New vacancies at gender-bender clinics

“It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all,” said Dr Johnson, who rivals Shakespeare in the number of entries into quotation dictionaries.

Admittedly, his remark was directed at dogs walking on hind legs. But the quip is so universal that it applies to transgender-therapy clinics, or rather my feelings about them. Replace ‘surprised’ with ‘disgusted’, and there you have it.

Being the reference modern country, the US is way ahead of us in concocting these dystopic institutions. They have 40; we have only one, with two branches. But give us time: transatlantic saplings usually take a few years after transplantation to reach full luxuriance.

Our solitary gender-bender clinic is very much in the news these days because its five employees have quit, citing fears that children are being misdiagnosed.

A boy as young as three (3!!!) may be slightly effeminate, which to modern ideologues can mean only one possible diagnosis: inside him there’s a girl struggling to get out. The boy is then prescribed hormone blockers to prevent the onset of puberty. (The hormones are different, but the general idea is the same for not very girlish girls.)

By the time he reaches 16, the poor lad is ready for huge doses of oestrogen and surgery, expertly designed and deftly performed to turn him into the kind of sideshow that used to entertain punters at county fairs.

Those five employees follow in the footsteps of a dozen others who objected to how the clinic operated. However, as far as I know, none objected to the apocalyptic disaster of such freak hatcheries existing at all.

If gender dysphoria is indeed a widespread clinical condition, one would think that it would have spread as widely eight years ago as it does now. Yet that’s not the case: the number of children referred to the clinic increased from 94 in 2010 to 2,519 in 2018.

Since to the best of my knowledge dysphoria isn’t a disease or, even if it is, it’s not contagious, some extra-medical factors have to be at play here. The issue isn’t medical, but existential.

A distinguishing, possibly the defining, belief of post-Enlightenment modernity is that man-god has ousted god-man, or even killed him according to Nietzsche. That means that man has usurped God’s powers and claimed full sovereignty over his life, body, destiny – everything.

God’s will no longer exists; it’s man’s own will that has dominion over nature and himself, as part of the natural world. This presupposition ineluctably leads to the certainty that human nature in general, and certainly every person’s nature in particular, can be remodelled and irrevocably changed to conform to some ideology.

This notion would never have occurred to any sane person in the period that preceded Jesus Christ’s rise to superstardom and going simply by his initials (“Hey, JC, JC, would you die for me?”).

In those days, people believed that every person was created by God in his own image. Hence barging into a person’s body or soul with a surgical knife (other than for a genuine medical need) or political diktat was seen as not only insane but also grossly blasphemous.

Like most Enlightenment concepts, that empowerment of the individual was bogus: man didn’t acquire real sovereignty. All he got was a chance to transfer sovereignty from God (and therefore himself, as a person carrying a particle of God) to secular opinion formers, who were seldom blessed with moral and intellectual integrity.

Those chaps have indeed proved their knack at forming opinions, by such expedients as executions, torture, concentration camps or – at the milder end – simply by unlimited propaganda, corrupt and unsound education, and diligent work at smashing up every cultural survival of Christendom.

Those operating at the two ends, the violent red and pacific violet, rely on different methods, but their objectives are identical. Both wish to remake human nature in the image of some secular deity, be that communism, fascism or deracinated, lobotomised  multi-culti New Age.

Compared to such a lofty task, reshaping the nature of a single person is child’s play. All it takes is some pharmacological advances, new surgical procedures and – above all – a society ready to accept, legitimise and welcome those freak assembly lines.

Ever since the reference country of modernity enshrined pursuit of happiness in its founding document, unhappiness has become an affront to everything modernity holds dear. It’s ready to cross the line separating eudemonic from demonic to expunge unhappiness from the human condition.

Best of luck with that, but the goal is a desert mirage: the closer one gets the further away it moves. Unhappiness is dialectically linked with happiness: since one is impossible without the other, it’s best not to worry about it.

Effeminate boys or masculine girls may be unhappy about their sexuality (which is what dysphoria actually means – it’s unhappiness medicalised), and they deserve our sympathy.

One way or the other, they are in for a rough ride – but we can all pray that they find solace in things that matter more than genitalia: the life of the mind, spirit and pursuit of truth, for example. All those things, that is, that modernity is busily trying to marginalise, if not criminalise.

Puny aspirations, puny thoughts, puny culture, puny morality – these are the hallmarks of any society pursuing the satanic aim of reshaping man, be it spiritually or surgically. For underlying it all is soulless nihilism and, ultimately, despondent hopelessness.

For the practical ramifications of such lovely things, check the blood-sodden history of the twentieth century, the first one in which Enlightenment values held sway from beginning to end. And we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, to use the phrase popular in the birthplace of transgender therapy.