If it wasn’t already, the Jesse Van Rootselaar horror story makes it tragically obvious that the “best practices” our health-care establishment adopted for cases of “gender dysphoria” are absolutely terrible.
Radical activists somehow persuaded the medical and mental-health establishments that “gender-affirming care” is the only answer — when in fact it is destroying the lives of confused children.
Supposedly responsible and caring adults are using kids as culture-war cannon-fodder, grooming them into permanent mutilation.
Taking an unstable teen boy, giving him powerful hormones and telling him that the entire structure of history, society and biology is allied against him is a recipe for disaster, writes The Post Editorial Board.
Affirming something that (in all but a tiny fraction of cases) is only a passing confusion is awful even when it doesn’t come with life-changing hormone therapy and/or surgery.
Particularly when the underlying issue is significant mental illness, which then goes untreated.
Think about it: In every other scenario where a young person believes that something is wrong with their healthy body, responsible adults in the caring professions counsel the child to align his or her perceptions with physical reality.
We don’t tell an anorexic girl who believes she is fat to diet or offer bariatric surgery; we teach her to eat healthily and develop a positive sense of her body.
But for the last decade or so, the “experts” have told kids who feel confused about their changing bodies or their evolving sexuality that their problems can be solved by “social transition” all too often accompanied by medical interventions to correct the “mistake” that put them in the “wrong” gendered body.
An entire industry has emerged to ensure that these unfortunate youth — who are often emotionally or mentally disturbed — are sustained in their belief that they are “really” the opposite sex.
A boy who says he is a girl is a girl in this deranged taxonomy, and anyone who questions the “diagnosis” is at best ignorant, but more likely a deadly enemy.
Taking an unstable teen boy, giving him powerful hormones and telling him that the entire structure of history, society and biology is allied against him is a recipe for disaster.
Teenage boys can act unpredictably and dangerously even without irreversible drug treatments or surgeries on their genitals: Confirming paranoid suspicions and warning them that society hates them is like releasing time bombs into the world.
We’ve now seen multiple trans school shooters — Robin Westman and Audrey Hale, for two — within a few years: The malpractice must end.
Again, some very very few people’s lives may legitimately be improved through sex reassignment; they ought to be treated compassionately — but the over-diagnosis of gender dysphoria has become a plague.
Jesse Van Rootselaar needed major mental-health treatment; instead he got poisonous propaganda, drugs and easy access to guns.
This madness must end.
