What is a woman? - “We don’t know yet.” Part 2
An American Export: Trans-ideology and the manufacturing of Gender Dysphoria.
Contents
Introduction: “We don’t know yet.”
Post-Modernism in action (out of the University and on the streets).
On Relativism.
On Safetyism.
The American
UniversityMadrassa System.Woke Religion: A taxonomy.
What is a Woman?
Abigail Shirer.
What is Gender Dysphoria?
Dr. Littman: Adolescent girls and Peer Contagion.
Lupron: Pharma and the business of Gender Dysphoria.
Lupron: On Infertility.
Lupron: Chemical Castration turned pubertal “pause button”.
Hansel and Gretel
“St George in retirement” syndrome.
Victoria (Australia).
Mark Latham in NSW (Australia).
Dr. Toby Rogers and my thoughts on mass vaccination.
Detransitioning.
The story of Nathan Verhelst.
11. Lupron: Pharma and the business of Gender Dysphoria
Scott Newgent from “What is a woman?” makes the point that each child “convinced” generates $1.3m (USD) to Pharma.
Let’s pause for a minute, are you surprised that there is a financial component to this story?
Are you surprised that there is Pharma involved in this story? This is June 2022 and if you have even partially woken up during the last 2.5 years, then finding out that Pharma have a stake in this game shouldn’t come as any surprise.
“Blockers”: Chemical castration
Wherever Pharma has a pay day, they will reinvest as far up stream as they can get to create the “science” and the conditions and the narratives and the beliefs necessary to make sure that whatever trickles, or pours, down does so into their open mouth.
Gender dysphoria: a modern pandemic? | The Spectator Australia
The High Court subsequently ruled in 2020 that children under 16 were not able to give consent. Prior to this, children as young as 8 had been given hormone blockers, with the potential for permanent sterility, moving on invariably to take cross-sex hormones at puberty.
With the knowledge that three-quarters, left untreated, change their minds at puberty, and as many as half presenting with mental disorders, it is staggering that this situation has been allowed to occur. The growth in gender reassignment surgery, which usually follows, is even more disturbing, with operations increasing in Europe and America with 10,000 to 15,000 having had surgery in France alone.
We are starting to witness the blowback, with those permanently disfigured looking for legal redress.
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Australia has also seen an explosion in numbers referred to gender clinics. In 2003, the Melbourne Royal Children’s hospital had only a single case, they now have 200.
Studies from the US have suggested that as many as 10 per cent of students now believe themselves to be transgender, this for a condition that as recently as 20 years ago, was thought to occur in 2 or 3 per 100,000. The ongoing concern is that medical and surgical interventions may turn ‘a healthy child into a patient for life’.
And this from 2018
Transgenderism Is Just Big Business Dressed Up In Civil Rights Clothes (thefederalist.com)
Transgenderism, a purported civil rights movement, now intersects at every juncture of the global marketplace. It is hard to remember it came out of the medical industrial complex as a term for the most intense body dysphoria. Children are being prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, sterilized, and groomed into lifelong medical patients and consumers in more than 50 U.S. gender clinics that weren’t here ten years ago. It’s all because of transgenderism and that people fighting to live free of discrimination are hailed as heroes and celebrities for feeling alienated from their own biology.
Gender ideology a boon to Big Pharma and threat to parental rights (nypost.com)
Actually, that bit about the latest science isn’t quite right. Medroxyprogesterone acetate, a common drug in “gender-affirming therapy,” has long been used to chemically castrate sex offenders.
Another widely used medication is Lupron, a controversial hormone blocker. Lupron was initially developed to lower testosterone levels in men with prostate cancer, effectively chemically castrating them. It’s now used as a puberty blocker in the booming business of “transitioning” children.
Lupron manufacturer AbbVie made $726 million on the drug alone in 2018. AbbVie has joined other major pharmaceutical companies in lobbying to keep drug prices high while virtue-signaling about diversity and inclusion.
Transgender people require lifelong medical support, making them ideal customers for the health-care industry, and the well-documented phenomenon of “peer contagion” - kids pressuring each other into thinking they’re all trans — ensures an endless supply of consumers.
Not that this should come as any surprise, but there is a Lupron Class Action in the US.
