Bill Maher is too wishy-washy on this issue. His argument, presented in the video clip shared below, collapses because he fails to walk on principled moral and scientific grounds. He wants to have it both ways, believing this places him on common ground—that it makes him a centrist and therefore reasonable. But there is no common ground here. Either you oppose child abuse or you defend and support it. Maher is committing a grave form of the golden mean fallacy.
(By the way, this is why the cry for “bipartisanship” is misleading. A party responsible to the electorate does not win elections to sacrifice principle on the altar of compromise. Parties seek power to determine path and policy. The opposition often calls for bipartisanship to thwart the will of the people. But I digress.)
Jon Cryer, of Two and a Half Men fame, on the other hand, stands firmly on ideological ground. And, like all ideologues, he attempts to support his argument by twisting the meaning of words.
Cryer’s claim that one of the most frequent types of gender affirmation surgery addresses the problem of gynecomastia, which is abnormal growth in breast gland tissue in boys or men, is correct, but it cannot serve his purpose here, for the simple reason that addressing a physical abnormality in a child is not the same thing as altering a child’s body based on the crackpot construct of gender identity.
Addressing gynecomastia is an actual gender affirmation surgery. It is not normal for a boy to have breasts. However, removing healthy breast gland tissue in girls is gender denying surgery. It does not affirm what she is—an immature female human—but rather attempts to negate what she is by falsely claiming that she can be what she isn’t if her body is surgically altered. Cosmetic surgery does not change a girl into a boy. No surgery can do this.
It’s the same for the use of testosterone to stimulate genital development in a boy with a micropenis. Medical intervention to produce a normal-sized penis is actual gender affirming care. However, injecting a girl with testosterone to enlarge her clitoris is gender denying in the context of “transmasculine care,” the industry propaganda term for the fiction of female-to-male gender transition.
One of the early physical effects of testosterone is clitoral enlargement (clitoromegaly). But the clitoris is not a penis.
And that’s not all that testosterone will do to a girl’s body. Along with the attempt to enlarge the clitoris to simulate a penis (the dissatisfaction with results sometimes leading to the disfiguring horrors of phalloplasty), the effects the girl will suffer include deepening of the voice, increased muscle mass, body and facial hair growth, fat redistribution, and the cessation of menstruation, which can lead to sterilization.
What people like Cryer use to advance ideology is word trickery—the type of trickery George Orwell warned us about. When dealing with ideology, one has to flip over the word or phrase to extract its true meaning. Gender-affirming care is not what the cult is advancing or defending. A boy with a micropenis needs earlier hormonal intervention, and the parent who refuses to seek this treatment is neglecting the needs of the child (imagine an adult with a micropenis thanking a parent for not doing anything about it).
Again, what the Cryer crowd is defending is gender denying care—and this inversion conceals the child abuse that is occurring in these cases. Thus, what Cryer and his ilk are really defending is child abuse and medical atrocities—all for the sake of ideology and corporate profit. The parent who seeks testosterone for a daughter to make her appear masculine is violating the child’s rights and harming her health.
Cryer’s other argument about suicide is something the medical industry and the gender identity movement concocted to emotionally blackmail parents into sterilizing their children.
Elevated suicide risk among those with gender dysphoria can be explained by the prevalence of psychiatric comorbidities among those prone to gender confusion. Trans-identifying individuals present with mood, personality, and psychotic disorders. In fact, the prevalence of these disorders is extraordinarily high. Those with autism are also overrepresented in this population. Research finds that as much as 25 percent of people seen at gender clinics meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder or show elevated autistic traits.
Doctors know all this, yet they proceed with so-called gender-affirming care. The industry doesn’t care about people. It cares about money. To be sure, there are doctors here and there who care, but their actions are determined by corporate logic—which is, at its core, the pathological pursuit of profit. Doctors have become well-compensated employees.
Moreover, evidence that medical transition eliminates or significantly reduces suicidal risk is at best mixed, and long-term mortality data do not support the claim that risk is reduced over time. The reasons for this are obvious.
