What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

We are now a year removed from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In the flurry of protests that followed the late June 2022 decision, LGBTQ-identified persons and organizations paid a surprising amount of attention to the Court’s decision. The rainbow flag was a mainstay at Dobbs protests. Even a shallow dive into written backlash against the Court’s decision revealed that LGBT people were concerned about Dobbs at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships were, despite the latter’s lopsided contribution to actual abortion numbers. The most obvious reason for the former’s concern was Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference, in his concurring opinion, to reconsidering other “substantive due process precedents,” like those in the Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.

But some share of the political angst no doubt comes from the fact that there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).

Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.

This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.

The prospect of motherhood can no doubt undermine one’s sense of self-rule over one’s own body. This is particularly the case if you understand your body as “belonging” to you, and that you rule over it by making choices for it. You can permanently alter it, be harmed by it, or be at odds with it. It’s not surprising that a pregnancy can scare people, because—in the progressive worldview—you have the right not to be pregnant, just like you have the right to self-identify as you wish. It’s a cousin to asserting you have the right to body modification in service to your own self-definition. (And why should being a minor prevent such rights?) Dobbs appears to undermine all this; its three dissenting justices claim that “‘there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter’—especially relating to ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘family life.’”

As previous legally effective arguments about fixed, stable sexual orientations give way to malleable sexual and gender self-identities, it’s tempting to wonder whether we’re not simply speaking about different worldviews—as Hunter’s terminology maintained—but alternative religious systems. LGBTQ, after all, is a big-tent system that contains its own rituals, creedal commitments, forms of worship, sacred items and places, a liturgy, a calendar with holy days, appropriate confessions, salvation accounts, martyrs, moral codes, and magisterial representatives. Religious belonging commonly begins with self-identification. Just as not all Christians practice their faith, so too not all self-identified LGBTQ persons demonstrate behaviors long associated with the movement. And just as there are many moral questions that divide Christians, so too is this the case in the LGBTQ world. But the emotional depth of disagreement here suggests core religious belief systems are clashing.

Language and authority structures are no less pivotal in the LGBTQ world than they are in our own faith. British social theorist Anthony Giddens—a leading public intellectual in England and one of the more famous sociologists alive today—articulated the importance of sealing new ideas with new words in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy: “Once there is a new terminology for understanding sexuality, ideas, concepts, and theories couched in these terms seep into social life itself, and help reorder it.” This is why Hunter described culture (in his book To Change the World) as the power of legitimate naming. With regularity we now find ourselves wrestling with our opponents over basic terms. But sometimes even new religious movements get ahead of themselves, bungling their systematic ontology. As one Wall Street Journal columnist noted recently,

Those protesting the (Dobbs) ruling have a particular challenge in that there is now some disagreement among themselves about what exactly they are advocating and for whom. The left has been engaged in a confusing internal debate about what a woman is.

Indeed, this may prove to be a bridge too far. The recent flare-up involving Bud Light and Target Corporation, and the mystifying battle over whether drag queens should read stories to other people’s children, suggest that many people of any and no faith are fed up with the proselytizing. There’s plenty of religious tolerance in libertarian America—including among Christians—but little interest in revolutionary ideas about “queering” the gender binary. Sexual difference is not a problem requiring a solution. The Human Rights Campaign, as close to “headquarters” as it gets, should have seen this coming. Instead, it declared an LGBTQ “state of emergency” in the United States, akin to a plea for religious tolerance. But when parents’ rights are openly undermined by their efforts, the HRC should not be surprised when people of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.

Christians have a distinctive anthropology of the human person and a better, happier long-term vision for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to articulate it. But the time for making explicit what we believe—the true, the good, and the beautiful—is now. While it remains to be seen how our post-Roe society will look and how the present cultural conflict will play out in courts, legislatures, and around kitchen tables, a few things are certain. Subtlety won’t cut it. Gradualism won’t do. Charity—courtesy, kindness, and love—is always in good form. But don’t think that being deferential or nice will evangelize effectively or preserve our longstanding vision of the human person and its design, purposes, and ends from its ideological challengers. To paraphrase one old saint’s remarks about laws concerning marriage and education, it is in these two areas that Christians must stand firm and fight with toughness and fairness, and—if I may add a category—good judgment. A world, and not simply one country, is at stake.

