I have turned off comments, pingbacks, and likes for this post. It seems to have attracted the attention of persons with a neo-Nazi political agenda. This post is emphatically not about the suppression of any person or group of persons because of his or her sexual preferences. It is about the regrettable decisions that some young persons make about their sexuality. And it is about the cheerleading for transgenderism on the part of “liberals,” pundits, and politicians who seem not to care one whit about the destructive social consequences of the policies that they wish to ram down the throats of the 99.4 percent of Americans who are not transgendered.

You know what “hateful discriminatory” speech is. It’s speech that offends a leftist’s precious prejudices. A good example is found in a recent post here, “The IQ of Nations.” The post is based on facts, insofar as they can be ascertained, about the average IQs of the people of 159 countries. But because the post contradicts what leftists want to believe, or profess to believe, about the correlation between race and intelligence, it is — by their definition — “hateful and discriminatory.”

It’s also “hateful and discriminatory” to suggest that transgenderism is, for the most part, a fad. Worse than that, it’s a fad that will leave much harm in its wake while further diminishing the liberty of Americans. I hereby plead guilty, in advance, to the propagation of “hateful and discriminatory” speech facts.

Among the subjects addressed by Drs. Lawrence Mayer and Paul McHugh in “Sexuality and Gender” (The New Atlantis No. 50, Fall 2016) is gender identity. The executive summary of Part Three, which addresses that subject, gives these findings:

● The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported by scientific evidence.

● According to a recent estimate, about 0.6% of U.S. adults identify as a gender that does not correspond to their biological sex.

● Studies comparing the brain structures of transgender and non-transgender individuals have demonstrated weak correlations between brain structure and cross-gender identification. These correlations do not provide any evidence for a neurobiological basis for cross-gender identification.

● Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.

● Children are a special case when addressing transgender issues. Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.

● There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents, although some children may have improved psychological well-being if they are encouraged and supported in their cross-gender identification. There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.

Denise Shick takes a longer view in “Why We Should Have Seen the Transgender Craze Coming” (The Federalist, November 28, 2016):

Alfred Kinsey planted the sexual-revolution seed when his book, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” was published in 1948. The book caused quite a stir back then. Although the majority of the men Kinsey surveyed for his study were prison inmates whose sexual proclivities didn’t accurately represent the overall male population, the book gained support and propelled the culture in a decidedly permissive direction.

Then, when the first birth-control pill hit the market in 1960, the sexual revolution hit the fast track. Within a few years, rates of premarital and extramarital sex skyrocketed. “Sex is natural and fun,” people said. “Why confine it to heterosexual sex within marriage?”

In the 1950s, prior to the introduction of contraceptive pills, 60 percent of women were still virgins on their wedding day. By the late ’70s, that figure had dropped to 20 percent. In a matter of a few decades, premarital and extramarital sexual activity went from relatively rare to commonplace.

But extramarital heterosexual sex wasn’t enough for the newly liberated. So the push for homosexual normalization began. Prior to the late ’60s, those who engaged in homosexual activity understood they were on the fringe, recognizing that the vast majority of Americans wouldn’t accept their activities. So they kept their behaviors quiet and hidden.

Then, following the Stonewall rebellion in 1969, homosexuals began to “come out of the closet,” and increasingly pushed for the normalization of their way of life. By 2000, only those viewed as religious zealots held out against the push for legitimization of homosexual practices and homosexual marriage. With that battle won, the sexual libertines moved on to conquer the next sexual frontier: transgenderism.

In the early ’50s, George William Jorgensen Jr., an American man, flew to Denmark, where medical specialists surgically altered him. Jorgensen returned to America as Christine, and when the story hit American news outlets, most Americans were shocked and dismayed.

Aiming to temper the average American’s dismay, physician Harry Benjamin published “The Transsexual Phenomenon” in 1966. Eleven years later, the New York Supreme Court ruled that Renée Richards, a transgender woman who played professional tennis, was eligible to play at the 1977 United States Open as a woman. The normalization of another long-held taboo was by then well underway. By 2002, the Transgender Law Center opened its first office in San Francisco, and there was no turning back.

So here we are, in 2016, looking at our gender-confused children and asking what happened and what can we do.

Whence gender confusion? This is from Professor (of psychiatry) Richard B. Corradi’s “‘Transgenderism’ Is Mass Hysteria Similar to 1980s-Era Junk Science” (The Federalist, November 17, 2016):

Transgenderism would refute the natural laws of biology and transmute human nature. The movement’s philosophical foundation qualifies it as a popular delusion similar to the multiple-personality craze, and the widespread “satanic ritual abuse” and “recovered memory” hysterias of the 1980s and ‘90s. These last two involved bizarre accusations of child abuse and resulted in the prosecution and ruined lives of the falsely accused.

