I speak of the tipping point, when toleration of what is euphemistically termed ‘gender-affirming medical care’ for minor children and teens (otherwise known as chemical and surgical mutilation) flips hard over from the trendy, laudable and even fashionable into the “Oh, Hell NO!” side, after so many years of being put out there as trendy, laudable, etc. by all super-tolerant, oh-so-progressive activists in the media, politics and the oh-so-superior intellectuals.
It all rather reminds me of the great satanic day-care ritual abuse panic of the mid-1980s, where a combination of guilt-stricken parents, manipulative “experts”, amoral prosecutors, buffaloed law enforcement and a news media panting for sensational headlines all combined in a great storm of panic … a panic which everyone eventually realized, with a sense of mild shame was wholly without grounds. But not before a lot of innocent people were railroaded, tried, found guilty and had their lives and livelihoods thoroughly wrecked. Only a very few news reporters stood against the panic. One of those few was a woman reporter for, of all things, New York’s uber-lefty tabloid, the Village Voice, who was following a local case, and basically saying, “Hello! How is this even remotely possible, the baroque and improbably ornate stories of abuse that these kids are reporting? Seriously are you all out of your minds?!” (Yes, I read the Village Voice the Stars and Stripes bookstore carried it, along with all the other periodicals. I liked Nat Hentoff’s column.)
It seems like the first wave is now breaking on the shore of reality: those twenty- and thirty-somethings who feel they were rushed higgledy-piggledy into taking a cocktail of puberty-cancelling drugs and submitting to irreversible surgical procedures and have now lived to regret it and have the courage now (born of desperation and disillusion) to speak up about their unhappiness over what they felt they were rushed into, against vicious social media abuse from the pro-trans crowd. Those human Guinea pigs are coming to the realization of the full irreversible horror of what was done to them, in the service of a warped gender ideology. Yes, they were kids, and yes, they were stupid and impulsive, in battening onto what they were told by authority-figures, to include teachers, the fashionable elite in the media (many brandishing their trans-kids like some kind of warped status symbol) and reaffirmed by their peers. Their peers were likewise stupid, impulsive, and gullible beyond belief, but that’s what teenagers are, and social media only makes peer pressure more intense. Their parents were bowled over by authority figures, perhaps even kept out of the loop entirely … or maybe even in the worse cases, were heart and soul for the trans process, which can be seen as a kind of venomous Munchausen-by-proxy.
And now those who regretted what they were enabled to do, are bringing legal suit, and speaking out. This would have been predicted by practically anyone with a pulse who paid appalled attention. Seriously, anyone who considered this for longer than two minutes knew that this would happen and that the hapless victims of peer pressure, adolescent angst and a degree of body dysmorphia would come to regret it. It’s even a minor plot point in Kurt Schlichter’s latest dystopian adventure a militia formed of vengeful adults, who were hustled into trans-surgery. They call themselves “The Mutilated” and as outlined in the novel … they are angry savagely and murderously angry.
So is the tipping point with regard to minor children and teens about to happen? Discuss.
WRT the angry “trans” and gender-odd: is it a sampling bias in the pictures I’ve seen, or are they heavily represented in antifa?
Can it be that the last few years of Left driven insanities is what was finally needed, to get people to actually pay attention to what the Left is up to?
Can the long desired backlash finally be coming?
If it does, it’ll be Epic, Scot!
It’s bad. Who knows what will happen. One hopes that the individuals involved will find peace.
In the couple of cases I heard about through the grapevine, the trans kids controlled their parents by threatening suicide. In such cases it’s difficult not to feel for the parents who are in impossible positions.
However, the exploiters, ideologues, teachers, doctors and other adults in positions of authority who egged on the confused kids deserve great blame indeed.
The real tipping point is understanding that sex has a telos, which is procreating and creating stable families. Deviations from this telos are fundamentally disordered and by tolerating it we create more dysfunction and harm to both individuals and society.
The trans stuff is horrific, and obviously so, but it only exists because of the normalization of of a wide range of weird sexual deviancy like homosexuality and whatever is shown in hardcore internet pornography.