John the Baptist Was a Witness for Life and a Martyr for Marriage

It is June, and Pride has flooded the world. Pride is on display in the streets, in stores, in schools, and even at the White House. All of the great and the good (or at least the wealthy, famous, and powerful) are affirming the triumph of the sexual revolution, and some even applaud transgender toddlers and sadomasochism on parade. Affirmation is increasingly mandatory; the devotees of Pride are literally taking away lunch money from low-income children because their Christian school dissents from some aspects of the rainbow creed.

Christians should not be surprised when many of the rich and powerful mock God and scorn His people, and boast of indulging their every material desire and sexual whim. We have been warned about the world and its rulers. But this month also offers us encouragement to resist the depredations of the sexual revolution. June 24th is this weekend, and it is not only the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, but also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.

Before he was even born, John testified to the sanctity of all unborn human life. The sexual revolution requires abortion as a backstop against the consequences of the promiscuity it promotes, but John shows why the personhood of humans in utero cannot be denied without embracing grave heresy about Christ’s nature.

John’s ministry testifying to Jesus began before either was born. According to Luke’s account:

when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

The unborn John’s recognition of the unborn Jesus was a miracle that demonstrates the value of human life in the womb in several ways. First, the passage shows that the fetal John the Baptist and the embryonic Jesus were human persons congruous with their adult selves, and that both were already participating in their divine missions.

Second, the recognition of Jesus as Lord early in Mary’s pregnancy testifies to His divinity even as He grew within Mary’s womb. This divinity at conception is why Christians honor Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. This title is affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformed Protestant teaching, and is attested to by many ancient sources, such as Ambrose of Milan’s great Advent hymn, “Veni Redemptor Gentium” (“Savior of the Nations, Come”), which in verses 3 and 4 declares both Jesus’ full divinity and full humanity in the womb.

Third, this episode demonstrates the full humanity of all unborn persons. To claim that the unborn are not fully human is necessarily to claim that Jesus was not fully human while in Mary’s womb. But the Bible insists that His humanity was like ours in every way but sin. Denying the full humanity of the unborn therefore requires either also denying the full divinity of the unborn Jesus (thereby rejecting the reason for the unborn John’s joy and the teaching of the ancient church) or asserting that Jesus’ full divinity was present without His full humanity. Either is an enormous heresy.

Just as the beginning of John’s life shows us the value of unborn human life, the end of John’s life shows us the importance of marriage. At the end of his life John sacrificed himself to bear witness to the inviolability of marriage. As recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, “Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife,” because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” John was then executed at the request of Herodias, after Herod promised a favor to her daughter.

John could have kept quiet on this matter, contenting himself with calls to repentance that did not single out the powerful by name. He could have said that Herod’s sexual conduct was not actually a serious sin worth worrying about, that God doesn’t really care about what people do in the bedroom. He could have chosen to recant in the hope of saving himself after he was imprisoned. But there is no indication that John wavered or doubted his declaration that Herod was wrong to take his brother’s wife for himself.

John took his stand for marriage and fidelity, and he held to this position to his death. And Jesus allowed this martyrdom. Jesus could have told John to ease up in condemning Herod’s sexual sin—that it was not that bad, or even not sinful at all. But Jesus did not do this. Rather, His teachings contain many hard words for us, including condemnations of the sins celebrated by Pride. Jesus calls us in the condition he finds us, but He also calls us to repent of our sins, including sexual ones.

The lurid details of John’s death highlight how sin grows when indulged. Herod did not really want to execute John, but he found himself so entangled by his sins of lust and pride that he felt compelled to add evil to evil by ordering John’s death. And so John the Baptist, the wilderness ascetic whom Jesus declared to be the greatest man born of woman, died as a martyr for marriage.

This is a reminder of how seriously Christianity takes marriage and sexuality. The union of husband and wife is both a symbol of Christ and the church, and the vocation that most of us are called to. Marriage is the basis of civilization and culture in this world, and a sign of our union with God in the world to come.

This should encourage us as we are beset by the celebrants of Pride. The Christian path is the way of Christ, which is almost always contrary to the habits and desires that prevail in our culture. This often means worldly suffering, rather than worldly celebration. But we know that the defense of life, marriage, and chastity is a service to God, and He will ensure that our labor is not in vain.

Realists Unite! New Documentary on Gender-Affirming Care Presents “Pro-Reality” Position in Response to Trans Ideology

The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.

