In Los Angeles the other week, I heard about the experience of physicians with patients identifying as transgender.
Under California’s Gender Non-Discrimination Act, a transgender patient has “the right to nondiscriminatory treatment on the basis of gender identity or gender expression”. All patients, it states, will be addressed and referred to
based on their self-identified gender, using their pronouns and name in use, regardless of the patient’s appearance, surgical history, legal name, name registered in the EMR [Electronic Medical Records], or sex assigned at birth. The correct gender and pronouns should be reflected in the documentation whenever possible. If the patient’s family members suggest that the patient is of a gender different from that with which the patient self-identifies, the patient’s view should be honoured.
In other words, any Californian physician who thinks such treatment is wrong, or that it may lead to harming the patient’s mental or physical health and thus contravenes medical ethics, must shut up and get on with it. Not to do so would expose the physician to disciplinary action.
One physician told me about a patient of his who had identified as a transgender woman. Mindful of the risks involved to his professional standing, the doctor said he was extremely careful not to transgress any of the rules. He used the patient’s preferred pronouns of she/her, addressed the patient as a woman and in no way questioned the patient’s professed female identity. He played it by the book.
The patient, however, launched a complaint against him. His offence, said the patient, was to have referred to her as “a person”. She was, she said, “a dragon”.
The patient, said the physician, was of course mentally ill. But to say so would have cost the doctor his job. Instead he sent the patient back the thousands of dollars she had paid him in fees and told her the professional relationship was now void.
If you think this is just too outlandish to be believed, a story in today’s Telegraph will leave you sadder and wiser. The paper reports:
A Church of England school teacher told a pupil she was “despicable” after she refused to accept that her classmate identifies as a cat.
The 13-year-old girl and her friend were reprimanded by their teacher at Rye College, in East Sussex, on Friday at the end of a Year 8 class on “life education” in which they were told they can “be who you want to be and how you identify is up to you”.
The row, which has infuriated parents, was allegedly sparked by one of them asking a fellow pupil: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?”
Their teacher told them they were being reported to a senior leader and were no longer welcome at the school, part of the Aquinas Trust, a Church of England network of 11 schools, if they continued to express the view that only boys and girls exist.
The Telegraph has heard a recording of the heated exchange taken by one of the pupils, in which the teacher starts by saying “how dare you – you’ve just really upset someone” by “questioning their identity”. The pupil responded: “If they want to identify as a cat or something then they are genuinely unwell – crazy.”
The teacher then asks the girls “where did you get this idea from that there are only two genders”, adding: “It is not an opinion.” The teacher said that “gender is not linked to the parts that you were born with, gender is about how you identify, which is what I said right from the very beginning of the lesson.”
She added that “there is actually three biological sexes because you can be born with male and female body parts or hormones” and “there are lots of genders – there is transgender, there is ‘agender’ who are people who don’t believe that they have a gender at all”.
The girls said they “don’t agree with that” and that you “can’t have” an “agender” identity: “if you have a vagina you’re a girl and if you have a penis you’re a boy – that’s it”.
The teacher interjected in a raised voice: “What do you mean you can’t have it? It’s not a law ... Cisgender is not necessarily the way to be – you are talking about the fact that cisgender is the norm, that you identify with the sexual organ you were born with, that’s basically what you’re saying, which is really despicable.”
The teacher suggested they were homophobic and confused, which the girls denied. When the pupils said their mothers would be on their side, the teacher responded: “Well that’s very sad as well then.”
The teacher said that “if you don’t like it you need to go to a different school”, adding: “I’m reporting you to [senior staff], you need to have a proper educational conversation about equality, diversity and inclusion because I’m not having that expressed in my lesson.”
These astounding stories are tragic — tragic for the “transgender” individuals involved, and tragic for western society. They are also the reductio ad absurdum of two lethal social trends that first surfaced decades ago in progressive circles.
The first was the doctrine that mental illness was nothing other than a social construct. There was nothing objective about the diagnosis, it was said; indeed some who were diagnosed as in need of psychiatric treatment were in fact perfectly sound in mind while it was the structures of an oppressive western society that were insane.
The second, related trend was the mantra of today’s hyper-individualist society that there was no objective truth and that subjective experience, personal autonomy and self-actualisation carried all before them. “I can be whatever I choose to be” western progressives told themselves.
And so now we are where we are. Individuals born as men can choose to be women; those born as women can choose to be men. But if they can change their sexual identity just like that, why stop at gender? Why not identify as a cat? Or a dragon? Why is that any more crazy than a man declaring himself to be a woman or vice versa?
The worst and most sinister aspect of this epidemic of coerced mass derangement is that our children are being groomed to it in their schools. The Church of England school in the Telegraph report — a Church of England school! — is a mere drop in this fetid ocean.
As Lottie Moore of the Policy Exchange think-tank’s Biology Matters Unit has written in the Spectator:
Over 60 per cent of schools are failing to inform parents when a child discloses that they want to change their gender, according to a survey conducted in March by Policy Exchange. A third do not inform the Designated Safeguarding Lead, the standard procedure for all safeguarding issues within a school. Nearly three quarters of the schools we asked teach that everybody has a gender identity – and a quarter that some children may be “born in the wrong body”. Such ideas have no basis in scientific reality — and can cause serious harm to vulnerable children.
Into this lethal maelstrom has blundered none other than Britain’s Chief Rabbi, whose deeply troubling guidance on the matter to orthodox Jewish schools has just come to light. I will be addressing this guidance and its implications in a subsequent post.
UPDATE: The Telegraph further reports:
The Telegraph has discovered that a pupil at a secondary school in the south west is insisting on being addressed as a dinosaur. At another secondary school in England, a pupil insists on identifying as a horse. Another wears a cape and wants to be acknowledged as a moon…
One pupil at a state secondary school in Wales told The Telegraph of a fellow pupil who “feels very discriminated against if you do not refer to them as ‘catself’”. She added: “When they answer questions, they meow rather than answer a question in English. And the teachers are not allowed to get annoyed about this because it’s seen as discriminating.”
The student in question is in Year 11, but began using the pronoun “catself” in Year 9 “when the whole thing with neo pronouns started”, the pupil said.
She described how lessons could be completely derailed if a teacher attempted to get the child to reply to a question in English rather than meowing.
“It’s affecting other people and their education and everybody in their lessons. It’s distracting to sit in a lesson and have someone meow to a teacher rather than answer in English, especially at secondary school age.
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