Such popular delusions are characterized by a false belief unsupported by any scientific or empirical evidence and have a contagious quality that overrides rational thinking and even common sense. This all-too-human tendency to suspend individual critical judgment and go along with the crowd is greatly facilitated by social media. Most important, however, the cause has received the imprimatur of “experts.” The very people who should know better have bought into the hysteria. Just as “mental health professionals” a generation ago supported the child abuse delusions, and even participated in prosecuting the unjustly accused, so too have they fueled the fire of the transgender delusion.

The transgender movement was greatly energized when The American Psychiatric Association (APA) in its 2013 revised edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders” (DSM-5) delisted “Gender Identity Disorder” as a psychiatric “disorder,” reclassifying it as “Gender Dysphoria.” However, rather than providing a scientific validation of the transgender agenda, the APA’s action was a remarkable abrogation of professional responsibility in the interest of political correctness.

Unlike medical diseases, psychiatric disorders have no diagnostic biologic markers—no physical findings, laboratory tests, or imaging studies. Psychiatric diagnoses consist of symptom checklists determined by committee consensus. It should come as no surprise that the process is exquisitely reactive to prevailing cultural and political winds. Absent biomarkers that define illnesses, there is no end to the mental and emotional conditions that can be called psychiatric disorders. It can be extremely profitable for an activist special-interest movement to succeed in getting its cause legitimized as a mental disorder, not least for a pharmaceutical industry poised to retarget psychotropic drugs to treat any new mental illness….

Only prelogical children and psychotic adults believe in magical thinking, that “wishing can make it so.” Yet “gender dysphoria” is characterized as “gender incongruence:” a feeling of dissatisfaction with one’s “assigned” (birth) gender, and a wish to be otherwise-gendered, makes one a different person. To reclaim one’s true (desired) gender identity may require sex-reassignment surgery, a treatment for the “new diagnostic class” of gender dysphoria sanctioned by the APA. The torturous vocabulary the DSM manufactured to label the possible gender spectrum variations would be laughable were it not so tragic….

Anorexia and “gender dysphoria” are among the many manifestations of psychological conflict that may occur during the “identity crisis” of adolescence, an important developmental milestone in identity formation. It is a time of rapid physical changes and strong sexual urges. Gender confusion—the wish to be the opposite sex, or even to be no sex at all (non-gendered)—can simply be a young person’s temporary pause in resolving the conflict between the safety of secure parental attachments and the compelling but frightening urges of adult sexuality and autonomy….

The success of the transgender rights crusade, based as it is on the cultural delusion of denying biologic difference between the sexes, would suggest there are no limits to the movement’s goal of reshaping American culture and its institutions….

Any religious or moral opposition to the [transgender] movement is reflexively characterized as hateful and discriminatory. Nowhere to be seen are the accounts of disillusionment and depression by those who regret having had surgery….

Along with the media, the political left has warmly embraced the LGBT movement’s apparent goal to reshape the social fabric and cultural traditions of American life and to reconstruct society to suit its demands. There appears to be no limit to efforts to silence dissenters. Religious believers are being demonized, and many fear even freedom of the pulpit is in jeopardy. There is no hesitation in using courts to impose the will of a tiny minority on the general public, even to the extent of changing the bathroom practices of the entire nation….

Historically, contagious popular delusions that deny common sense and fly in the face of reality eventually run their course. This will likely be the fate of the transgender craze. But before it collapses under its own weight, many people will suffer irreparable harm.

Harm will come not only to  those who fall prey to the transgender delusion, but also to those who oppose its inevitable manifestations:

• mandatory sex mingling in bathrooms, locker rooms, and dorm rooms — an invitation to predators and a further weakening of the norms of propriety that help to instill respect toward other persons

• quotas for hiring self-described transgender persons, and for admitting them to universities, and for putting them in the ranks of police and armed forces, etc.

• government-imposed penalties for saying “hateful and discriminatory” things about gender, the purpose of which will be to stifle dissent about the preceding matters

• government-imposed penalties for attempts to exercise freedom of association, which is an unenumerated right under the Constitution that, properly understood, includes the right to refuse business from anyone at any time and for any reason (including but far from limited to refusing to serve drug-addled drag queens whose presence will repel other customers).

How did America get from the pre-Kinsey view of sex as a private matter, kept that way by long-standing social norms, to the let-it-all-hang-out (literally) mentality being pushed by elites in the media, academy, and government?

I attribute much of it to the capitalist paradox. Capitalism — a misnomer for an economic system that relies mainly on free markets and private-property rights — encourages innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth. One result is that a “capitalist” economy eventually produces enough output to support large numbers of persons who don’t understand that living off the system and regulating it heavily will bring it down. Thus the sad story of declining economic growth since the 1960s and its proximate causes: government spending and regulation of the economy. But the unproductive leeches — whose numbers include most academics, pundits, and politicians — don’t understand or don’t care, and so “capitalism” becomes less and less able to support them. Or, rather, it becomes less and less able to reward productivity because such a large fraction of its output is claimed by the leeches. Which is a recipe for a death-spiral into stagnation and negative growth.