The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.

Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.

Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.

How has the response been to the film thus far?

Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.

JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.

How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?

VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.

JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?

VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.

JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.

What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?

VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”

Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.

The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.

I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.

JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?

VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).

JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.

Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.

But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.

Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?

As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.

How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?

VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.

But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.

This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.

JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.

You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?

VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!

And ask commonsense humanistic questions:

– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?

JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!

Bills DeSantis Signed Target Trans Rights, Abortion and Education in Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.

A Small NY University Fired Employees For Using Their Pronouns in Emails

After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.

Biden Plan for Transgender Title IX Rules Began on Inauguration Day

Demonstrators supporting trans rights in Washington last week.

Biden Plan for Transgender Title IX Rules Began on Inauguration Day

Gender-affirming care and its long history in the US

Supreme Court Rules for Transgender Girl in School Sports Dispute

The Surgeries Are Immoral

Florida has made it illegal for doctors to surgically alter the genitals of minors to treat gender dysphoria. In November 2022, after the Florida Board of Medicine took an initial step toward banning “gender-affirming” procedures, Florida Surgeon General Joseph Lapado praised the board’s members for “ruling in the best interest of children in Florida despite facing tremendous pressure to permit these unproven and risky treatments.” The pressure was indeed quite strong. But describing the procedures as “unproven and risky” misleadingly suggests a technical difficulty that could be fixed with better data or tools.

The real problem is more basic: the surgeries remove healthy organs without good reason. That’s not risky—it’s harmful and morally wrong. The people who seek such surgeries are trying to alleviate very real suffering, but whether surgery addresses such suffering humanely is not a question patients are automatically best positioned to answer. That’s true of any patient seeking any medical procedure.

The question is both a moral and a political one. If the surgeries grievously injure the vulnerable people they’re supposed to help, then patients shouldn’t seek them, doctors shouldn’t administer them—and voters and legislators should seriously think about banning them.

__________

In many surgeries, acts that would normally be harmful and wrong are made beneficial and right by special circumstances. Sticking pieces of metal into a human hand is normally wrong to do, but certain hand surgeries require it. What makes that morally acceptable? Besides having particular shapes, hands have certain functions, like grasping and pushing and pulling. These functions aren’t accidental. Being able to perform them is what makes a hand good at being a hand. When a hand is limp or broken, then what would normally be harmful to the hand—adjusting bones, pricking its skin—is helpful if it’s what a surgeon needs to do to get the hand working normally.

The basic principle goes back at least to Aristotle. The parts of an organism ought to serve the whole organism. Helping someone’s organs function as parts of their body is how doctors care for a patient’s physical well-being.

Some of the surgeries administered to treat gender dysphoria involve acts much more extreme than small incisions. Hysterectomies, mastectomies, and penectomies don’t just alter but remove organs. Sometimes, taking out an organ is morally quite right—if an organ is cancerous, for instance, or at serious risk of becoming cancerous. Again, organs ought to serve the good of the whole organism—which, minimally, means that organs shouldn’t host agents of harm to the organism. That’s why bilateral mastectomies can often be the right treatment for breast cancer (or for the genetic risk of breast cancer), why hysterectomies can be the right treatment for cervical cancer, and so on.

For removing an organ to be morally permissible, you need a very powerful reason—something like countering a mortal threat from the organ. It’s true that there are cases in which removing a perfectly healthy organ from a patient is morally acceptable—live organ donation, for instance. But in all cases of licit organ donation, the functions performed by the donated organ are performed by organs that remain in the body. That isn’t true for the surgeries covered by the Florida ban.

The big question is whether something about gender dysphoric patients can justify the surgeries we’re talking about. I think the answer is no.  Even assuming the psychological facts most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and even assuming ideal conditions of autonomous consent, the surgeries are unjustified and therefore harmful. Compassion demands acknowledging the pain of transgender people; it equally demands not performing surgeries that make their lives worse.

___________

Some patients seeking the treatments we’re discussing claim to be assigned to the wrong sex, to have a gender (a psycho-social sense of self) that doesn’t match their body. Surgery, this argument goes, could settle the conflict between, say, a female gender and a male body by surgically reforming the latter to mesh harmoniously with the former.