First, changing a person’s body to simulate the opposite gender does not make a person what she cannot be, and as the euphoria of transition fades, the realization that it did not make her the other gender intrudes. The industry doesn’t want to talk about detransitioners, and there’s massive social pressure—including from the doctors themselves—on those with broken bodies to keep quiet about their regrets (not to mention the shame the victim feels at having made such an enormous mistake). But the reality is that many victims wish to have their intact bodies back, but can’t because all this is irreversible.
Second, so-called gender-affirming care does not address the psychiatric conditions that caused the child to think she was the opposite gender to begin with. All the mental illnesses that made her suicidal remain. And now she has to deal with the regret for the path she has taken. Transitioning solved none of her problems and gave her many new problems to negotiate. And there is no escaping the end of the path. She is now a lifelong medical patient.
This is a typical path:
Parents have a child with a Cluster B personality. The child has been online and fallen prey to a social contagion. Her peers have love-bombed her into believing she is a boy. She finds self-edifying status in the process. Finding themselves at wits’ end to try to deal with a girl who says she’s a boy, some parents try at first to talk her out of her delusion. Other parents affirm, using virtue signaling as a coping mechanism for the situation. Many parents fear being shamed by their tribe. What sort of parent doesn’t affirm their gender-confused child? There is a lot of social pressure to affirm the child even when the parents have misgivings. Then there are other parents who are thrilled to have their daughter become their son.
Whether out of a desire to help the child overcome her confusion, and mitigate the hell of a Cluster B child, or virtue signal to the tribe, the parents take the child to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist has seen a lot more Cluster B than the parents and knows what he’s in for. So he passes the child to the endocrinologist. In doing so, he has also affirmed the child in her delusion, either because he is trying to extricate himself from a difficult and sometimes dangerous situation (especially if the patient is a boy) or because he has been told that he must do so out of a professional responsibility.
The endocrinologist administers hormones to the girl, which produces euphoria, or “trans joy.” The endocrinologist’s intervention and the resulting euphoria provide further affirmation for the child. The boost she gets from testosterone leads her to believe even more surely in the path that she’s taking. The next step is often surgery.
Surgeons make their money from performing surgeries, just as endocrinologists make money from administering hormones. Remember, all this is an industry generating billions in profit. With surgery, the next step of affirmation is accomplished. The girl, perhaps now a woman, presents as a man (usually the simulation is poor, so some girls and women resort to the “nonbinary” category—another impossible class of being). More “trans joy.”
The girl or woman who is now identifying as a boy or man becomes even more aggressive because of a continued need to self-affirm the path and because of the alteration in her hormonal physiology (testosterone is associated with aggression and low frustration tolerance). As a result, she seeks to impose her worldview on others. She desperately seeks affirmation. There’s a lot of grooming that goes on in these circles as a result. The social contagion spreads. Indeed, as noted, the girl was groomed by older peers already a ways down the path.
This is the expressive and political side of the phenomenon. It’s why your kids have to learn about gender diversity in school. It’s a movement, and many confused youth find comfort in movements. Movements provide meaning. Those who make themselves simulations of other genders want to make others like them. They also want to make the rest of us participate in their delusion (hence the pronoun rules and Orwellian slogans). All this is good for business, so corporations promote the movement.
There are other girls and women, however, who, the euphoria having faded, will look at their broken bodies and become disillusioned with a trajectory they pursued, which was affirmed by everybody who should’ve been protecting them all along. All this is made worse by the fact that borderline personality disorder (BPD), a Cluster B personality disorder often present in this population, is strongly associated with self-injurious behaviors (e.g., cutting) independent of anything else. So the disorder that should have been dealt with at the outset becomes more injurious because the path gave the girl or woman more motivation to self-harm.
Gender denying care is institutionalized medical malpractice. There are clear legal criteria for establishing this, and the evidence is overwhelming.
Healthcare providers owe a duty to the patient, which comes into existence whenever a doctor-patient relationship is established. The attempt to turn girls into boys betrays this relationship.
