Recently, I received an email from a professor in the philosophy department at Guilford College. Her short, strange, and unsolicited missive asked whether it was true that I think that “transgender folk” are “mentally ill.” She went on to say that such a view is “an insupportable position” that is “unworthy of a scholar.” She concluded her brief sermon by informing me that her “preferred pronouns” are “she, her, and hers.”
Although I don’t usually answer unsolicited emails I can answer her question succinctly: Yes, I do think “transgender folk” are mentally ill. I also think that any professor who actually thinks that my stated position on the mental stability of “transgendered folk” disqualifies me as a scholar qualifies as mentally ill. Please allow me to explain.
Until recently, it was understood that a man who thought he was a woman (or a woman who thought he was a man) suffered from Gender Identity Disorder, or GID. As Matt Walsh explains in his brilliant new book, The Unholy Trinity, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) was only recently pressured into removing GID from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This was done solely for political reasons.
Now that GID is gone and has been replaced with “gender dysphoria,” which is not considered a mental illness, we are no longer treating it. Instead of trying to change a man’s feelings when he becomes convinced he is a she, we now try to change his body to match his feelings. This is done either by hormonal injection, surgical alteration, or both.
Obviously, this is part of a big change of philosophy in the span of just a few months. Hence, I believe it would be a good idea to review the different stages of this rapid change and briefly summarize the implications for “transgendered folk” and, perhaps as importantly, for transgender activists.
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Treatment. Back when we used to treat “transgendered folk” as suffering from GID we intuitively recognized that we were dealing with a mental illness. If someone thought he was a she we treated him. We would no more want him to have his genitals surgically removed under the guise that he was a woman than we would want them sewn onto his forehead under the guise that he was a unicorn. If you think that sounds harsh, you are wrong. Treating people who are sick with the goal of keeping them from hurting themselves is not cruelty. It is called compassion.
Tolerance. When we removed GID from the DSM we did so under the banner of tolerance. But tolerance presupposes a moral judgment. In other words, we were declaring that although we judged something was wrong with people suffering from GID we would no longer express our judgment - so others would heap praise upon us for being “open-minded.” If you think that sounds harsh, you are right. When people refuse to help other people who are sick and thus allow them to hurt themselves it is called cruelty.
Acceptance. When you actually accept the idea that the he is a she then you have crossed a pretty serious line. Quite often, those who say they accept the transgender delusion are lying. They just want to come across as hip or cutting edge. But if they actually accept the delusion then they are also suffering from a delusion. Put simply, if you look at the he who says he is a she and actually come to believe he is a she you have lost your sanity. It is no different than hearing a man declare that he is a poached egg and then coming to believe that he really is a poached egg. In other words, true acceptance and internalization of craziness is properly dubbed as craziness.
Mandatory Acceptance. Once you cross the final line and go from merely adopting the other person’s delusion to demanding that others do the same there is really no turning back. The very idea that a professor with a PhD in philosophy would have the unmitigated gall to demand that I adopt her delusions in order to be “worthy” to be classified alongside her as a “scholar” shows that the inmates have taken over the asylum. But it shows much more than that. It also reveals that rigid ideological conformity has now replaced reasoned debate in higher (hire?) education. This mindset can be referred to as intellectual coercion. To the extent that it demands conformity without debate it can also be dubbed as intellectual cowardice.
Making identity relative is not the final goal of these so-called progressives. But with it all things are now possible. It takes a complete divorce from biological law in order to affect a complete divorce from the moral law. This, in turn, will allow these so-called progressives to eventually become gods. That is their final goal. It’s been that way since the fall of man.
Of course, if their identity relativism is false then it is false. But if relativism is true then it is also false. Thus, there can be no objective standards by which to judge whether my views are “unworthy of a scholar.” All that matters is my subjective view of my own worthiness. Once that standard is accepted then teaching is rendered obsolete. The idea of peer-reviewed research is also rendered obsolete. We have all been appointed to lifetime tenure as our own judges.
In the final analysis, one thing is certain if this worldview prevails. We must acknowledge that the pursuit of truth was never anything more than a sad delusion.
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