I think it is always an error to say you’re a woman trapped in a man’s body. Whether one is male or female is determined not by psychology, but by organs that serve distinct reproductive roles. Interestingly enough, this point actually seems to be accepted by those who say the bodies of gender dysphoric patients should be altered from one sex to the other. If whether someone is male or female isn’t determined by reproductive organs, why should gender dysphoria be treated by altering just those organs? The problem is not misassigned sex, because sex cannot be assigned or misassigned or reassigned. It can only be embodied.

But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you could be a woman trapped in a man’s body. Surgery wouldn’t change that. Altering a man’s genitalia may disable him from engaging in reproductive acts, but it does not—indeed, it cannot—produce the organs that enable a woman to engage in reproductive acts. A man cannot become a woman, no matter what a surgeon does to his genitalia. If that weren’t true, then the many people who in the history of human cruelty have had their genitals forcibly removed would have thereby been moved closer to membership in the opposite sex. But that is simply not so.

Altering a woman’s genitals doesn’t make her into a man, and altering a man’s genitals doesn’t make him into a woman. Even assuming that the proponents of the surgeries are right about the psychological states of patients before the surgeries, the surgeries don’t achieve their intended result.

___________

Perhaps what’s morally relevant isn’t whether a surgery switches the patient’s sex, but whether it gives the patient psychic relief. If the patient is psychologically improved by the surgery, does that make the surgery morally permissible? Whether something gender-related caused a patient distress before the surgery isn’t relevant to our question; all that matters is whether the patient feels better afterward.

As before, let’s grant the proponents of surgery their best-case psychological scenario. Assume these surgeries do, in fact, induce relief, contentment, a sense of wholeness, or some such positive mental state. Here’s the problem: any positive mental state will be an unfitting response to the physical harm caused by the surgery. The patient might feel better, but they will feel better about a situation about which they ought to feel worse, so the surgery will have replaced one mismatch between mind and body with another.

Consider, for example, the mental state of fear. Fear is that distinctively unwelcome, repellent, dominating frisson. Fear is appropriate for dangerous situations and a bad fit for harmless ones. Fear has norms. There could be such norms only if fear, in addition to being a feeling, also depicted the world outside the mind in a certain way. To be afraid of something is for one’s mind to claim that the something is threatening, dangerous, to be avoided. If a situation is in fact dangerous—if fear is making a true claim about the situation—then fear is the right response. Otherwise, it is not.

As it is with fear, so it is with contentment, pleasure, relief, and other mental states. They can be judged appropriate or inappropriate only with reference to the situations to which they respond. Take contentment, for instance—that calm state of desire for things to continue as they are. That’s the correct response to a loving marriage or a good job. But it’s an incorrect response to injustice, because injustice ought to be rectified, and contentment is a state of satisfaction. Or take relief, that lessening of felt urgency or pressure. Relief is a good response to, say, the successful end of an important and difficult project, but not to the accidental, unexpected death of a beloved child. The same goes for pleasure, that warm feeling of attraction and inner harmony. Taking pleasure in another’s suffering is wrong, because suffering calls for sympathy, a desire to aid the victim, and perhaps anger.

For one’s mental states to respond improperly to the world is a sad thing, and it calls for compassion, not blame. People who have been depressed know how frustrating it is to feel numb at what ought to elicit joy or sadness. I know people for whom everyday stuff is terrifying. This is an awful experience, not because terror is always bad—it’s often fitting and valuable—but because everyday stuff just doesn’t call for terror.

The mental states we are discussing can be valuable only if they fit the situations to which they respond. So, even if removing a healthy sexual organ makes a patient content, the contentment itself is valuable and worth aiming at only if the removal of the healthy organ is something with which one ought to be pleased. But considered on its own, the removal of healthy organs is physically harmful.

Surgeons who try to relieve their patients’ pain by stunting or removing healthy organs are doubly in the wrong: they are harming their patients’ bodies, and they are doing it in order to induce an inappropriate mental response. It would be similar for a doctor to help a teenager cut herself to alleviate her anxiety.

___________

But maybe we should take a longer-term view of benefits to patients. Let’s say that some surgery relieved a patient of psychic distress that had blocked the patient from having the friendships they wanted, the job they hoped for, or some other aspect of human flourishing. Would the gain to the patient’s life outweigh the direct harm of the surgery?

