Many years ago, when I was a boy, I whiled away a summer afternoon in the parlor of my grandmother’s big house on Tremont Street, thumbing through back issues of the Saturday Evening Post. I can’t remember any of the stories I read, but the memory of one cartoon has remained with me ever since. The cartoon depicted two doctors dressed in white lab coats standing on the front porch of a building that was clearly designated as a Mental Health Clinic. On the lawn before them was a little man on horseback who was dressed exactly like Napoleon Bonaparte.
What gave the cartoon its punch were the thousands of massed infantrymen and mounted cavalrymen who were arrayed behind the little man – all the way to the horizon. What excited me then – and now – was the way this scene flickered between two proposed realities. Was the little man delusional and in need of a check-up from the neck up, or did the army-of-conquest at his command make him, in reality, Napoleon Bonaparte? The cartoon begs the question: If enough people share your delusion are you no longer delusional, have you, in fact, succeeded in fabricating a new reality?
For the sake of my own sanity, I must conclude that the little man on the horse is nuts. Merely believing that the little man is Napoleon doesn’t make him Napoleon, no matter how many people believe him to be Napoleon and not even if the editorial staff of the New York Times declares him to be Napoleon. Consensus is not truth; consensus alone does not settle the question. Did the consensus of opinion among the medieval academics really make the Earth flat? Did their earnest conviction make the sun revolve around the Earth for even one minute? No. And yet. . .
Delusional people are legion – they hang out together; they form political action committees; they struggle to create alternative realities by the force of sheer numbers.
A case in point: There are people who believe that women can be created by surgeons. It’s an article of faith for these folks. These same people are inclined to believe in the existence of women who are trapped inside male bodies, a notion as queer as anything in Greek mythology.
It isn’t by chance that seemingly educated people believe such things; the fault lies in the peculiar nature of their “education.” To glimpse their weird alternative reality on naked display, you have only to pick up the New York Times.
The August second ’08 issue included an article datelined Greeley, Colorado. It begins, “Angie Zapata began living as a woman six years ago even though she was born male and named Justin.” The part about Angie “living as a woman” was straight-up reporting, but notice the odd locution “she was born a male.” In the very first sentence, Times reporter Dan Frosch is telegraphing us that he has totally entered the alternative reality of the gay-and-transgendered micro subculture.
Mr. Frosch continues to abuse feminine pronouns in this paragraph:
“On Wednesday, the police arrested Allen R. Andrade, 31, and charged him with murder. According to the authorities, Mr. Andrade had gone out on a date with Ms. Zapata, and upon discovering she had male genitalia, beat her to death – starting with his fists and then with a fire extinguisher.”
According to a police affidavit the shaken and disappointed Mr. Andrade had told investigators that he thought he had “killed it.” We can appreciate Mr. Andrade’s confusion and his use of the neuter pronoun to designate the female impersonator whom he met on an Internet dating site. After seeing photos of Justin at “Angie’s” apartment, Mr. Andrade had confronted Justin/Angie about his true sexual identity. According to the police affidavit the person wearing women’s clothes, the person who had already performed oral sex on Mr. Andrade, had replied, “I am all woman.” After that preposterous lie, it was “lights out” for Angie.
“We’ve heard from so many people expressing not only just outrage but also shock as to how this could happen,” said Chris Fiene, a board member for the Lambda Community Center in nearby Fort Collins, which provides services for the “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community.” Got that? These queer folk are shocked to discover that any man would be shocked to discover that the woman he was dating was really a teenage guy who had just tricked him into a homosexual encounter. The queer folk don’t believe that Justin did anything provocative by defrauding Mr. Andrade and goading his indignation; they don’t believe that Justin was being creepy and importuning; they believe that Justin was just being “her” wonderful and unique self. That’s the alternative perspective of the small percentage of humanity that is not heterosexual. It’s a perspective shared by those liberals who have bought into the dopey notion that sexual oddballs are an oppressed minority “just like black people.”
