On X (Twitter) I made the following comment to the shared video clip, which I will paraphrase below the link for convenience and clarification.
Trying as hard as I can to understand, I can see no difference between putting out ones eyes, or the famous cases of amputating legs (see The Exploitative Act of Removing Healthy Body Parts), and castrating a boy or a man or performing a mastectomy on a girl or a woman because they believed they have always been the other gender. A doctor who amputates the healthy breasts of a woman because she believes she is a man is acting no differently that a doctor who removes the healthy eyes of a woman who believes she is blind. If the latter is wrong, then so must also the former must be wrong.
I know the woman in the video clip did this to herself, but why shouldn’t a doctor safely remove her eyes? Why shouldn’t the doctor affirm her authentic self as a blind woman? That sounds absurd until we come to the matter of gender. It strikes me as some sort of bizarre internalization of loathing about sex to treat the elective castration of a boy as something different than removing his healthy arms or legs. The only difference I can see it that one body part is involved in sexual pleasure while the other is not. That and the fact that amputating a man’s limb makes an amputee while amputating a woman’s breasts don’t make her a man.
The older brother of a boy at my high school (this was in the 1970s) took LSD (or was schizophrenic—this part was always a bit unclear to me) and read the passage in Matthew that it is better to lose one part of your body than to have your whole body thrown into hell. The verbiage in that passage is dramatic, telling the faithful to cut the offending body part from his body and cast it away. And so the kid did. His mother found him with a bloody towel on his crotch and his severed penis on the desk in his room. I used to ride my bicycle past his house on my way to see my buddies at the apartment building at the end of the street. It made me sick to my stomach every time I rode past to think of about what he had done to himself because he had become deluded. I did not know then that doctors were already amputating penises in transsexual surgical procedures.
* * *
After making this comment, an X user called Boomer wrote, “For myself, the obvious distinction is she is surrendering an ability that allows her to be independent and self sufficient. Someone modifying body parts based on gender identification, by itself doesn’t necessarily affect their ability to be full functioning and self sufficient.” I responded that I know blind people who are independent and self-sufficient and that if Boomer didn’t know about the horror stories of people who have undergone gender affirming care, then Boomer needed to study the matter before commenting. Sort of rude thing to say, I admit, but the moment irked me. Why? Because it assumes that we let a person harm herself as long as she doesn’t become dependent on others. Who makes that determination?
It’s one thing to put out your eyes, cut off your arm, etc. You’re responsible for that action. Whether I think it’s right or wrong, it might be odd to hold you accountable for self harm (if your actions were designed to become dependent on the system, it would be a fraudulent action). But I should intervene and stop you if I can. You may be suffering from a delusion, and the action you take in that moment you may regret. I certainly should regret not having helped you in your moment of need. Because it is not sane to want to put out your eyes or cut off your arm.
But it’s another thing when you harm another person. If you put out her eyes, or cut off her arm, then you are responsible for the action that maimed her. If there’s no justification for causing that harm, i.e., the eyes are not diseased, or the arm is healthy, then you have criminally maimed that person. This is especially odd for a doctor to do this; at least in principle, doctors are supposed to help people not hurt them.
During the holocaust, the Nazi doctors did all kinds of things to people in the name of advancing medical science. Moreover, they killed people for merciful reasons (see the T4 euthanasia program). From the standpoint of their ideological system, what they were doing was legal and justified. For those of us who stand outside that system, we can see it for what it was: maiming and murder. These were crimes against humanity. These were atrocities.
What Boomer is rationalizing here is crimes against humanity. Boomer is inside an ideological bubble, failing to see the reality of what is being done to deluded and vulnerable people by doctors (for profit). This is what ideology does to people: it confuses their judgment and finds them justifying atrocities. This is the function of gender ideology. It rationalizes physician harm. The harm perpetrated is a billion dollar industry.
* * *
One of the arguments Boomer made during our back-and-forth is that a doctor may do a better job of poking out a woman’s eyes, which is the one thing the woman regrets. I have a friend who worked for many years at a psychiatric hospital. There was a delusional man there who tried several times to poke out his eyes. My friend was on the ward the day that the man successfully poked out his eyes. He was haunted by the fact that he couldn’t get to the man in time to stop him. Nobody at the hospital thought that the solution to the problem was to have a doctor remove the man’s eyes.
This is because everybody at the hospital understood that a man who wants to poke out his eyes is delusional or in crisis. In judging such things, rational observers use the rational actor standard. People are not thinking rationally when they want to poke out their eyes. They’re not thinking rationally when they want to cut off their arms and legs. It’s not normal for an animal to want to do something like that. It’s ethically wrong for a doctor to do something like that to a person. It should be criminal. And this is why “gender affirming care” should be criminalized.