What You Should Know About Lupron Class Action Lawsuit - Law Answer
I was on lupron when I was 7 or 8 because of precocious puberty and when I was 19 I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism and have had trouble getting pregnant, luckily I was able to get pregnant with my 11 year old son and my unborn son I am currently pregnant with. Lupron was horrible, the side effects were just down right horrible.
L.MccallJuly 27, 2021, 5:08 am
My daughter was prescribed Lupron for precocious puberty. She got the injection and year or 2 later diagnosed with thyroid cancer.
The Lupron Money Trail- Hormones Matter
The Kaiser Report identified that in a 2 year period of time Lupron’s manufacturer, AbbVie, had paid $157,066 to the lead investigator of Lupron’s precocious puberty clinical trials, Dr. Peter Lee (a pediatric endocrinologist). According to ProPublica’s “Dollars for Docs”, for the years 2015, 2014, and 2013, Lee received from AbbVie a total of $102,325 for “Promotional Speaking/Other” for Lupron. (Payments by AbbVie to Lee for Lupron related “Consulting”, “Travel and Lodging” and “Food and Beverage” were not tallied, but figures are available at ‘Dollars for Docs’/ProPublica for each of those 3 years.)
The Kaiser Report also identified that both AbbVie and investigator Lee did not answer specific questions about the omission of serious adverse events (a bone disorder and a pathological fracture) in a key pediatric clinical trial of Lupron. How is this acceptable? If the drug company and lead clinical trial investigator will not answer questions about adverse events in the trial – who will?
In the drug company’s campaign to promote Lupron for precocious puberty (entitled “Too Soon”), they claimed (in 2003) “[t]here are almost 5,200 children who have central precocious puberty and grow up too soon” (see Question/Answer # 10). Lee was a member of the editorial board of “Too Soon”, and Lee is a consultant for AbbVie, and “has received payment for the development of educational materials by AbbVie”.
It goes without saying that during a promotion of something (especially if one is being monetarily compensated for doing so), such promotion usually results in a loyalty to, and liking for, ‘the thing’. And especially so if ‘the thing’ is a “cash cow” (stated in a ‘CafePharma’ post of August 8, 2011 @ 3:47 pm).
In 28 months (August 2013 through December 2015), AbbVie made 69,173 payments related to Lupron for a sum of $16.9 million to 24,910 doctors, and Lee came in second place in ‘top doctors receiving payments related to Lupron’.
12. Lupron: On Infertility
From Irreversible Damage:
Katherine began reading everything she could about Lupron. Originally used in cancer treatment and in kids with precocious puberty, it is now prescribed off-label to prepubescent kids to halt the onset of puberty before beginning cross-sex hormones (typically administered up to two years later). The goal is to block the secondary-sex characteristics that would make eventual “passing” as the opposite sex more difficult if one continues on the path to medical transition.
But the more Katherine read, the more disturbed she became. When the medical papers she read cited studies, she tracked down those and read them, too. “So first of all, the studies show that when a kid is put on puberty blockers, almost 100 percent will go on to do cross-sex hormones.”
This is true, though the reasons are not entirely clear. One possibility is that a young person would only go on puberty blockers in the first place if she was reasonably certain of wanting to lead a transgender life. Another is that, after years of socially identifying as a person of the opposite sex, the social costs of taking it all back are quite steep. It’s hard to change your mind about something you’ve been insisting on for so long—even if you might wish you could.
But it was the next thing she learned that sent Katherine spinning. “When you’ve stopped puberty with puberty blockers and go straight to cross-sex hormones, you absolutely guarantee that you will be infertile.”
When the gender clinicians pushed Katherine to start her preteen child on hormone blockers, they were proposing that she put Maddie on a path toward infertility. Her faith in the gender therapists fell apart.
Katherine could not understand how psychologists would encourage this, how doctors would allow it, or why medical professional standards would permit parents to consent to eliminating such a vital human capacity on behalf of their minor children. And yet, right in front of her, schools were encouraging it, parents were going along with it, the media was celebrating it, and everyone was acting as if this were perfectly kosher. It was enough to make her think she might be losing her mind.
13. Lupron: Chemical Castration turned pubertal “Pause Button”
From Irreversible Damage:
Remember “Katherine Cave”? She’s the mom whose daughter came out as “trans” at twelve after a school presentation, and Katherine—not knowing what else to do—took her daughter to a gender clinic. One of the first things the counselors pushed, as an essential first step, was that her daughter be put on “puberty blockers.”
