How Fashionable to Prescribe the Cruellest Cuts Peter Smith
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/society/2023/04/how-fashionable-to-prescribe-the-cruellest-cuts/
Suppose I decided one fine day to self-identify as a non-binary pineapple. Je suis un ananas. Mes pronoms sont Ze, Zir, Zirs et Zirself. I forgot to mention, a French pineapple.
You might understandably think I’m mentally unbalanced. But, being a kindly sort of person, you might humour me. If your young son or daughter came home from school one day claiming that they were pineapples, you would not humour them for long. Maybe five minutes, before you told them not to be silly and to go wash their hands before having something to eat and drink.
Children are suggestible but I found both as a child and as a parent that a sharp dismissive grounding retort, particularly from a dad, was usually enough to dispel unfounded anxieties and delusions. Before you knew it, little Johnny or Jill was playing happily if young or preoccupied with juvenile pursuits if older. What you don’t do is to indulge fantasies beyond a playful and indulgent few minutes. What you certainly don’t do is to affirm fantasies; unless it’s Santa Claus. Unfortunately our society, or an influential segment of it, including the political class, sees virtue in affirming dangerous and debilitating fantasies in children and teenagers.
When a child or teenager believes they have been assigned the wrong biological sex; that really they are a male with female anatomy or a female with male anatomy, then they are living a fantasy. That must be our assumption. There is a gulf of genetic difference between males and females going way beyond surface appearances. If the fantasy persists, the only reasonable conclusion is that the youngster concerned is mentally troubled and in need of professional help; help which is squarely aimed at ridding the affected youngster of their delusion and bringing them back to reality. That isn’t the prevailing zeitgeist among officialdom.
Queensland and the ACT since August 2020 and Victoria since November 2022 have laws, as has New Zealand, which ban conversion therapy practices. Such practices are commonly described as those “which seek to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” Other states are following suit or will soon. Shamefully, under (conservative Catholic?) Dominic Perrottet, the previous Coalition government in NSW was preparing to act. The new Labor government will certainly soon act.
Positively affirming fantasies from on high is bound to filter down to classrooms. Among the impressionable young it is bound to play its part in promoting a contagion of sexual-identity dysphoria; which has ultimately led, as we know, to the chemical and physical maiming of young bodies. There is no lip-sticking that pig. It is evil incarnate pure and simple. From the UK some data via the Cass Review interim report commissioned by the NHS and dated February 2022:
In the last few years, there has been a significant change in the numbers and case-mix of children and young people being referred…From a baseline of approximately 50 referrals per annum in 2009, there was a steep increase from 2014-15…in October 2020 there were 2,500 children and young people being referred per annum, 4,600 children and young people on the waiting list…this increase in referrals has been accompanied by a change in the case-mix from predominantly birth‑registered males presenting with gender incongruence from an early age, to predominantly birth‑registered females presenting with later onset of reported gender incongruence in early teen years.
From the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine on the closure of the Tavistock Clinic.
The Tavistock failed to collect data on puberty blockers for those under 16, refused to follow up the effects of its treatments and paid virtually no attention to other common factors such as autism, eating disorders or histories of trauma and abuse. It naively confused sexual orientation with gender identity, accepted at face value all declarations by children that they were born in the wrong body and treated all complex problems through the prism of gender.
This was reported by The Medical Republic (TMR):
Australian Professional Association for Trans Health president Dr Fiona Bisshop acknowledged that there were broader concerns around the use of puberty blockers for transgender children. “People are absolutely correct in that we don’t have long-term data [on puberty blockers for gender dysphoria], and we do need long-term data,” she told TMR.
“But you can’t collect long-term data if you don’t actually put people on puberty blockers, and it’s going to take a long time for that data to appear.”
Phew! Actually, people aren’t put on puberty blockers. By definition, children are. And, apparently, girls can begin puberty from as early as the age of eight. I’m not a medico but I would have thought that treating children who are not facing life threatening illnesses with experimental substances whose long term effect is unknown would be a no-no. Against the Hippocratic Oath, wouldn’t it be? I ask, honestly but inwardly despondently.
A report by the Daily Mail (UK) on some US data.
The number of gender reassignment surgeries being carried out on American children has risen 13-fold in the last decade, a study suggests. Researchers looked at the number of mastectomies — sometimes called ‘top surgery’ — performed on girls under 18 at a major health system in California since 2013. The operation involves surgically removing breast tissue and flattening the chest of biological girls who are trans, so they can feel aligned with their gender identity.
‘Oh Lord, make haste to save us’, has seldom seemed more apropos.
Finally, what’s at issue here? Much of the public debate is about protecting women’s sports and safe spaces. Incidentally, the men inside trans women competing against real women must have no self-respect. To be clear, this is a fight worth having. However, the underlying fight is against the normalisation of transgenderism. Leave aside the ABC and its left-green-woke fellow media travellers. Consider conservative commentators on, say, Sky News.
Whenever the pernicious effects of transgenderism are brought into view, conservative commentators inevitably fall over themselves to make sure their audience understands how fair-minded they are personally. Often they tell of having a well-regarded friend or colleague who’s transgender. Self-virtuous preening has nothing to do with young girls having their breasts cut off. Nor does it have anything to do with the sexualisation and grooming of children in public schools; with drag queen story time, or with inappropriate reading material in school libraries.
I, too, knew a transgender woman. So what? Impressionable, insecure, mentally-fragile youngsters are being preyed on in some perverted campaign by trans activists to increase their foothold in society. Got to push back hard against this. It can’t be normalised. And it is a complete irrelevancy to talk kindly about adults who for whatever reason have decided to comport themselves as though they are the opposite sex. That has nothing to do with the price of eggs.
Things are going very wrong in our Western societies. And that is putting it mildly. Treating minors (and I suggest the old standard of those aged under 21) suffering from what is clearly a mentally confused state with puberty blockers, hormones, mastectomies and penectomies, has got to be beyond the pale in civilised societies. Adults have qualified licence to make life-changing alterations to their own bodies. Though even then there is a societal duty of care; and counselling should be a prior requirement to prevent those who are mentally unbalanced from injuring themselves. Minors must be protected from undertaking irreversible life-changing procedures; not encouraged or affirmed in their mixed-up mental states.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when Christian values, common decency and common sense reigned. Memory of it is becoming fainter and fainter.
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