Premium

We Will Pay for Our Delusions

AP Photo/John Bazemore
The opinions expressed by contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of RedState.com.

This past week, a female University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) swimmer bravely stepped forward to voice her discomfort at being forced to share a locker room with Lia Thomas, a male swimmer claiming to be a transgender female. Thomas’ claims have just been accepted at face value – as real – by collegiate swimming governing bodies and UPenn, even though Thomas isn’t a “transitioned” female in any way, shape or form. Lia Thomas has the body of a man.

Perhaps that is because Lia Thomas is a man.

But I digress.

Or do I? That really is the crux of this whole outrage. A fringe group of activists of questionable mental soundness is demanding that men be allowed to participate in women’s activities, and pose as women, and have access to private spaces for women. As a result, the majority of women are having their needs and comfort pushed aside to accommodate a small minority of men. Worse, they are being threatened, silenced, and subjected to vicious insults and ostracizing in an era that just saw a #MeToo movement meant to empower women. Once again, men get to decide for women what is empowering, and when.

Celebrity author J.K. Rowling has found herself a target of cancel culture simply because she decided the leftward swing of her progressive views stops at erasing womanhood on the altar of transgender ideology. Recently, she self-funded a Scotland women’s shelter for sex-abuse survivors. She supports the shelter out of her own pocket, not because there isn’t plenty of government funding for such things in the socialist nation, but because it was the only way the shelter could legally reject male-to-female transgender clients. For years, many sex abuse survivors in Scotland have been complaining about being forced to share facilities and private therapy group space with men claiming to be women, claiming they are often re-traumatized by having to share intimate details of their abuse with men. Women who have asked for at least an option to be housed or counseled with female-only programs have been shamed as bigots and TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists…yes, you can insert your eye roll emoji here).

Rowling is a staunch feminist, a committed liberal, and no fan of conservatism in her nation, or anywhere else. However, she is employed in the realm of imagination. As such, she has an expert’s eye for sussing out the difference between reality and fantasy, and she cannot trade the reality she lives in as a woman (and abuse survivor herself) for the fantasy the transgender activists are demanding.

In my own school district here in southern California, administrators have placed tampon and menstrual pad stations in boys’ bathrooms, even in elementary schools. Why? Because we live in a time of delusion, and the delusion that men can have periods is now being forced upon our children. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what the adolescent boys who come across these products are doing with them. Hint: They’re not using them for their periods. I have heard from a few pissed-off janitors who have to clean up the “curiosity factor” strewn all over the boys’ bathrooms in our schools at the moment.

If it were just limited to the wasteful act of placing menstrual products in boys’ bathrooms at school, that would be one thing, but just this week we heard a harrowing story from a whistleblower at the Pediatric Transgender Clinic at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Jamie Reed, a former employee of the clinic and supporter of transgender issues, came forward to expose how the clinic pushes children into irreparably damaging “transition” treatments and surgery, even when there is ample evidence that most of those children will grow out of their gender dysphoria.

Reed claims that doctors would ask questions like “do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?” to “bully” children’s parents into going ahead with gender transitions – under the pretense that not doing so would make them suicidal.

The whistleblower said that working at the center, which medically transitioned 600 children within two years, was: “Like I was in a cult, and I had to de-program my way out of it.”

“Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like mushroom, rock, or helicopter. Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay,” she said. “Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity.

In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”

This era of delusion is going to cost our nation dearly. We are lying to an entire generation of children, confusing them, scrambling their developing brains with hormones and other drugs no healthy child should have coursing through his/her body, and then expecting them to grow up to be well-balanced, thriving adults who will eventually lead America. The health of our nation is at risk because of this particularly insidious and infectious delusion.

It won’t just be a problem for the future of our country, it is a huge problem for the children subjected to this confusion right now. Right now, physically healthy, robust children are being made unhealthy, on purpose. More and more “detransitioners” – people who have decided to reverse their transgender transformation – are coming forward to talk about the lasting effects of their “gender-affirming” care and it is horrific. When an essential body part like one’s genitals – parts that are perfectly healthy – is surgically altered, the body will endeavor to “heal” itself, which creates a chain of lifelong care in order to maintain the illusion of a penis on a woman or a vagina on a man. Coincidentally (or not), it also creates a chain of lifelong financial commitment to the doctors and centers that build businesses based on transgender pathologies.

It is time for the adults in the room to step forward, like Jamie Reed, and start demanding accountability and a return to good sense. If we don’t, we – and most importantly, our children – will pay dearly for these delusions. Some people literally already are.

Recommended

Trending on RedState Videos