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“A transition is never done…You can never carve away enough pieces of yourself to be satisfied. You can never rid yourself of the fundamental facts of your own biology. You can never be cleansed of sin. The end goal of transition isn’t self-actualization. It’s self-annihilation.”
–Tree
(pseudonym of a male detransitioner)
There’s a public health crisis sweeping across America right now. A deadly contagion has gripped our population. Children, teenagers, and young adults are most susceptible to it and most seriously harmed by it. The disease, depending on the severity and how far it goes untreated, can inflict irreversible damage upon those who suffer from it.
No, it’s not COVID-19. It’s worse (and COVID-19 is bad). It’s the highly contagious and transmissible craze of transgenderism and trans ideology that is spreading like gangrene, infecting the minds and poisoning the hearts of our nation’s children.
This virus can be caught in their public school classrooms. Or from watching Disney+. Or by scrolling on their smartphones. In some cases, wicked teachers or other trusted authority figures — groomers — intentionally expose their students to the disease. When contracted, side effects can include self-loathing, body-hatred, and mental illness that often terminates in physical mutilation or even suicide.
The most serious public health crisis in America today isn’t a pandemic, it’s a “transdemic.” And we must do everything we can to stop it, to vaccinate our nation against it, before it infects and destroys another soul.
To briefly position ourselves in the conversation from a linguistic and philosophical standpoint, this is what you need to know: Postmodernity plus the sexual revolution paved the way for our society to buy into one of the biggest lies in the history of mankind. What was that lie? Gender identity. The lie was that there even exists such a thing as a “gender identity” and that it can be separate from, or opposite to, one’s biological sex. Further, in the event that this psychological, subjective category of perceived gender identity is understood to be contrary to one’s biological sex, the gender identity must take precedence over the physical reality of the body. This is the core teaching of “gender ideology” — and it’s being used to brainwash children into thinking they can be “born in the wrong body.”
In a world not gone mad, your sex and your gender are essentially one and the same. But the trans movement has driven a wedge between the two. Thus, when we consider men trying to become women, or vice versa, it’s arguably more accurate to refer to that effort as “transsexual” rather than “transgender,” as John Carpenter has argued here. But human beings can’t change their sex. They never have been, and they never will be able to.
I, on the other hand, reserve the right to change my word usage in future articles. But for now, I’m going to use the colloquial term “transgender” to refer to the pandemic — the transdemic — at hand. That is, the massive explosion, the viral-like growth, of transgenderism and “transitioning” in our youth and young adults.
If you’re tempted to doubt me, consider this staggering statistic: According to The Gender Mapper, there are now “300 clinics that prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children in North America. In 2016 there were less than 50, in 2013 there was a handful.”
Or this — in 2007 there were only two pediatric gender clinics in the United States — one in New York and one in Washington, D.C. Now, there are dozens all across the country.
Driven in large part by social media and the no-holds-barred advocacy of the LGBT+ agenda, we have socially engineered our children to think what was previously unthinkable — that they were somehow born in the wrong body (they weren’t). That they can consent to puberty blockers (they can’t). That just because they went through a tomboy phase as a girl, or liked theater as a boy, it means they are the opposite gender (they aren’t).
Writing for the New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat recently touched on this trend, this drastic uptick in case numbers across the country. He wrote:
“According to Gallup, the share of younger Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen precipitously in the last decade. Almost twenty-one percent of Generation Z — meaning, for the purposes of the survey, young adults born between 1997 and 2003 — identifies as L.G.B.T., as against about 10 percent of the millennial generation, just over 4 percent of my own Generation X, and less than 3 percent of baby boomers. Comparing the Generation Z to the baby boom generation, the percentage of people identifying as transgender, in particular, has risen twentyfold.”
Let that sink in. In less than four short generations, there has been a twenty-fold increase in youth who identify somewhere along the LGBT spectrum — and the most dangerous place to land is on the “T.”
