A short blog entry this morning. I have some longer pieces in the pipeline, but university lectures started this week, and I am always editing, elaborating, and updating my talks with students, so my attention is necessarily split between scholarship and teaching. This will from week to week affect the frequency and length of my essays going forward. At least for the next few months. I only have time for this note. But it is an important one. It’s a clip of Helen Joyce in conservation with Peter Boghossian taking on the toughest of roles: serving as the conscience of the parent who participates in the “transitioning” of a child.
Joyce speaks with moral clarity and courage. Like the emotional blackmail of suicide, the “I have a trans child” line is another manifestation of emotional bullying. It is designed to shut down criticism of gender ideology and the atrocities it justifies in the minds of those who fail to safeguard children from social contagion and to keep them away from disordered and unscrupulous others.
Whether trans identifying children are at greater risk of suicide is not a valid reason to stop their puberty, administer crosses hormones, and surgically mutilate their bodies. Either humans can change their sex or they can’t. The answer to this question is straightforward: humans are mammals and mammals cannot change sex. The argument that gender is distinct from sex is fallacious, as I have shown on this blog. It’s time to stop turning gay children into the simulacra of the opposite sex and help them accept themselves for who they are. Validate the experience, to be sure; don’t affirm the confusion. Being the parent of a “trans child” does not relieve one of the moral obligation to protect his child from harm.
I was alerted to this clip by a X (twitter) user who described Joyce as a “startlingly cruel and hateful person.” The truth can be cruel for sure. When people speak the truth, others may indeed find it disturbing. Honest criticism of the choice of others can feel harsh. It must be one of the most difficult things for a parent to live with knowing he failed to safeguard his child from disordered and unscrupulous others. But a parent failing to protect his children doesn’t change the truth of his failure or the need to call him out on it. While truth has its own integrity, it depends on people with integrity to speak it. Helen Joyce has that integrity.
One more thing before I go. This idea that not stopping puberty being the same as forcing a child to participate in something against their will, without his consent, and so forth, or that puberty is like a disease or medical condition (precocious puberty aside)—these arguments are exactly the same as claiming that not stopping a child from getting taller is forcing him to grow taller and therefore to do something against his will and consent. Like sex, growing taller is a fact of life. Would it be right for the parent of a normally developing child to suppress the hormone that produces bone growth because her child—or the parent—wanted to be short? I believe that question answers itself. So what explains the practice of stopping puberty in a normally developing child? That question also answers itself.
freedom and reason 
Doctors have lost the ability to distinguish between a healthy and sick person.