15.

Applying Virtue Ethics to Life in Society

The Injustices behind the LGBTQIA+ movement1

I. Transgenderism: The Ideology

This class will focus on the “T” in the above acronym: Transgender.
Transgender people have a gender identity or gender expression that differs from their
assigned sex. Some transgender people who desire medical assistance to transition from one sex
to another identify as transsexual. Transgender–often shortened as trans–is also an umbrella
term: in addition to including people whose gender identity is the opposite of their assigned sex
(trans men and trans women), it may include people who are not exclusively masculine or
feminine (people who are non-binary or genderqueer, including bigender, pangender,
genderfluid, or agender). Other definitions of transgender also include people who belong to a
third gender, or else conceptualize transgender people as a third gender. The term transgender
may be defined very broadly to include cross-dressers.
Being transgender is independent of sexual orientation: transgender people may identify as
heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, asexual, or may decline to label their sexual orientation. The
term transgender is also distinguished from intersex, a term that describes people born with
physical sex characteristics “that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies”. The
opposite of transgender is cisgender, which describes persons whose gender identity or
expression matches their assigned sex.
The degree to which individuals feel genuine, authentic, and comfortable within their
external appearance and accept their genuine identity has been called transgender congruence.
Many transgender people experience gender dysphoria, and some seek medical treatments such
as hormone replacement therapy, sex reassignment surgery, or psychotherapy. Not all
transgender people desire these treatments, and some cannot undergo them for financial or
medical reasons.
Many transgender people face discrimination in the workplace and in accessing public
accommodations and healthcare. In many places they are not legally protected from
discrimination.
The epidemic of supposed gender dysphoria among children and adolescents —
“transgenderism”—has often been described as a cult. The designation is in some ways apt.
Though lacking a charismatic leader usually found in such movements, other expert descriptions
of cults certainly apply: “designed to destabilize an individual’s sense of self by undermining his
or her basic consciousness, reality awareness, beliefs and worldview, and emotional control.”
Cults also lead the target to believe that “anxiety, uncertainty, and self-doubt can be reduced by
adopting the concepts put forth by the group.”

1
Source is article by Jane Robbins, Will Transgenderism be Swept Away by History, published by The Public
Discourse.

1
 The promise is a “new identity” that will solve all problems, even as it separates one from
family and previous life. This is especially true in cases of so-called Rapid Onset Gender
Dysphoria, in which previously normal teenagers (usually girls) suddenly announce their desire
to transition to the opposite sex. It is readily apparent how a teenager struggling with severe or
even common adolescent angst could be lured into such a group.
Perhaps transgenderism is better described as a form of “social contagion.” This term refers
to “the spread of ideas, feelings and, some think, neuroses through a community or group by
suggestion, gossip, imitation, etc.” The explosion of cases of gender dysphoria, previously an
exceedingly rare condition, over the last few years has coincided with a meteoric increase in
sympathetic attention to the topic in regular and social media—thus suggesting social contagion.
Individuals who have been ensnared in but escaped from the transgender movement describe
it as an ideology, with elements of both the political and the religious. The devotion to the
ideology is so deep that, as one psychiatrist describes the mindset, “anyone who hesitates in
supporting transition and [sex-reassignment surgery] is a dinosaur committed to an outgrown,
inherently discriminatory understanding of trans persons and needs to be defeated in court or in
the public arena.”
And yet these descriptions—cult, social contagion, ideology—fail to capture the uniqueness
and enormity of what is happening with the transgender movement. Past and current cults have
seduced their victims into losing all sense of reality and embracing bizarre and dangerous beliefs;
social contagions and mass crazes have affected large groups of seemingly intelligent
individuals; ideologies have taken hold that have altered societies and cost lives. But now we are
facing something different.
Previous cultish or similar social phenomena have generally been limited to some degree by
time, space, or eventual return of the senses. But Western civilization is now gripped by a
cultural cyclone that is blowing through such limitations with totalitarian force. Transgenderism
has shaken the foundations of all we know to be true. Scientific knowledge is rejected and
medical practice co-opted in service of a new “reality”—that “gender” is independent of sex, that
males and females of any age, even young children, are entitled to their own transgender self-
identification based only on their feelings, and that literally every individual and every segment
of society must bow to their chosen identity at risk of losing reputation, livelihood, and even
freedom itself.
The Science of Sex and Gender Identity

Before exploring the revolution, it is necessary to outline briefly the science in the area of
sex and gender identity. According to guidelines of the National Institutes of Health (which itself
is currently funding ethically dubious studies related to the treatment of gender-dysphoric
patients), grant applicants for health studies must consider sex as a biological variable “defined
by characteristics encoded in DNA, such as reproductive organs and other physiological and
functional characteristics.” Human sex “is a binary, biologically determined, and immutable trait
from conception forward.”
Although certain rare congenital disorders of sexual development (“intersex” disorders) can
result in ambiguity about biological sex, there is no “spectrum” of sex along which human beings
can be found. Biological sex is binary.