This contagion was manufactured in the lab of the sexual revolution and slowly released into our society and culture over the last few decades by Hollywood, Marxist revolutionaries, gender studies programs on college campuses, and the radical progressive politics of the Democrat party.
As with all revolutions, it goes slow until it goes fast. Fueled by the redefinition of marriage under the Obergefell ruling in 2015, this virus has since been spreading at light speed. The slippery slope wasn’t a fallacy, it was a fact.
Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, the gender ideology industry is leading our children away, down into the depths of hell. Some may come back, but they won’t ever be the same. Do you think long-COVID is bad? Try being stuck — for the rest of your life — as a stunted prepubescent male or testosterone-addled female because your parents let you dope up on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in the name of progress. As Brandon Showalter, a reporter with the Christian Post remarked, “Some of us won’t be shocked by the scope of the carnage when this mass psychosis breaks…Countless young people with endocrine failure, brittle bones, liver and kidney issues, heart disease, rising rates of cancers, and many rendered sterile.”
Showalter would know, too, as he has done extensive reporting on this issue. In his article, “Doctors speak out: Lupron and the ‘diabolical’ push to sterilize, gender-transition confused kids,” he writes, “To many people, the sheer fact that gender has been medicalized with high-powered drugs is nothing short of horrifying, and they wonder how this can be legal or allowed to happen.”
How did this happen? In part, at least, through the once-failed, then resurrected, pseudo-science and work of Dr. John Money. Showalter writes:
“In the 1970s, Dr. Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist in private practice in Atlanta, Georgia, was a fellow at Johns Hopkins where Dr. John Money began the concept of gender as an identity of one’s inner sexual self. It was called ‘transsexual’ back then, Van Meter explained to CP. Prior to this, the word ‘gender’ was linguistic, generally used interchangeably with “sex” and was not medicalized.
‘He had patients that he treated as adults and then he also had the pediatric patients treated with surgical and hormonal manipulations with really phenomenally bad outcomes,’ Van Meter said.
The Atlanta doctor credits Money with dividing sex and gender in a way that has spread so much confusion, both in the lives of patients and more broadly in culture.
‘He thought perhaps we could societally change one’s gender by treating people differently, socially and with hormones. And what he found was that he was trying to change sex,’ which was impossible, he said.
The entire project collapsed and Johns Hopkins ultimately closed the program in the early 1980s. It stayed relatively dormant until 2006 when Dr. Norman Spack in Boston, Massachusetts, decided to reinvigorate transgender medicine in the United States, Van Meter explained, ‘and from there it literally spread like a viral infection.’”
Did you catch that? Like. A. Viral. Infection.
Consider also the massive money infrastructure behind this transdemic. Jennifer Bilek, writing for First Things, explains how “The LGBT rights agenda—note the addition of ‘T’—has become a powerful, aggressive force in American society. Its advocates stand at the top of media, academia, the professions, and, most important, Big Business and Big Philanthropy.”
Highlighting the organization known as the Arcus Foundation, Bilek documents that it “has given more than $58.4 million to programs and organizations doing LGBT-related work between 2007 and 2010 alone, making it one of the largest LGBT funders in the world.” The Arcus Foundation has a particular interest in driving gender identity and transgenderism, even creating a “complex system of advocacy and funding that would promote gender identity/transgenderism in the culture.”
She concludes by exposing the disconnect between the public presentation of the movement as some underdog effort to secure rights for the oppressed versus the reality of the transgender movement — a well-funded effort backed by radical billionaires around the world. Bilek writes, “Although activists present the LGBT movement as a weak, powerless group suffering oppression and discrimination, in truth it wields enormous power and influence—power it increasingly uses to remake our laws, schools, and society.”
They aren’t just remaking our “laws, schools, and society.” They are also remaking — rather, unmaking — our children as well.
And this brings me to the story of “Tree.”
I’ve been meaning to write on this topic for a while now. As with everything, and particularly issues of this magnitude, it takes work. But tonight, I am fired up and frustrated. I’m sickened and saddened. And I want to make sure to get at least some of the white-hot fury and anger I feel at the utter madness and horror that our society has unleashed on the most vulnerable among us channeled through the keyboard (who must think it’s done something wrong) and onto the page so that we can begin to do something about it.