The New York Times flirts with parody when it tells us straight-faced that “Ms. Zapata had dreamed of moving to Denver, becoming a professional drag queen and working as a cosmetologist. But she started hanging out with a rough crowd and dated too many men, some of them dangerous, her sister said.”
To erase any lingering doubts that both Justin Zapata and the New York Times were headed downhill, the “newspaper of record” added that “Monica Zapata said her sister had drifted into drugs and at one point talked about prostitution to make extra money.” That would be the “sister” who was really her brother, the one whose male genitalia would have restricted him to the role of gay prostitute.
At last, we can see what the transgender hustle is all about – it’s about homosexuals who want to masquerade as heterosexuals in borrowed bodies. The gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender agenda is all about homosexuality; it is all about enlarging a comfort zone for homosexuals. What distinguishes the “transgendered” is their emotional need for a much deeper cover: the fleshy form of the other sex.
I recall one of those television profiles about a husband who “came out” to his wife of many years about his decision to undergo transsexual surgery. The wife clearly loved the big lug and she chose to remain his helpmate as he underwent the anatomical transformation. Both of them knew that their marriage was doomed. The wife’s sadness was palpable; the husband was looking forward to future fulfillment. The entire process would culminate with the husband’s recovery from genital reconstruction.
What was striking by its absence was any acknowledgement of the obvious fact that the husband was enduring all this painful anatomical reconstruction so that he could have guilt-free sex with men. The faithful wife was being dumped so that hubby could indulge himself in homoerotic fantasies under deep cover, his gay psyche safely hidden inside a fabricated facsimile of a real woman’s body.
How We Got Here
How our popular culture came to include television documentaries about “sexual reassignment” is a tale worth retelling. In their seminal manifesto, The Overhauling of Straight America, queer theorists Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill called for a propaganda offensive that would include strenuous efforts to demonize all critics of homosexuality, that would portray homosexuals as society’s victims, that would downplay the seamier aspects of gay life and that would present homosexuals as unthreatening and seemingly normal.
Above all, the normalization of homosexuality was seen as essential to the expansion of the gay comfort zone. To this end the gay radicals set their sights on the mental health profession which had defined homosexuality as a disorder.
It should be noted that psychiatry is not a science; it is a craft; it is a body of opinion rooted in observation. Even informed opinions may be in conflict, which is why there are so many approaches to healing emotional distress and disordered thinking. In any case, mental health professionals are in the business of treating mental disorders. Theirs is a profit making enterprise.
Psychiatrists, just like the rest of us, want to make a buck and don’t want to work too hard while doing it. That’s why gay radicals succeeded so quickly in coercing the top officers of the American Psychiatric Association into closed-door negotiations over the issue of the APA’s listing of homosexuality as a disorder.
Gays had targeted APA members whenever they appeared in public, shouting them down, cat calling and turning every assembly into a shambles. The radicals made it clear that if the mental health professionals wanted any peace they would have to negotiate. With their professional lives threatened, the APA buckled in short order.
After a year of closed-door meetings, during which no one critical of the gay agenda was permitted to speak, the APA prepared to do something unprecedented: it would put the question of whether homosexuality was a disorder to a vote of the APA’s membership. Unlike every other disorder in its published manual of disorders, homosexuality would stay or go on the basis of a consensus of the membership’s opinions. There was no talk of putting schizophrenia to a vote, or phobias, or depression.
The voting was conducted by mailed ballots. The APA membership was never informed that the funding and the wording of the ballots were the work of gay radicals pushing a political agenda. Almost everyone who received a ballot tossed it into the trash. Only 25% of the APA membership bothered to return their ballots, a sampling so small as to be statistically worthless. The returned ballots probably included more than a few from closeted gay psychiatrists. When the true nature of the vote was revealed, APA members expressed their dismay, saying they would have voted differently had they known that the ballot was a political device. Some said they had only voted to drop homosexuality as a disorder to spare gays from ostracism, not because they believed that gays were not disordered. In any case, the voting results were junk; gays were never given a meaningful bill of health from the American Psychiatric Association. All the vote established was what a cowardly bunch of careerist the APA bosses were.
