Transgendering Language By David Solway
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2022/10/29/transgendering-language-n1641125
As has become flagrantly obvious over the years, the political left and its myrmidons in the media, medical industry, social agencies, public libraries, and school system have become slickly adept at framing the cultural debate between conservatives and “progressives” by mutilating discourse, fudging long-accepted distinctions, and decoupling terms from their culturally ascribed referents. What was understood for centuries and millennia as decency becomes indecency, good becomes bad, virtue becomes vice, settled tradition becomes feral violence, family and marriage become barbarism and bondage (the feminist mantra), and so on. Conversely, what is destructive of customary order becomes enlightened transformation.
A comparatively recent and most egregious case in point involves what is now called “conversion therapy,” the target of the non-binary and transgender prepossession preaching “diversity” to minors — a cult that has now acquired conventional status. But what is “conversion therapy”?
It is a term calculated to deceive, to reverse normal assumptions by condemning parents concerned about their children’s sexual identity. Thus, to take an instance of adroit dissimulation, according to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “So-called ‘conversion therapy,’ sometimes known as ‘reparative therapy,’ is a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation.” The truth is precisely the opposite. Responsible parents do not wish to “change” or “convert” their children’s sexual orientation but to retain it.
Undeterred, the Movement Advancement Project (MAP) approvingly cites “Conversion ‘therapy’ laws [that] prohibit licensed mental health practitioners from subjecting LGBTQ minors to harmful conversion ‘therapy’ practices that attempt to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.” Similarly, for the Community Based Research Center (CBRC) in Canada, “Sexual orientation and gender identity and expression change efforts (SOGIECE) are deeply harmful, scientifically discredited practices [sic]. To protect people from this cruel treatment, all levels of government should work to prohibit people and organizations from conducting SOGIECE.” This is how disinformation is made to sound noble. Put bluntly, children are being urged to switch genders even against their parents’ will.
Over and over again, “conversion therapy” is defined by these centers and organizations as a dangerous and abusive practice. It is seen as falling into four distinct categories: psychotherapy, medical, faith-based, and punitive, all deemed to be coercive. Some go so far as to condemn such practices as forms of shock therapy and even chemical castration. Site after site on the net proclaims the damage being done to vulnerable young people by supposedly cruel mental health professionals in cahoots with reactionary parents. Agreement is pretty well unanimous. One has to scroll through a vast number of pages to find even one contending article or report.
However, the general acceptance of the term and practice is a violation of both definition and procedure, a sordid attempt to repurpose nature. The fact is, “conversion therapy” is a brazen misnomer. Parents who struggle to give their children happy, normal, and productive lives as the boys and girls they have been from birth find that their custody rights have been attacked. That they are properly defending a biological norm and maintaining a natural state of affairs against the LGBTQ2+ insistence on gender manipulation is regarded as “conversion.” Clearly, it is not the parents who are doing the “converting,” but the state, the medical profession, and the education establishment who are convincing children to undergo drastic hormone regimens and surgeries with permanently disabling effects.
The real “conversion” that is taking place is from natural sexual identity at birth to non-binary and transgender dysphoria, assumed as a therapeutic given. Nonetheless, it is the parents who have been criminalized in law for an offense committed by a persecuting and iniquitous government. Witness Canada’s Bill C-4, which declares that conversion therapy harms society because “it is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality… and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations” (emphasis mine). The Bill is a farrago of abject nonsense, as is the concept of sex as “assigned” at birth by medical personnel and society.
The irony of gender ideology is particularly mordant. Psychological, chemical and surgical mutilation is a function, not of parents maiming their offspring as is generally claimed, but of the gender theorists and predatory groomers who transition (or “convert”) children via persuasion, doctrine, pornographic material, sexual gadgetry, hormone treatments, puberty blockers, testosterone infusions, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, orchiectomy, voice therapy, facial reconstruction, mastectomy, hysterectomy, and other undiminished horrors. It is the official mandarins in the precincts of authority who are the real criminals, encouraging and even forcing young people to embrace life-altering outcomes that promise to be, for many of them, a lifelong condition of misery and dysfunction.
Meanwhile, as noted, the gender mavens will jail parents who object to the insertion of the state into the natural family. They will move to pass legislation, like Ontario’s Bill 89, that seeks to place the state in loco parentis — as in totalitarian societies, the child is understood as belonging to the state, not to the family. They will hide their congenial abominations under perfumed euphemisms like “gender-affirming health care,” but they are nonetheless recidivist felons. The stench of their dogmatic atrocities befouls the cultural and social environment. Their starting point is to conceive the abnormal as normal; preserving the normal is consequently regarded as a “conversion.” The device is a classic non-sequitur, assuming as a rhetorical fact what has not been or cannot be established, like the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” canard. It is as effective as it is disingenuous.
These apprentices of evil must be held to account. As Ben Shapiro argues in an important article, our “traditional framework of thinking and acting…must be restored. The burden of proof must be on those who wish to destroy, not on those who wish to maintain.” One thinks of the slaughter of the innocents (Matthew 2:16-18). The leftist play with language and policy is nothing short of demonic as it proceeds to blight a generation in its campaign to destabilize a livable future. “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:14) has taken on a new and ruinous significance, for such is the kingdom of hell.
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