This whole movement smells even worse when you reflect on how we have maimed a generation, both physically and mentally, in the name of “rights,” “diversity,” “equity,” and “progress.” These verbal veneers hide the true violence and demonic evil of transgender ideology. They are rhetorical whitewashed tombs, housing the ruined bodies of thousands of children who have been scarred for life. Along with abortion, it’s another modern-day version of child sacrifice — an even more apt description when you consider how woke parents often foist this on their impressionable children because they have been brainwashed themselves.
They say love wins. Not this kind. This kind destroys.
So, whatever you do today, I want you to also do one more thing. Just one more. I want you to make sure that you take the time to read this one blog, a harrowing and heartbreaking essay shared by a “male detransitioner” who goes by the name “Tree.” On his Substack, “A Cut Down Tree,” he posted an article entitled, “Purification Rites: An autobiographical essay.”
There are certainly other (and increasing numbers of) detransition stories out there, as those who pursued the Sisyphean task of going from male to female, or female to male, realize their madness and step back from the brink. Tree’s account, however, is particularly moving.
He writes:
“I didn’t want to be a man. I didn’t want to be big and hairy. Men scared me. I’d seen my mom assaulted when I was young, and I didn’t want to be like the man who’d done that to her. The idea of testosterone poisoning made sense to me because maleness itself terrified me. I’d been bullied a lot in school by other boys, and a lot of that bullying involved sexual abuse—groping, inappropriate touching, striking my butt and genitals, and verbal harassment (wolf-whistling and yelling sexual comments at me). These, I felt, weren’t the sorts of things that happened to men. My suffering was only legible if I was a woman.
This background made me vulnerable to the ideology of transgenderism. I had no friends in high school and spent a lot of time online, and I was exposed to the burgeoning social justice/woke movement before it entered the mainstream. When I connected to the internet, I was inundated with messages about the violence of maleness. This wasn’t just “toxic masculinity”—I saw feminists saying all masculinity was toxic, that all men were rapists, all men were oppressors, all men should be killed. As a white man, I was directly responsible for all of the oppression experienced by women and people of color.”
In another post on another day, I should tease out the interconnectedness of the insidious messages of intersectionality — of overlapping oppressions — between Critical Race Theory (CRT) and LGBT and trans ideology. For Tree, a straight, white, male, the message was loud and clear — everything he was by birth, by nature, was wrong. He was the worst of the worst. His mere existence was a scourge on society. The mind worm of madness had begun to infect him.
He goes on, asking,
“Is it any surprise that teenagers (frequently autistic teenagers who take everything literally) want to transition when they’re exposed to societal messages telling them ‘men are bad, men are dangerous to women, only men have power’ and ‘you can change your gender if you want to?’”
Whether he intended it or not, his writing rings out with the undertones of the neo-Gnosticism that undergirds trans ideology — the belief that the “body” is bad but the “inner self” is, or can be, good. He continues in very religious language, recounting that he thought:
“My very nature meant I deserved pain. I couldn’t remove my whiteness from myself, but maybe I could remove my maleness. The first step was to get rid of the poison coursing through my body: testosterone, the hormone turning me into an animal and a brute. I needed to purify myself.”
Purify himself — from himself. Cleanse himself — from the sin of being male. Purge himself — from the surge of God-given testosterone in his male-sexed body.
How could he pursue this cleansing? By transitioning.
Tree hauntingly remarks that, “My transition wasn’t driven by fetishism or misogyny. I was just a lonely, wounded child. All I really wanted was to be loved.”
Unfortunately, he found “love” — of the fake variety — in all the wrong places. He notes that, “This trans phase might have also passed on its own—if it weren’t for the Queer Youth Center.”