None of this mattered to the gay radicals – they had gotten what they were after: the illusion of a clean bill of health from a prestigious mental health organization, which they could exploit as a political pry bar to crack open their admission to other spheres of influence, such as schools, churches and even the mental health profession itself. The pace of “normalizing” homosexuality would accelerate from then on. In this instance gays did not need a genuine consensus of psychiatric opinion; the mere illusion of a consensus worked just as well. The joke was on America.
Enter the Surgeons
Though few surgeons had been performing sex reassignment surgeries before George Jorgensen, Jr. became Christine and made newspaper copy in 1952, such surgeries remained disreputable long afterward. As gay publicists succeeded in “normalizing” homosexuality, surgeons took note of the diminished stigma attached to all things gay. Those surgeons who looked to the psychiatrists for clues as to whether performing sex-change operations was ethical, or just pandering to disordered people in the grips of an obsession, were suddenly given a big green light from the mental health careerists who didn’t want any trouble from the homosexual radicals. After that, servicing the “transgendered” became a cash cow.
But the question lingers: Given the strictly political and emotional underpinnings of the new mood toward transsexuals, are these surgeries ethical?
Many mental health professionals no longer ask themselves, “Is this person sick?” They only ask, “Is this person happy?” If the patient is living a life of stress-free contentment, he can be dismissed as well-adjusted no matter what creepy things he may be up to. If it’s not a felony, the analyst is totally on board. This state of affairs gives the surgeons free rein to pander to the patient’s every sexual fantasy. If the patient is happy, then who is the surgeon to judge him harshly? At best, surgeons make an effort to discern if the patient has outlandish expectations – unhappy patients tend to hire pesky lawyers.
Are They Crazy
The most convincing aspect of anyone’s claim to be someone trapped in the body of the other gender is the steadfastness of their conviction over many years. They don’t grow out of it; nothing changes their opinion of themselves. Other persons evince the same conviction; they gather in groups and petition us for sympathy and accommodation. The mental health folks give them a name and cater to their needs. But are they really men trapped in women’s bodies or are they just gay guys who are too homophobic to admit to their own secret agendas. Is performing surgery on these guys ethical or just fantasy fulfillment for the deranged?
Perhaps we could see the “transgendered” with new eyes if we took a moment to look at another group of people who share many of the same outstanding features, people who are also convinced that they will never be truly happy until they too have longed for surgeries.
In January of 2000, the Falkirk and District Royal Infirmary, in Scotland, stayed the hand of surgeon Robert Smith. Doctor Smith had already amputated the perfectly healthy legs of two of his patients and he was preparing to amputate the legs of a third patient. All three patients had requested that their legs be sliced off; all three were deemed mentally competent; the two men whose legs were tossed in the trash gave interviews and declared that they were now much happier people.
Doctor Smith’s patients are not alone in their desire to be rid of healthy arms, legs, toes and fingers. In May of 1998, a seventy-nine-year-old New Yorker paid ten thousand dollars for a black-market Mexican leg amputation; he died of gangrene in his motel room. A year later an otherwise sane man in Milwaukee chopped off his arm with a home-built guillotine and then declared that he would chop it off again if surgeons reattached it. A California woman who was denied a hospital amputation tried to induce gangrene in her legs by using tourniquets and ice packs; when that failed she lamented that she would now be compelled to lie with her legs over a railroad track.
When confronted, the Scottish surgeon announced that “It was the most satisfying operation I have ever performed. I have no doubt that it was the best thing for those patients.” The BBC produced a documentary about people who share the desire to be amputees; it is called Complete Obsession. This film includes a quote from psychiatrist Russell Reid of Hillingdon Hospital, London: “You can talk till the cows come home; it doesn’t make any difference. They’re still going to want their amputation, and I know that for a fact.”
