The reckoning of the transgender zeitgeist is going to be more brutal than you can imagine

Years ago there was this craze surrounding “recovered memory.” It hit peak frenzy in the 1980s. Huge numbers of psychiatrists and mental health professionals aggressively promoted a quack pseudoscience regarding “repressed memories.” Countless patients, many of them children, were subject to hypnosis and other dubious treatments in order to dig up the alleged memories of traumatic abuse that they had buried deep within their psyches. It was fraud stuff, bogus from the start, just a total hysteria from beginning to end, though it ended up destroying a bunch of families and institutions and inflicting ruinous mental health damage on huge numbers of people. Harvard clinical psychologist Richard McNally called the whole charade “the worst catastrophe to befall the mental health field since the lobotomy era.”

I think about that disaster a lot in the context of transgenderism, which is so patently and self-evidently in the same vein as the recovered memory fraud: Prominent, high-ranking, credentialed “experts” have endorsed and aggressively promoted an obviously fake and ruinous and destructive mental health craze, one that is inflicting successive waves of damage on individuals, on families, on institutions—just ruin at every level, all over again. The New York Times notes that the recovered-memory-abuse craze helped drive a sort of offshoot psychiatric zeitgeist of multiple personality disorder: “By the early 1990s, multiple personality clinics could be found across the country, for a disorder that the Cleveland Clinic today describes as very rare, affecting just 0.01 to 1 percent of the population. Over 40,000 patients, by one estimate, had come out of therapy believing they had many individual personalities.” The parallels to transgenderism are stark enough to be stunning.

But the damage is even worse than the recovered memory sham. Back then the fallout was mostly concentrated in the destruction of relationships, the ablation of personal and institutional trust, wasted money, wasted friends and family. Transgenderism is still bringing about those terrible consequences, but it is also leaving in its wake many thousands of people with irreparably mutilated bodies, destroyed reproductive systems, chopped-off genitalia, breasts and castrations for men, beards and mastectomies for women, just sheer butchery on a scale that is hard to imagine.

And it is happening to children too. That is really the most horrific aspect to this misery. They are doing this to kids, they are permanently ruining the bodies and minds of so many children. And nobody outside of a few conservative writers and activists really cares all that much. Longtime New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie earlier this month wrote that the effort to roll back the transgender zeitgeist constitutes “a singular assault on the bodily autonomy of all Americans, meant to uphold and reinforce traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.” They are castrating boys and chopping the breasts off girls and the Paper of Record is sneering about “traditional hierarchies of sex and gender.” It’s insanity on a level that would be hard to believe were it not 100% true.

It’s too late to really stop any of this. There’s a great scene in the Nolan movie Interstellar when the astronauts are moving through a supradimensional wormhole and one of them remarks that their spaceship’s controls will not function in that space: “All we can do is record and observe.” The transgender craze is like that: It has gone beyond anyone’s ability to halt, at least through conscious and deliberate action. It has to play itself out. At this point there is no stopping the armies of opportunistic surgeons, broke-ass doctors, bad parents and vulnerable children. The machine is too well-oiled at this point, the presumptions too ingrained.

But the reckoning is coming. And it will be more brutal than we can possibly imagine—more so, certainly, than that which followed the recovered-memory craze, in which there wasn’t really much reckoning at all. I don’t mean that there’s going to be some sort of violent backlash or reprisal or something like that; there won’t and nor should there be. The result will rather be a destruction of the existing order in a way that is difficult to comprehend. We are going to have to deal with countless thousands and thousands of people who were encouraged, and permitted, to mutilate and poison their bodies when they were very young; we will also have to address the older people who were obviously suffering from profound mental illness and who should not have been allowed to mutilate and poison their bodies as well. And we’re going to have to confront the fact that nearly every major institution in society—the huge doctor’s groups, the New York Times, mass media, children’s programming, churches, retail stores, restaurants—embraced all of this, celebrated it, goaded it on, delighted in it, profited from it.

I mean, think about it: Virtually every major medical organization and nearly all hospitals and doctor’s offices in the country are on board with this. Major columnists in the New York Times want little boys to be able to castrate themselves. Last year Target started selling undergarments to help young women mash their breasts down, as well as underwear to make it appear as if they have male genitalia between their legs—the textbook enabling of a debilitating mental illness. Starbucks offers its employees “benefits” that include body mutilation and “facial feminization,” i.e., the cracking and splitting of facial bones in order to make a man appear more like a woman. The ACLU will literally go to court to help young people access irreversible sterilizing medical procedures. The federal government is all-in, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or Democrat in the White House. Every major level of society is geared toward this.

So, yes, when the reckoning comes it is going to be very, very hard. This is not some esoteric craze limited to a few remote cultural outposts; it’s everywhere, and so many countless numbers of people and institutions are culpable in helping advance it. The course correction is not going to be pleasant; the comprehensive loss of trust, when it is finally realized, will bring an end to so much of how we’ve ordered our society and our culture. I’m not sure if what comes next will be any better, but it’s hard to imagine it could be worse than this.