If you want a healthy society that isn’t encouraging children to destroy themselves physically, mentally, & spiritually, then you can’t just pretend that blocking children from chemical castration or genital mutilation is enough. Sure, a 12 year old isn’t mature enough to make this decision — But neither is an 18 year old who has been exposed to propaganda her entire life. Nor is it appropriate for mentally-ill adult men to dress up as their sexual fetish in public.
The entire reason this occurs in the first place is because of the permissive attitude towards truly toxic sexual propaganda that has poisoned the social fabric, emanating from predatory corporate media. Fixing the trans issue means addressing the truly monstrous media environment.
I have very little faith that any sort of backlash is coming. After the recent election my faith in the American people is gone.
One of the things that brought the Salem Witch Trials to an end was lawsuits. Some of those accused sued their accusers for slander, which was serious business in 17th century New England. That is about my only hope for similarly ending our own societal bout of madness–good old American litigiousness. If enough doctors, therapists and hospitals are hit with lawsuits and enough mutilated teens take the stand, it just might bring this to a halt.
In order to maintain the facade that they are on the side of “science,” the Left has to at least pay lip service to Darwin. Well, in Chapter IV of his “The Descent of Man,” Darwin stated quite clearly that morality exists by virtue of natural selection. He claimed it can exist in any life form intelligent enough to noodle over what its innate behavioral predispositions are trying to tell it. These behavioral traits themselves exist because they happened to improve the odds that creatures bearing the responsible genes would survive and reproduce. It follows that, from a purely scientific point of view, mind you, nothing can possibly be more immoral than destroying a child’s ability to have children of its own. You might say the Left has created the perfect morality inversion. In other words, upon pondering about what their moral emotions are trying to tell them, they have come up with the somewhat counterintuitive deduction that they “ought” to render themselves extinct by turning their children into biological dead ends. In other words, they “ought” to do something 180 degrees out of step with the reason the aforesaid emotions exist to begin with. They deserve at least collective honorable mention for this year’s Darwin Award.
I note in passing that not a single academic moral philosopher has come down firmly and unequivocally against the poisoning and mutilation of children in order to “transgender” them. It seems odd, at the very least, since they have concocted scores if not hundreds of different flavors of morality and come up with new ones to regale us with on a regular basis. When push comes to shove, these gentry are very careful to stay inside the ideological box that defines their leftist ingroup.
Trans gender-bending is really the ultimate (il)logical destination of the ‘Blank Slate’/Nurture over Nature theories of human development. The Left persists in this because abandoning these theories would torpedo their Lysenkoist belief they can mould mankind into a different image, and would also upend a whole series of beliefs founded on the denial of fundamental and inheritable differences within the human race.
I certainly hope that Ms. Cattinson and others like not only find justice but find their warnings heeded. I would add to their stories events in England regarding Mermaids and the Tavistock gender clinic. These are the necessary first steps on the long road back but I cannot quite call it all a tipping point
The gender-affirming movement wields immense power across various institutions, all of which have seemingly closed ranks. . Biden has directed federal agencies to both promote gender-affirming care and counter state and local efforts aimed at limiting the same. Medical institutions such as the AMA have issued guidelines promoting such care and various elite hospitals not only run transgender clinics for children but engage in active surgical mutilation. K-12 schools up through national teacher unions have actively worked to keep parents ignorant of their child’s gender dysphoria.
Combine that with normalization efforts such as school bathroom and athletic policies, drag queen events involving children, and the “otherizing” up to and including calls for law enforcement of those who object to all of this and you see very distinct battle lines being drawn.
I have also noticed what seems to be an increase over the past few weeks of stories in the media quoting medical professionals of the need for early medical intervention for dysphoric youth and of heroic parents taking their children to states where they can get the care they desire. Almost like it’s battlespace preparation f to fight Cattinson and others “we have loving families and science on our side and all you have is regrets and far-right wingers.”