Though you may never have heard of it, this obsessive state of mind is common enough to have a name: acrotomophilia. The “philia” part signals that it’s akin to other paraphilias – what the common folk call perversions. The apotemnophile’s greatest desire is to become an amputee, which is not to be confused with the acrotomophile’s desire to cuddle up to an amputee. Got that? Good.
The amputee-fetish community is a thriving subculture with its own nomenclature: the “wannabees” are seeking amputations; the “devotees” are seeking the amputees; the “pretenders” are physically healthy people who pretend to be disabled, using street-theater props, such as braces, crutches and wheelchairs. Indeed, this is something of a Golden Age for these freaks; the Internet is blossoming with memoirs, videos, books and chat rooms that cater to the amputation-fixation community.
It has not been lost on close observers how every aspect of the amputee-fetish folks is mimicked by an analogous aspect of the transgender community. Both groups employ the language of identity. “I have always felt I should be an amputee” is perfectly echoed in “I have always felt I was trapped inside the body of the wrong sex.” In both cases, the “true” self is one that can only be attained through surgical intervention.
Rugged females and effeminate males have always populated the spectrum of natural human variation; they have always been among us. What has changed recently is the social context in which these off-center folks exist.
Prior to World War Two, only a few percent of Americans had a college education. When that war ended, the American economy was threatened by the rush of returning military personnel whom the economy could not absorb. Massive unemployment loomed, threatening another Great Depression. The economy was saved by the GI Bill which parked countless thousands of people in American colleges for years. These educated men and women would later energize the economic boom of the 1950s and 60s. They would also emerge from college steeped in notions of cultural relativism, of new fangled child rearing, and the introspective preoccupations of the psychoanalytical professions. Their children, the Baby Boomers, were nurtured by this college-educated bunch of navel gazers. They would be receptive to the identity-group paradigm of the Black Power movement, which would be mimicked by the identity feminists and the radical homosexuals. In today’s America every child is born into an environment drenched in the language of selfhood and identity. This historically recent language permeates our literature, our political philosophy and our notions of what is therapeutic. It is the common language of our junk culture, of daytime TV; it shapes the way we talk and think. Every advertisement is an exercise in the lingo of self-expression, self-realization, self-actualization and self-knowledge. It is assumed that everyone is self-absorbed. Is it surprising that a people steeped in this vocabulary feel at ease using it to articulate their obsessions? It is the lingua franca of every liberal poseur.
The kinship of healthy-limb amputation to sex-reassignment surgery has been noted repeatedly by clinicians and patients. Psychiatrist Russell Reid observes: “Transsexuals want healthy parts of their body removed in order to adjust to their idealized body image, and so I think that was the connection for me. I saw that people wanted to have limbs off with equally as much degree of obsession and need and urgency.” The amputee pretenders are echoed by the cross-dressers who hover at the fringes of the transsexual community, a community built entirely around a desire.
So, is transgenderism “real” or is it a residual artifact of our popular culture? Here’s the problem: The very act of classifying a human being will alter that human – people alter their self-conception in response to how they are classified. This is called a “looping effect.” For example, if a therapist thought a patient might be harboring multiple personalities, some patients would seize the opportunity to begin expressing different personalities. Creating a new category of madness gives patients a new way to be mad. Today, the whole multiple-personality epidemic of the 1970s is remembered with embarrassment. To be blunt: psychiatrists contribute to the contagion of mental disorders by the very act of lending their stature as “experts” to the business of naming disorders, of specifying treatments, of inventing scales to measure derangement, by publishing speculations and by steering patients to “support groups,” which serve to deepen the patient’s identification with their disorder. At the end of World War Two, Americans would have laughed at the idea that thousands of their fellow citizens would someday clamor to have their genitals surgically removed, but that is our present reality, due in no small measure to the recognition of “transgenderism” by psychiatric “experts.”
