Trans advocates and politicians have destroyed the natural order.
The Ancient Greeks had an interesting notion of a telos. A telos, per Aristotle, is the end, fulfilment or goal of a being. The end of an acorn, for instance, is to become an oak tree. The telos of a tadpole is to be a frog. Indeed, every natural being has an end at which it aims and which it is naturally compelled to become.
So too is it for humans. In contrast to the current relativism that asserts we have “fluid” goals and genders, our ends are essentially the same as all other living beings: we are born and pass through childhood; we develop sexually during puberty; we reproduce and raise our own children; we grow old and pass away.
Or so it has been until now. Certain technological and social currents – namely leftist extremism – are destroying puberty itself. Developments like puberty blockers and gender-transition surgeries have enabled practitioners to stunt the process of puberty or to render our reproductive organs useless. Sterility and disfigurement are increasingly common trends.
A recent example was seen in Victoria, with the Supreme Court ruling that a 12-year-old boy can be given puberty blockers without his father’s consent. The boy, who “presents as a girl, wears girls’ clothing and shows a preference for female colours”, attended the Royal Children’s Hospital at the age of eight and was diagnosed with “gender incongruence of adolescence and gender dysphoria in adolescents”.
Other examples abound. In another case in Melbourne, the mother of a 13-year-old girl tried to have the court-appointed lawyer to her case removed to facilitate access to puberty blockers. In another case, a father’s refusal to abide by gender norms left his three children confused and questioning “their gender identity”. A stance that led to restrictions on the man seeing his two youngest children and which coincides with the eldest child’s plans “to undergo a mastectomy”.
It’s the same all across the West. In the US earlier this year, the 14-year-old daughter of a Montana couple was removed from her parents because they objected to their child’s “transitioning”. A report from the Manhattan Institute notes how the number of American girls who have undergone “top surgeries” (double mastectomies) is larger than expected. Indeed, 5,000 – 6,000 girls underwent the procedure between 2017 and 2023, with at least 50 of these surgeries conduced on girls younger than 12-and-a-half.
This is obviously appalling. Yet the deeper issue concerns the role of the state. Instead of a paternalistic ruling class that seeks a genuine good for its subjects – some form of salus populi suprema lex (“the health of the people is the supreme law”) – what we have instead are governments that capitulate to the current liberalism with little regard for objective standards or public wellbeing. To speak philosophically, the natural law has been obliterated by the positive law.
An example of which was witnessed last week with the case of Roxanne Tickle and the so-called ‘Tickle vs Giggle’ affair. The male-born Ms Tickle, who underwent gender-affirming surgery in 2019, was successful in her action against women’s advocate and CEO Sall Grover and her Giggle for Girls app. The Federal Court found that Ms Tickle had been a victim of “indirect discrimination” upon being banned from the platform and awarded her $10,000 in compensation and legal costs. Ms Grover now plans to appeal to the High Court.
Yet to return to the underlying issue, what is at stake here is the disjuncture between natural and positive (man-made) law. In this example, Ms Grover was found guilty as her case falls under the newly amended Sex Discrimination Act.
Indeed, this is “the first time a case alleging gender identity discrimination has been heard by the Federal Court” since the act was amended in 2013. An amendment which makes it “unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or intersex status”.
An adverse ruling, however, does not change the natural or physiological facts. Ms Tickle is no more able to gestate or in possession of a womb after her victory than she was before it. A stance that was stoically appreciated by Ms Grover and that was captured back in the 1980s by philosopher Alan Bloom when he noted that the “law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk”.
Yet this anti-natural stance has only become more egregious and widespread. In Victoria, for instance, the Change of Suppression (Conversion) Practices Prohibition Act 2021 places any number of traditional gender norms and practices as potentially outside the law. So far-reaching is the legislation it has left many afraid of losing their child to the state.
As one article observed, Victorian parents are distraught. They feel “unable to do anything to prevent their children pursuing potentially irreversible and harmful changes – from chest-binding to taking hormone blockers and ultimately sex-change surgery.” A fear that is not unfounded given the all-pervasive left-liberalism of the Garden State and via examples like the Montana case given above.
We are thus in a vicious cycle. We have a ruling elite that promotes and oversees a strident left-liberalism. Yet it is also one that punishes parents for having the temerity to not want their child “liberalised” by the state.
In essence, the process is this: we drown children in liberal/LGBT ideology; they respond by attempting to engage in liberal practices like “top surgeries” or gender transitions; we then use the state to force any recalcitrant parents to hand over their child for the required medical intervention. The child’s life is then ruined. And anyone who questions this is either ignored or punished for not going along with our collective insanity.
This is not only my view either. American author Jonathan Haidt has noted how the spread of leftist ideals is being driven by conformity to the dominant liberalism. As Haidt notes, liberal trends like gender dysphoria are almost purely a “social contagion”. As Haidt adds, we are being sucked in to liberal “vortices” where we “take on each other’s purported mental illnesses”.
This has all been further confirmed by writer Wesley Yang. As Yang notes, there has been a “5x increase in those self-identifying as transgender among those aged 18-24 between 2014-2022” and a “4x increase in those…aged 25-34”. Our young, therefore, are being propagandized into a form of liberal insanity the likes of which we have never seen.
Those of us advocating normalcy are thus faced with twin threats. On the one hand we have a liberal contagion that is spreading like wildfire through social media and the popular culture. On the other we have a leftist activist class that is further enflaming these trends.
As the Victorian article above observed, our children are “subject to encouragement and cajoling from activist pro-trans teachers and counsellors”. Indeed, one parent “found text messages from a counsellor to her daughter advising the child to leave home so she could escape her sceptical parents and freely pursue her newly-found wish to transition to being a boy”.
This is obviously bad news. There is, however, a simple solution. It is, of course, to reject it all on the grounds of nature. The “Ms” Tickles of the world do not have wombs. They cannot bring a baby to term or lactate. They will never go through menopause or have a hysterectomy. No amount of obfuscation or legal machination will ever change this, and they should all be told as such.
The same goes for what is happening to our children. By putting adolescents on puberty blockers and associated substances we are not only disregarding the Hippocratic Oath of “doing no harm”, we are blatantly rejecting the notion of a natural teleology.
To return to the Ancient Greeks, the end of a human life is eudemonia or human flourishing. It is not a life of destructive medical interventions inflicted on innocent adolescents by a liberal managerial class too frightened to confront the LGBT monsters they have created.
