It’s Time To Eradicate Transgenderism From Public Life

The tragic news of the deadly mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis last week was quickly followed by the unsurprising revelation that the shooter, a 23-year-old man, identified as trans.

It should be obvious by now that transgenderism — the entire industrial complex of medical interventions, legal actions, social affirmation, and political rhetoric now attached to what was once called gender dysphoria — is a serious threat to public safety. As such, it should be outlawed and eradicated from public life.

To be clear, I’m not saying that individuals who believe they are trans should be eradicated, but the gender ideology that affirms them in their delusion should be. Men and women suffering from this cruel delusion should have our compassion, and every effort should be made to bring them back to the reality of their biological sex. Public policy, however, should focus on the ideology of transgenderism and those who perpetrate it. We should treat it the way we treated radical Islamism after 9/11, or communism in the 1950s. It should be understood as a dangerous threat, and anyone advocating or working to advance it should be treated as a criminal and an enemy of the people.

What does that mean in practice? Doctors that administer so-called “gender-affirming care,” whether in the form of prescribing hormone-blockers or performing mutilative surgeries on otherwise healthy patients, should have their medical licenses revoked and face criminal prosecution. They should arguably be held liable for the crimes of the mentally unstable people they exploited for profit.

Such laws should make no distinction between doctors who do this to minors or to adults. This is an important point, because it gets to the heart of why transgenderism is so pernicious and dangerous, and why so many people were duped into tolerating for so long. On the right, we often hear arguments that such-and-such transgender medical intervention should be banned for minors, the implication being that it’s okay if an adult wants these things done.

That’s wrong, and it denies the reality that these interventions can only cause harm, violating every physician’s Hippocratic Oath. After all, we would never consent to a physician being allowed to indulge an adult patient’s disordered desire to have a healthy limb amputated or a functioning organ removed simply because they “identified” as someone without that limb or organ. We recognize there is something deeply pathological about wanting a healthy limb chopped off or a functioning organ removed. We recognize, too, that any physician who agreed to do such a thing isn’t fit to practice medicine and should be barred from doing so.

In other words, the underlying assumption behind our misguided tolerance of transgenderism is that it doesn’t harm anyone if a man wants to “live as a woman,” or vice versa. But this assumption is false, as recent events keep demonstrating. The normalization of transgenderism harms a great many people — especially children, who don’t have the ability to protect themselves from it the way adults do.

By the same token, parents that affirm their children in transgenderism and facilitate their “transition” should be treated as child abusers and dealt with accordingly. Democrat-controlled states like California would like to make it a crime for parents to refuse to affirm their child’s “gender identity,” but what’s needed are laws that do the opposite, and criminalize such affirmation. Same goes for teachers, coaches, and any other adult who has regular contact with and responsibility for minors.

All of this would of course require changes to various state laws, and in the case of certain deep-blue states, drastic changes indeed. But some red states could right now begin the process of “transgender-proofing” their states by taking steps to discourage and deter adults in positions of authority from supporting or promoting transgenderism.

At the federal level, much could be done to encourage this. As my colleague Eddie Scarry noted last week, President Trump could direct the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services to re-write the rules on “gender-affirming care,” and then investigate and prosecute medical facilities and doctors that provide such care, as well as parents who seek it out for their kids. In addition, there’s likely quite a bit of financial leverage the Trump administration could bring to bear on medical institutions, especially ones attached to university systems, to discourage transgender ideology and the various “treatments” that come out of it.

When politicians promote and embrace transgenderism, there should likewise be repercussions, like the withholding of federal funds — similar to how Trump has dealt with universities that turn a blind eye to campus radicalism or antisemitism. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan have all made pro-transgenderism statements recently, with Frey and Walz both declaring Minneapolis and Minnesota to be a “safe haven” for transgenderism. If they persist in this, their state and city should be deprived of various sources of federal funding, and they themselves should become potential targets for Justice Department investigations.

What we don’t need are red flag laws or gun control measures in response to the danger of rampant transgenderism. As Auron MacIntyre memorably put it, “I don’t want gun control, I want trans control.” The entire corrupt enterprise should be outlawed and buried, forced underground. That might not stamp it out entirely, but it would save a lot more people from the harmful, even deadly, effects of this pernicious ideology.

There are lots of different ways to devise policies that would in time eradicate transgenderism from public life in America. My purpose here is not to go into them in detail, but simply to argue that eradicating transgenderism through hard political power should be the overarching and unapologetic goal of the right. As far as possible, the entire demonic system should be swept away — and we shouldn’t have to wait for the next trans mass shooting to say so.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.