Once the psycho-babble of “gender-identity disorder” and “sexual reassignment” was firmly fixed in the everyday language of the “educated” smart set, ordinary people were given license to reinterpret their life’s experiences in these new terms. People began to re-imagine their histories in a previously unimaginable ways; they redefined themselves to conform to the newly defined categories. The very existence of a burgeoning clinical apparatus to serve these newly-defined identity groups greatly enhanced the likelihood that more people would imagine themselves to be members of those identity groups. As more people defined themselves as transgendered, their increasing numbers increased the likelihood that even more people would define themselves as transgendered. Every new conceptual category opens the door for people to fantasize that they too might belong to the newly discovered tribe of exotic people. The unthinkable becomes thinkable. Merely by giving a weird desire a name and then calling the satisfaction of that weird desire a “treatment,” the mental-health shamans have spun a cash cow out of thin air. This is the process by which elective amputation made the shift from self-mutilation to being thought of as a treatment for a mental disorder. This is the process by which closeted homosexuals became the transgendered, became “women” caged in male bodies and deserving of surgical intervention.
The inclination of our popular culture to look to psychiatry to explain what past generations understood to be sin, weakness, perversity, unhappiness, crime and deviance explains the current increase in all sorts of mental disorders. Old human complaints have been given new names in the godless, sin-free realm of post-Freudian liberal intellectualism. Specialists in the gender-confusion clinics must now contend with patients who have internalized the psycho-speak of gender dysphoria and are bent on gaming the system to get the surgeries they crave.
The collaboration of psychiatry and surgery in recent decades has been truly hideous. The profitable but stupid use of clitoridectomy to “cure” masturbation, the use of cosmetic surgery to “cure” an “inferiority complex,” the reckless employment of sexual reassignment surgeries on infants with ambiguous genitalia have all exposed the psychiatric/surgical collaboration for the clueless, bumbling, prideful misadventure that it is. The capstones of this enterprise were all those grotesque frontal lobotomies.
Despite the notorious history of this collaboration, surgeons, with the blessing of psychiatrists, continue to operate in a shadow realm where stringent ethical oversight has yet to arrive. It is in this twilight realm that the most closeted gay males seek the deepest closet of all: the imitation of a woman’s body.
Enter the Freak
Back in 2003, Yeshiva University, in all innocence, hired Jay Ladin as a literature professor. Three years later, and a scant two weeks after being granted the protections of tenure, the sly Mister Ladin announced that he was really a woman inside a man’s body. This thick-trunked, broad-shouldered, gap-toothed fella with a deeply receding hairline told the rabbis that he was in the process of “becoming a woman.” The university put Mister Ladin on indefinite leave.
On September 8, 2008, the New York Post reported that Mister Ladin had returned to the classroom sorting pink lipstick, a tight purple knit top and a “flirty black skirt.” The Post’s pronoun-challenged reporter, Rebecca Rosenberg, informs us that “After a month of heated debate among rabbis, administrators, Ladin and her lawyers, the university agreed to let her return. . .” Faculty members said the university’s hand was forced by lawyerly threats.
Ms. Rosenberg’s tortured prose continues: “Although she’s taking progesterone and estrogen to grow breasts and feminize her appearance, she retains the most prominent part of her manhood. . .” In other words, the big lug is hung like a plow horse. A color photo shows the bearish Jay Ladin in clunky sandals, skirt and knit top, smiling like the cat that ate the canary, still gap-toothed, with long stringy hair and the same deeply receding hairline. While Mr. Ladin’s cross dressing wouldn’t raise an eyebrow in Greenwich Village, he was, in fact, walking the halls of Yeshiva University, a community steeped in Torah law.
