Okay, I just…I can’t even.

Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.

Oh. Well. Umm. Okay.

I like to say that being trans is the second-worst thing that ever happened to me. (The worst was being born a boy.) Dysphoria is notoriously difficult to describe to those who haven’t experienced it, like a flavor. Its official definition — the distress some transgender people feel at the incongruence between the gender they express and the gender they’ve been socially assigned — does little justice to the feeling.

Sorry, dearie, it isn’t “socially” assigned. It’s biologically assigned.

Many conservatives call this crazy.

And all other sane people, too. Because, y’know, IT IS.

A popular right-wing narrative holds that gender dysphoria is a clinical delusion;

Because, y’know, IT IS.

hence, feeding that delusion with hormones and surgeries constitutes a violation of medical ethics.

Because, y’know, IT IS.

Just ask the Heritage Foundation fellow Ryan T. Anderson, whose book “When Harry Became Sally” draws heavily on the work of Dr. Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist who shut down the gender identity clinic at Johns Hopkins in 1979 on the grounds that trans-affirmative care meant “cooperating with a mental illness.” Mr. Anderson writes, “We must avoid adding to the pain experienced by people with gender dysphoria, while we present them with alternatives to transitioning.”

In this view, it is not only fair to refuse trans people the care they seek; it is also kind. A therapist with a suicidal client does not draw the bath and supply the razor. Take it from my father, a pediatrician, who once remarked to me that he would no sooner prescribe puberty blockers to a gender dysphoric child than he would give a distemper shot to someone who believed she was a dog.

Smart, sensible man, your dad. I’m sure you hate his guts for it.

Buried under all of this, like a sober tuber,

A “sober tuber”? What the hell is…oh, never mind. We’ll just shine that one on.

lies an assumption so sensible you’ll think me silly for digging it up. It’s this: People transition because they think it will make them feel better. The thing is, this is wrong.

I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones. One reason is that, absent the levies of the closet, years of repressed longing for the girlhood I never had have flooded my consciousness. I am a marshland of regret. Another reason is that I take estrogen — effectively, delayed-release sadness, a little aquamarine pill that more or less guarantees a good weep within six to eight hours.

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

Wait a minute, what—your GIRLFRIEND?!? What the…you’re a MALE harboring delusions of being a FEMALE, but you are nonetheless sexually and romantically attracted to women?

I am now thinking that “mentally ill” is way, WAY inadequate to describe the utter chaos going on in this man’s head. There’s just no sorting out such an incredibly advanced level of cray-cray. The mental gears aren’t meshing but clashing, sending chunks of gear-teeth wending their way through the downstream works. Even the most half-assed backyard mechanic knows the kind of catastrophic, total breakdown that always results from that sort of thing.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

Y’know, you’re really not doing a hell of a lot in the way of demonstrating that you aren’t completely bug-fuck nuts here.

As long as transgender medicine retains the alleviation of pain as its benchmark of success, it will reserve for itself, with a dictator’s benevolence, the right to withhold care from those who want it. Transgender people have been forced, for decades, to rely for care on a medical establishment that regards them with both suspicion and condescension. And yet as things stand today, there is still only one way to obtain hormones and surgery: to pretend that these treatments will make the pain go away.

Making the pain go away—providing a cure or at least a palliative to the disease or injury in question—is sort of the whole point of medical treatment. Too, voluntary surgical mutilation for the purpose of pandering to mental illness isn’t exactly what most of us would consider “care,” I’m afraid.

The medical maxim “First, do no harm” assumes that health care providers possess both the means and the authority to decide what counts as harm.

That isn’t a mere “maxim,”I’m afraid; it’s a solemn and serious oath—the ne plus ultra, the bedrock principle of the medical profession entire. Which, in your selfish arrogance, you seem to think you have the right to force doctors to blatantly violate to suit your own folly. Ain’t asking much, are ya, cupcake?

Let me be clear: I believe that surgeries of all kinds can and do make an enormous difference in the lives of trans people.

