Should a child be allowed to medically alter their body if she decides one day that she wants to be a boy?
According to the author of a new piece in New York Magazine, the answer is “Yes, absolutely.” And if she wants to do it several times or ruin her body, the answer is still “Yes.”
For our latest cover story, @andrealongchu makes the moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies. https://t.co/ABvvXkkG3J pic.twitter.com/W3kfrF8DBl
— Intelligencer (@intelligencer) March 11, 2024
The piece, written by Andrea Long Chu, a transgender author, explains to us that anybody at any age should be given the freedom (and the resources at public expense) to change their sex at any age.
It’s an interesting argument because it exposes the radical nature of alphabet ideology better than most, and even its antinatalist/anti-human roots. Alphabet ideology has nothing to do with compassion and everything to do with destroying the social norms that allow society and even the species to exist.
I wish I could say the argument is shallow, but it isn’t. It is a well-reasoned argument that follows from the premises we are asked to accept. If we accept one premise above all others, much of what comes next follows naturally.
That premise? Human beings have no particular good that we could define as flourishing. Or, to put it more easily comprehensibly, there is no Nature biologically or metaphysically. What we are is what we desire to be, and the only good for which we are built is actualizing whatever we want to be at any moment in time.
The argument is that the only human good is the freedom to do or be whatever we desire at that moment and that any restrictions on our desires are inherently tyrannical. There is no moral order, reason, or health that we can objectively define. Nothing. There is pure will and nothing more.
It is hard to overstate how radical this proposition is; it is the definition of nihilism, which is the belief that there is no such thing as good or evil.
We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from. When the TARL insinuates again and again that the sudden increase of trans-identified youth is “unexplained,” he is trying to bait us into thinking trans rights lie just on the other side of a good explanation. But any model of where trans people “come from” — any at all — is a model that by default calls into question the care of anyone who does not meet its etiological profile. This is as true of the old psychiatric hypothesis that transsexuality resulted from in utero exposure to maternal sex hormones as it is of the well-meaning but misguided search for the genes that “cause” gender incongruence. It is most certainly true of the current model of gender identity as “consistent, insistent, and persistent,” as LGBTQ+ advocates like to say. At best, these theories give us a brief respite from the hail of delegitimizing attacks; they will never save us. We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.
Chu rejects the entire notion of “gender dysphoria” or any of what we might think of as the medicalization of gender; she sees hormones and surgery as empowering but not as treatments for any kind of disease. The whole “life-saving medical care” argument is beside the point. Kids should get chopped up if they want to. Period. Talking about “treatments” is conceding to much, because Nature itself does not exist in any normative sense.
Nature is the limitation, that’s all. To the extent we dislike what it is, we change it.
The is the preeminent argument in modern society, and alphabet ideology is the inevitable result (at least alphabet ideology shorn from its aggressive recruitment of children to become transgender) of a philosophic tradition that extends back to Descartes. Once you accept the mind/body dualism and erode the idea of what our Founders called “Nature and Nature’s God,” will is all that is left.
Nietzsche would recognize the transhumanist movement, although he would not celebrate it. He often spoke of health and vitality, and the alphabet movement celebrates their opposites. Most Leftist movements embrace victimhood, tantrums, appetites, and the demand to be celebrated for being ill in some way. The “fat positivity” movement is a perfect example of this.
What is striking about the latest iteration of alphabet ideology is the hunger to extend the embrace of will all the way down to infanthood. And that is what makes this article worth so much time analyzing. If you marinate in the ideas you can see the essence of modern Leftism. It is a clearly written, fairly easily understood statement of everything wrong with modern nihilistic Leftism.
Consider for a moment the most important role of the parent is, to provide food, shelter, and protection for a child. It is teaching a child to reason, to restrain themselves and their appetites, and to become something other than selfish tyrants. Toddlers are by their nature little barbarians–delightful barbarians, as we can watch them learn and grow and discover–but barbarians nonetheless.
They are bundles of appetites, supremely selfish, often violent when they are upset, and in desperate need of training in social skills and self-control. Parents teach children all these things, and in the Left’s version of freedom, this is a form of oppression. We help children integrate into society, but society itself is oppressive and evil. That rhetoric is the essence of Leftism, and they truly mean it.
