Mick Hartley

Suzanne Moore in the Telegraph:

Change happens, according to the famous Hemingway quote about his bankruptcy, “gradually, then suddenly”. The same could now be said of the dismantling of gender ideology. Its moral bankruptcy, a decade of sterilising and mutilating children’s bodies, looks to be over.

In the flurry of executive orders that Donald Trump has signed since re-entering the White House, here is the big one: prohibiting gender transitions for people under the age of 19.

“It is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called ‘transition’ of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures,” reads the executive order, entitled Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.

This means no more puberty blockers, no more operations, double mastectomies, castration, “facial feminisations” and all the rest of it. No more irreversible “gender affirming care”.

The Democrats, still apparently stunned into stupor, appear to have no understanding of how this issue affected their loss in November’s election, and continue to defend the indefensible. All of this will now be fought out in court cases and arguments over Medicaid and insurance.

How did we get to this? How did anyone think that telling children that they were born in the wrong body, and that those bodies could be surgically and chemically rearranged was sensible? But this is hardly the first time medics have caused harm.

There's a grim history of medical fads, like lobotomies, that now seem barbaric. Others, for instance the refrigerator mother theory of autism, fitted in with psychological theories of the time but have long since been discarded. Somehow gender theory combined the two: barbaric in its treatment of supposed "trans kids", and faddish in its embrace of postmodern queer theory and the like. But gender theory has had a far wider effect than any of its predecessors. It's been embraced from the top, by governments on down. And the damage it's done has been, commensurately, much deeper.

For in the end, gender ideology is a belief system, a cult, a religion. It is entirely faith-based. Science and reality do not figure. Yet as this belief system starts to crumble, how do those who believed in it walk it back?

They believed above all that they were the good people, that sex was a spectrum, not a binary. They believed that legitimising the fetishistic behaviour of middle-aged men was the new civil rights movement. That this group had little in common with ever-increasing numbers of deeply unhappy teenage girls who did not want to grow into adult women was obvious. Except to the cultist.

Trans became an umbrella with its own language, and the righteous and the modern took it to be the one true faith. Stonewall spread this ideology. So did the BBC, The Guardian, most liberal media, the Labour Party, the Fawcett Society, the NHS, the “humanists”, the entire art world, and academia – in other words, the cultural elite….

Few will admit they were wrong or misled. They will simply rewrite history. Just like those who sought to relieve the agonies of deeply depressed patients through an ice pick in their brains, they will say their experimental treatments did help some, that they were at the forefront of a new kind of medicine.

Those who cheered this on will keep quiet while they scrabble in the dirt for the next civil rights battle. They picked the wrong one. It would take actual bravery to say this in public. Their silence is deafening.