At the Queer Youth Center, they “affirmed my identity, introduced me to trans activists, and encouraged me to engage in activism myself,” he wrote, adding, “(The activism is a central part of the trans movement—these people don’t want you to just transition, they also want you to spread the ideology. This moral drive to proselytize is part of how the movement has spread so quickly.)”
Note again the religious language. It’s not enough for you to catch the disease, they demand that you disciple others into the illness as well.
And so, with his mistaken “female gender identity” cemented as preeminent over his obviously male-sexed body by the Queer Youth Center, Tree felt like he “had to transition.” He would pursue the self-purification — even though he clearly didn’t know what he was doing:
“I wasn’t old enough to understand what I was doing to myself. I didn’t realize what I was giving up, how permanent these changes I was making were. But I hadn’t yet made the worst decision of my life. That would come a few years later, when I decided to have myself castrated.”
Even as he moved forward towards irreversible bodily harm, Tree realizes in retrospect what a mistake it was. He didn’t need to be chopped up, he needed someone to talk him down.
“I needed serious psychiatric help and deprogramming, not to have my balls cut off so I could more closely resemble the sexless angel I wanted to be.
I saw the surgery as a rite of purification. I felt that by removing a part of myself I would become whole. Years of online grooming and ideological brainwashing had made me delusional, but no one pushed back on it.”
What a ringing indictment — “no one pushed back.” He continues:
“The doctors were happy to go through with it, and they had medical degrees. So I took two weeks off work, went into the hospital, and had my balls cut off.”
He immediately regretted the surgery. But there was no going back.
I hadn’t cleansed myself, I’d ruined myself, and I’ll never get back what I lost.
For many people, transition is an obsessive quest to compulsively eradicate one’s own sexed characteristics. It’s born from ideology, self-hatred, trauma, and grooming by online strangers. Gay, autistic, mentally disabled, and gender non-conforming teenagers, as well as victims of sexual violence, are the most affected. Pharmaceuticals and plastic surgery investors are getting rich off of the butchery, mutilation, and mass sterilization of these vulnerable and traumatized populations. Doctors and therapists who assist people in transition aren’t providing care, they’re enabling self-harm and practicing eugenics.
A transition is never done. There’s always more surgeries, new treatments, more work to do. You can never carve away enough pieces of yourself to be satisfied. You can never rid yourself of the fundamental facts of your own biology. You can never be cleansed of sin.
The end goal of transition isn’t self-actualization. It’s self-annihilation.”
If your blood isn’t boiling and if your heart isn’t breaking when you finish a story like this, you, too, might need help. You might actually need to purify yourself because you’ve grown cold and unconcerned about one of the most pressing ethical, moral, political, and religious issues staring down America, like a leering Goliath, today.
But assuming you are moved by the same pathos that I am for this man, then logically the next thought must be, “What can we do?” What can–what must–be done to help put an end to the writing of such tragic stories?
Lord willing, this June may bring the end of the holocaust of abortion in our nation as we currently know it. So, as I read this account of a young man’s attempted self-annihilation, I would argue what we need to do is this: As soon as Roe falls, Christians across the nation must put all of their political energy, at every level, into purifying our society of trans ideology. It must be banished from the public square, the public schools, and our public imagination.
We need a shutdown — of all gender clinics. We need a lockdown — of all “Queer Youth Centers.” We must do what it takes to stop the gender ideology-driven trans madness that is maiming and killing our kids. So-called “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors must be made illegal. Doctors who transition teens need to be jailed. Pro-transition speech aimed at kids must be banned. Whatever it takes — that’s what we must do.
In order to fight this righteous war, waged for the bodies, minds, and souls of the next generation, we must be armed. To that end, let me recommend four resources that you can begin using to inoculate yourself, and others, against this deadly — this demonic — virus.
As atheist and evolutionary biologist Colin Wright put it, “I’m frequently asked why I focus so much on the nature of biological sex. It’s because in my view this may be reality’s last stand. If this undeniable fact can be denied en masse, then we become hostages to chaos. We simply cannot afford to lose our collective tether to reality.”