To make “thoughtfulness” a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.
Liberating people from society means liberating children from social norms and ultimately their parents. Any vision of the Good or of Nature is necessarily limiting. Nothing is a more basic proof of Nature’s iron power over us than biology and biological sex. To liberate people, we must liberate them from even the basic notions of health and sexuality.
Natural limits must be eliminated in order to truly liberate people.
Suppose women’s oppression really is a product of their biology, Firestone wrote. What follows? Only that feminists must work to change biological reality. The genius of this gambit was to refuse the idea that biological facts had some kind of intrinsic moral value that social or cultural facts did not. Biology could not justify the exploitation of human beings; indeed, it could not even justify biology, which was just as capable of perpetuating injustice as any society. When Firestone wrote of women as a “sex class,” she — unlike the TERFs who followed her — had in mind the Marxist dream of a classless society, something that could be achieved only by freeing humanity from the “tyranny of its biology.” For her, this meant a “revolutionary ecological programme” of fertility control, artificial reproduction, and the full automation of labor. That may sound unrealistic. But this is the point: Justice is always an attempt to change reality.
Chu’s argument encapsulates the postmodern view. The next step in human evolution is liberation from what makes us human. This is actually a more common belief than you might suppose, and it naturally follows from the rejection of the belief that there is a God or a Nature that provides norms.
Consider Aristotles’ conception of Nature, in which everything contains what he called a telos, which you can think of at its purpose or its health.
The telos of an acorn is to become an oak tree, and not just any old oak tree, but a strong and thriving one. In reality most oak trees are less than perfect–the telos is not fully realized–but we all know what an oak tree should be like. A properly ordered nature would be like a garden, in which everything maximizes the potential of each being. Plato would call this the idea of an oak tree–its perfect form, which reality can only approximate.
The same goes for human beings. The perfect human being would be strong, healthy, virtuous, and thriving. A properly ordered society should maximize the flourishing of human beings, who each has a best version of themselves toward which they should strive to achieve.
Christianity obviously shares a similar view, although God rather than nature provides the measure. We are made in the image of God, and while imperfect, the Good for us is to come as close to God as possible.
Postmodernism rejects this view: we are whatever we will, and that goes for children as well as adults. Attempts to socialize children are inherently restrictions on will.
The freedom of sex does not promise happiness. Nor should it. It is good and right for advocates to fight back against the liberal fixation on the health risks of sex-changing care or the looming possibility of detransition. But it is also true that where there is freedom, there will always be regret. In fact, there cannot be regret without freedom. Regret is freedom projected into the past. So it is one thing to regret the outcome of a decision, but it is a very different thing to regret the freedom to decide, which most people would not trade for the world. If we are to recognize the rights of trans kids, we will also have to accept that, like us, they have a right to the hazards of their own free will. This does not mean shooting testosterone into every toddler who looks at a football. But if children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right. Yet we let this happen every day — and not without casualties. I am not speaking of suicide; I am speaking of the many opponents of trans rights who observe with horror that they too might have transitioned given the chance, so intensely did they hate being teenage girls. I do not know if they regret their biology today. I do suspect they regret that they never got to choose it.
“Consent to puberty.” The tyranny of nature must be rejected. What you and I consider “health,” postmodernists consider tyranny.
Most parents instinctively know that part of our duty of care is to protect children for their good. Children cannot reason, are ignorant, have very hazy notions of consequences, and regretting modifying one’s body and destroying one’s health is fundamentally different than regretting getting blind drunk as a teenager.
Chu’s argument is simply this: there is no “good” for human beings, so whatever one wills at any moment becomes the good. Sterilizing oneself, eating oneself to death, or becoming a zombie on fentanyl or tranq is as valid a choice as any other.
This is the essence of postmodernism, although there are infinite variations on the theme and more than a little politics of tantrums thrown in (others’ freedoms often restrict one’s own and, therefore, should be eliminated), but you get the idea.
As Dostoevsky said, “When God is dead, everything is permitted.” Including mutilating children.