The world’s richest man has it right. Last Friday Elon Musk tweeted, “[a]ny parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.”

Twenty years ago this would not have been a controversial statement. The general response would have been, “of course.” But today it is a position at the very edge of a massive chasm that exists between the left and the right. How did this happen, and why?

It is not as if Elon Musk is a distant observer, who emerges from his executive suite from time to time to issue statements just to weigh in on current controversies. For him it is also a personal matter. A month ago, Musk’s 18-year-old son by a previous marriage filed a a petition for a name change in the Santa Monica Superior Court. He also petitioned for a new birth certificate, changing his sex to female. The wide rift that exists in our culture, apparently is equally as wide within the billionaire’s own family.

So called “trans-affirming care” — puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery — have been restricted, banned or are under consideration in 15 states: Indiana, Idaho, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, Iowa, Tennessee, Mississippi, South Dakota, Utah, Florida, Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas and Kansas.

In the remaining states the care remains legal and several have passed or are attempting to pass laws that will make the states trans sanctuaries.

A bill is under consideration to do just that in Illinois, but it has remained in the Assignment Committee since February, with no other action taken so far. California, by law, already is a trans sanctuary and in Minnesota legislation has passed in the House to become a sanctuary state. By Executive Order, Governor Tim Walz already has required protection for “gender-affirming” care since March 8th.

In Colorado, Governor Jared Polis signed a bill on April 14^th making that state the third official sanctuary state. On April 12^th, the Washington State House passed an amended version of a Senate Bill that protects runaway trans children and allows them to get hormone therapy and surgery without parental consent, although the Department of Children, Youth and Families has to be involved.  That bill apparently needs Senate approval before being sent to the Governor. Many other states are taking up this issue as well.

The Biden Administration is fully behind “trans-affirming” care and has declared it “settled science.” Biden, himself, just released a statement opposing H.R. 734, a bill that would require children to play on teams that align with their biological sex. The President says if it reaches his desk, he will veto it.

It is simply incredible and nonsensical that this deep divide exists. Even Saturday Night Live, which was once a comedy show, took up the issue over this past weekend. In an unfunny skit with Molly Kearney, the show took shots at several red states for banning what she called “health care for trans kids.” The left refuses even to look at the possibility that chemicals that sterilize, and surgery that mutilates and sterilizes children could be viewed as destructive, not helpful.

Anyone who speaks out against medical intervention for children risks condemnation and even physical assaults. Those who favor medical intervention become completely unhinged by any challenge to their views, making it impossible to have a civil debate. There is no debate, according to the left, pointing to the endorsement of “gender-affirming” care by the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Children’s Hospital Association, and others as confirmation for their position.

We cannot get a coherent answer to the question of why these organizations support such care, when in Europe, where trans hormone therapy and trans surgery started, the medical clinics are being shut down. The preferred therapy there is now talk therapy.

Why the difference?

Popular bloggers, Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster, recently hosted Jamie Reed on their podcast, Triggernometry. Reed is the whistleblower who exposed the destructive transgender care practices at Washington University Transgender Clinic in St. Louis, MO. The clinic currently is under criminal investigation by the Missouri Attorney General.

Reed is a gay woman who is married to a transgender man and worked in the clinic managing the care for the clinic’s patients for the last several years. Initially it was expected the clinic would care for 50 or so patients a year, but 50 turned into hundreds, then thousands.

Kisin asked Reed how she explained this explosion of trans-identifying children. While Reed’s observations cannot be generalized to other populations, she has come to a few conclusions based on the thousands she saw. Her view was interesting.

She observed that white children in the U.S. are indoctrinated to believe they are privileged, and because of that they are seen as “oppressors.” Many are desperate to escape that label. Because they are white, it is difficult for them to claim a different race or ethnic identity. They can’t claim poverty when their family is affluent, and they find it too difficult to identify as gay or lesbian. It is easier for them to claim to be non-binary or trans. Trans seems to be the path of least resistance to become a member of an oppressed group, freeing them from condemnation as an oppressor.

She didn’t explain what accounts for other racial or ethnic groups who identify as trans, other than to say that most of the upsurge, she believes, is fueled by social media. These children are encouraged to join the oppressed class. She said if you took most of these kids to a farm in Montana and took away their phones, it would be better for them than the treatment they receive in gender clinics. The idea they were trans would most likely vanish.

Doctors, too, are affected by social and professional pressures. More important, she said, is that each medical professional is merely a “cog in a spinning machine.” The machine involves multiple professionals, each one carrying out his or her specific task. If any one of them stops or does something different the entire machine breaks down. Each professional performs his assigned task to the best of his ability, without the necessity to evaluate the entire spinning machine. That is someone else’s responsibility. They don’t think about it.

It reminds me of an examination of the people who were involved in Hitler’s death camps. Both Hannah Arendt and Christopher Browning looked at the phenomena of seemingly normal people committing mass murders in places like Auschwitz and multiple other concentration camps.

