re-engineering society
Rod Dreher wrote about an NPR segment examining the need for doctors trained to help trans people, but his real beef was just with the trans community:
This morning, on the drive to the airport (I’m on my way to New York City now), I heard a radio piece talking about the need for transgender health care, and how medical educators in Oregon are meeting it. There’s not yet a transcript available for the broadcast, but I can tell you that it begins with the reporter framing transgender surgery in a politically correct way — something like, “the patient had surgery to realign her body with her gender identity.” This, by the way, is an example of how the media re-engineers society by changing language. Later in the piece, a doctor says that in years past, people with gender dysphoria would typically have been referred for mental health treatment. Today, though, they get surgical intervention.
This is massively important! What if psychiatric treatment, or some adjacent treatment, is what is better for them than gender reassignment? What if that is what would restore them to health?
Here is why I say his issue is with trans people themselves, not really with the medical community or society at large. And Rod himself asks the question - what is the best treatment for persons experiencing gender dysphoria?
The answer, unquestionably, should come from trans persons. If you think you know what is best for these folks, despite never having experienced gender dysphoria or undergone any of the supposed “treatments” out there that claim to cure a person through psychiatric treatment or white knuckling it or exorcisms, on what grounds are you claiming that it is effective? And if a trans person tells you they underwent gender reassignment surgery and undergo a hormone regimen and identify publicly as a gender other than the one assigned at birth, and their life is drastically better, on what grounds would you disbelieve them? Gut instinct? Previously held assumptions? Your current interpretation of scripture?
If someone told you they were experiencing medical symptoms you have never lived through and you decided you knew best what their treatment would be and denied they were actually feeling better or healed when they ignored your advice, well at a minimum that would make you an anti-vaxxer. But more importantly it would show just how little you care for the person in front of you.
Rod says the media is “re-engineering society” through the language they use - namely by centering the perspective of the trans person undergoing the experience instead of the armchair theologians and pop psychiatrists who any science or philosophy of the human person which updates is an attack on the foundations of society. It’s not. It’s just society learning to listen to the folks it has previously ignored.