2
 By contrast, “gender identity” is a psychological phenomenon, not an immutable
characteristic, and not found anywhere in the body, brain, or DNA. There is no medical test that
can detect it. Because twin studies show the infrequency of both genetically identical twins’
suffering gender dysphoria, the condition clearly is not genetic. Nor is there any evidence to
support the common claim that a patient has a “girl’s brain in a boy’s body,” or vice versa, as
repeated in media sensations such as I Am Jazz. To the contrary, every cell of a male’s brain has
a Y chromosome and every cell of a female’s brain has two X chromosomes, which is true
regardless of whether the individual “feels like” the opposite sex. Any “evidence” of an innate
gender identity is utterly fictitious; to the contrary, there is much unrefuted evidence that various
psychological and environmental factors are determinative.
Not only can the feeling change, research show that it does so in a great majority of cases (at
least for child patients). For example, children with gender dysphoria who are allowed to
experience natural puberty will come to accept their sex by adulthood in 61 to 98 percent of
cases. By contrast, children who are subjected to transitioning treatments such as puberty
blockers and cross-sex hormones almost always go on to live as transgender adults. Data on the
persistence rate of adult patients is unreliable, primarily because so many patients are lost to
follow up. But many of those patients are increasingly seeking medical help to reverse the
procedures.
There is no evidence that so-called gender-affirming treatment (GAT) has any positive
effect on the long-term psychological well-being of individuals who suffer gender dysphoria.
Such people do, in fact, have high rates of suicide before treatment (with the rate of suicide
attempts nine times the rate of the general population). But a study from Sweden, a highly
“affirming” country for citizens who consider themselves transgender, shows that undergoing
GAT does not reduce the suicide rate for these patients. In fact, their rate of completed suicide
was found to be 19 times the rate for the general population.
With respect to what used to be classified as “gender identity disorder” (GID), medical
associations have bent to the prevailing political winds. In 2013 the American Psychiatric
Association (APA) changed the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders)
to replace GID with “gender dysphoria,” a term that now focuses not on the psychological basis
for a patient’s rejection of his sex but rather on the distress produced by that rejection. If there is
no distress, reasons the APA, there is no problem—it is perfectly normal, and certainly not a
“disorder,” for a person to refuse to acknowledge the significance of his or her body. The
“stigma” supposedly disappears.
The APA has so far resisted the demands of some transgender activists to “de-pathologize”
the condition completely. The absence of a recognized diagnosis means the absence of insurance
coverage. So, in the professional literature, transgenderism occupies an uneasy limbo between a
psychiatric condition and a normal state of human identity. Someone must pay for these
expensive “reassignment” procedures.

3
 The American Psychological Association’s guidelines acknowledge that not all clinicians
believe in affirming the beliefs of gender-confused patients (at least when those patients are
children), but they largely adopt the agenda of the transgender radicals. The organization states
flatly that “gender is a nonbinary construct that allows for a range of gender identities, and that a
person’s gender identity may not align with sex assigned at birth.” Having adopted this
manifestly unscientific foundation, they go on to build their house of cards around a political
rather than medical scaffold.
The political reclassification of gender dysphoria has gone global, with the World Health
Organization’s (WHO) May 2019 decision to remove the condition from the list of mental
disorders and refer to it as “gender incongruence.” WHO explained this move as necessary to
remove discrimination against dysphoric individuals and declared that their right to GAT should
be guaranteed.