Reality’s last stand. Will Christians let atheists outfight them on this front, on the battle lines of “reality’s last stand?” I certainly hope and pray that would not be the case. Because we know more than just physical reality, we also have God’s revelation of truth.
In light of that, while we must hate the ideology and those who are willing to push it on children for their own nefarious agenda, we must also have great compassion and love for those who have been made to suffer under it. As we fight, we must hold out gospel hope. At the heart of the trans sickness is the same sickness that has infected mankind from the beginning: sin.
Remember, when the world had just started spinning, God reached down into the dust of the earth and made man, Adam. Then he reached into man, took a rib, and made woman, Eve. In the beginning, He made them, male and female. This is who we are. It’s stamped into our very DNA. We can no more change from male to female than blue can change to red.
Yet the trans movement acts as if Romans 1 is a list of instructions to be followed, and not the ringing indictment of sin that it is. The trans movement is the apotheosis of self; men and women seeking to play God over their plastic bodies, as they now reach down into their flesh, trying to turn men into women and women into men. In the transgender act, humans strive to be both the Creator and the creation, to remake mankind after our own, twisted image. It’s ultimately an act of high-handed rebellion. So whatever else it is, it is a sin — and so we need a Savior to solve it.
Praise God that a Savior is provided in the form of a God-man, who took on flesh for us. Far from demanding that we purify ourselves, which always was an impossible task, Christ instead bore the wrath of God so that we might be made pure, be made holy, through Him.
The trans movement is also a satanic inversion of the logic of Isaiah 53. The Suffering Servant comes to bear our sins in His body, and it is by His stripes, by His wounds, that we are healed. Sadly, those like Tree seem to think they can be healed by carving the wounds into their own bodies. But such things cannot be.
We cannot transcend our embodied nature, as men and women. This is how God made us, how He made humans. We may kick against the goads of creation, but surely we cannot topple the architecture of the One who laid the foundations of the heavens and the earth. And we cannot redeem our fallen nature, as sinners, without humbly asking for a heart of flesh that only comes through the new birth by the Spirit. In that sense, Tree was onto something. He needed to be remade, reborn. Not on the outside, but from within.
To miss this grave distinction, and to try to undo the embodied reality of being a man or woman, is to pursue not a path towards becoming a new creation, but rather an act of undoing. Tree realized this, as well, in his closing sentences. Amazingly, they almost perfectly echo an observation I myself had made a few weeks back about what the effort of transgenderism truly entails.
He said, “The end goal of transition isn’t self-actualization. It’s self-annihilation.”
He’s right. I had reached this conclusion as well recently while reading J. Budziszewsk’s commentary on how freedom means living according to — and not against — our nature in his book On the Meaning of Sex. I had tweeted:
“Transgenderism is a form of self-annihilation. Couched as an act of ‘freedom,’ it is quite the exact opposite. We are not “free” to pursue existence contrary to our natures. A man seeking to be a woman doesn’t become a woman, but rather destroys his nature as a man.”
Of course, I’m confident Tree hadn’t seen my tweet. But the point is accessible, general, and deeply important. Because the most serious symptom of the transdemic is the manifestation of its final form, the act(s) of self-annihilation found in elective mastectomies, “bottom surgeries,” and the like. Procedures like this must become unthinkable. But in the meantime, they must be made illegal.
I fear much ground has already been gained by the annihilators. Still, Christ is King, and we are His subjects, willing or not. And He is a gracious King, who may yet bring restoration now even as we await future redemption.
After all, this is the King who had a word of hope specifically for eunuchs, to those like Tree, who feel “cut down” or “cut off.” A word of promise that they can, in fact, be made whole. Perhaps not entirely in this life, but most assuredly in the life to come, in eternity. This word also comes from Isaiah, and with it, we will close:
“Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’
And let no eunuch complain,
‘I am only a dry tree.’
For this is what the Lord says:
‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.’”
Isaiah 56:3-5
Follow William on Twitter! @William_E_Wolfe
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