Emergency! Take your panic stations, for American civilization is under siege.
A “gender industry” is raking in the dough by subjecting our kids to sex-change procedures that can leave them “mutilated” or sterilized.
So says an assortment of right-wing Louisiana state legislators, Christian activists and maverick doctors. There's a crowd with its feet on the ground for sure.
Exactly how the gender bandits bend our kids to their depraved will is never explained. Do they have a Svengali with hypnotic powers in their ranks? Or do they just snatch victims off the street and frogmarch them off for unspeakable experiments in some secret operating theater?
Either way, surely we should have noticed that civil society was collapsing about our ears, while mad scientists played fast and loose with the future of humanity.
All this scaremongering is evidently part of a campaign that activists have launched in various states to ban “gender affirming” medical treatment for youngsters.
“Gender affirming” treatment serves to ease the transition from male to female or vice versa, so this is not an issue of any direct relevance for the vast majority of us. And any suggestion that some latterday Josef Mengele is at large is absurd. Doctors may prescribe puberty blockers, hormonal therapy or even in rare cases, surgery, but gender affirming treatment for those under the age of 18 seldom involves anything more sinister than counseling.
Gender affirming treatment is endorsed by various professional bodies, and the American Medical Association deems it “medically necessary.”
In fact, the entire transgender brouhaha, although it has dominated the headlines world-wide in the last couple of years, is not only foreign to the experience of most people but seems to have emerged all of a sudden and out of the blue.
The LGBT lobby and the Stonewall propaganda machine punch way above their weight, however, and in some circles “transphobe,” a term unknown until a couple of years ago, has become a derogatory term on a par with racist.
Opponents of gender affirming treatment for Louisiana's youngsters would have you believe that surgeons are slicing them up in large numbers, but official statistics say it ain't so. A state health department study found that from 2017 until 2021, Medicaid, which covers most of our youngsters, did not pay for a single gender reassignment operation.
Those opponents also claim that transgender adults typically regret the move, but the state health department found that to be alarmist nonsense too. The truth evidently is that the transgender children get better grades and are less likely to kill themselves.
Transgender people must always have been with us — human physiology and psychology do not change from generation to generation — but not so long ago they were out of mind for most people and hardly ever rated a mention in the mass media.
They are presumably more content and better adjusted now that they get an embarrassment of attention and a fairer crack of the whip in this more open era. Indeed, the question is whether the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, for this is also the era of gender dysphoria when, say, a male anatomy may be no bar to competing in a female athletic competition. A policy that houses inmates with penises in women's prisons is clearly nuts, but that is what kowtowing to the transgender lobby has reduced us to.
Perhaps civilization is under siege at that.
Email James Gill at gill504nola@gmail.com.