But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want.

Then you’re full of shit as a Christmas turkey, bub. It might seem a reasonable proposition to an all-in, balls-to-the-wall narcissist like yourself, sure. But it’s horseshit on stilts, and nothing more.

Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

Uh huh. Again: you think that just because you “want” something—something aberrant, something that is its own proof of mental illness—a doctor should be forced to violate his own professional oath to give it to you…while knowing he is doing tremendous damage, possibly even contributing to your death by your own hand, as you yourself freely admit. In other words, a doctor—any doctor, ALL doctors—should be forced to cause misery and destruction in violation of his/their professional and personal ethics…simply because you “want” something—something you can never, ever have anything closer to than a gossamer illusion, a deceit. Chopping off the penis you were born and slashing a gash in its place will never make you or any other mentally disturbed man a woman. Rod Dreher explains:

Do you see what’s happening here? Chu says that the treatments doctors have given him are making him sicker, even making him desire suicide. But if he wants to suffer and to die, then he should have that right. Satisfying desire is the only thing that matters.
 
This poor man with asparagus-colored hair is going to submit to mutilation next week, and will have to spend the rest of his life inserting an object into the wound surgeons will have made in his pubic area, to prevent his body from healing itself. This man — “like many of my trans friends” — expects this medical procedure to make him no happier, and in fact may make him feel more miserable, even suicidal.

But he wants it. People like him want all of society to upend its laws, its customs, and its norms to facilitate that desire, and to act like there’s nothing wrong with it. And society is giving them what they want, and punishing those who deny that this is paradise.

Freeing the autonomous will from sex and gender norms is the summum bonum of contemporary American progressivism. The insatiably miserable Andrea Long Chu is its incarnation.

We have gone beyond gay people to allow transgender people — fewer than one percent of the population — to change America forever.

Progressives! They make a desert and call it peace. They carve a gash and call it a vagina. They make us all insane, and call the sane crazy.

None of which is coincidence, happenstance, or accidental.

What about the Hippocratic Oath? Here you have someone declaring on the pages of The New York Times that the surgery he is about to have will not make him happier, and in fact may drive him to suicide. But he doesn’t care. He wants that he wants. In a just order, those surgeons would be charged with a crime if they go through with this. Desire is the only criterion of health, is that where we are now? What if someone desires to have their legs amputated? Or to commit suicide? Where are the limits?

There are none, of course. Nothing—no matter how patently foolish, fantastical, outrageous, or wantonly destructive—will ever be enough for them. Every concession made to their successive head-spinning manias does nothing but provide them a jumping-off point for the next outrage against common sense, decency, and sanity. Any of us who haven’t learned that by now is either a damned fool or a covert collaborator.

Now back to the psycho for a gruesome denouement.

Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman.

Nothing, not even surgery, will grant you the mute simplicity of ever being one at all. It’s that whole pesky Y-chromosome thing, don’tchaknow. So, at this late stage of the game, I just have to ask: what the fuck is the point of all this grief, horror, and angst, then?

I will live with this, or I won’t. That’s fine. The negative passions — grief, self-loathing, shame, regret — are as much a human right as universal health care, or food.

WELL. Didn’t see the stupid liberal shibboleths coming, I didn’t; I’m sure you all can imagine my surprise. Sorry, guy, but four of those things are NOT like the others, and nary a one of them is a “right.”

Which leads me to ask why it is that ALL of these psychopaths and lunatics are devout Leftists, anyway? Never mind, don’t bother responding to that one. It was rhetorical anyway, and is a question that answers itself.

There are no good outcomes in transition. There are only people, begging to be taken seriously.

Someone so horribly twisted, so indisputably dysfunctional and diseased as to beggar belief, now begs to be “taken seriously”? REALLY? Taken seriously by whom? For what reason? On what grounds? To what worthwhile end?