Puberty is a sweeping metamorphosis. If your kid’s pretty sure she’s going to want to be a trans man, why make her travel there by way of breasts, hips, and menses? Gender doctors like to insist that halting puberty at onset (typically, ages eight to thirteen) is a neutral intervention, or “pause button,” since if the blockade is withdrawn, normal puberty should resume. Like freezing your eggs, blocking puberty is presented as simply allowing a young woman to put nature on hold while keeping her options open.
Once used in chemical castration of sex offenders, Lupron is the go-to puberty blocker, FDA-approved to halt precocious puberty. If your four year-old daughter is spontaneously developing breasts, Lupron shuts off part of her pituitary to slow puberty down, until her brain and peers catch up.
What the FDA has not approved is using Lupron to halt normal puberty in anyone—transgender-identified or otherwise. In general, doctors don’t like to interrupt healthy endocrine signaling based on the say-so of minors, and gender dysphoria has no observable diagnostic criteria. There are as yet no reliable studies that show Lupron is safe for these kids. All available studies note the “low quality” of evidence, or contain similar caveats. Nevertheless, endocrinologists have been administering Lupron “off-label” to gender dysphoric minors in ever-rising numbers for a decade.
But is Lupron actually a neutral, low-risk intervention? Imagine you’re a fifteen-year-old girl. But unlike all of your friends, you have no pubic hair; you’ve never had a period; you have no breasts; you’ve never experienced orgasm. In terms of size and function, you have the vagina of a prepubescent girl. Sound like a neutral intervention?
We wouldn’t consider a drug that stunted your growth in height and weight to be a psychologically neutral intervention—because it isn’t one.
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No surprise, then, that in a clinical trial 100 percent of children put on puberty blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones. That is a stunning statistic, especially considering that when no intervention is made, roughly 70 percent of children will outgrow gender dysphoria on their own. Far from being “neutral,” the psychosocial effects seem closer to radical.
Suppression of normal bone density development and greater risk of osteoporosis, loss of sexual function, interference with brain development, and possibly suppressing peak IQ are all risks puberty blockers carry. The degree and level of certainty of each is anyone’s guess, since we have no good long-term studies on children who were given puberty blockers for gender dysphoria. What we do know is that these risks increase dramatically if an adolescent moves straight from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones. In that case, infertility is almost guaranteed—and sexual development and potential for orgasm may be foreclosed for good.
Adolescent and adult endocrinologist Dr. William Malone is one of the country’s most outspoken critics of administering puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors. He told me that the risks of shutting off the pituitary without observable medical justification are dire. “After a certain period, basically the way to think of this is that the system ‘goes to sleep’ and at some point it may not wake up,” he said.
It’s worth noting how great a departure this is from normal medical protocol. When we allow parents to consent to medical procedures for teens or tweens, it is typically to permit doctors to save, cure, or alleviate an observable medical problem. But in the singular instance of transgender medicine, we allow a parent to consent to intervention that halts normal, healthy biological functioning—essentially, introducing the “disease state” brought on by a pituitary tumor—all based on self-reported mental distress.
From Trans (by Helen Joyce)
TRANS: The Sunday Times Bestseller : Joyce, Helen: Amazon.com.au: Books
Doctors are usually cautious when treating children, especially when interrupting normal physical development. But very surprisingly, puberty blockers have never been put through clinical trials for use in gender medicine, and are not licensed by their manufacturers for this purpose. Their main uses are to treat hormone-related conditions in adulthood, in particular endometriosis and prostate cancer, and to ‘chemically castrate’ sex offenders. The two studies that looked at what happened when they were used to delay puberty in animals suggested this caused defects in spatial memory and increased behaviours thought to be analogous to depression in humans.
Their only licensed paediatric use is to treat ‘central precocious puberty’, a rare condition in which children’s bodies mature far earlier than normal. This causes major physical and social issues, but even so, there are concerns that the side effects are unacceptable. The drugs stop calcium being laid down in bones, and studies suggest a significant drop in IQ. American women treated in childhood for precocious puberty are suing the manufacturer of one puberty blocker, Lupron, alleging that it caused brittle bones, mental problems and chronic pain.