I don’t say this to discourage but rather to prepare for what will be a long and bitter struggle. By the time we get to a certain age, we all have been through moments that seem like tipping points (elections, 9/11…) and we find out that they are merely pauses or at most slight retrenchments on the long road to hell. Cattinson and others like her have a large part to play to galvanize the opposition through their personal stories and subsequent litigation. We can play a role by not just pushing for parental notification and curriculum reform legislation but also by promoting voucher programs that will drain the K-12 swamp. We can also elect governors, legislators, and presidents who will push these policies and we need to hold them to it. We need our Scott Wieners.
The problem is that this will take time. It may seem like the plague of “gender affirming” is sudden but it took years of progressive takeover of both schools and the bureaucracies to make it happen. Accordingly it will take years of sustained effort unwind it and while it’s very doable we need to be honest that we haven’t been very good at such sustained cultural war efforts in the past.
If, indeed, a “tipping point” ever arrives, I suspect, among a myriad of abuses, the wanton mutilation of children will have played a large part.
I am, however, of a mind with seannc (above); were Americans a rational and well-grounded people such a tipping point would have come long ago and the resultant pogram merely a historical footnote. It appears that those with whom I share geographic boundaries have fully accepted Leftist theocracy and there is no outrage sufficient to provoke even the feeblest of a response.
Sorry, All those people have now committed a Hate Crime under the civil rights laws. Merrick Garland and the full weight of the federal judiciary will be on them forthwith. You see, that “Infrastructure Act” that McConnell voted for and helped pass contained clauses making “Gender Identity” a “Protected Class” for all purposes of all civil rights laws. THIS IS NOW LAW!
I don’t know and kind of doubt we’ve reached a tipping point, or will in the near future”¦.when it should have happened, and when I thought it would happen was Johns Hopkins stopped doing gender reassignment surgery decades ago”¦
the notion that the vote fraud of 2020 and 2022 tells us anything about the views of real people in America is silly.
There’s actually a silver lining to this cloud. As long as the Left is obsessed with “transgendering” at least they’ll be distracted from even more destructive whimsies. During much of the 20th century, for example, many of them were fanatically determined to “save mankind” by forcing Communism down our throats. That earlier “holy Crusade” resulted in the deaths of tens of millions, usually of the most intelligent and productive citizens in the populations affected. The likely result of “transgenderism” will be the mutilation of thousands of children. Bad as that is, it could be worse.
Christopher B
The ultimate blank slate line was the old one claiming gender and sex to be 100% social constructs, so that a child could be raised as a boy or a girl or a boy-girl or a girl-boy and it wouldn’t make any difference. When this got busted, the usual suspects cast about for an alternative and settled on “The True Gender of a child underneath the physically-apparent right-wing false consciousness presumed gender is ultra super critically important and must be recognized and supported.” Because anything, *anything,* ANYTHING to avoid admitting that sinful hateful right-wingers might possibly be correct about something.
The medical profession needs to be reminded of its old and honored expression, now apparently forgotten: Primum non nocere (“first, do no harm”).
Where are the ads in Georgia saying Warnock supports gender propaganda in schools? Blacks need to be informed of this.
James The Lesser, arrest records back up your observation
I also posted this comment at Althouse. Obamacare radically transformed American Medicine. When Teddy Kennedy complained that American Medicine was a “Cottage Industry” he identified the system as one in which patients were roughly equal to doctors. Obamacare created the “Industrial Medicine” model. Most doctors are employees of major corporations that also run hospitals. This gradually came to be as health care was dominated by the payers, like big insurance companies and then HMOs. Now, one aspect of the industrial model is that surgeons’ incomes are controlled. Like plastic surgery, gender surgery is cash and remunerative. I have read that these mastectomies are $10,000. Nobody pays that for mastectomy for cancer. When obesity surgery first became popular, the early adopters were usually the worst surgeons. I spent years reviewing malpractice cases. That will happen with this transgender thing. One consolation is that most of these parents agreeing to this mutilation are probably leftists. It’s a bit like “The Roe Effect” in which those having abortions tended to be leftists and killing their babies insured that they would not reproduce.
