Transgender activists have conscripted the medical professions to physically alter people who identify as the opposite sex. This includes puberty blocking, hormone injections, mastectomies, and “bottom” surgeries to create faux genitals of the sex as which the patient identifies — sometimes even in adolescents.
But now the ground is being prepared for these interventions to go even further — to uterine transplants in transgender women (biological males) so they can experience gestation and birth (a procedure already available to women). And the activists are all on board for allowing this extreme intervention once it has been widely tested in animals (which I consider animal abuse). From the Euronews story:
Mats Brännström is a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology and chief physician at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He is also the doctor who helped deliver that first-ever baby born as a result of a uterine transplant. Now, he frequently gets emails from people assigned male at birth asking about the procedure.
“I get emails from people all over the world,” he told Euronews Next. “But there is the risk that we will rush into this because we have patients who are very interested”.
“I say to them we haven’t done enough research, but I think it will be possible in the future. It may take five or 10 years, I would say”.
“If it’s an efficient method with no risk, I don’t think there are any ethical boundaries,” he added, pointing out that many societies already allow for people to undergo gender-affirming procedures that help them transition to their self-identified gender. “We change the legal statutes, we do corrective surgery for other things in the body. So this is part of it”.
But no surgery is “without risk.” And this particular surgery would implant an organ into a body not designed (if you will) to gestate and give birth. Moreover, such a pregnancy would require the injection of hormones and other medications to supplement what the female body contributes to gestation. And even if gestation was successful, giving birth would almost certainly require a caesarian section. These are no small things. Nor are they inexpensive.
I also hasten to add that none of this would be for the benefit of the baby, but to allow the patient to have a fulfilling experience:
Just as the desire to experience gestation has spurred uterus transplant research in women who suffer from uterine factor infertility, uterus transplants in transgender women should also be considered in the same light, the researchers conclude.
“I feel quite strongly that uterus transplantation enables a specific type of experience,” said Chloe Romanis, Associate Professor in Biolaw at Durham University in the United Kingdom and a fellow at Harvard University in the United States.
“Wanting to be a parent is one thing but wanting to be a gestational parent is another; it’s quite a unique experience,” she told Euronews Next. “It’s something that people will feel very strongly about, it’s something that people will feel speaks to their identity, not just as a person, as a parent, but also as a woman”.
“So I think that that’s something that we need to respect”.
No, we don’t. We are not entitled to everything we want because we want it. Moreover, if such procedures are deemed a matter of human rights, how will we ever control health-care costs?
Besides, if we have the right to experience every aspect of how we identify, why should it stop at transgenderism? If the armamentarium of medicine must be put in harness to allow transgendered people to live out their intense inner desires — whatever it takes — why not also similarly enable patients who identify deeply and fervently as disabled?
This is not a hypothetical situation. A mental-health patient suffering from BIID — body integrity identity disorder — is an able-bodied person who believes his true self to be, say, an amputee, blind, or a paraplegic. If the biological maleness of a transgender woman’s body can be surgically recreated to appear female — even to the theoretical extent of implanting a uterus — on what principled basis would the person who fervently yearns to have an amputation, or to have his spinal cord snipped, be denied the same satisfaction? I mean, what is the difference?
The only distinction I can think of is that one has to do with sex — an all-powerful force in contemporary society — pushed by the irresistible LGBT cultural juggernaut. Issues of disability don’t (yet) demand the same obeisance.
But once transgenderism has swept the field, BIID will become the next radical cause, and I can think of no principled way to permit the former while denying the latter, since both are about validating and effectuating fervently held inner states and, you know, equity! Indeed, there has already been advocacy in that direction among mental-health professionals and transhumanists.
These issues are civilizational. If everything that ultimately matters becomes subjective, we will descend into social anarchy and chaos.