Whether blockers cause such direct harms will not be known for years. But there is no doubt about an indirect harm that will be suffered by any children who start taking them young enough to avoid puberty altogether: sterility. Cross-sex hormones cause the secondary sex characteristics of the desired sex to develop – breasts, beards and so on – but only a person’s own sex’s hormones can cause their ovaries or testicles to mature.
14. Hansel and Gretel
When watching What is a woman? you will come across two of its leading insane characters.
Over the last two years I have thought more and more about the Hansel and Gretel story, and its meaning, especially as it relates to the “devouring feminine”.
Both Bowers and Forcier are the modern day embodiment of the cannibal “old woman” in Hansel and Gretel.
Hansel and Gretel (americanliterature.com)
"We will bake first," said the old woman, "I have already heated the oven, and kneaded the dough." She pushed poor Gretel out to the oven, from which flames of fire were already darting. "Creep in," said the witch, "and see if it properly heated, so that we can put the bread in." And once Gretel was inside, she intended to shut the oven and let her bake in it, and then she would eat her, too.
While we are on the subject of fairy tales here is a therapist (a sane one) from the documentary talking about how teachers cannot question it if a student identifies as an animal (yep, you read that right).
15. “St George in retirement” syndrome
I got this from Douglas Murray in his book The Madness of Crowds. It well explains how organisation that set out to achieve something, once achieved cannot simply pack up and retire. They need to find new and ever expanding causes. The initial causes might have been true but the ever expanding list of new causes is not.
What everyone does know are the things that people will be called if their foot even nicks against these freshly laid tripwires. ‘Bigot’, ‘homophobe’, ‘sexist’, ‘misogynist’, ‘racist’ and ‘transphobe’ are just for starters. The rights fights of our time have centred around these toxic and explosive issues. But in the process these rights issues have moved from being a product of a system to being the foundations of a new one. To demonstrate affiliation with the system people must prove their credentials and their commitment. How might somebody demonstrate virtue in this new world? By being ‘anti-racist’, clearly. By being an ‘ally’ to LGBT people, obviously. By stressing how ardent your desire is – whether you are a man or a woman – to bring down the patriarchy.
And this creates an auditioning problem, where public avowals of loyalty to the system must be volubly made whether there is a need for them or not. It is an extension of a well-known problem in liberalism which has been recognized even among those who did once fight a noble fight. It is a tendency identified by the late Australian political philosopher Kenneth Minogue as ‘St George in retirement’ syndrome. After slaying the dragon the brave warrior finds himself stalking the land looking for still more glorious fights. He needs his dragons. Eventually, after tiring himself out in pursuit of ever-smaller dragons he may eventually even be found swinging his sword at thin air, imagining it to contain dragons. If that is a temptation for an actual St George, imagine what a person might do who is no saint, owns no horse or lance and is being noticed by nobody. How might they try to persuade people that, given the historic chance, they too would without question have slain that dragon?
In the claims and supporting rhetoric quoted throughout this book there is a good deal of this in evidence. Our public life is now dense with people desperate to man the barricades long after the revolution is over. Either because they mistake the barricades for home, or because they have no other home to go to. In each case a demonstration of virtue demands an overstating of the problem, which then causes an amplification of the problem.
But there is more trouble in all of this, and it is the reason why I take each of the bases of these new metaphysics not just seriously but one by one. With each of these issues an increasing number of people, having the law on their side, pretend that both their issue and indeed all these issues are shut down and agreed upon. The case is very much otherwise. The nature of what is meant to be agreed upon cannot in fact be agreed upon. Each of these issues is infinitely more complex and unstable than our societies are currently willing to admit. Which is why, put together as the foundation blocks of a new morality and metaphysics, they form the basis for a general madness. Indeed a more unstable basis for social harmony could hardly be imagined.
This syndrome plays out in many ways and it a window into understanding the ever increasing letters of LGBTQIA+, I guess they just decided to stick a plus sign at the end to leave it open ended. Hardly anyone understands what all these letters stand for, let alone the policies that each of these letters campaigns for. The T alone is the subject of this stack, my longest so far I think, and frankly I am just scratching the surface.
Which brings me to the Mardi Gras;
Who we are - Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
When people go and celebrate it, they sort of know that it “proudly provides a platform for our LGBTQIA+ communities”, they do not understand that the “T” for example advocates for increasing gender confusion in little kids, then advocates for “affirming” that confusion, and then advocates for providing chemical castration and mastectomies to these confused kids. So, all these people celebrating Mardi Gras have no idea what is within each letter.
