G. K. Chesterton's observation that "the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason" speaks to the particular nightmare that is gender medicine. There are so many 'if... thens,' where the ‘ifs’ have lost all contact with reality and then everything proceeds logically from that fateful starting point.
For something that is hands-on with people’s flesh and blood, there’s a deep dissociation embedded in medicine that is perhaps necessary to practice medicine—breaking body taboos, taking someone’s life in your hands—and which medicine selects for in practitioners. This dissociation carries real risks. Taken to an extreme, under Nazism, the German medical profession's belief system was effectively hacked by a racist, eugenicist ideology, such that sworn healers became killers in the name of healing (see Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors).
Dissociation is clearly at work when gender doctors talk about what they do and why. There's a terrible and terrifying disconnect between language and action (sterilizing kids, many of whom would simply have grown up to be gay).
Girls become “boys,” not in reality, but in the way we talk about reality. Elective mastectomies on girls become “reconstructive chest surgery” on “boys.” Exploratory therapy or letting a kid go through puberty as nature intended becomes “conversion therapy.” Drastic, life-altering medical interventions become conceptualized as non-interventions. Hysterectomies, oophorectomies, and phalloplasties become “gender-affirming care.”
These doctors are no longer capable of seeing what they're actually doing.
There's a transfer of loyalty that takes place when doctors are confronted with "trans" kids. Doctors' sense of responsibility shifts from the actual patient in front of them to the patient's transgender alter. That is, the doctor falls under the same spell as the patient. Doctor and patient then collude, mining the patient's one and only body for resources the trans alter requires, and drugging and slicing that body into compliance with the new identity regime.
If a doctor cannot see the patient in front of them, as they are, how can they can possibly provide ethical care? How can you treat a child ethically when you forget everything you know about child development? How can you treat a girl ethically when you deny her sex?
This is the most mystifying aspect to me about what’s happening, and more than anything else, it’s what makes me again and again question my own sanity. It seems so obvious that sterilizing children based on no criteria, other than what the child believes, is tremendously ethically wrong. I can’t imagine a clearer example of a reckless medical practice, and yet it’s become commonplace. In addition to our children needing to be deprogrammed, we need a deprogramming effort in place for the vast numbers of clinicians, inside and external to the clinics, who support affirmative care. Personally, I think prison would be a perfect place to enact such a program, but I suspect that wouldn’t be feasible. Maybe it could be part of a job training program after they lose their licenses. One can dream…
Outstanding commentary on what is going on in "gender care" medicine. They are not treating the person, tehy are treating an illusion :-(