Excuses, excuses

This interview with an anonymous doctor about the corruption of medicine brought about by transgender ideology somehow puts me in mind of Lincoln’s frustrated quip lamenting the lack of action on the part of his top generals during the early stages of CW 1.0: “Here as everywhere else, it seems that nothing can be done."

Christopher Rufo: Please begin by setting the scene. What’s it like in a major children’s hospital in the United States regarding transgender interventions for children?

Physician: I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about the cultural shift that happened in 2020, because transgender ideology and Covid are inextricably linked. Normally, doctors operate by the authority of the professional societies that govern our specific practice. That worked because the individuals in those institutions were reliable, intelligent, and thoughtful. But with Covid in 2020, we started getting medical decrees without peer review or evidence—you saw this with masks, social distancing, and emergency-use authorizations. These decrees were expressed as something that everyone had to do, without justification based on sound science. The other thing was censorship. If you were to ask questions or express doubt about these medical decrees, you would be ostracized within your department, and you stood a good chance of being publicly humiliated, severely reprimanded, or fired.

That’s when transgender ideology really took off. Within these academic institutions, so-called experts in the field of transgender medicine would simply declare that puberty blockers and other interventions were the gold standard of care. The evidence to support this is completely fraudulent, but no dissent was permitted. Everyone within the medical community knew that if he questioned transgender ideology, he would suffer the same type of repercussions that had happened during Covid. The best way to describe the environment would be as an authoritarian, censorious culture that discourages any meaningful debate and encourages the demonization of anyone who asks questions.

Boldface mine, and here’s why: know what the most serious, damaging shortage this country suffers from today, as demonstrated by the cowed, meek response to the FauxVid lockdowns and mask mandates? Solid, dauntless Real Americans who treasure their freedom enough to stand up against any and all who would dare to traduce it, that’s what. Anyways. Onwards.

Rufo: What are the main tenets of transgender medical theory that are enforced as the conventional wisdom? And how have those tenets changed medical practice?

Physician: One, when an individual believes he or she is of a certain sex, he or she is truly of that sex. Two, the ideal response is to affirm that individual’s preferred identity. Three, the repercussion of nonintervention is a higher likelihood of that individual committing suicide. The threat of suicide removes any of the guardrails for what we must do to affirm that individual’s identity. Puberty blockers become justified at 11 years old. Hormones become justified at 13 years old. Double mastectomy becomes justified before 18.

But in reality, when you “affirm” these individuals’ gender identity, what you are doing is affirming their hatred for themselves. You have these children who are going through confusing times, difficult times; when you affirm this belief system, what you’re really doing is telling them: “You hate yourself at this moment, and I will affirm that.” We have to ask ourselves, why do these people have such high rates of suicide? Because we’re affirming that they should hate themselves and that they should try to destroy themselves.

Although it may appear as if I was about to get pretty rough with “Physician" above, that wasn’t really my intention. The quoted passage, as well as the rest of the interview, shows that in truth he actually does have a pretty good handle on what’s really going on here and why, and is appropriately ashamed of the despicable way his profession has exploited the situation. To wit:

This should weigh heavily on the consciences of the doctors who did this to a child with the opportunity to live a normal life, to have a normal childhood. At some point, that child is going to wake up, and he’s going to realize that this was unnecessary, that his sexual organs are permanently mutilated, that the balance of his hormones is completely destroyed. He’s going to realize that there’s no going back, that the people who were supposed to protect him threw him to the wolves.

Couldn’t have said it better myself, Doc. And there ought to be serious consequences for that monstrous betrayal visited upon those who perpetrated it, to their enormous financial benefit. But alas, there won’t be.

Despite all appearances to the contrary with the Transgender Jihad’s recent onslaught against all things decent and sane, it’s not all gloom, doom, and despair out there. Actually, there have been some recent developments that bode quite well, although perhaps not in the ways that seem most obvious.

They Arrived: Portland Is Becoming a Haven for Gender Refugees
Thousands of people are leaving Texas, Florida and other states that are waging a culture war on LGBTQ+ people. Portland needs them.

So Portland should have them, then, and may they have joy of their choice.

John Welsh, a 46-year-old father of two, moved to Portland a year ago, and he has a message for the thousands of people fleeing because crime and blight make the city feel unsafe: Try raising a transgender teenage daughter in Texas.

Welsh and his wife began to see that Portland was a better place for them when they came on a house-hunting trip in June 2021. They were out looking at properties, and their daughter, Ess, then 15, used her bus pass to go to the Japanese Garden from their Airbnb in Irvington.

“My wife said, ‘You know, that’s the first time in as long as I can remember that I’ve felt safe with her just going out and about somewhere,’” Welsh recalls.

“Should this trend persist,” Reed writes on her Substack, “we may witness the largest domestic migration crisis since the Dust Bowl.”

There’s a flaw of the “one of these things is not like the other” variety here, highlighted above by moi and which I’ll circle back to anon. But first, let’s set the stage for that peroration:

Conservatives go to red states and liberals go to blue as the country grows more polarized
STAR, Idaho (AP) — Once he and his wife, Jennifer, moved to a Boise suburb last year, Tim Kohl could finally express himself.

Kohl did what the couple never dared at their previous house outside Los Angeles — the newly-retired Los Angeles police officer flew a U.S. flag and a Thin Blue Line banner representing law enforcement outside his house.

“We were scared to put it up,” Jennifer Kohl acknowledged. But the Kohls knew they had moved to the right place when neighbors complimented him on the display.

See it yet? The Welsh’s terror at living in the nightmarish, intolerant hell of Texas is nothing but vapor and paranoia, all hat and no cattle as a native Texan might put it. To date, there is absolutely NO record of LGBTQXXXZYXP39+++etc Persons Of Penis being slaughtered wholesale by marauding bands of Lone Star H8RRZZZZ™ looking to bathe in the blood of gender-confused lunatics—NONE.

This auto-generated fear is as phantasmagorical as the “genocide” supposedly being carried out even now against such mentally-disturbed people across the nation, and is based on the same idea: that merely refusing to stand up and cheer for their pitiable delusion is the exact same thing as wreaking violence upon them. And that’s just contemptible, self-serving nonsense.

On the other hand, the harassment and hatred endured by the Kohls for having the heartless temerity to fly a US flag outside their humble Kaliforny abode is all too real, as anybody who’s ever been visited in the middle of the night by hordes of bullhorn-toting, torch-bearing pAntiFa and/or Burn Loot Murder rioters or had their car vandalized in a public parking lot because there was a Trump sticker on the back bumper can truthfully attest.

One of these things is NOT like the other. Indubitably, definitionally, and demonstrably, one of them is REAL. The other, not so much.

The other thing about the Portland cry-me-a-river boo-hoo-hoo’ing which struck me was the reference to what in happier times was commonly known as “voting with your feet,” ie that “domestic migration crisis” bushwa. No, you hysterical, disingenuous twit, it is NOT a crisis. Quite the contrary, actually— IT’S EXACTLY WHAT THE FOUNDING FATHERS INTENDED AND HOPED, the very living definition of the concept of the Sovereign States being “the laboratories of democracy."

Don’t like where you’re living? The majority politics/weather/cultural climate of the place you call home at present doesn’t quite suit you? Fine, then; don’t weep, wail, and gnash your teeth in abject despair over your hopeless plight, just fucking MOVE already and be done with it.

While you still have the freedom to do so, I mean. Because if people who think like those Texas-to-Portland refugees have their way, that freedom will soon be going the way of all the others they’ve dispensed with “for our own good."