No, because well-being shouldn’t be instrumentalized that way. Imagine that some people said you could be friends with them, but only if you did some degrading thing in public, or if you slept with every member of the group, or if you stole from your grandmother, all these acts would be as immoral as physical self-harm. Moreover, they’re not the sorts of things good friends would ask of someone, since good friends try to promote one another’s well-being, not to harm it.

Let’s imagine a friendship between two people, one of whom has gender dysphoria (but who has not had any surgeries). Besides the standard duties of friendship, the friend without dysphoria has duties owing to the other’s dysphoria: sympathetically acknowledging their distress, helping them to accept identity in their body, encouraging them to seek psychiatric treatment, and so on. If anything, surgery would make these duties harder to discharge, even if the surgery delivered psychic relief. The patient would be physically worse off (because they would have lost healthy organs) and would not be mentally well either (because they are now psychically relieved at having sustained a physical injury). Advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean undoing the psychological effects and alleviating the physical harm done by the surgery. Not advancing the health of the dysphoric friend would mean neglecting a basic purpose of friendship—to help unwell friends to get well, which at a minimum requires not acquiescing in their belief that they are well when the belief is false.

___________

Up until now, I’ve been exploring whether the surgeries can be justified by their benefits to a patient’s mental health, or to some part of their life that might be affected by mental health. I’ve assumed the psychological facts that are most favorable to proponents of the surgeries, and still, a good justification for the surgeries hasn’t been found.

It could be that we have been looking for the justification in the wrong place. Maybe it’s not the patient’s improved mental health (as well as related goods, like friendship) that makes a surgery moral, but rather autonomous consent to the surgery. In the preface to his book When Harry Became Sally, Ryan Anderson discusses a 2018 New York Times op-ed by Andrea Long Chu, who identifies as a transgender woman. Chu intended to undergo vaginoplasty surgery in the coming days, but he didn’t expect the six-hour procedure to make him happier or relieve his dysphoric thoughts. To Chu, that was beside the point: “no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies … withholding [the surgery]. … [S]urgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want.”

If a surgery considered in itself is wrong, it’s difficult to see how consent could make it right. Consent just doesn’t seem to have that power. Consider some other wrongful acts: tearing the wings off of butterflies, cheating on an exam, lying to a friend. Does the fact that one freely chooses to do these things somehow make them morally right? On the contrary, to quote the great liberal political theorist Joseph Raz: “Demeaning, or narrow-minded, or ungenerous, or insensitive behavior is worse when autonomously chosen or indulged in.” When a human being acts wrongfully and autonomously, she isn’t an accidental part of chain of events that produces something undesirable. She’s consciously willing the wrong thing.

At this point, a proponent of the surgeries might dig in their heels and say we have unlimited moral sovereignty over our bodies. I find it hard to argue against this opinion, though I find it equally hard to imagine how one might argue for it. But consider the consequences. Torture, live vivisection or burial, slavery, drowning, and so on would all be considered morally acceptable, as long as someone freely signed a consent form. Our basic dignity would be exchangeable if only we agreed to the exchange. The idea is obscene.

___________

None of the potential justifications for the surgeries has passed muster. If the surgeries aren’t justified, then the extreme acts they involve—such as amputation—are not helpful but severely harmful. That means patients shouldn’t request the surgeries, and doctors shouldn’t agree to perform them.

Generally, the medical profession can be counted on not to perform harmful procedures. Patients who have Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID), for example, believe that they would be better off if an arm or a leg were amputated. Both BIID and gender dysphoria involve a deep alienation from one’s body. But while many doctors in America do remove organs to treat gender dysphoria, they do not amputate limbs to treat BIID (according to Dr. Peter Brugger, a Swiss research physician who’s published extensively on the disorder, whom I interviewed over email). This is not—so far as I can tell—because the law prohibits it.

Sometimes there are good reasons for the law to step in and just say no to a procedure. Many American states have made it illegal to perform gay conversion therapy. The risk of serious harm was judged too high to leave to the medical field to regulate. Sex-reassignment surgeries, which are increasingly popular to perform and risky to oppose publicly, should be banned on similar grounds. Such surgeries aren’t a run-of-the-mill vice like excessive smoking that the state should, given limited resources, leave to individuals. The surgeries do direct, grievous, physical, irreparable harm to the vulnerable, under the auspices of medical care.