Don’t get me started on the “Q”. Blissful ignorance. Remember that steak in The Matrix?
Gender dysphoria: a modern pandemic? | The Spectator Australia
Three-quarters of these gender issues in children are female to male, whereas in the adult group the sex ratio is for some reason reversed, with an incidence of 0.005-0.014 per cent in males and 0.002-0.003 per cent in females; the reason for this difference is unclear. Surveys of adults from America suggest a higher range, between 38 and 500 per 100,000 (0.38 to 0.5 per cent), with as many as 1 in 4 seeking surgery. In Europe, 1 per 30,000 adult males seek gender reassignment surgery and 1 per 100,000 females.
Despite these tiny numbers, the LGBTQ+ lobby has already invaded the debate by suggesting the whole population should adjust personal pronouns to accommodate gender fluidity. They go further by demanding that the ability to identify as a different sex should be determined by the individual, without medical or legal input, a situation courting disaster.
16. Victoria (Australia)
Victoria is the wokest State so far, but others will follow suit. This contagion has plenty of steam within it. We have Labor (hard left) government now at Federal level and every State (except NSW). The capacity to hold back this tide, by using the tools of elected government, is currently inadequate. We may need several election cycles to balance the pendulum in this country.
Resources in Victoria - Parents of Gender-Diverse Children (pgdc.org.au)
Here is the Federal government providing its support for gender confirmation surgery.
Gender confirmation surgery | healthdirect
As you can see from the What is a woman? documentary, a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis has become big business and as you can see from the Australian government site, they will pick up the tab. So, again, we have an industry-government collaboration in “supporting” and promoting a “standard of care” that has thrown out the tried and tested “wait and see” approach immediate chemical and surgical intervention.
Based on the recent Victorian Change or Suppression (Conversion Therapy) Prohibition Practices Act 2021 there are risks to parents who do “not affirm” their child’s “condition”. I expect this to spread to other States.
And this from our Northern Territory
Gender dysphoria: a modern pandemic? | The Spectator Australia
The current trend of gender education at an earlier age is likely to produce more candidates for gender confusion, leading to hormone therapy or worse. That this could possibly happen without parental input in those who are below the age of consent, should set alarm bells ringing. The recent Northern Territory plan to treat those identifying as transgender without parents’ consent, at as young as 14, has taken the debate to another level.
17. Mark Latham in NSW (Australia)
Nobody has done more to try to stave off the gender fluidity agenda in NSW than Mark Latham. He has been fighting, almost singlehandedly against the Leviathan.
Mark Latham vows to oppose rainbow activism in NSW schools - Binary
There has been an ongoing battle in NSW where the Safe Schools “anti-bullying” program acted as trojan horse to introduce gender fluidity ideology. This was dropped in NSW in 2017.
Safe Schools program ditched in NSW, to be replaced by wider anti-bullying plan - ABC News
But the NSW education department insists on finding a way to get this stuff into young kids.
NSW Education Department has been caught out. Again. - Binary
Binary spokeswoman, Kirralie Smith, said all parents should be concerned.
“The government has done little to protect children from exposure to harmful ideological programs. Parents send their children to school for an education, not indoctrination. It is unacceptable that the Education Department is encouraging and promoting such material against the explicit demands of parents in NSW.”
And recently the NSW government has said it will not support the Latham’s bill to keep this stuff out of our schools.
NSW government rejects Mark Latham's anti-trans education bill (qnews.com.au)
Most parents of NSW kids don’t know this battle is going on and those that do know, have no idea what it’s about. They think Latham is a “transphobe” and that a few extra “harmless pro-nouns” cannot hurt.
They have no idea what gender dysphoria is, that it can be manufactured and helped along, that it can be “affirmed” by the medical establishment, that they could get into trouble if “they don’t also affirm” and that medical intervention including chemical castration and mastectomies are not off the table if their child gets caught up in this “manufactured psychological contagion”.
18. Dr. Toby Rogers and my thoughts on mass vaccination
I stumbled onto Rogers some time back when he wrote this wonderful stack on autism in Sept 2021.