“He’s not a woman. He’s a male with enlarged breasts,” observed Rabbi Moshe Tendler, a senior dean at Yeshiva’s rabbinical school and a professor of biology and medical ethics. “He’s a person who represents a kind of amorality which runs counter to everything Yeshiva University stands for. There is just no leeway in Jewish law for a transsexual. There is no niche where he can hide out as a female without being a massive violation of Torah law, Torah ethics and Torah morality.”
Compounding Jay Ladin’s ethical lapses was the fact that he had defrauded an innocent woman into becoming his wife and he had fathered three children with her. Ladin’s wife has filed for divorce and custody of her children. She has fled their Amherst, Massachusetts home.
This sad situation is redolent of the case of Dale v. Boy Scouts of America in which the homosexual plaintiff claimed the right to be a Scout leader and the spokesman for a college gay rights group simultaneously. In that case the United States Supreme Court wisely decided that the Boy Scouts of America had a constitutional right to its own voice and that the continued presence of Mr. Dale in a leadership position was confounding that voice. Whether Yeshiva University, likewise, has a constitutional right to its own voice is in question. Yeshiva certainly has a distinctive voice and that voice is very much of a piece with traditional Torah teaching. Whether Yeshiva has compromised its voice because of entanglements with contract law (tenure) or governmental assistance has yet to be determined. Did Mr. Ladin defraud Yeshiva by pretending to share its values and perspectives while cunningly planning to reveal his true nature only days after he was granted tenure? It looks that way.
Clearly, Yeshiva would never have granted Mr. Ladin tenure had it known he was a freak; the timing of Mr. Ladin’s jack-in-the-box announcement of his intended anatomical makeover suggests that Mr. Ladin also knew that Yeshiva would have denied him tenure if he had dealt with them honestly. Everyone involved understands that Mr. Ladin’s continued exhibitionism may adversely affect student enrollment and alumni donations. Yeshiva wants to send the world one message; Mister Ladin is sending a very different message.
Where Will It Lead?
Larger questions present themselves. As the spiritual descendents of Dr. Frankenstein proliferate across the land, will there be an end to the fantasy fulfillment that surgeons are willing to provide? The depressing answer leaps out at us: Michael Jackson. Of course there will be no end. There are people whom surgeons have altered to look like the fantasy animal of the paying patient’s choice. One follow had his tongue split down the middle so that both halves could flit about in different directions. Want eyes like a cat – just ask. Will that be Visa or MasterCard? Add some colorful embellishing tattoos and you can look like a fish.
If the primary cause of HIV transmission among homosexuals is anal intercourse, then why not design an HIV resistant sex organ and have it surgically implanted? Why not design several? Pick the sex organ of your choice, gay guy. Why stop at just one? Why not have a national design competition to see who could design the most titillating, the most flattering, the most outrageous sex organ? Would these innovations improve public health; would they revolutionize prostitution? Would heterosexuals seek supplementary sex organs also? You bet! When surgeons went into the fantasy fulfillment business, natural design was tossed out the window and good taste became a nullity. My radio just announced that veterinarians in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia have decided that docking dogs’ tails and surgically altering their ears to make them stand upright is against their veterinarians’ code of ethics. It’s a relief to know that somewhere someone is standing firm for the biological integrity . . . of dogs.
Here in America, liberals with soft hearts and flabby intellects were quick to junk the traditional definitions of man and woman. Oxymoronic locutions such as “gay man” and “Lesbian woman” proliferated, as though the adjective did not nullify the noun. When the novelty of “transgenderism” caught their fancy, liberals were quick to apply the words man and woman to any under-construction transsexual or even to anatomically intact males and females who simply claimed to really be humans of the other sex.
When a child insists that his dog is really a pony, we call that magical thinking. When a liberal calls a guy in a dress “a woman” and tells us that “she retains the most prominent part of her manhood” we can only conclude that liberals are childlike. That’s why the preservation of civilization should be left to the traditionalists. Some call them the conservatives. I call them the adults.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2008
October 10, 2008