When the transgender kids ask 'Why?', what will we say?

Answering the unanswerable in an age of teenage mastectomies.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust—better known as Tavistock, better known as the British government-funded clinic that has impelled countless children to pursue a life of synthetic hormone poisoning and irreversible genital surgery, all in the name of transgender ideology—has closed. Some of the Nordic countries, meanwhile, are instituting rollbacks of their own treatment of “transgender children.” This is wonderful news for anyone who doesn’t want, you know, young women to undergo double mastectomies because they believe they’re boys, or for young boys to cut off their testicles and fabricate crude wound-vaginas out of their penile flesh because they’ve been convinced they are girls. Et cetera.

The big question of the moment is how we got to this point. I am of the cautious optimism that the transgender moment is sort of at the very earliest stages of tipping in the other direction, and that the gory human wreckage of the last fifteen or twenty years of this hideousness is becoming too enormous to ignore. I suspect we were always bound to make our way out of this, albeit very slowly. But arriving at this point is another thing entirely: How on earth did so many people ever so easily acquiesce to the demonstrably insane proposition that “identifying” as a member of the other sex makes you a member in that group yourself—and then extend the presumptions of that delusion to incredibly impressionable and vulnerable children?

I like to picture the way this cultural breakdown will be discussed maybe 15 or 20 years from now, probably among people who had misgivings about the whole thing but who still sort of meekly submitted to the zeitgeist without saying anything:

Jim: You know, I was thinking of something the other day…remember that time back in the 2010s and 2020s when, like, six-year-old boys would tell their parents they were girls, and the parents would, like, get on board with it, and start treating the boy like a girl, and eventually when he got a little older he’d get himself castrated and take estrogen and pretend he was a girl?

John: Whoa…yeah. I’d forgotten about that. That was crazy.

Jim: It was crazy. High school kids were doing it, too, like a bunch of kids with autism and depression and other mental health disorders were just declaring themselves to be members of the opposite sex and undergoing these insane medical procedures. And, like, everyone kind of went along with it, right? Why did we do that?

John: Wow, yeah. I dunno, man. I haven’t thought about that in years. That was like, thousands of boys and girls that did that, right?

Jim: It was a lot, I think. Why did anyone allow that to happen? What was that about?

John: I dunno. Weren’t we all kind of scared that if we came out against it, people would, like, say mean things about us online? Like everyone was worried that if we opposed, like, cutting off the breasts of pubescent girls, then there’d be a bunch of mean tweets about us on the Internet or something?

Jim: Was that it? That does sound familiar.

Maybe that’s how it will be, though one imagines that enough people will be ashamed at having said nothing (or of having aggressively encouraged this destructive fad) that this kind of retrospective analysis may very well be vanishingly rare, if it happens at all. A great many people will probably prefer to “creep away to hide and to forget that men can be like this,” as Steinbeck put it. Still, it will forever be a meaningful and consequential question as to how we ended up letting this happen, if only so that we can maybe, possibly work to avoid something similar in the future.

Please understand I do not mean that as a mere rhetorical device. A great many lives have been ruined by a terrible ideology. There are things here that can never be put back together, no matter how profoundly they might be regretted. It is incumbent upon us to reflect on what has happened here, to determine why so many weak people allowed so many powerful people to exploit and degrade so many vulnerable people, viciously and violently, at length, for years, with no consequences. You can’t give someone back their hacked-off organs, their fertility, their denuded bone structure, or the years of their lost lives, but you can resolve to learn from why you allowed it to happen and how you might forestall it from happening again. In a world where body parts can’t be regrown, it’s the only kind of recompense possible for what has happened.

Whatever else is to come, meanwhile, it is worth stressing that we are not at all out of the woods yet:

The pro-trans group [Stonewall] shared a Metro article about a 'non-conforming' four-year-old whose nursery doesn't respect their attitudes.

Stonewall wrote: 'Research suggests that children as young as 2 recognise their trans identity. 

'Yet, many nurseries and schools teach a binary understanding of pre-assigned gender. 

'LGBTQ-inclusive and affirming education is crucial for the wellbeing of all young people!'

Maybe if they start carving up two-year-olds, that will shock and horrifying enough minds to really get the ball rolling. Or maybe not. At this point I’d bet my money on not. There is still very far to go.