II. The Injustices of the Transgenderism Movement

Transgender Totalitarianism

Transgender orthodoxy (or ideology or theology) has thus seized Western society with
absolutely no basis in fact. It is difficult to identify any comparable cultural phenomenon at any
point in history. Nations have been engulfed by political movements such as National Socialism,
based on fabricated science about racial identities, but those movements were different in kind
from the transgender revolution. Even totalitarian political systems are built less on broad citizen
acceptance than on the naked power of the armed State. By contrast, transgenderism is defeating
reality without firing a shot.
At various points in history, the field of medicine has embraced evidence-free practices,
such as lobotomies in the early twentieth century, as has the field of psychotherapy (phrenology,
for example). But in none of these cases did the professions as a whole demand absolute
acceptance of, and perhaps participation in, the groundless doctrines. Instead, the practices were
confined to a narrower group of experimenters who had limited and only temporary success
against the reality of science and common sense.
This is not the case with transgenderism. Supposedly sophisticated and highly trained
medical professionals across the spectrum now not only ignore the absence of evidence, they
deny even facts that have been obvious to every sane human being since creation.
Actual physicians now declare under oath that there is no physical basis for determining
whether a human being is male or female. Dr. Deanna Adkins, a professor at Duke University
School of Medicine and the director of a new Duke-affiliated gender clinic, testified in a North
Carolina court, “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender
identity… It is counter to medical science to use chromosomes, hormones, internal reproductive
organs, external genitalia, or secondary sex characteristics to override gender identity for
purposes of classifying someone as male or female.” This would come as a surprise to the
millions of doctors and billions of other normal people who have been classifying individuals
that way since the beginning of time.

4
 This politically based insistence that black is white has enshrined treatments that are
extraordinarily damaging to patient health, both physical and mental. Pediatricians refer
dysphoric children to complicit endocrinologists, who administer hormones with harmful and
often irreversible consequences, who then refer the children to complicit surgeons, who wield the
scalpel to remove healthy organs and create pathetic, non-functioning replicas of others.
Psychiatrists or psychologists may be involved, but often only to rubber-stamp the patient’s
supposed need for the radical treatments. Gender clinics spring up like mushrooms after a
shower of acid rain.
Professional medical societies cower before these activists and create guidelines based not
on science but on politics. Dissenting physicians are bullied into silence, leading the outside
world to believe the lie that the medical profession as a whole supports the “affirmation” of
gender identity as incongruent with biological sex. Medical ethicists muse that physicians’
participation in these schemes should be required as a condition of licensure.
Claiming a place among actual medical societies and presenting itself as the gold standard in
transgender treatment, is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
WPATH purports to be the voice of medical experts on this issue but operates more as a
political-advocacy organization―no professional degree of any kind is required for membership.
Despite the “all comers” approach to membership, WPATH’s guidelines for treatment are
considered gospel in some parts of the medical profession.
A noteworthy aspect of WPATH’s 2011 revision of its Standards of Care was its
encouragement of a new paradigm for obtaining informed consent from patients. As described by
Dr. Stephen Levine, a psychiatrist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine: [The
new model] asserted that patients know best what they need to be happy, generally meaning that
patient autonomy is the singular ethical consideration for informed consent… This includes
children and adolescents. The mental health professionals’ roles in recognition and treatment of
the highly prevalent psychiatric comorbidities and decisions about readiness were de-
emphasized, particularly by the pronouncement that there is nothing pathological about any state
of gender expression.
According to WPATH, then, doctors are to sublimate their ethical concerns about treatment
of dysphoric patients to the current desires of those patients.
WPATH has spawned USPATH, which openly proclaimed the political mission of its 2017
conference: to “stand as a strong statement of support for continuing the rapid developments in
trans health in America, and for the community of health providers, researchers, and advocates
who are advancing that care.” At that conference, organizers bowed to threats of violence from
transgender radicals and cancelled the appearance of Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist who
takes the apparently loathsome position that patients will generally be happier if they can be
reconciled with their biological sex. The only concern among these supposedly objective
professionals about how to silence Zucker’s lone skeptical voice was how to do it without getting
sued.