Rogers is the ONLY person I know of to discuss the consequences of widespread vaccine injury at a social and political level. For example here:
So what does that new culture look like? It’s brilliant (because lot of people on the spectrum are absolutely brilliant), autistic (social relations are hard, meltdowns are frequent and long), and fascistic (not quite sure why, but something about both the extreme need for order and an excited energy that is untethered from traditional ethics seems to be part of what happens with society-wide vaccine injury).
I could be completely wrong about all of this. But ask yourself the question — why are both major political parties in the U.S. drawn to fascism right now? I think it’s because there is a huge market for it, neurologically, in the population, because so many people, particularly those 35 and younger, are vaccine-injured. Over the coming decade autistic authors, autistic singers, and autistic politicians, to name a few (all high-functioning of course) will be in great demand.
So, my question is: What is the likelihood that there is a connection (obviously not sole connection) between the 72 vaccine doses that US kids get (40+ in Australia) and their psychological health and their propensity to latch onto gender fluidity as an explanation for their anxieties and mental health problems?
19. Detransitioning
From When Harry became Sally (NOT on Amazon)
Crash rejects the idea that transitioning is the only solution, even for severe dysphoria, since it doesn’t fix the “root problems,” and it may actually deepen the alienation from one’s body. The process of detransition requires learning how to deal with the underlying issues that transitioning did not resolve. It’s a long process, she says, but worth the effort.
Detransitioning is as much about facing trauma as it is about figuring out how to live in an altered body. Transitioning was all about trying to get away from what hurt us and detransitioning is finally facing that and overcoming it. It’s about making connections between how other people have treated us and how we’ve seen ourselves and our bodies. It’s about remembering terrible, scary, upsetting memories and integrating them. It’s about making sense of what happened, giving up old explanations that no longer work and coming up with new ones that fit our experience better. In the process we often reject much of what we believed when we were trans because it no longer suits us or seems true. It’s about understanding how the society around us has influenced us and shaped how we thought, felt and came to view ourselves. It’s not just figuring out how specific people hurt us but how our culture has restricted and attacked us and all women. It’s about connecting both with other women who transitioned and then stopped and to women in general. Feeling like we couldn’t be women, being cut off from other women is one of our deepest wounds and healing it means finally finding common ground and community with other women.
Detransitioning is learning to accept and be fully present in your body. It is about finding different ways to cope with and heal from dysphoria. Transitioning is not the only viable treatment for dysphoria, however severely it may manifest. We have learned this through experience and often with great difficulty and sacrifice. And many of us found that transitioning made our dysphoria worse instead of improving it. Many of us found some relief through changing our bodies but found even greater peace and happiness coming to accept our bodies as female. I was very satisfied with the physical changes caused by testosterone. They never felt wrong. But changing my body did not get at my root problems, it only obscured them further. My actual problems were trauma and hating myself for being a woman and a lesbian. Since I started dealing with my trauma and finding ways to be more present in my body, I have felt a lot more joy, strength and power than I ever felt taking t [testosterone]. Learning to accept the body and fully inhabit it is an effective way to treat many people’s dysphoria. Many detransitioned and dysphoric women have found ways to re-connect with our bodies, such as meditating, yoga, working out, exercising or doing physical labor, and we combine these practices with working through the trauma that caused dissociation from the body in the first place. It is often a long and difficult process that takes years but the rewards are well worth it.
20. The story of Nathan Verhelst
I want to end with Nathan’s story from Douglas Murray and The Madness of Crowds;
Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing –possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’ It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps?
Take the case of Nathan Verhelst, who died in Belgium in September 2013. Nathan had been born a girl and was given the name Nancy by her parents. She grew up in a family of boys and always felt that her parents preferred her three brothers to her. There was certainly plenty that was strange about the family. After Verhelst’s death his mother gave an interview to the local media in which she said, ‘When I saw “Nancy” for the first time, my dream was shattered. She was so ugly. I had a phantom birth. Her death does not bother me. I feel no sorrow, no doubt or remorse. We never had a bond.’