Look, I’ll say it again: I personally believe that these misbegotten human oddities are in the main more to be pitied than censured for their affliction. They can have all the body parts they want gratuitously chopped off for all me, long as I don’t have to be involved in any way whatsoever with it—to include paying for it, either directly or indirectly (speaking of which, ummm, ooopsie).

But when the Left stridently insists that we all must laud bizarre, delusional aberrations as “heroes” and celebrate their “courage”—especially after having so viciously excoriated normal, healthy, well-adjusted, heterosexual Americans for so long—and that our entire society must be radically altered in deference to dementia…well, that’s stretching tolerance rather farther than its native elasticity will support.

Doesn’t mean the miserable freaks ought to be ostracized; doesn’t mean they ought to be shunned, doesn’t mean they ought to be harmed in any way.

It DOES mean they ought to stop waving their apparently unsatisfactory, anguish-inducing genitalia in our faces, stop allowing the Left to use them as political tools in its never-ending campaign of nihilistic destruction against pretty much everydamnedthing, and just tootle on off and leave us the fuck alone…lest it all wind up snapping back on the whole sordid circus eventually, providing them a demonstration of what oppression and intolerance really look like.

Update! The list of things you aren’t allowed to say just gets longer and longer.

In August, I was locked out of my Twitter account for the first time. I was told that I had “violated [Twitter’s] rules against hateful conduct” and that I had to delete four tweets in order to gain access to my account again. In this case, the tweets in question named Lisa Kreut, a trans-identified male, as the individual who targetedFeminist Current’s ad revenue and led efforts to have Vancouver Rape Relief blacklisted at the 2016 BCFED Convention.

On November 15th, my account was locked again. This time, I was told I must delete a tweet from October, saying, “Women aren’t men,” and another, asking, “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?”

After dutifully deleting the tweets in question in order to gain access to my account again, I tweeted, angrily, “This is fucking bullshit, @twitter. I’m not allowed to say that men aren’t women or ask questions about the notion of transgenderism at all anymore? That a multi-billion dollar company is censoring basic facts and silencing people who ask questions about this dogma is insane.” This tweet went viral, racking up 20,000 likes before Twitter locked my account again on Monday morning, demanding I delete it. This time they offered no explanation at all — not even a vague accusation of “hateful conduct.”

To be fair, it’s not that insane. Multi-billion dollar companies are clearly primarily interested in profit, not free speech or women’s rights. But Twitter is a company that represents itself as a platform for communication, for debate, and for sharing ideas, news, and information.

And you believed that bumptious horsepuckey, did ya? See, that was your first mistake, from whence all the other trouble sprouted.

What is insane to me, though, is that while Twitter knowingly permits graphic pornography and death threats on the platform (I have reported countless violent threats, the vast majority of which have gone unaddressed), they won’t allow me to state very basic facts, such as “men aren’t women.”

What seems insane to me is that so many people keep on using Twitter knowing full well they’ve banned who even knows how many people for daring to question shitlib orthodoxy in even the most diffident, humble, and polite way, expecting a different result in their own case. Then again, I never have given a lumpy fart about Twitter anyway, so what the hell do I know? Nicole Russell picks up the ball and runs with it:

It appears Murphy was banned solely due to repeatedly pointing out that men cannot be transformed into women simply because they want to call themselves women. This is a fact at best, and Murphy’s opinion at worst. Murphy refused to bend to the progressive view that the transgender issue is now nearly as sacrosanct as abortion. She was not banned for hateful conduct or speech but for failing to fall in line with the progressive agenda Twitter embraces.

Of course, Twitter is a private company and can do whatever it likes. But they have billed themselves as an open platform, one that welcomes debate, ideas, and sharing. 

Yeah, well, they lied. Liberals always do—about everything, but most especially about “debate, communication, ideas,” et al. They quite like to congratulate themselves on how very much those things mean to them while bereft of any interest whatsoever in them, and are prone to becoming enraged when called on it. The sooner you accept that simple home truth, the sooner you can stop wasting your time trying to have an honest discussion with them and get on with your life.