There is a very brave and growing movement to persuade states to ban these surgeries, along with puberty-blockers and cross-sex hormones, for minors. Proponents of such bans often argue that we lack empirical data about the treatments, that there may be bad long-term psychological effects to such treatments, and that minors are at a delicate stage in life and should wait until they have grown up (by which time their gender dysphoria may have abated).

I worry that appeals to data outsource the final word to the researchers in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. Given the present state of these professions, does anyone have serious doubts about the results the experts will deliver?

Untethered to a principled view that the surgeries are wrong, the anti-surgery camp may find itself making concession after concession—to the poignancy of severe cases of gender dysphoria, to the independence of the medical profession, to ignorance about the long-term effects of the surgeries (which ignorance could be remedied only by letting the surgeries be performed and observing the results), and, of course, to patient autonomy.

Instead, we should oppose the surgeries with an account of human freedom ordered toward the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse. The goal of self-government, at the political level, is to help citizens govern themselves fruitfully in their personal lives. Addiction, loneliness, our inhumane sexual culture, and the ever more popular desire to reconfigure one’s body with surgery aren’t isolated problems—they result from a national refusal to put political and cultural heft behind the conditions of genuine flourishing.

Unfortunately, American conservatives are wary of political appeals to flourishing. They prefer to talk about freedom and leave matters there. That was fine when America’s enemy was the Soviet Union and when American culture generally promoted the fruitful use of freedom. What about when America allows 100,000 people to die from alcohol and opioids in one year, sees over half of all marriages dissolve, can’t find enough military recruits, empties out church pews, and fills heads with TikTok, porn, and Adderall? Americans are used to thinking of their free society as a humane society, and the more humane for being free. But a society can be both free and inhumane if that society’s culture and laws are neutral about the virtues enabling the proper uses of freedom.

Conservatives need to choose between their impulse to let people live as they damn well please and their opposition to the grisly stuff being done by scientists and surgeons. One of these days, artificial intelligence and medical technology are going to get together and transform flesh-and-blood men and women into bespoke apparatuses of circuitry and steel. What will conservatives say then?

Certain limits cannot be transgressed without abolishing our humanity. The time to build a political coalition around the significance of our embodied personhood is now, when the practice to be opposed is the not-terribly-alluring one of cutting off the genitalia of vulnerable people. Next time, conservatives may not be so lucky.

Yeshiva University’s Ban on L.G.B.T.Q. Club Leads to Scrutiny of Funding

Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.

Why States Must Define Sex Precisely

Until recently, no precise legal definition of sex—and especially the terms “male” and “female”—was needed because no one contested it. Unfortunately, because of gender ideology’s growing influence on our laws and institutions, states no longer have this luxury. Gender activists are now working to redefine sex in federal laws and regulations, such as Title IX, to include “gender identity.” If this succeeds, it will subvert all preexisting legal references to sex, contrary to their original intent.

Some state legislators are proposing to define sex by tying it to biology, but in an artfully vague or general way, in order to distinguish it from “gender.” Here’s a common formulation that appears in bills dealing with pediatric gender medicine:

“Biological sex” means the biological indication of male and female in the context of reproductive potential or capacity, such as sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience or gender.

“Gender” means the psychological, behavioral, social, and cultural aspects of being male or female.

It’s not clear why the term is being defined as “biological sex” rather than “sex” simply.  After all, the purpose of the definition is to tie sex to biology, so the qualifier “biological” is redundant. More to the point, this definition provides no explanation of the difference between males and females. As a result, it’s not likely to do much good in cases where that difference is at issue.

Recognizing this problem, some states have begun to propose legislation to define these terms in state law. Montana is currently debating one such law, SB 458 (2023). To see why this needs to be done, we must understand what gender ideology is and the confusion that it creates.

What Is Gender Ideology?

Gender ideology’s intellectual pedigree is complex. For our purposes, however, we can focus on its orthodox formulation in school curricula, popular culture, and medicine. In this form, it displaces the sexual binary of male and female—which describes all mammals including humans—with two subjective notions: First, an internal sense of gender called “gender identity” that is distinct from, and can even be in discord with, the body; and second, mere “sex assigned at birth.”

Hence, its most ardent champions do not refer to a person’s sex when defining their terms. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is representative. “Gender identity,” the commission explains, “is each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is a person’s sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” Note that the same word appears in both the definition and the word being defined. That circularity is a philosophical necessity because gender ideology detaches gender identity from biological sex.

