You will note that laws have been passed in some States specifically prohibiting mental health professionals from “treating” transgender (or, it goes without saying, homosexual) people, EVEN IF THEY WANT TREATMENT.
This is not about tolerance, or freedom. It is about the destruction of traditional consensual norms, in favor of what is called tolerance, but which is in fact radical INtolerance.
I will echo McHugh and point out that men cannot be made into women, and women cannot be made into men. They can merely be made to outwardly resemble them. You cannot actually change someone’s sex, anymore than a white person can be made black with spray-on tan and a trip to the hair salon.
I don’t think transgenderism and homosexuality are mental illnesses in and of themselves–and certainly not wrong in a traditional ethical sense–but I do think that in a HIGH proportion of cases, there is underlying sexual and emotional trauma which created these outcomes, and which is not resolved through sex reassignment surgery, or a homosexual lifestyle.
The task is always to look to the highest and best good, both for the individuals and for society. What I think Leftist GroupThink prohibits is an HONEST discussion of the real problems these people have, which in turn prevents an honest and effective amelioration of the quite real unhappiness.
In important respects, invoking the word “hate”–which, like “racism”, has been denuded of content through propagandistic use, and now seemingly simply describes anyone does not agree FULLY and reflexively with the meme of the day–for things like questioning the wellness of men who want breasts and to cut their dicks off, is not different than shaming everyone who wonders just what successes of the Civil Rights Movement we are, now, 50 years later, supposed to applaud.
When you cannot speak honestly, when you must live in fear of well organized hate campaigns (and I am using the word here in its traditional sense) when you fail to toe some line that didn’t even exist yesterday, then you are not only not living in freedom, but you are being forced to participate in the destruction of meaning, of language, of community, and of effective political solutions to real problems.
Leftists don’t solve real problems. Their only forte is in rationalizing failures. And given that such rationalizations require frontal assaults on coherence and reason, their on-going successes mean on-going failures whose sources cannot be traced, and which cannot be identified, or corrected.
I don’t think people become better by assuming that Bruce Jenner’s real problem is solely that he (he still has his balls, in my understanding, so he remains a man) wants to act like a woman, and that society rejects him (He just won an ESPY, so that argument is a non-starter); and I don’t think I become worse by pointing out that there is almost certainly an underlying psychopathology that nobody wants to talk about.
Jenner is not positioned to thrive. Dressing up like a woman and taking hormone injections is like winning the lottery without learning to budget money: one year from now, my guess is he will be just as happy–or, to the point, unhappy–as he started out. That is when the media will lose its infatuation with him, and although I have not followed him in any of his shows, it does appear that attention is important to him, and when he is past it, melancholy and depression will likely set in. His change will not alter permanently who he really is.
Nobody wants to say it, but I will. Goddamn it if just speaking the obvious has not become an act of rebellion.
I say again: lies only help the liars. They do not help real people. Anyone who wants to do good in this world must value truth and honesty.