5
 Transgender activists in the medical profession go a step further: They even support
legislative prohibitions on what they call “conversion therapy.” This means psychiatrists and
other psychotherapists are banned from even exploring with a patient the underlying
psychological basis for the dysphoria. To paraphrase Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh,
referring a gender-dysphoric patient for “affirming” therapy is similar to referring an anorexic
patient for liposuction. But doctors in the new gender industry collude with the political gender
radicals to ban the very psychiatric treatment that could spare a patient a lifetime of warring with
his own body.
Just as history offers no parallel for the moral and professional rot in the medical field, it
contains nothing comparable in the wider culture:
• The transgender revolution has captured all categories of government, with legislative,
executive, and judicial branches rushing to impose policies preferred by the activists.2
• It has captured the media, which dutifully present the radical ideology as the new normal
and paint opponents with a hostile tinge. Social media giants such as Twitter routinely censor
any content deemed insensitive to dysphoric people, even a simple statement of truth such as
“men aren’t women.”3
• It has taken over public and some private schools, from preschool through higher
education. If a student claims he is transgender, he is, and all students and personnel must treat
him as a member of his newly chosen sex.4
• It has taken over American business, with requirements (sometimes self-imposed, and
frequently in response to well-funded bullying) for public pledges of allegiance to the new
orthodoxy. Corporations are now urged not only to support the concept but to apply pressure in
the public square against dissenters.5
• It has corrupted religion, especially mainline Protestantism, by replacing Scriptural
teachings with the dogma of narcissistic choice and entitlement.6
• It has corrupted athletics, with biological males now allowed to compete against smaller,
slower, less muscular women and girls to the inevitable detriment of the female athletes.7
• It has corrupted the law, with statutes that were enacted without any thought of gender
identity now being interpreted to elevate the “rights” of the dysphoric over those of other
citizens. Even the federal statute that was enacted to protect girls’ access to meaningful
participation in sports (Title IX) has now been inverted to protect the male invaders of girls’
teams.8
• It has corrupted research, with the federal government now funding unethical and
unprofessional research projects that are designed to support a particular outcome rather than

2
https://transequality.org/issues.
3
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/twitter-bans-users-for-transgender-heresies-meghan-murphy/
4
https://transequality.org/issues/youth-students.
5
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-north-carolina-transgender-paypal-hld-idUSKCN0X21XR.
6
https://www.hrc.org/explore/topic/religion-faith.
7
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/feb/24/terry-miller-andraya-yearwood-transgender-sprinter/.
8
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/obama-administration-title-ix-transgender-student-rights-223149.

6
arrive at scientific truth. Further, it has ginned up outrage at any research that reaches
conclusions contrary to transgender dogma.9
• It has corrupted language10, with demands for false and fabricated pronouns to refer to
transgender individuals, and with enforced redefinition of basic terms such as “man,” “woman,”
“father,” and “mother.” What even radicals referred to ten years ago as “physical sex” or
“biological sex” is now routinely deemed “sex assigned at birth,” as though the attending
obstetrician recorded whichever sex first came to mind.
• It has trampled religious freedom, including the rights of couples who wish to adopt or
foster children and the organizations that help them. Unless these individuals and organizations
agree to speak and act in accordance with transgender mandates—to deny their most
fundamental beliefs—they will be forced out of these critical childcare and family-formation
programs.11
Perhaps most seriously, it has bulldozed the ancient, fundamental rights of parents to protect
and guide their children.12 The Obama administration issued guidance recommending that school
officials not notify parents whose child is experiencing gender confusion; and though that
guidance is no longer in effect, keeping parents in the dark remains the rule in some states.13
Parents who do know of the problem but reject the notion that their child is trapped in the wrong
body are subjected to emotional blackmail directed by the “experts,” who, of course, profit from
this new industry. Warned that without hormones and surgery their child will commit suicide,
parents are told bluntly that their choice is between a “live daughter and a dead son,” or vice
versa. If they still refuse to consent to what they know will harm their child, the government may
strip them of custody. When the medical and governmental establishment excludes the natural
protector of a child—the person who knows and loves him more than anyone else on earth—
from decisions that can literally ruin the child’s life, civilization itself is undermined.
Why Now?

Why is this happening? Why has a fog of lies descended on entire societies such that even
children are being sacrificed to this voracious leviathan?
Volumes will be written about the underpinnings of the mass transgender hysteria. A few
considerations:

9
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/08/new-paper-ignites-storm-over-whether-teens-experience-rapid-onset-
transgender-identity.
10
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/31/fashion/pronoun-confusion-sexual-fluidity.html.
11
https://www1.cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2019/march/ca-bill-would-force-foster-parents-to-use-any-transgender-
pronouns-foster-children-want.
12
https://thefederalist.com/2018/02/20/ohio-judge-strips-custody-parents-not-letting-daughter-taking-trans-
hormones/.
13
https://www.theblaze.com/news/2018/09/28/new-jersey-educators-must-accept-students-chosen-gender-identity-
not-required-to-notify-parents.