This way of speaking and thinking is the essence of gender ideology.

Efforts to redefine terms such as sex to comport with the lexicon of gender ideology threaten many important social goods. To preserve these goods, states need to anchor their legal definitions of sex, and related terms such as “male” and “female,” in the solid ground of biological facts.

A Campaign of Confusion

The main way gender ideologues have confused the public is by falsely claiming that disorders of sexual development, often mislabeled “intersex” conditions, prove that there are more than two sexes—or that the sexes are somehow fluid or mere endpoints on a spectrum.

Such disorders occur in 0.018 percent of the population. In some such cases, however, newborns have ambiguous genitalia. This makes the task of determining sex more complex.

Nevertheless, appealing to these disorders to justify gender ideology is an intentional diversion. First, none of these conditions produces other sexes or “genders.” Second, gender ideology provides no new insights into these disorders. Third, people who identify as transgender or nonbinary rarely have one of these disorders. And fourth, no such disorders correspond to the growing list of “gender identities.”

Defining Sex Imprecisely

Unfortunately, some who seek to defend the reality of sex—that is, the sexual binary—offer hasty and imprecise definitions, which can serve to discredit their efforts.

A bill might claim, for instance, that all humans are either male or female and have either XX or XY chromosomes—corresponding to females (XX) and males (XY). But, as noted above, there are rare chromosomal disorders where this doesn’t hold. If the wording of the law fails to account for people with these disorders, it provides a target for critics to torpedo the legislation.

The same sort of problem arises with some common ways of defining the two sexes. One might say, for instance, that “a woman can have babies; a man can’t.” That’s true—but it’s not a definition of “man” or “woman.” After all, some women have had hysterectomies, or have gone through menopause. Do they not count as women? Of course they do. So much the worse for the definition.

Now, everyone intuits that the difference between men and women has something to do with the ability to have babies. And there are ways to state the intuition precisely. For instance, to speak in the argot of “set theory,” you can say that the set of people who can have babies is a proper subset of the set of women. The set of all men, in contrast, contains no subset that can have babies.

And if you remember high school biology, you know that XX and XY chromosomes have something to do with sex. But biology is complex, and definitions are hard to get just right. Set theory or chromosomes might help us understand the difference between males and females, but as a matter of law these definitions are not precise enough. Vague legal definitions create openings for gender ideology to gain a toehold.

Defining Sex Precisely

Here’s the good news: there are several ways to define sex precisely. It just takes some work. Any good definition will capture the central concept of biological sex—the orientation of male and female bodies for reproduction. It will also refer to what happens under normal development while accounting for disorders. Finally, it will accommodate the fact that organisms have and do different things at different stages of development.

For instance, a female human embryo does not menstruate or get pregnant—nor does a woman who has passed through menopause. A male embryo very early in development does not (yet) have a penis or testes.

The definitions provided in Montana’s SB 458, for instance, account for both disorders and development. A human male is, minimally, a member of the human species who, under normal development, produces relatively small, mobile gametes—sperm—at some point in his life cycle, and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete. A human female is, minimally, a member of the human species who, under normal development, produces relatively large, relatively immobile gametes—ova—at some point in her life cycle, and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete.

The phrase “under normal development” does a great deal of work in these definitions. We grasp the existence of distinct animal taxa (species, genera, families, classes, etc.) intuitively. “Human” refers to our species (Homo sapiens). We also distinguish abnormal from normal development without much effort.

For instance, we know that humans are bipeds—that they naturally have two legs. But if a child is born without one or both legs, do we conclude that the newborn isn’t human, is a member of another species, or is “interspecies”? Of course not. We recognize that the child suffers from some sort of disorder—some disruption in development involving, say, chromosomes or an event in utero. Note that we’re engaged in counterfactual reasoning. We infer that the newborn would have had two legs except for some event or abnormality that prevented this from happening.

We can learn to reason this way over time if we encounter enough organisms to discern the basic pattern, or if we study biology. For most adults, this way of thinking is common sense, or what philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge.” That is, we understand the basic contours of sex and how it works in the world, even if we have a hard time explaining the chain of reasoning and definitions involved.

