THE MORNING RANT: Trans-Children Advocates Are Back-Tracking to Salvage Their Reputations as Lawsuits and a Preference Cascade Bring the Butchery to an End

Words cannot describe just how diabolical the trans-children social contagion has been. Hospital groups and pharmaceutical companies prospered, Munchausen mommies were entranced, and thousands of children were sterilized and mutilated. There is no way to ever undo the damage done to those children, but a recent lawsuit awarding a victim $2 million is a start.

In ensuing days, there has been a cascade of former advocates suddenly reversing their support for transing children, as they face the possibility of massive legal judgments, as well as losing what remaining credibility they still have.

Since that judgment, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons quickly put out a statement opposing gender transition surgeries for minors, stating that “ASPS recommends that surgeons delay gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.” Almost immediately after the ASPS statement, the American Medical Association also backed off, announcing that “In the absence of clear evidence, the AMA agrees with ASPS that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.”

Over the weekend, the Washington Post published an editorial by Megan McArdle titled “The Transgender Orthodoxy is Cracking” which lays out the off-ramp for establishment liberals. She reassures the WaPo’s readers that she is a member of their tribe by stating, “I’m not opposed to pediatric transition. I simply believe we need better evidence before making it standard medical practice.” But she also acknowledges how a minority opinion that seemingly has widespread concurrence can collapse quickly, and that transing children is one of those issues:

Public orthodoxies that diverge from private opinion may be surprisingly stable, but they can also prove remarkably unstable, because they depend on private thoughts to stay private, giving doubters the illusion that they are lone deviants rather than members of a silent majority. Each skeptical voice makes it more likely that further doubts will be raised, triggering a rapid shift to a new equilibrium.

If you’ve wondered how communism collapsed, that’s how. And if you’ve wondered why communist regimes are so oppressive, that’s also your answer. When you are the custodian of a fragile orthodoxy, you cannot afford to allow a hint of dissent.

Perhaps an even greater signal that the establishment left is abandoning the trans-children fad is that David French of all people is trying to publicly walk-back his passion for pushing trans-everything on children. He responded to the detransitioner’s lawsuit victory by tweeting “This is absolutely expected. The facts in many of these cases are truly shocking, and juries were never going to be swayed by extreme and bespoke ideological justifications for drastic and permanently life-altering medical procedures.”

Mr. French, of course, worked his way from the National Review to the New York Times by making the “conservative Christian” case for the left’s most pathological agenda items. Most famously, David French called it a “blessing of liberty” for men dressed pruriently in women’s clothing to entertain children in a public library.

As odious as French’s support for “Drag Queen Story Hour” might have been, it still didn’t explicitly support the transing of children. But in a piece David French wrote for The Dispatch in 2021 titled “Hungary is No Model for the American Right,” he made it explicitly clear that he supports the practice of adults pressuring children into adopting a trans-identity. In this piece, French condemned Viktor Orban’s government because ”the regime just passed a law sharply limiting any promotion of homosexuality or gender transition to children.

The fact that David French, who is on the record advocating for the “promotion of…gender transition to children,” is now walking back that support serves as a beacon to the establishment left that the trans-children era is over.

Two years ago I wrote a piece titled The Trans-Children Era is About to Be Memory-Holed & the Perpetrators Will Be Disavowing Involvement.” I’m flattered that Ed Driscoll continues to link to it at Instapundit, which he did again a few days ago. Here are a few excerpts, which are still relevant, especially in regard to documenting those who pushed this evil.

The trans-children social contagion is soon to be memory-holed, and a day is coming when it will be hard to find any politician or person of authority who will acknowledge having supported this atrocity. There will need to be accountability.

Obviously, those who operated the gender abattoirs should be imprisoned for their grisly mutilation of healthy children, as should those who diagnosed healthy children as needing to be butchered and sterilized. As for those who simply advocated for child gender transitions, they must not be able to whitewash their records. They have rendered themselves unfit for any role in public policy.

Expect there to be a massive scrubbing of social media and professional records by those needing to distance themselves from their advocacy for or involvement in “gender affirming care” for minors.

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There are some acts of evil that were once widely accepted, but once the tides turned against them, the nature of those practices became so incomprehensible that virtually no one would ever claim to having supported them. When I was a child in Texas in the 1970s, it was barely a decade after legal segregation ended, yet I never met a single person who had an opinion of Jim Crow other than that it was a moral abomination and a disgrace. While I genuinely believe that the adults in my childhood were appalled by segregation, there were plenty of folks around who had to have supported segregation, or else it wouldn’t have persisted for so long. But none would admit it, because it would be admitting complicity in evil.

There are other examples of unthinkable practices that were once widely supported, but which are now recalled with abhorrence, such as eugenics and lobotomies. The trans-child social contagion will be remembered similarly.

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So, what do we do for now? Document. Document. Document. In every state and municipality there are up-and-coming politicians and political aspirants who have been very public about their support for “gender affirming care” for minors. Get screenshots and videos of their advocacy before they scrub their records and pretend it never happened.

I practice what I preach. There are a few people with political aspirations whom I am familiar with through my personal and civic circles. They have hard-left politics and live in deep blue bubbles where extremism is not challenged. During the BLM summer of 2020, they publicly advocated on social media in favor of riots, vandalism, criminal violence, property destruction, and defunding the police. With those positions now toxic even for Democrats, the social media of these passionate folks has been scrubbed. But I have screenshots. I don’t seek to cancel anybody, but I will not tolerate people denying the radical agendas they once advocated for. They can own it and say they were wrong, but they cannot deny it. There are abundant employment opportunities for them in fields where their terrible judgment will do no harm, but they have proven their unfitness for policy making.

I fully expect that within a year or two, our elites will be dismissing all talk of child sex changes as just another right-wing conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, the victims who received 15 minutes of adulation for surrendering their bodies to an evil fad when they were children will be discarded and forgotten. The damage done to their bodies can never be reversed, but at a minimum they can sue and seek to financially harm the ghouls who played mad scientist on their bodies.

But most importantly, anyone who once advocated for gender-transitioning children does not have the judgment to ever again be involved in formulating public policy.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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