7
 • The transgender mania naturally results from the relentless march of the sexual revolution.
The denial of human nature began with the birth-control pill’s decoupling of sex from
reproduction. That led to the separation of sex from marriage, which dissolved restraints on non-
marital sexual activity and non-marital childbearing. A family of mother and father was no
longer considered necessary for creating children, which meant there was nothing special about
the maleness and femaleness of romantic partners. Enter Obergefell, which by discovering
homosexual marriage as a constitutional right obliterated even physical, biological distinctions
between the sexes. And if there is no meaningful distinction, a human being should not be
confined to one sex but rather should be inherently capable of moving between the sexes or
stopping somewhere in the middle.
• The mania results from the elevation of the narcissistic autonomous Self, which is entitled
to whatever choice it deems desirable at the moment—even a choice that violates physical
reality.
• The mania results from the developing concept that patient desire should be the primary if
not sole determinant of medical treatment. The WPATH guidelines make clear that the demands
of the patient trump the ethical concerns of the physician. Carrying this concept to its logical
conclusion, one dysphoric man argued in a chilling essay in The New York Times that a doctor
should be obligated to provide the mutilating surgery the patient wants to better resemble a
woman—even if the patient knows and admits that the surgery will cause great physical harm
and will fail to relieve, and perhaps will even increase, his emotional distress. Under such a
standard, the physician ceases to be a healer and becomes merely a tool for fulfilling the fevered
desires of a troubled patient. And unlike a healer, a tool has no right of conscience, no legitimate
basis for refusing to participate in the requested procedures.
• The mania results from the cult of experts. Parents whose every instinct screams that their
children need psychotherapy, not GAT, yield to professionals who claim to know better. If the
expert says the appropriate treatment is X, then every non-expert is expected to submit without
question—even if the folly of the recommended course is a flashing red light.
• The mania results from hubris. One GAT physician describes the heady adulation from
desperate patients and families: “Every single encounter is so rewarding. They tell us, ‘You are
my hero. You are saving my kid’s life. We don’t know what we would do without you.’”
According to researchers who interviewed surgeons involved in the early phases of SRS, the
surgery appealed to some physicians’ desire “to prove to themselves that there was nothing they
were surgically incapable of performing.” Change a man into a woman or a woman into a man,
and ye shall be as gods.
• The mania ultimately results from the decline of religious faith. None of the cultural
evolution described above could have happened in a society that still recognized the reality of
God, and of biblical and natural law. And to paraphrase Chesterton, the person who does not
believe in God believes not in nothing, but rather in anything.

8
 Of course, one should never dismiss the lure of one of the oldest temptations known to
humanity: greed. Some professionals in this expanding area of practice no doubt desire to ease
the suffering of confused patients. But the health care professionals who have uncritically
accepted the quackery of the unholy Money–Benjamin14 alliance, as well as the pharmaceutical
industry that will churn out drugs and hormones which hapless patients must take for a lifetime,
will reap the benefits that are projected to hit almost $1 billion by 2024. This kind of reward can
go a long way toward easing the twinges of conscience.
Signs of Hope

In May 2019, the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) moved toward a
scientific definition of “sex” in federally funded health programs. While the Obama
administration had decreed that statutorily prohibited discrimination on the basis of “sex” should
encompass discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” HHS recently issued a proposed rule
reversing that expansive and unlawful interpretation. “Sex,” the proposed rule clarifies, will be
given its scientific meaning, referring only to demonstrable biological sex rather than to
amorphous, changeable feelings of gender identity.
Perhaps the most powerful voice leading to a restoration of sanity will come from
“detransitioners” —individuals who underwent medical transition, realized they had made a
tragic mistake, and are now speaking out to warn other victims of the gender industry. An
example is Walt Heyer who has a website sexexchangeregret.com that is getting more and more
traffic as people are becoming more aware they have been victims of an ideology. Heyer lived as
a transgender for some years but has transitioned back and is not helping many people to recover
their true selves.
In September 2019, a United Kingdom High Court decided not to grant the petition of
Freddy McConnell, a transman, to be registered as the father of the child she bore and gave birth
to. McConnell was born female but because of gender dysphoria she transitioned to being male
and was legally recognized as such for several years now. She had surgery and hormone
treatment to look like a man, but she retained her reproductive organs. In 2017 with fertility
treatment she became pregnant and gave birth in 2018. She applied to be recognized as the father
of the child. The UK court ruled that she cannot be registered as the father but the mother
because motherhood is about being pregnant and giving birth regardless of whether the person
who does so is considered a man or a woman by law. This seems to be the first legal definition of
mother in English Common Law. It is plain common sense.

14
Harry Benjamin and John Money: sexologists who in the 1950s were pioneers of the transgender movement.