ever-so-enlightened atrocity

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Jan 28, 2007

This is vile even by progressivist standards. German quacks started pumping a 12-year-old boy, now 14, full of female hormones so as to make him "the world's youngest transsexual." For legal reasons, castration and other surgical mutilation must be delayed until "Kim," born Tim, turns 18.

Tim was diagnosed as a transsexual two years ago, when doctors and psychiatrists concluded that his claims to be "in the wrong body" were so deeply felt that he required treatment. The therapy involves artificially arresting male puberty, with a series of potent hormone injections before the administration of female hormones to initiate the development of features such as breasts.

"Diagnosed" as a transsexual? A compound fraud. Transsexuality is a creation of Leftist politics, not medicine, and to "diagnose" it means nothing more or less than to impose one's morbid political agenda on a conveniently vulnerable victim. The victim in question, being 12 years old and profoundly conflicted at the time the procedure began, seems to have acquiesced in the treatment. Surprised?

Dr Bern Meyenburg, the head of a clinic for children and adolescents with identity disturbances at Frankfurt University, concluded that the child was serious. He wrote in his diagnosis: "Kim is a mentally well-developed child who appears happy and balanced. There is no doubt of the determined wish, that was already detectable since early childhood. It would have been very wrong to let Kim grow up to be a man. It is rare to have such a clear-cut case."

The doctors also tell us that at the onset of puberty the child was "terrified of growing facial hair and her [sic] voice breaking." And we're to understand that the same child is "happy and balanced." Right.

In the absence of a coherent view of what human nature is, there is no common notion of what it means to be a healthy human person (as opposed, say, to what it means to be a healthy kidney). Hence any well-spoken crank with a doctorate and a white lab coat who can manipulate the language deftly enough can, in order to gratify his own covert desires, get society's permission to create any kind of monster he wishes.

Dr Achim Wuesthof, an endocrinologist specialising in children and adolescents, who is treating the teenager at a clinic in Hamburg, said the procedure had been a success so far.

[chop]

"They are not freaks, nor do they suffer mental illness. They are simply trapped in the wrong bodies. That is why it is best to help them as early as possible and reduce the trauma for them and their families."

"Trapped in the wrong bodies." Utter rubbish. That's sentimentalism without a rag of scientific legitimacy. Using the expression should ipso facto constitute sufficient cause for yanking a physician's credentials. But all the professions, psychology and medicine as much as law, are in such philosophical disarray that even practitioners uneasy with the fraud will be incapable of obstructing it. The words of Lee Harris below are to the point:

The essential nature of a culture war is invariant: A set of traditional values comes under attack by those who, like the Greek Sophist, the French philosophe and the American intellectual, make their living by their superior proficiency in handling abstract ideas, and promote a radically new and revolutionary set of values.

It's not that there isn't a philosophically cogent rival to the new sophism. There is -- but an extremely potent taboo has been attached to it. Any attempt to protest the sexual manipulation of Tim on the grounds that it violates goods necessary to integral human fulfillment would be shouted down with the cry of "Natural Law!" And judges, physicians, psychologists, and academics generally would stop their ears and all join in the shouting. Because Natural Law philosophy has been shown defective? No, because too much is riding on its acceptance or rejection.

Progressivist intellectuals such as deans and editors and high court judges see the indefensible puerility of a phrase like "trapped in the wrong body" as clearly as we do. But they tolerate it -- and, at need, defend the mutilation it purports to justify -- as the price of deflecting the force of Natural Law reasoning, which, if permitted to direct their deliberation and choice, would mean they'd have to forfeit altogether the project of protean sexuality (self-created, free-form, non-judgmental sexual liberty) which is the keystone of their public philosophy. Such a forfeiture is unthinkable. Sooner than put that project at risk, they're willing to put up with incoherence and cruelty.

The political alliance between abortion rights and gay rights absolutists bears this out. Gays claim that unitary human nature is a fiction and that the individual has absolute dominion over his own trajectory. Why? Because it allows them total liberty of sexual indulgence. Abortion partisans claim that a woman has absolute dominion over her own body. Why? Because it allows them total liberty of sexual indulgence as well as the liberty to disencumber themselves of the undesired consequences of that indulgence. Robert Bork points out that an absolute right over one's body was not recognized by law (the law didn't permit a surgeon, he says, to amputate a man's healthy arm even if he asks him to -- say, to settle a bet), but there's no question today that judges will pretend it's absolute wherever the project of moral self-determination -- what Scalia calls "the sweet mystery of life" jurisprudence -- is imperilled.

The excision of a healthy baby, like that of a healthy limb, is of a piece with the decision to addle a 12-year-old boy with estrogen on the basis of the politically expedient imbecillity that he's "trapped" in the wrong body. It has nothing to do with physiology and everything to do with Elton John's habits of oral hygiene -- which habits the Western élites have made the touchstone of public thought about civil order. If a few innocent Tims get Kim'd in the process -- well folks, we've already put orphans out to ranch in gay households and ash-canned tens of millions of unborn babies as surgical waste. It's the price of progress.