Over the past four or five years we’ve witnessed yet another heroic effort by the fringe left to mainstream mental illness as a normal state of affairs. This is the normalization of “transgenderism.” Where once it was the realm of loonies like Chastity Bono, suddenly it became one of those progressive idols, like homosexual marriage, that you have to bow down to if you want to escape the SJWs and their harpies. Now there are elementary school kids being pushed along the path to transgenderism. Fifty-plus-year-old men are deciding that they want to play women’s basketball. And (almost) Social Security recipient Bruce Jenner was declared “woman” of the year according to Glamour. Old men in raincoats are free to use the women’s restrooms so long as, at the time, they “identify” as women. Girls who believe they are boys are allowed to compete in high school competitions after ingesting industrial quantities of anabolic streoids to help with their “transition.” Second tier male athletes are finding that “identifying” as female makes them sports superstars plus they get to shower with the girls. If you don’t want to have sex with a transgender person, it is you who are the problem:

“[N]ot being attracted to trans people is deeply transphobic. The entire notion that someone isn’t attracted to a group of very physically diverse group of people because they are trans is built on fear and disgust of trans people. None of this means it is transphobic to not be attracted to individual trans people. Nor is it transphobic to not be attracted to specific genitals. But it is transphobic to claim to not be attracted to all trans, people. For example, there is a difference between saying you won’t go out with someone for having a penis and saying you won’t go out with someone because they’re trans.”

Whatever.

None of this is harmless. The kids who are being hormonally altered before they are surgically mutilated have an exponential increase in the chance of additional mental illness and suicide. The Federalist has a sad essay of the evil deception and delusion that is transgenderism:

After moving to San Francisco in search of community and acceptance, Paul, uninsured, stumbled across a community health clinic. Upon his first visit, he was prescribed male-to-female hormones, given very little information on the risks and potential side effects, and told “not to worry” whenever he expressed concern about drugs or long-term side effects.

After five years of transitioning, Paul sought a way out. Following a poor experience on hormones and wanting to sever his dependence from medication, his doctor suggested an orchiectomy, the removal of one’s testicles, which he was told would allow the hormone intake to stop. With hopes of a life independent of medicine and dysphoria, surgery seemed a saving grace.

“On the day of surgery, I was surprised at how it was suddenly unfolding into something larger than I expected. I tried to stop them, but I was then anesthetized. After surgery, I went into shock at how thoroughly I’d been altered in both appearance and function,” Paul says. “I was a sex addict, and sex was now disrupted. I also now found myself in a constant, low level of groin pain. A year later, the bleeding began. I was told to wait it out, see a specialist, and not to get a lawyer.”

After a painful recovery, Paul was told that, despite having been told otherwise before surgery, he couldn’t actually stop hormone treatment. He confronted his doctor, whom Paul says admitted to lying, claiming “rules were broken for his benefit, to increase access to care.”

In short, we are treating as casually as a change of clothes a very serious and long term project that seeks nothing less than the transmutation of a person into something they are not and can never be. Just as “Paul” in the essay had buyer’s remorse, so, too, are a large number of other victims of this fraud who are also seeking a way back to normalcy. Gender reversal surgery is growing in Europe:

Around five years ago, Professor Miroslav Djordjevic, the world-leading genital reconstructive surgeon, received a visit at his Belgrade clinic: a transgender person who had undergone surgery at different clinic to remove male genitalia – and since changed their mind.

That was the first time Prof Djordjevic had ever been contacted to perform a so-called gender reassignment “reversal” surgery. Over the next six months, another six people also approached him, similarly wanting to reverse their procedures. They came from countries all over the western world, Britain included, united by an acute sense of regret.

But in a demonstration of how politics trumps common sense and humanity, the transgender mafia united to block a research proposal to even study the problems associated with genital mutilation followed by a hormone cocktail:

Bath Spa University is conducting an internal inquiry into claims that it turned down an application for research on gender reassignment reversal because it was “potentially politically incorrect” and would attract criticism on social media.

James Caspian, a psychotherapist who specialises in working with transgender people, proposed the research about “detransitioning” to the university in south-west England, which, he said, initially approved the application.

When he went back with his preliminary findings that suggested growing numbers of young people, particularly women, were regretting gender reassignment, Bath Spa said his proposal would have to be resubmitted to the ethics committee, which rejected it.

They don’t want the problem studied because they are terrified of what will happen when a large scale survey of the victims of gender reassignment surgery is carried out and the human cost is calculated. 

This infatuation with transgenderism is not only anti-science, it is cruel and barbarous. Treating it as normal and kowtowing to the nutbars who are pushing it is dangerous to society and it will be fatal to a non-trivial number of people who are already struggling with mental health issues. We have to stop treating it as something benign and treat it as the evil it is.