans treatment.
I think you are on a good trail here, and one that I hope is being pursued by solid researchers.
“Hormone cocktails” is a term that gives me the willies. Hormones are powerful neuro-chemicals that can have all sorts of interactions with other medications and can lead to a host of side effects/consequences. The problem is that sex hormone research is encumbered by an extra layer of political foolishness that inhibits honest and thorough research. This goes triple in the case of gender dysphoria.
Certainly. What are side-effects for others might be beneficial effects for some.
Research is often encumbered by foolishness. Pellagra was persistently misunderstood for an unbelievably long time for class reasons (which in America, included race). Sexual issues of any kind are of course ripe for foolishness. I think that’s only human, so the question is, which way does the foolishness go?
Gender dysphoria itself is a rather slippery term, as, at face value, it just means being really unhappy with the sexual characteristics of the body you were born with. The term looks like it isn’t meant to be taken at face value, though, but to indicate really feeling like the opposite sex. Which is bad. Being miserable with the sex you were born to shouldn’t be conflated with actually being happier if you transitioned to some other “gender”. Accepting the body you have, which could include less-radical medical intervention that does make that body a less miserable thing to inhabit, strikes me as the reasonable thing to try first, and the only thing you’d want to permit minors to try, since a lot of people do grow out of it.