The social paradox is analogous to the capitalist paradox. Social relations are enriched and made more productive by the toleration of some new behaviors. But to ensure that a new behavior is enriching and productive, it must be tested in the acid of use.* Shortcuts — activism cloaked in academese, punditry, and political posturing — lead to the breakdown of the processes by which behaviors become accepted because they are enriching and productive.

In sum, the capitalist paradox breeds the very people who are responsible for the social paradox: those who are rich enough to be insulated from the vicissitudes of daily life, where living among and conversing with similar folk reinforces a distorted view of the real world. (Being “rich enough” just means being in the top-10 or top-20 percent of America’s income distribution, which allows you to live more luxuriously than almost everyone who has ever lived.) As Fred Reed puts it, in a different but related context, there is a

sharp dividing line between who read the New York Times and those for whom it is the house organ of a class of people they detest. This is the Trumpo-Hillarian Chasm. New York, which controls the country with Washington as its action arm, is not particularly cognizant of what goes on in the rest of the US. The imposition of  political correctness prevents New York from hearing anything it doesn’t like, but also prevents it from knowing the extent to which people believe things New York doesn’t want to hear.

New York is merely the ornament atop the radical-chic bubble, which encompasses The Washington Post, most of the other dying big-city newspapers, the major TV networks, PBS, and the well-insulated upper crust of most major cities in America.

It is the cossetted beneficiaries of capitalism who lead the way in forcing Americans to accept as “natural” and “of right” behavior that in saner times was rarely engaged in and even more rarely flaunted. That restraint wasn’t just a matter of prudery. It was a matter of two things: respect for others, and the preservation of norms that foster restraint.

How quaint. Avoiding offense to others, and teaching one’s children that normal behavior helps them to gain the acceptance and trust of others. Underlying those understood motivations was a deeper one: Children are susceptible creatures, easily gulled and led astray — led into making mistakes that will haunt them all their lives. There was, in those days, an understanding that “one thing leads to another.”

The relaxation of standards of behavior merely invites more relaxation, as we have seen with a series of Supreme Court decisions that legalized homosexual sodomy, barred the federal government from declaring that marriage is a heterosexual union, and then overruled thousands of years of social tradition by declaring the legality of homosexual “marriage.” If the Kennedy Court of Social Upheaval continues to hold sway, its next “logical” steps  will be to declare the illegality of sexual identifiers and the prima facie qualification of any person for any job regardless of “its” mental and physical fitness for the job.

Returning to my main point after that satisfying rant, the parents of yesteryear didn’t have to worry about the transgender fad, but they did have to worry about drinking, drug-taking, and sex. Not everyone who “experimented” with those things went on to live a life of dissolution, shame, and regret. But many did. And so, too, will the many young children, adolescents, and young adults who succumb to the fad of transgenderism.

I bear no animus toward those few persons who are truly conflicted about their sexuality. But I have no sympathy for juvenile faddishness and the unseemly (and temporarily halted) eradication of privacy in the name of “gender equality.” It’s as if time-honored codes of conduct have somehow become unnecessary and unduly discriminatory. (Where have we heard that before?)

When did it all begin to go wrong? See “1963: The Year Zero.”
_________
* I owe “tested in the acid of use” to Philip M. Morse and George E. Kimball, Methods of Operations Research (Washington, B.C.: Operations Evaluation Group, 1946), p. 10.

---

Related reading:

Hadley Arkes, “The Lost Structures of Civility,” City Journal, Autumn 2016

Catholic Hulk, “Political Vaginae,” Rightly Considered, November 30, 2016

Jeffrey S. Flier,”As a Former Dean of Harvard Medical School, I Question Brown’s Failure to Defend Lisa Littman“, Quillette, August 31, 2018

Theodore P. Hill, “Academic Activists Send a Published Paper Down the Memory Hole“, Quillette, September 7, 2018

Kelsey Harkness, “The Alarming Findings of a New Study on Transgender Teens and Suicide“, The Daily Signal, September 14, 2018

Other related posts:

Libertarianism, Marriage, and the True Meaning of Family Values
Same-Sex “Marriage”
“Equal Protection” and Homosexual “Marriage”
Parenting, Religion, Culture, and Liberty
“Family Values,” Liberty, and the State
Civil Society and Homosexual “Marriage”
Perry v. Schwarzenegger, Due Process, and Equal Protection
Rationalism, Social Norms, and Same-Sex “Marriage”
Pseudo-Libertarian Sophistry vs. True Libertarianism
In Defense of Marriage
The Myth That Same-Sex “Marriage” Causes No Harm
Are You in the Bubble?
The Culture War
Two-Percent Tyranny
Ruminations on the Left in America
The Beginning of the End of Liberty in America
The Euphemism Conquers All
Superiority
Whiners
A Dose of Reality
God-Like Minds
Non-Judgmentalism as Leftist Condescension
An Addendum to (Asymmetrical) Ideological Warfare
And the Truth Shall Set You Free
How America Has Changed