Normal vs. Abnormal Development

Some might claim that the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” is prejudicial, or that it represents an incursion of sectarian philosophy into science. This is false. One might view these categories, say, in terms of natures conceived along Aristotelian lines. Others may understand the distinction statistically, in terms of sexual selection, through a combination of these views, or in some other way. But whatever one’s philosophical or theoretical framework, it’s impossible to get very far in describing biological reality without relying on the distinction between normal and abnormal. This is true whether one is a rancher with only a high-school education, a physician with an MD, or a developmental biologist with a PhD.

Is it special pleading to appeal to what is “normal” for disorders of sexual development? Not at all. It’s how we understand function and development in all organisms—including sex. We know from observation, analysis, and well-confirmed theory that humans are mammals (class: Mammalia), and that sex in mammals is binary. That means there are two and only two types of gametes and corresponding body structures. One of each gamete is needed for reproduction.

Moreover, under normal development in all placental mammals, including humans, a male has XY chromosomes, and he will develop and at some point have testes, a prostate, and a penis. A female, under normal development, has XX chromosomes, and she will develop and at some point have a uterus, ovaries, a cervix, and a vagina. Barring a disorder or disruption, a female can carry, give birth to, and nurse offspring at some point during her life cycle. A male cannot. Males and females also differ in the prevalence of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, respectively, and develop distinct secondary anatomical differences under the influence of these hormones, especially during puberty.

This is why, in almost all cases, the presence of such features is sufficient to conclude that a newborn is either male or female. Sex in almost all cases is easily observed, not “assigned.” But what about the rare exceptions? What happens if a newborn lacks some secondary sex characteristic—such as a penis—or has ambiguous genitalia, or is found (using much more recent techniques) to have a chromosomal anomaly?

As mentioned above, we would not, and should not, conclude that the child is not a human, or has no sex, or is some third sex. In most cases, we can with a bit more investigation determine that the child is male or female, and so would have the usual features of that sex except for a disorder that disrupted normal development.

Even if we could not determine the sex of an individual, we would treat this as an epistemic limit. We would not, or at least should not, treat such a person as a member of a third sex, or of no sex. And even if one were inclined to do that in such rare cases, this would do nothing to establish the many exotic claims and implications of gender ideology. For instance, it would provide no basis for the claim that a developmentally normal male could be a female simply by identifying as one. A transgender or nonbinary gender identity is not the same thing as various disorders of sexual development. In fact, we understand such disorders by reference to normal sexual development.

In sum, current efforts to redefine sex to include “gender identity” would dissolve sex as a stable legal category and create legal chaos. In response, public institutions must shore up their defenses. One key way to do that is by defining sex—including male and female—precisely in law.

House Republicans Pass ‘Parents Bill of Rights’ Act

The bill passed by House Republicans has no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate but appeals to many of the party’s most conservative voters.

Of Innocence and Experience

In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:

The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:

a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.

In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.

Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country

Every day, anti-trans rhetoric is spreading and becoming more virulent. Conservative forces in statehouses across America are pushing bills that would strip trans people of rights, including access to vital medical care. In some places, these laws have already passed. This is all part of a concerted, coordinated effort, as Madison Pauly’s reporting shows. Pauly gained access to a trove of emails exchanged by a group of anti-trans advocates who workshop legislative bills, public messaging, and other aspects of their crusade:

They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child. 

Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post. 

Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.

At Wellesley College, Students Vote to Admit Trans Men

Outside of The Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center at Wellesley College, on Monday.

"This was real and raw": Fans weigh in on Chris Rock's special, from trans jokes to Slap clapback

Gender Changes: Genderfluidity and Trans Possibilities

The Forgotten History of the World’s First Trans Clinic

There is a moral panic about transgender issues sweeping America. While it is raging most viciously in the Republican Party — see: the odious speeches at CPAC last week; Tennessee banning drag shows and gender-affirming health care for minors; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requesting information from public colleges about students who have sought hormone treatment and reassignment surgeries — the panic’s tentacles extend much further. There is no better moment, then, to read historian Brandy Schillace’s piece about the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking facility in interwar Germany that heralded a just, humane future for gay, trans, and non-binary individuals, until fascism arrived. Schillace is at work on a book about the institute, and you can also listen to her talk about it on a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered:

That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.

Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.

When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.

The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.

CPAC speaker says, "Transgenderism must be eradicated," while claiming it doesn't exist