by Douglas Murray
Almost no one does wicked things in the knowledge that what they are doing is wicked. It is a truth that should be universally acknowledged that in order to do something truly evil, a person needs to believe that what they are doing is good.
Until somebody steps in and says “no.”
This week there was an extraordinary development in one of the great medical and social scandals of our time.
Alex Byrne is a professor of philosophy at MIT. This week he outed himself as one of the authors of the review published last month by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Or rather he outed himself after being hounded and exposed by demonic maniacs online.
The review goes over treatments of so-called “gender dysphoria” in minors.
The fact that the authors of the DHHS review even tried to remain anonymous tells us a lot about the toxicity of this whole debate.
The review itself is considerate and moderate. It weighs up the actual evidence and simply suggests that American authorities should align with the emerging consensus among experts and politicians in Europe. Which is that things have been done in the name of treating “gender dysphoria” are a medical and ethical nightmare.
For over a decade now, the “be kind” brigade has been insisting that “trans” should be the next civil rights issue of our age.
No less a graveyard of thought than Time magazine had a cover in 2014 saying that transgender issues should be “America’s next civil rights frontier.”
That is a very loaded way to present a complex issue.
After all, talk about “civil rights” brings two particular struggles to mind. The first is the struggle to ensure that ethnic minorities — in particular African-Americans — have equal rights to everyone else in the United States. That issue was addressed and answered by force of moral argument six decades ago.
The second issue that it brings up is the fight for gay rights, which also started some six decades ago. Since that time, the moral argument of the gay rights movement has also been accepted.
Nobody today wants to be a bigot who removes rights from black Americans or gay people.
But by presenting the complex issue of trans as the inevitable next step in a campaign for ever more rights, our societies in the West took a mad turn.
After all, the acceptance of other arguments were based on the idea that the people getting their rights were equals — and that society would not need to change itself or alter its fundamentals in order to grant these rights.
The moral force of both movements were founded on the basis of “Just like us.” And that is how they succeeded.
The “trans-rights” movement, by contrast, turned everything completely on its heads. They insisted not just that some people feel that they have been born in the wrong body, but that nobody is born with any discernible biological sex.
They insisted that because some people feel a confusion about their sexual identity nobody has a fixed biological identity. That — as some of us said from the start — was madness.
It would be like the gay rights movement saying “We’re here, we’re queer — and as a result there is no difference between men and women.” I doubt the gay rights cause would have succeeded if that was the track that campaigners chose.
But that was where the trans movement went. And of course the landmine which they trod on — and which was gone along with for far too long — was the explosive issue of children.
As the DHHS review notes, the whole idea of “gender affirming care” (note how manipulative that phrase is) was based on unbelievably weak evidence.
Even before you get to issues of life-changing surgery, there was the imposition of “puberty blockers.” These could be handed out after minimal consultation to any child who simply felt concern about the onset of puberty and worried about the changes to their body. They were handed out with no long-term studies of their effects.
Too few professionals warned that these medications could cause lifelong sexual disfunction, infertility and much more. The ones that did raise alarms or even questions were hounded by the dementors of our age — both online and off.
But how did anyone think a child could make an informed decision about such a measure?
Studies from Sweden, the Netherlands, Britain and other countries have confirmed what many of us said, which is that young people — including those who might grow up to just be gay — would be “trans-ed” by the health industry. And live to deeply regret it.
“Gay conversion therapy” may have become a taboo. But converting gay people into approximations of the opposite sex became deemed “progressive.”
We were told that if a child who had “gender dysphoria” was not medicated with cross-sex hormones, or did not have a double-mastectomy then a range of things would happen. We were told that “trans children” (another fallacious category) would “kill themselves.” Or that any criticism of such procedures was “disappearing” or even “genociding” trans people.
I have lost count of the number of American parents I have spoken to who were told by doctors that they had to “trans” their child and were given the slogan if, say, the child was a biological male, “Would you rather have a trans daughter or a dead son?”
Parents were literally bulldozed into agreeing to life-altering surgeries and medical experiments being run on their children.
Now a smidgen of sanity has been brought to the debate.
Future generations will look back at this period and marvel at what we allowed. They will coo with amazement that we gave life-altering drugs and performed life-altering operations on young people not old enough to vote, drive or drink alcohol.
But we can already tell why it happened. It happened because pseudo-science was waved by crazed progressives bullies, who in the name of “kindness” did things that were wicked beyond words.
https://nypost.com/2025/06/26/opinion/standing-up-to-bullying-unscientific-transgender-activist-mob/
