Transgender delusion needs to end

OPINION:

About half of America’s 50 states seem to care more about children’s well-being than about being sufficiently “woke.”

That’s why they don’t embrace gender insanity and instead ban puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones and irreversible surgery for minors.

The Supreme Court this past week heard arguments on Tennessee’s law barring trans treatments for minors.

Some justices blew wide holes in the case for creating trans kids. But it’s by no means a lock that this allegedly conservative court will restore sanity on this issue.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who is normally a solid constitutionalist, wrote the egregious 2020 Bostock ruling, which added sexual orientation and gender identity to the Civil Rights Act’s employment discrimination category of “sex.”

This unleashed a legal fury that has fueled sexual confusion. It includes strained verbiage such as being “assigned male” or “assigned female” at birth, as if people were not really born male or female. Biology is ignored and only feelings — which can and do change — count.

Let’s keep this simple. Anyone using the term “assigned” to describe a birth sex is comfortable with lying.

This runs deeper than the victimization of some unfortunate individuals. It’s a society-wide attack on truth and the right to speak the truth.

In Wednesday’s hearing, Justice Gorsuch was uncharacteristically silent, according to media accounts. Meanwhile, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another possible swing vote, asked questions that “suggested she was still grappling with the case’s implications,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

The court must decide whether subjecting a minor child to dangerous drugs, hormones or mutilation is the prerogative of the state, or doctors, or parents.

How about nobody? What if this were about mentally ill youngsters who for some reason believe they should lose a limb so they can be “themselves”? Does anyone honestly think it would be OK to lop off an arm if a parent or doctor approves it?

Why then is it OK to treat puberty like an illness, and to cut off a girl’s healthy breasts or to castrate a boy?

This is evil on stilts, the kind of misguided “compassion” that has caused so much grief. You can understand how some parents, told that their children will kill themselves if the parents don’t go along with the fiction, become enablers — out of love. They and the affected child deserve real compassion, not codependency in the delusion.

Some things are beyond even a parent’s prerogative, such as committing child abuse.

A case in point: A California judge ruled in November against a Texas man, granting his estranged wife, a pediatrician, the authority to castrate their 12-year-old son, James, whom she calls “Luna.”

The mother calls it “gender-affirming care.” When language is altered to advance a desired outcome, you can bet evil is afoot. Many mainstream organizations, including corporations, colleges and even the American Academy of Pediatrics, have bought into the madness.

At its annual meeting in 2023, the American Anthropological Association canceled a session on biological sex, saying: “There is no single biological standard by which all humans can be reliably sorted into a binary male/female sex classification.”

Really? Billions of people have said over the centuries across the world at the birth of a baby that “it’s a boy!” or “it’s a girl!” Perhaps they were all mistaken. As was God.

Genesis 5:2 says, “He created them male and female, and blessed them.”

Likewise, Jesus Christ restated it: “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’?” (Matthew 19:4-5).

Profound biological differences between the sexes are obvious, well documented, consequential and essential to human thriving.

Females have two X chromosomes; males have one X and one Y chromosome.

“I often say, ‘No Y, no guy,’” says Georgia Purdom, a molecular geneticist specializing in cellular and molecular biology who warns against messing with the original design.

“When we introduce hormones that contradict the body’s natural production — for example, administering testosterone to a female body that naturally produces estrogen — we’re essentially conducting a large-scale experiment,” she told The Stand, a publication of the American Family Association.

“Hormones play a crucial role in gene expression. … For example, estrogen and testosterone have significant effects on bone density, muscle mass, fat distribution, and even cognitive functions.”

The downsides of “transitioning” to the opposite gender are becoming more and more widely known, including increased — not decreased — risk of suicide.

“Britain, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark have concluded that transition puts youth at a greater risk of physical and mental harm while benefits remain uncertain,” Dr. Patrick Hunter, a pediatrician and bioethicist, wrote recently in The Washington Times.

The current Supreme Court case comes as the science is catching up with many dubious claims floated about sex and transgenderism.

Here’s another thing to keep in mind. Josef Mengele and other Nazi doctors conducted hideous experiments at Auschwitz on Jews and other prisoners. These included sex-change operations and organ removals.

Mengele escaped, was never tried at Nuremberg and died in Brazil in 1979, according to Britannica.

Right now, I’d settle for Congress passing a national law to criminalize this current rash of child abuse and put the perps behind bars.

• Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times. His website is roberthknight.com.