There are war crimes, and there are ‘culture war’ crimes.
There are war crimes, and there are ‘culture war’ crimes.
E ven in wars, there are standards. The United Nations defines “war crimes” as “violations of international humanitarian law (treaty or customary law) that incur individual criminal responsibility under international law.” By way of analogy, culture-war crimes constitute horrors done in the name of advancing some ideological agenda that would shock the conscience of any morally sane person, regardless of his or her political bent.
For instance, there are plenty of voices on the left (as well as on the right) who maintain that it is wrong to chemically castrate a child, stunt his natural growth, and risk his health and mental well-being by deceiving him about a fundamental aspect of his nature, i.e., his biological sex. And further, that it is wrong to subject a child to clinical experiments that will sterilize him and impair his sexual function, all because a widely contested and incoherent ideology demands that this be done.
There are also some voices on the right (as well as on the left) who think that their various ideological sacred cows are more important than preventing such abuse. Whatever the cover they choose to adopt — transgender ideology, “compassion,” business interests, “limited government” — their part in this medical scandal amounts to a culture-war crime.
Enter Asa Hutchinson, the Republican governor of Arkansas, who earlier this month vetoed a bill prohibiting the prescribing of puberty-blocking drugs to gender-confused youth as well as prohibiting doctors from performing sex-change surgeries on minors. Hutchinson told CNN that this is about the Republican Party pursuing a “message of compassion.”
He is not the only one. As Isaac Schorr noted on the Corner earlier this week, Commentary magazine’s otherwise astute Noah Rothman thinks that “Asa Hutchinson Is Right” in vetoing that bill. He writes:
All this gaslighting [i.e., the Left’s culture-war tactics] is enough to drive you a little mad. So, it is understandable, if not excusable, that the American right has resolved to fight this fire with fire; using the levers of government they control to promote their own ideological objectives. That mission has been accompanied by an effort to impose ideological homogeneity on dissenters within the Republican coalition. Thus, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson finds himself in the hot seat.
Huh? Look, I’ve never voted in America. I am neither Republican nor Democrat. And like so many of my readers — concerned citizens, parents, doctors, and teachers (on both sides of the Atlantic) following the transgender craze — I find these ideological pissing contests insufferably silly and beside the point. That’s why, at National Review, I have personally ensured that we’ve invited feminists, trans-identified people, former trans-identified teenagers, parents, psychiatrists, and leftists along with conservatives to weigh in with some much-needed skepticism on this woefully misreported topic.
So, let’s be clear here. Governor Hutchinson is in the “hot seat” for the simple reason that he refused to protect already vulnerable children from being experimented on in a grave and reckless way. In its recent decision on the question of puberty blockers (note that surgeries have never even been up for discussion in the United Kingdom), the High Court of England ruled that it was “highly unlikely that a child aged 13 or under would be competent to give consent to the administration of puberty blockers,” and that it was also “doubtful that a child aged 14 or 15 could understand and weigh the long-term risks and consequences of the administration of puberty blockers.”
This, as well as testimony from victims, is precisely why the British court has ordered a moratorium on using drugs to interfere with the sexual development of young people.
Curiously, however, Rothman insists that the real issue here is neither basic ethical standards in clinical practice nor child welfare, but rather right-wing ideology and politicking. He defends Hutchinson’s principal objection, writing that, for Republicans “to use the instruments of law to pursue cultural objectives, as Democrats have, is to sacrifice the GOP’s commitment to the ‘principles of limited government’ and the ‘freedom of choice.’”
Since when were “limited government” and “freedom of choice” an adequate excuse for facilitating child abuse?
On Tucker Carlson’s show, Governor Hutchinson displayed stunning ignorance on the medical concerns when he cited the American Academy of Pediatrics on the matter as his authority. Carlson rightly noted that the policy positions of that organization are political and not based on medical research (which Hutchinson was unable to cite in any case). To illustrate this point further, I’d ask you to consider that the AAP’s 2016 guidelines were written by a transgender activist with no medical training.
