The Uterine Descent into Madness

Boston’s Children’s Hospital have released some promotional videos recently, or at least they have reached some prominence on Twitter recently. What are they ‘promoting’? They’re promoting their expertise and caring attitude at dealing with transgender children, although if you watch one example here you might be forgiven for thinking they’re actually promoting transitioning.

What this child psychologist, Kerry McGregor, actually says is “seemingly from the womb” which is not quite what the tweet author quotes. It’s close enough, though.

The actual content of the video is disturbing enough, but what I found really creepy was the oddly delighted smile that seems fixed on this psychologist’s face throughout. It may be she’s just struggling with excess gas, but it has every appearance of someone being really happy about this state of affairs with regards to kids.

It’s very odd.

I know doctors sometime project this calm and a “no need to worry” kind of manner when they’re telling you they will have to remove several parts of your body and the lifelong consequences might be quite limiting. However, they rarely project some kind of ghoulish delight at the prospect.

Maybe Kerry is aiming for a reassuring manner, but I think she missed the mark quite badly. The impression that comes across is the inconsequentiality of it all. It’s so inconsequential that I can tell you about it all with this really happy face.

And this seeming inconsequentiality is very apparent in the way a lot of gender ideologues talk about transitioning. Or at least that’s the impression I’m getting (once again I apologise that I haven’t been able to read the entire internet).

They seem to talk about it almost as if changing ‘gender’ is like choosing what colour T-shirt to wear that day.

For some it really is that performative. It’s Monday and I’m feeling a bit girly today so today I’m going to identify as a woman. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? For others, who really do have some internal struggle between their inner and outer perceptions of themselves, it’s altogether more serious. For these people, the struggle might be so intense and so painful that they contemplate drastic measures to alter their biology as far as is medically possible and to go as far along the road of changing sex as is currently feasible.

I don’t see any other option at the moment than supporting the very small percentage of people in this latter category on their journey. Medical transitioning, and legal recognition, might be the best we can currently do to alleviate the suffering and to allow those afflicted to live a happier and more fulfilled life.

In decades to come we might have understood the staggering complexities of the human mind and its interaction with biology and society a little bit better and there might be other options available to us. But for now, I’m happy to support their treatment and to put laws in place to help combat any discrimination or disadvantage they might face.

It seems to me to be a decent and compassionate compromise. We can’t really change someone’s sex but we can tinker with externalities and provide a supportive societal framework for those undergoing this difficult journey.

You’ll notice that I’ve written the above with some degree of seriousness. Somewhat uncharacteristic of me, I know. I’ve used words like treatment and difficulty and struggle. Is my perception correct? Am I right in thinking that someone who feels they have been “born in the wrong body” is probably facing a significant level of distress and suffering?

It’s one thing to attempt to be compassionate and to help people in difficulty, for whatever reason, and quite another to project an attitude of joy for someone’s situation. Yet what we’re seeing from the gender ideologues is precisely this attitude of joy and even celebration when someone “comes out” as trans. There are even examples of parents doing “gender reveals” for their kids when they declare themselves to be ‘trans’.

This has definitely strayed from the territory of ‘support’ and into the uncharted waters of ‘promotion’.

One problem, and we might even say it’s the problem, as Douglas Murray in his book The Madness of Crowds points out, is that we’re behaving with an astonishing level of certainty about these issues where no such certainty is even remotely warranted.

We have no idea why some people are affected by this feeling of mismatch between their inner perceptions of themselves and their external reality. The corollary of this is, of course, is that we can have little to no idea whether someone is ‘genuinely’ affected by what has been termed ‘gender dysphoria’, or whether they have fallen victim to societal conditioning and social contagion, for example. How do we tell the difference?

One way might be to spend a good deal of time talking to a skilled psychologist who can explore the myriad threads of our lives and get some feel for the complex interaction of pressures, thoughts and feelings that help to drive our personalities and our psyches.

But hang on one blessed minute. This option has largely been closed off in the case of gender. We’re not allowed to do that any more. The psychologist’s role is merely to affirm the patient’s self-diagnosis. Any attempt to untangle the complex web of interactions and pressures that might have led an individual to such a point is seen as some kind of ‘conversion therapy’.

In the dream world of modern gender ideology we are, it is supposed, the only possible authority on ourselves.

It’s a seductive and affirming position, but I have to remind myself that although my inner perception of myself is of someone who is devilishly attractive, disarmingly charming and possessed of an almost divine wit, the females of this world seem entirely oblivious of this reality.

It’s difficult enough for an adult to have a truly accurate self-perception and yet we are to uncritically accept that “seemingly from the womb” children are certain about their ‘gender’ when I would surmise that most adults, when asked, could not adequately define gender? I’m certainly in this category.

My daughters’ cousin when she was at primary school (some years ago now) accidentally saw a more adult scene on TV one day. Her dad, a vicar, was a bit panicked and she said “it’s OK, dad, they’re only having sex”. Which, of course, alarmed him even more. He became even more alarmed when she carried on to say “it’s what the kids do at school behind the bike sheds”.

I’m not sure it was really the bike sheds - but you get the idea. Anyway, it transpired that some girls and boys were playing a kind of ‘dare’ game where they kissed one another (we’re not talking a full-on game of tonsil hockey here). After a puckered up brief ‘kiss’ the girls and boys would go “yeeuuuuk!” and run away laughing.

A child’s understanding and perception of the world is very, very, very different than that of an adult’s. It’s often a wonderful, charming, funny and utterly original perception and it’s one of the joys of parenthood to have the privilege of sharing in those changing and developing perceptions. But when we claim a child as young as 2 or 3 can ‘know’ their “true” gender we’re on very shaky ground and projecting adult perceptions and understandings on to the pronouncements of children.

If we are to believe Kerry from Boston this ‘understanding’ can be there seemingly from the womb. This clump of cells, which magically became a human being when taken from the womb, can understand the socially-conditioned gender they are before any social conditioning could possibly have taken place.

We can, seemingly, affirm gender identity from the womb, yet not affirm that this is a human life - it is only a clump of cells, but it knows its gender.

I would, I suppose, be classed as “gender critical” these days. The gender activists would say that I’m hateful, or bigoted, or transphobic, or whatever. I might be less critical if I understood what the hell these folks were going on about, if I could piece together some coherent thread of logic, or see a science and evidence based foundation for the ideology. But, alas, I cannot. The only honest position I can currently take is to be critical.

Do I want people to be treated with compassion, without discrimination, and to be able to live happy and fulfilled lives? Of course I do. Any changes to societal structures and laws have to be made with an eye to fairly balance the conflicting rights and interests of all ‘groups’ in society - not just one.

What we’re doing at the moment is growing something in the ‘womb’ of society, like Rosemary’s Baby, that’s leading us into a kind of madness. It’s appallingly divisive, perhaps by intent, but it’s not grounded in anything but ‘feelings’ (which are important, but not the be all and end all). We do not understand the trans issue in any reasonable way, yet we claim to do so. Or some claim to do so. Basing societal structures and laws on the flakiest of scientific foundations will not end well. It didn’t for covid and it’s not going to end well for ‘gender’, either.

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