These practices therefore constitute a breach of duty, in that the provider fails to meet the accepted standard of care for their profession. I worded it that way because there is a trick here. Organizations supplying standards of care, e.g., WPATH, rationalize these practices to give the industry cover. Gender identity ideology produces an epistemic in which malpractice is concealed through a tacit immunity given by so-called standards of care. Again, this is an industry, and corporations are very clever at immunizing themselves against legal action. Standards of care are to be judged in scientific terms, though, not through the lens of corporate profit and ideology. But activists, ideologues, and the industry have corrupted science.
There is a clear causal relation between the medical practice in question and harm to the patient. The breach of ethics—independent of standards of care—directly causes harm and injury to the patient.
Finally, damages resulting from so-called gender-affirming care are easy to assess, since the patient suffered actual harm—emotional distress, financial loss, and physical injury.
Standing back, at the societal level, in addition to producing massive profits for the medical industry, so-called gender affirming care is something of the second coming of eugenics—and a very profitable form of the practice. Sterilization removes individuals from the reproductive pool, and it shouldn’t be lost that the demographic group most affected by this practice is the same group that is already experiencing historic declines in fertility. In the progressive phase of modern racialism, the disfavored races have shifted. The function of sterilization underpins the critical stance of the left towards the traditional family, which is manifest in the aggressive transgression of normative gender roles. This is the goal of queer politics.
As a matter of historical record, eugenics was intertwined with aspects of the progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the United States. At the heart of progressivism was the advancement of corporate science-based solutions to social problems. Eugenics was seen by progressives as a “scientific” way to improve society. By the early twentieth century, more than thirty US states had passed compulsory sterilization laws targeting people with psychiatric illnesses. The Supreme Court upheld these laws on the same basis as compulsory vaccination, another progressive fetish. This is the same crowd that thought lobotomies performed on juveniles would make for a better society.
Progressives haven’t changed. They are out front in expressing the desire that the state impose mandatory vaccination rules. And although the targets of their sterilization program have changed, the advancement of sterilization programs hasn’t gone away. The patterns we see are not accidental.
Finally, these practices threaten gays and lesbians. The hypothetical girl I have used to illustrate path and process is likely a tomboy and may be a lesbian. By telling the girl that her masculine traits (masculinity and femininity are variable traits across genders, and while variation should be seen as normal and not pathological, the medical industry seeks the pathological because then there can be a profit-generating intervention) and/or sexual orientation suggest that she is a boy trapped in a girl’s body and medical intervention is needed to liberate her from the cage natural history put her in.
There is no greater madness than the belief that a boy can be born in a girl’s body. Now that I see it, it will forever astonish me that, even in the face of natural history and human biology, people believe otherwise.
However, a movement to hold the industry accountable for institutionalizing medical malpractice will prove too slow to deal with the current-day scale of atrocities we see ongoing. We need government action. These practices need to be criminalized, and the law enforcement arm of the state needs to be activated to aggressively prosecute offenders.
Doing this will be of great relief for parents, since they can simply say to their difficult child, “Honey, our hands are tied. The state does not allow doctors to perform these medical procedures.”
Their relief will feel a lot like the relief young Muslim girls feel when the other women in their communities are prohibited by law from performing clitorectomies on them because women are not supposed to experience pleasure during sex. This reality is barely even an analogy, given the fact that children who undergo the secular procedures I am describing, going under the name of “gender-affirming care,” are also often robbed of their ability to experience sexual pleasure.
A population in the grip of mass psychogenic illness is an interesting sociological phenomenon. But a moral person can’t be dispassionate and step back and say, “Well, things like this happen in advanced civilization.” Humans aren’t rats in a grand experiment. Society has to do something about it. I speak up for the same reason I have for my whole life spoken out against fascism and national socialism. Again, barely an analogy given the intersection of phenomena. Once a man sees something, and what he sees is evil and wrong, he must say something.
freedom and reason 