Welcome To The United States of Alice is an excellent article in The American Spectator about the manipulation of language. It resonates with me because of its clear condemnation of our current rejection of objective meaning. But it goes even farther, suggesting that it is representative of, and responsible for (at least in part) the destruction of our culture, and is quite possibly unfixable.
I’m not sure that I will go that far, but my current pet peeve, “transgender” and “sex-change surgery” are words that have meanings far from reality, and are reflective of the complete rejection of science and standard psychiatric practice.
“Sex-change” surgery was pioneered at Johns Hopkins Medical School but then discontinued in the 1970s since it failed to treat gender dysphoria. “[T]ransgendering is a psychological rather than a biological matter,” Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins, wrote recently. “The treatment should strive to correct the false, problematic nature of the assumption [that one is of the opposite sex and this is a matter of choice] and to resolve the psychosocial conflicts provoking it.”
A 30-year study in Sweden showed that after surgery, transgendered patients commit suicide at 20 times the rate of non-transgender people. Meanwhile in 75 percent of cases without surgical or medical treatment, McHugh noted, transgender feelings spontaneously disappear.
American culture is rushing headlong into the snake-pit of profoundly troubled people, and instead of helping them with psychotherapy and drug therapy, we giddily accede to their psychotic wishes to have their genitalia surgically altered, their hormones manipulated and their disturbed visions of themselves worshiped by the media.
Anyone with a passing familiarity with genetics, biology or just common sense will understand that it is impossible to change a man into a woman, or vice versa. No amount of squawking by pundits or photoshopped covers of Vanity Fair will change the genome of even one of the fifty trillion cells of the human body (yes….5×1013 ) from one sex to the other.
We do these poor, deeply troubled people a huge disservice. How does this differ from opening the gates of the nearest mental institution and handing out nooses and ladders to the clinically depressed, or pistols and baseball bats to the pschotically violent?
this, yes! [and visiting from AoSHQ BTW] Mental illness
is the main factor here, and we [the USA] seem to be
loath to want to admit that.
It saddens me that our society has become so callous that when we see someone in real pain, we put a jester cap on them and make them dance for us.