Gender Transitioning for Minors Amounts to Dangerous Medical Experimentation on Children

Some doctors—supported by activists, parents, and even the American Civil Liberties Union—have administered surgical and pharmaceutical treatments to children and teenagers to make them resemble members of the opposite sex. Such procedures are generally irreversible, and usually render the patient infertile. Paul McHugh and Gerard Bradley argue that children should not be allowed to consent to such life-altering procedures, especially when little is understood about their long-term medical and psychological effects:

[T]he champions of the transgender campaign rest their arguments on an essentially solipsistic view (“my truth”) that endorses the individual’s will, sense, or sentiments rather than on what is demonstrably real. The posture extends far into today’s bureaucratic culture. Many official surveys and job applications do not ask whether you are male or female, but rather with which gender you identify. In business and academic settings, it is fashionable to signal support for the transgender cause by adding to one’s own signature a parenthesis enclosing “my preferred pronouns” listing them as “he, his, him” or “she, hers, her” or even “they, theirs, them.” Note that “identify” and “prefer” are words linked to will, wants, and desires, as distinct from those such as “am” and “is,” which are linked to being, nature, and existence.

The treatments do much more to the maturing child than change his or her appearance. They tamper recklessly with complicated, incompletely understood neurobiological mechanisms crucial in human physical and personal maturation. And they betray a thoughtlessness about a critical and unique distinction in the psychosocial development of human beings.

[T]he testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone released by the male testis or the female ovary have “organizational effects” on the brain as well as “stimulating effects.” Not only do these hormones evoke sex-appropriate arousal, but they are also critical to producing sex-appropriate brain structures that have crucial and measurable psychological functions in mental life. Altering the natural hormonal constitution in adolescence by providing hormonal synthetics opposite to one’s genetic constitution cannot fail to disrupt these “organizational” matters—again, with unknowable long-term effects.

Eighty-five to 90 percent of children with gender dysphoria abandon it if their puberty proceeds without interference. . . . It thus appears that the majority of children complaining of distress with their natal sex do best if not treated: they outgrow their sense of being in the “wrong body” and come to live peacefully being the male or female they were found to be at birth.

Read more at Commentary

More about: American society, Medicine, Science, Transgender

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF