Most push notifications that pop up on my tablet concern impending catastrophe. But last week, one newsflash made my day. Glory hallelujah, the NHS is closing the Tavistock.
A clatter of tattletales have warned since 2005 that the UK’s only clinic for minors confused about which sex they are – having been encouraged to be confused by British media and their own teachers – was fast-tracking children into often irreversible treatments in the service of ideologically driven ‘gender affirmation’. At last the Cass report has determined that the clinic’s practices are unsafe. The Tavistock will close by the spring, which by my calculation is seven months too late – if not ten years.
A month ago, I noted that the trans craze is ‘anti-natalist’, because no one seems to care whether these doped-up kids will be able to bear children. But the phenomenon is also anti-a-great-deal-else.
We’re as prey to nonsensical manias, untruths and superstitions as we were in the 1600s
Anti-reality. Astonishingly, fanatical activists have brainwashed many otherwise, you would think, intelligent people into reciting like zombies: ‘Trans women are women.’ I can’t be the only one who reflexively translates when reading ‘trans women’: ‘Oh, right. “Men”, then.’ Thus our activist motto decodes: ‘Men are women.’ We might as well recite ‘Lamps are carrots’ or ‘Knitting needles are tractors’. Bearing XY chromosomes, a ‘trans woman’ is male down to each individual cell. However carved up, he cannot give birth or nurse; he doesn’t menstruate or go through menopause. His ‘transition’ is ornamental. Her transition is grammatical.
Presumably, if we’re forced to repeat that biologically moronic mantra enough times, it becomes true. It doesn’t. The very feverishness with which this would-be tautology is crammed down our throats betrays that its proponents know they’re touting a lie: that our sex is in our minds.
Yet a pliant legal apparatus now retroactively revises the sex on birth certificates, contrary to historical fact. Doctors describe sex as ‘assigned at birth’, as if determination of sex were as arbitrary as putting toddlers in the ‘redbird group’ and the ‘bluebird group’ in reception. Personally, whenever I’m confused about which sex I am, I pull down my pants. In fact, faced with any passing fog of girl-boy uncertainty, every night undressing before bed straightens me right out. Even small children can take this same simple pants-down test. It would beat the dickens out of the bilge Chris Rufo just exposed in the Portland Public Schools’ curriculum: ‘Some girls can have penises and some boys can have vulvas’, as ‘gender is like outer space because there are as many ways to be different genders as there are stars in the sky’. (It’s because of such nonsense that I am forthwith boycotting the word ‘gender’, which has become politically loaded and functionally meaningless.)
While Black Lives Matter can market the subjective judgment that the West is structurally racist, trans activists aren’t promoting an opinion but the overt defiance of objective reality. We’re on perilous ground when we mainstream bald-faced lies. We’re being asked to lie to ourselves and to each other, as well as to deny our shared perceptions of the material world. Once we start down that road, there’s no limit to the balderdash we will swallow, or will be made to swallow.
Anti-nature. Screen junkies forget this, but we live in bodies. They are not our invention. They’re not toys, like Barbie and Ken. They’re not infinitely malleable, mere canvases for our fantasies. It can’t be a coincidence that so many young people are suddenly determined to change their perceived sex during the digital era. But our bodies aren’t video-game avatars and cannot be rearranged at will with a pull-down menu. In elevating the subjective experience of self above the physical reality of us breathing, rutting bipeds, trans activists express an utter alienation from nature, to which the same younger generations claim to be so attached.
Anti-science. The notion that some people are ‘born in the wrong body’ belongs right up there with belief in phrenology (the Victorians), ‘wandering wombs’ (ancient Greece) or the vital medical balancing of ‘the four humours’, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile (Hippocrates). We’ve come a long way, you say? Maybe not. Having embraced wrong-body folklore, ideologues are pumping children full of puberty blockers with no clue about the long-term consequences of this experimental off-label medication for their patients. No one really knows the results of cross-sex hormones over a lifetime delivered at scale. The drugs are distributed like Smarties anyway.
According to the above conceit, I was born in the wrong body. I am 5ft 2in. But inside? I feel tall. My soul is tall. I experience myself as 6ft 5in. And because a terrible mistake was made when I was born and ‘assigned’ as this short person, I’m going to force everyone to look me in the eyes by staring 15 inches over my head.
We’re not nearly as sophisticated as we imagine. We’re as prey to nonsensical manias, untruths and superstitions as we were in the 1600s. You’ve got to wonder, too, what’s wrong with a culture obsessed with pretending to switch sexes when hardly short of genuine problems. We’re fiddling with our genitals while Rome burns. And the trans fetish is doing untold, often permanent damage to children who deserve the protection of proper grown-ups.
Maybe the Tavistock’s closure is a watershed, after which British institutions will gradually reconnect to reality, to nature, to science. But the trans trend has sunk its delusional claws deep into our schools, our media, our civil service. For adolescents often suffering from autism, anxiety, eating disorders or plain unpopularity, declaring as trans marks them as modern, cutting-edge. It bestows instant beatitude on previously shamed white kids. It’s a tantalising up-yours to parents. The NHS having just rechristened ‘gender dysphoric’ children as ‘early adopters’ is a bad sign; renaming is a flag of deceit. The witch doctors of the Tavistock could easily relocate to these proposed regional paediatric centres and bring their oil of newt with them. Still, the cheerful news story is a rarity. Let’s take a moment to bask in this one.
Comments