Both authors pointed to the Nazis using a division of labor as a way that allowed each worker an out. They were just one cog in a very large wheel, disconnected from ultimate responsibility for the mass exterminations. Someone else was responsible for designing the machine and keeping it going, not them.

The church, too, has taken sides on transgender divide, many of them coming down on the side of genital mutilation in the name of love, as the church from Revelation’s Thyatira might have taken. Most won’t adopt a position, being too cowardly to pick a side, much like the church at Laodicea would have done.

Very few follow the model of the church at Philadelphia, which faithfully followed God’s will.

Today the church is not driving the culture. It is being driven by it, transformed by it. Nothing is going to change in Chicago, or Springfield, or Washington D.C. until the church stands up and becomes an instrument of both truth and grace. That looks like that’s a long way off, but it could happen overnight if enough Christians answer the call.

Can you hear it?

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Read more:

Analysis: Illinois One of 29 States Allowing Boys to Play Girls’ High School Sports (Prairie State Wire)

The Trans Quagmire – How We Got Here (Thomas Hampson)

[VIDEO] Transgenderism is The Most Dangerous Extremist Movement in The U.S. (Tucker Carlson)

[VIDEO] Riley Gaines Speaks Out Against Trans-Insanity in Women’s Sports

[VIDEO] Transgender Agenda Run Amuck (Fox News Channel)

New CA Bill Requires Foster Parents to Swear Allegiance to LGBT Ideology (California Family Council)

Opposing Transgenderism Is Not Genocide (Oliver Perry)

30 Transgender Regretters Come Out Of The Closet (The Federalist)

[PODCAST] Generation Indoctrination: Inside the Transgender Battle (Christian Post)

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During the mid-90’s, international condemnation was directed at the practice of female circumcision, a euphemism for female genital mutilation. When people became aware of this barbaric procedure practiced in some countries, people all over the world, including the people in the United States, quickly responded by passing legislation outlawing the procedure for minors. The U.S. Law, The Female Genital Mutilation Act of 1996, outlawed the procedure in all 50 States and it made it a crime to take a child to another country for that purpose as well. It passed with substantial bipartisan support.

The surgery was common in some Muslim countries to prevent young girls, and women, from becoming sexually aroused. This mutilation of young girls surgically created sexual disfunction in hundreds of thousands of girls and woman across the globe. Tens of thousands of immigrant girls were affected in the United States before it was stopped.

People everywhere abhor harming children.

So where is the outrage over the practice of chemically and surgically mutilating children under the euphemism of “gender affirming care?” This kind of care is even more destructive than “female circumcision.”

Gender affirming care is not care at all.

Recipients of such treatment are forever rendered incapable of having children or even experiencing a normal sexual response. Once started on the path of changing their sexual identity, which is biologically impossible, the boy or girl will be dependent on medical intervention for the rest of his or her life. In addition, these interventions cause other, sometimes very serious, medical issues that have to be addressed as well.

Despite the investment of tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars, the patients remain the same. If they were born male, they will die male. If they were born female, they will die female. Any change is merely cosmetic, a series of very expensive chemical and/or surgical distortions of their bodies.

In the United States, it is full speed ahead on promoting transgender medical interventions for children. The American Academy of Pediatrics promotes “an affirm only/affirm early policy.” And the current administration claims that “gender affirming care” is settled science, the preferred method to treat gender dysphoria.

But that is a lie. It is far from settled science. There is a growing body of evidence that medical interventions are exactly the wrong thing to do.

The organization, Do No Harm, “a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, medical students, patients, and policymakers” takes issue with this claim. A recent study they conducted compared treatment approaches between the United States and European Countries.  The study found that:

“Northern and Western Europe, which share the United States’ broad support for transgenderism, reject the gender-affirming care model for children . . . [T]hese countries now discourage automatic deference to a child’s self-declarations on the grounds that the risks outweigh the benefits, while also calling for months-long psychotherapy sessions to address the co-occurring mental health problems.”

The Tavistock Gender clinic for children in London, which was a model for the establishment of other such clinics around the world, actually shut down last year. Meanwhile gender clinics for children are opening up and expanding all over the United States.

Not only the Do No Harm group is pushing back against the medical interventions. A study just released this year by Abbruzzese, Levine and Mason on “The Myth of ‘Reliable Research’ in Pediatric Gender Medicine: A critical evaluation of the Dutch Studies—and research that has followed” found that there is very weak to no empirical support for chemical and surgical treatments for pediatric transgender patients. Their conclusion is that no such treatments should be administered unless and until there is empirical evidence the treatments work. Currently there is no such evidence. There is no empirical evidence sufficient to justify medical interventions.

So I ask again, where is the outrage over the practice of chemically and surgically mutilating children under the euphemism of “gender affirming care?” Why has this become a political issue instead of purely an issue of what is best for the child? Why are so many doctors perfectly willing to perform surgery on children to remove their ovaries and testes, to destroy the penises and vaginas, to remove the uterus and breasts of girls—all healthy organs, sterilizing them forever. Even the chemicals sterilize them.

Why? And how can anyone remain silent about this legally sanctioned horror show?

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