TRANSGENDERISM occupies an outsize place in our political geography, its growth as an issue far outstripping the speed with which society accommodated gay people or gay marriage.
I say ‘accommodated’ in transgenderism’s case rather than accepted. While reasonable people see the justice of gay rights and many are reconciled to gay marriage, transgenderism, which entails irreversible surgeries and drug treatments, exists in an ether of its own.
Until Vanity Fair‘s fraudulent cover of Bruce-reinvented-as-Caitlyn Jenner, aged 65 and tarted up like a glamour model 20 years younger, most people were aware of transvestism but had never heard of gender dysphoria. Since that fateful PR stunt, transgenderism – its legitimacy, desirability and ersatz humanity – has seized a place in the public square as the main sexual rights issue of the day despite the tiny number of people concerned. Acceptance of transgenderism has become a litmus test in many areas of everyday life.
This is not Danny La Rue playing Charlie’s Aunt in the West End. Nor is it James/Jan Morris or Donald/Deirdre McCloskey who transitioned and then got on with their private, professional lives.
Transgenderism today flaunts itself as a culture war wrecking ball. It wreaks immense and sometimes irreparable damage on vulnerable young people while the government looks the other way, though it dives nannyishly into your life in plenty of other ways. Transgender activists, following the playbook perfected by groups such as Stonewall, have bludgeoned us into submission.
Relativists have forced us to believe – or at least to avoid saying out loud that we don’t – that judgmentalism about sexual predilections is taboo. That alone makes it hard to resist transgenderism, especially when its activists are so ruthlessly focused.
Even relativism won’t persuade us to legalise all the sexual desires that exist within the fathomless human imagination whose wilder fantasies most of us prudently keep locked in the privacy of our skulls. But the motorway speed with which youth transgenderism swept past the red lights makes one wonder what practice will be next to assert its rights in a zeitgeist that preaches freedom from restraint regardless of the elephant traps.
Transgenderism is rife with dangers that other writers at The Conservative Woman have described, concentrating on their disastrous effect on children and teenagers. Scandalously. nothing is done to try to shield the young who may be deluding themselves. The pressure we hear about is all the other way, to indulge transitional experiments.
And it is experimental. No one knows for sure what will be the long-term effects on boys and girls who step into transgenderism at an age when they are emotionally and mentally incapable of understanding that they are radically changing themselves for all the long decades of their future.
Transgendered people have published horror stories about the effects of their surgeries and their regrets. One transgendered man wrote about the agonies he suffered from the continuing pubic hair growth in the urethra of his surgically constructed penis.
If Dr Mengele had done what transgender surgeons and other enablers have done, the public outcry would have been deafening. But we say nothing. In fact, we cower because we are afraid to say anything. In 2020, our liberalism has become so advanced that we have total freedom to shut up, or else.
Anyone speaking against transgenderism in the academy, the media, the entertainment industry and even the public services risks being fired for hurting feelings or creating unsafe spaces for adult transgenders who have, after all, personally elected to become what they are.
Adults have the right to change their bodies and live as members of the opposite sex with the same civic protections as everyone else. What they cannot do is demand to be treated as members of an elite that is above criticism.
We have a duty to protect children against a sexual movement supercharged by social media, peer pressure and exemption from scrutiny; it would not have happened, or not so powerfully, before modern communications put eight billion of us in constant and instant touch via the internet.
We are losing touch with a tool which is vital to society: the judgment which clever apostles of relativism in the Humanities dispensed with so insouciantly. It may work for them as individuals but it is not working for the rest of us.