For reasons that this and other comments make clear, Nancy grew up feeling rejected by her parents and at some stage settled on the idea that things might be better if she was a man. In 2009, in her late thirties, she began taking hormone therapy. Shortly after this, she had a double mastectomy and then a set of surgeries to try to construct a penis. In total she had three major sex-change operations between 2009 and 2012. At the end of this process ‘Nathan’, as he then was, reacted to the results. ‘I was ready to celebrate my new birth. But when I looked in the mirror I was disgusted with myself. My new breasts did not match my expectations and my new penis had symptoms of rejection.’ There was significant scarring from all the surgery Verhelst had undergone, and he was clearly deeply unhappy in his new body. There is a photograph of Verhelst as ‘Nathan’ on a sparsely populated Belgian beach. He is squinting from the sunlight as he looks into the camera. Despite the tattoos covering part of his chest the scarring from the mastectomy is still visible. In a photo from another occasion he is lying on a bed in shoes and a suit, looking uncomfortable in his body.
The life that Nathan had clearly hoped for had not come about, and depression soon followed. So in September 2013, at the age of 44 – only a year after the last sex-change procedure – Verhelst was euthanized by the state. In his country of birth euthanasia is legal and the relevant medical authorities in Belgium agreed that Verhelst could be euthanized due to ‘unbearable psychological suffering’. A week before the end he held a small party for some friends. Guests reportedly danced and laughed and raised glasses of champagne with the toast ‘To life’. A week later Verhelst made the journey to a university hospital in Brussels and was killed by lethal injection. ‘I do not want to be a monster,’ he said just before he died.
It is not hard to imagine future generations reading such a story in a spirit of amazement. ‘So the Belgian health service tried to turn a woman into a man, failed and then killed her?’ Hardest of all to comprehend might be the fact that the killing, like the operations that preceded it, was performed not in a spirit of malice or of cruelty, but solely in the spirit of kindness.
Of course the case of Verhelst is unusual in all sorts of ways. But it is worth focusing on precisely because some of the lessons it raises are reflected upon so little. What is trans? Who is trans? What makes someone trans? Are we sure that it exists as a category? And if so, are we certain that attempting to turn somebody physically from one sex to another is always possible? Or even the best way to deal with the conundrum this presents?
Among all the subjects in this book and all the complex issues of our age, none is so radical in the confusion and assumptions it elicits, and so virulent in the demands it makes, as the subject of trans. There is no other issue (let alone one affecting relatively few people) that has so swiftly reached the stage whereby whole pages of newspapers are devoted to its latest developments, and where there is a never-ending demand not just to change the language but to make up the science around it. The debate around gay rights moved too swiftly for some people, but it still took decades to go from acceptance that homosexuality existed and might need to be accommodated to the position where gay marriage was legalized. By contrast trans has become something close to a dogma in record time. Conservative ministers in the British government are campaigning to make it easier for people to change their birth certificates and alter their sex at birth. A local authority has issued educational guidelines suggesting that in order to make transgender children feel more accepted, teachers in primary schools should tell children that ‘all genders’, including boys, can have periods. And in the US a Federal bill was passed in May 2019 which redefines sex to include ‘gender identity’.
Everywhere the feeling is the same. Among the crowd madnesses we are going through at the moment, trans has become like a battering ram – as though perhaps it is the last thing needed to break down some great patriarchal wall. The British gay rights group Stonewall is back with a new version of its old gay rights T-shirt. This one says, ‘Some people are trans. Get over it.’ But are they? And should we?
Your substack has been a wonderful follow-up to the film. Thank you for writing it. I have long considered myself quite ‘left.’ I love the idea of living in a world which celebrates diversity and generously affords dignity to all people. Turns out it isn’t that simple. The last two years have been a rather depressing opportunity to look a little deeper at all manner of things. In summary - I have learned that a significant chunk of what I see right in front of me is bullshit. The film, and your stack, has given me some tools for conversations with my little girl, to help her with critical thinking, and to protect herself from nefarious interests. I don’t consider myself in least bit anti-trans. But I think that puberty blockers are seriously messed up, and childhood is no time to make such significant, and irreversible decisions. That sort of thing should be strictly adults-only. Most of the people on the left that I used to identify with (I can’t believe they are all so angry at me just because I took the view that a certain jab doesn’t work well, and that masks are pretty silly in the covid context) would probably consider me transphobe. Well - I identify as non-transphobic, so they can stick that in their pipe, I guess.
I "like" this, although the content is horrifying. What a terrible madness. While I don't agree with "transition" for anyone, imposing it on a child who has no capability of understanding the consequences and almost certainly would come to peace with their birth sex if left alone is worse than criminal.