The AAP’s more recent policy statement was devised by a committee of less than 30 members and authored by a doctor with no published papers on gender dysphoria. James Cantor, a Canadian clinical psychologist, thoroughly debunked the statement, explaining that “not only did the AAP statement fail to include any of the actual outcomes literature on such cases, but it also misrepresented the contents of its citations, which repeatedly said the very opposite of what AAP attributed to them.” Cantor told National Review that the AAP policy statement was effectively “malpractice writ large,” while Kenneth Zucker, a clinical psychologist and leading expert in the field of childhood gender dysphoria, told NR that the statement was “so fundamentally flawed that one wouldn’t even know where to start.”
Indeed, when Rothman writes that, though “the right has become convinced that Hutchinson effectively consented to gender-reassignment surgery for children[,] in fact, such procedures are already age-restricted,” I begin to wonder whether he has studied this topic at all.
First, as everyone familiar with the so-called affirmation model is aware, each stage (social, chemical, surgical) leads on to the next. Thus, almost every trans-identified child on puberty blockers proceeds to cross-sex hormones, and from there many more pursue surgeries. Second, this idea that these procedures are “age-restricted” is naïve. A 2017 paper in the Journal of Sexual Medicine makes clear that “despite the minimum age of 18 years defining eligibility to undergo this irreversible procedure [i.e., surgical castration, a.k.a. vaginoplasty], anecdotal reports have shown that vaginoplasties are being performed on minors by surgeons in the United States.”
One surgeon interviewed in a research paper examining vaginoplasty for boys under the age of 18 described clinical practice of transgender medicine in the United States as a “new Wild West” where “a bunch of solo practitioners, basically cowboys or cowgirls who kind of build their little house, advertise and suck people in.” The youngest patient surgically castrated in this documented study was 15 years old.
The director of the largest transgender-youth clinic in the United States — note that there are at least 40, probably many more, not that anyone is counting — has admitted to referring “about 200” adolescent females for double mastectomies on account that “they’re not girls.” The same clinician told an audience that “a not insignificant” number of young people at her clinic “have actually done sex economy, sex work, for a place to live or something to eat,” and that “a lot experience homelessness, precarious housing, and have been in foster care.” In other words, among those being experimented on are some of the most vulnerable young people imaginable.
Among studies of transgender youth, one from 2015 involved transgender-identified street kids who had been prostituted; a 2018 follow-up failed to account for 41 percent of the participants, meaning that no one knows where they are or what has happened to them. There are no long-term studies proving that the affirmation model is safe or effective at decreasing poor mental-health outcomes. There is significant concern that it makes matters much worse. All of this is yet more insane in that there is a significant body of work, spanning decades, backing the more cautious clinical approach to gender dysphoria: “watchful waiting” and talk-therapy.
I could go on. In my investigation of gender-dysphoric youth in the United States, I have encountered cases of Down syndrome children, children who have been sexually abused, and autistic children being put on the gender-transition conveyor belt. Yet Rothman promotes the nonsense that “like the left, [the ‘anti-Hutchinson right’] has rested its argument on the conjectural — indeed, hypothetical — prospect of harm over and above the very real harm the state has imposed on the handful of youths to whom this therapy is prescribed.” (Emphasis added.)
Another disappointingly common argument is that the transgender issue doesn’t affect enough children for us to care. But there is no reason to presume that’s the case. Before the court order put a stop to its practices, the U.K. had just one transgender-youth clinic. That clinic saw roughly 2,500 children a year. Recall that the United States has at least 40 transgender-youth clinics. And consider that we are very likely in the midst of a social contagion of transgender-identifying youth. According to the CDC, around 300,000 American high-school students identify as transgender. This is to say nothing of younger children. Whatever the exact figure is, how many innocent lives must be ruined before we decide that it’s worth a bit of effort?
When Tucker Carlson interviewed Hutchinson, he referred to the case of Keira Bell. Ms. Bell is a young woman who had a troubled childhood and thought becoming a boy would solve all her problems; when she was still a minor, she was given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, and later had surgeries (as the vast majority of children whose puberty is halted go on to do). It is thanks to Ms. Bell, who has spoken out about what she now considers her abuse, that the High Court of England has prevented other young people from being abused in the same way.
Those who think that the situation is better in the U.S. than in the U.K. are kidding themselves. As the developments in Britain demonstrate, behind every ideological word cloud is a perfectly straightforward question, the one the impartial High Court decided: Should we allow vulnerable children to be experimented on by clinicians, at the behest of activists? I, like those judges, would suggest not.