No tipping point, but a crash instead. We’ve defined deviancy down so far, there’s no turning back.
The US no longer has a clearly defined moral core. We used to be Christian, but the Marxists in academia led the charge to neuter that construct.
Don’t hold your breathe waiting for a political solution. We’re no longer a republic, but rather a functioning oligarchy. The institutional Vichy GOP is owned by its donor class, which explains the inaction of the McFailure wing (I.e., McConnell, McCarthy, and Ronna McDaniel). We the People no longer have a voice in our affairs.
I think there are two probable futures for us:
– Continue on the current glide slope to a surveillance state, policed by our own Red Guards from the kids coming out of our schools. A social credit system will be implemented. High energy and food prices will keep us distracted; day to day survival becomes the norm (and we will be eating bugs). White Americans will become the new Jews, hounded out of any positions of authority. All this means that the US’s leading role in world affairs is eclipsed. This is intentional.
– The alternate path first requires disunion; we will never be able to recover anything close to what we once were with the blue states so far gone. It will be necessary to cast them aside and let them sink or swim on their own. We will then need a legislative roll-back to an earlier Constitutional style that puts the people first, and eliminates the need for most of the federal bureaucracy. We could then declare a Christian basis for society, and those who can’t live with that are free to leave for the coasts. There will entail a displacement of population, similar to the end of WW 2, when borders were redrawn and ethnic populations kicked out.
The odds of the second option are remote. We lack enough Alpha males to make this happen. The first option is thus more likely, due to sheer inertia and entropy.
Buckle up. We are living in interesting times
They shut down the Tavistock facility. They didn’t shut down what the NHS was doing there. Instead they’ve decentralized that work to NHS clinics all over the country.
It’s nice that there was enough public outcry to force Tavistock’s closure; it’s depressing that it was more along the lines of Cuomo’s departure from Albany than than anything else; the closure takes wind out of the sails of the folks investigating the place rather than admit there was anything to investigate.
OC: “I think there are two probable futures for us:”
In addition to the current glide slope to a surveillance state or dissolution, there is a third almost inevitable future — total economic collapse, followed by who knows what.
The real economy — mines, factories, sawmills — has been destroyed. Almost anything which has not been closed down by regulators has been offshored by big corporations. We are left with a non-sustainable “service” economy of lawyers & bureaucrats with underpaid peons to cut their lawns and their hair. The looming disaster has been postponed for decades by first borrowing and now printing money. The National Debt is unrepayable, which means that pensions are not going to be honored.
Perhaps Biden’s proxy war in the Ukraine will be the trigger for collapse. Or perhaps it will be China deciding that it no longer makes sense for them to export real goods to us in exchange for worthless Bidenbucks. Or perhaps it will be something else altogether. The economic structure of the US is creaking — all it will take is a good push.
FedGov will not be able to run a surveillance state … much as it would like to. After hitting rock bottom, the surviving inhabitants of North America will pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It will probably take two generations — half a century. Whatever emerges will almost certainly be based on a real economy, with lots of productive workers, very few regulators & lawyers, and hopefully nothing like today’s inheritable permanent Political Class.
Another thought about our pending dystopia: The list of known mRNA “vaccination” aftereffects keeps growing. In addition to the “died suddenly” syndrome, fertility rates are dropping rapidly, and the number of stillbirths is climbing.
It’s been said that the WEF wants to rule over a smaller population of serfs. What might that smaller population look like? Look at which countries jumped on the vaccination bandwagon: mostly, the Western nations. Much of the Third World took a pass on the vaccines, preferring to stick with ivermectin, which was already widely accepted and in use.
End result: the mRNA vaccines will kill off the Western (and mostly white) population. Now, do a search on “IQ by country” and see what will be left. Whoever inherits the WEF’s dream will be lording over a dumb population, just as they wish.
Dunno about the Chinese, as they are mandating the vaccines. Maybe thin out their population to something “more manageable?”