These examples are not analogies; they are concrete instantiations of the thing itself. They are real, tangible representations of the same thing. Just as a person is not thinking rationally when he wants to remove his arm, he is not thinking rationally when he wants to cut off his penis. How it came to pass that amputation of arms and penises are recognized as different things might be an interesting historical social science investigation, but that they are not different things is obvious.
We see a similar thing with the objection to transracialism among the advocates of transgenderism. The tweet I shared above is about transgender/racial man called Shontelle. As Genevieve Gluck correctly observes, Shontelle is a white man who engages in racial fetishization of black women. At least that’s one way of putting it, a gender ideologue would likely stress. I suspect that Shontelle will tell you that she identifies as a black woman. For Shontelle, trans black women are black women.
When I have raised the matter of transracialism in the past, I am told that the comparison is a bad analogy. But if gender and race are social constructions, if gender and race are essential identities, then if a man can change his gender, there is no reason a white man can’t change his race. Indeed, given the reality of genotypic sex, and in light of the absence of genotypic race, changing one’s gender is the more impossible thing. But they are analogous based not he logic of gender ideology, which raises several questions (which I asked in a 2020 essay The Strange Essentialisms of Identity Politics): Which identities may be taken up and which are forbidden? Who makes these rules? Who polices them? For what purpose? (See Adolph Reed, Jr. “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much,” Common Dreams, June 2015.)
* * *
I have politely discontinued my conversation with Boomer. It was going nowhere. My last response to this individual was after he threw in my face something I had earlier said, when I responded that I know blind people who are independent and self-sufficient. But it was Boomer who suggested that as a condition on whether she should be blinded. I was hoping Boomer would get back around to that. He wouldn’t stop doctors from blinding people as long as the result meets his criteria for being independent and self sufficient. I want to stop doctors from hurting people. Boomer doesn’t care if they do as long as they don’t burden others.
That some people who are born blind or blinded accidentally are independent or self-sufficient doesn’t mean all people are. Saying “I know blind people who are independent and self-sufficient” doesn’t mean I don’t also know blind people who aren’t. Just as there are some transsexuals who get on fine in life after their procedure, others who become life-long medical patients. The point is whether physicians should knowingly or purposely harm people by removing healthy appendages and organs. People who want body parts cut off from them are delusional and vulnerable. Doctors who carry out their wishes are taking advantage of them. This is wrong.
A physician taking the life of a suicidal patient is not an acceptable intervention. The goal is to save the patient. If the person is suffering from an unbearable medical condition, such a terminal cancer or ALS, then there is an ethical discussion to be had. But if it’s because they are delusional or in crisis, there’s no debate. There is nothing physically wrong with a person who says or thinks they are the other gender. They are delusional. In the case of gender, they are especially delusional because they desire something that is impossible. At least the woman who blinded herself achieved the end state.
The bottomline is that you don’t take advantage of a delusional person. It’d the same if they thought they were a lizard or a walrus. You don’t surgically alter a person’s body who believes the impossible to make them appear as a simulation of that thing. It’s contrary to the essence of medicine. It’s perverse.
* * *
Left to her own accord generally, yes. I’d try to stop her if I were around when she attempted to blind herself. I can imagine a person in the presence of another person who is harming herself standing by and allowing it to happen, but if the person could have prevented it and didn’t, then I’d find them having failed in their duty as a human being to prevent self-harm.
On principle, we have a moral obligation to (a) refrain from acting intentionally to cause harm and (b) act to prevent harm that may occur in our presence if it is in our power to act. It is hard to imagine people intervening in an attempted suicide being scolded for not allowing the person to complete the act. It is expected that the reaction to allowing that to happen would be “What in the fuck is wrong with you? Why did you let her kill herself?” You know, “You didn’t try to stop her from pouring muriatic acid into her eyes?”
It gets tricky with self/other-harm with respect to GAC because there is legal and social approval for this type of harm, and intervening may result in a severe penalty and great social disapproval. I see somebody going to a hospital for an elective orchiectomy. What can I do about that without being hauled away by police officers? I can try to talk him out of it, but I have no legitimacy of action (as I would, say, intervening in an attempted suicide).
My argument is that we have to change the law to align social approval with correct moral action, a step towards which involves explaining why elective castration and vaginoplasty is not analogous to elective enucleation but an instantiation of the thing itself.
freedom and reason 