In this week’s New York Magazine cover story — splashed with the headline “Freedom of Sex” — Pulitzer Prize-winning trans writer Andrea Long Chu argues the “Moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.”
With the freedom to change things, I’d like to amend that sentence to reflect reality. The essay is “A disgusting, gruesome, immoral case for child mutilation.”
The piece advocates for impressionable and confused minors to be treated as free-thinking adults, capable of making body- and life-altering decisions.
“We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this comes from,” writes Chu.
Never mind that it’s simply impossible to truly change your sex. But pushing experimental medical intervention, with irrevocable changes, to a population that isn’t allowed to legally get a tattoo or vote? Evil.
Chu, however, is concerned with some make-believe consent quandary — conflating a natural process with pumping artificial hormones into the body.
“If children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic upheaval in its own right,” she writes.
In the piece, Chu shows contempt for powerful journalistic voices including Abigail Shrier, Bari Weiss — whose The Free Press gave a platform to Washington University Transgender Center whistleblower Jamie Reed — and Jesse Singal, who started covering detransitioners back in 2018. Not spared is the New York Times, which has finally started covering this topic with a critical eye.
But only a day after the predatory polemic was published, there was a seismic shift in the direction of sanity. England’s National Health Service announced it would no longer prescribe puberty blockers to children under the age of 18, calling it a “landmark decision.”
Other countries, such as Norway and Sweden, have also pumped the brakes on medical intervention for minors grappling with gender dysphoria. But the US is still a nation divided on common sense.
At least 22 states have policies against what is dubbed, “gender affirming care,” yet it remains a political hot potato.
The news out of the UK landed on #DetransAwarenessDay. On X, many people who changed their gender only to revert to their biological sex shared their heartbreak, scars and aching regret.
The poignancy was not lost on Chloe Cole, a leading voice among the growing number of detransitioners.
The 19-year-old California native posted “Happy detrans awareness day!” above a news story about the NHS decision.
At 13, Cole — born female — went on puberty blockers and, at 15, she had a double mastectomy. But by 16, she realized it was a grave mistake.
Cole has testified before Congress, calling herself, “a victim of one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of the United States of America.”
Other detransitioners also mourned on X, with some sharing photographic evidence of their ill-fated decisions and revealing life-changing ramifications like infertility.
Many noted they had been led astray by adults online — swindled by gender hustlers.
“Well, R.I.P. the woman I could have been if the trans cult didn’t get to me,” writes a woman who identifies as a “detrans woman from Hungary,” next to a photo of herself as a little girl.
Celine Calame, a female who started identifying as a boy when she was a teen, wrote on the Reality’s Last Stand Substack: “Taking cross-sex hormones is like trying to install a Windows operating system onto an Apple computer. You can certainly do it, but the machine is not equipped to deal with that.
“I was groomed by adults online and felt trapped in my decisions.”
Abel Garcia wrote that trans rights activists “convinced me to transition after I was sexually abused & dealing w/ my confusion as a young man.”
These accounts are a stark reminder that trans activists are hawking distressed kids a bill of goods — a false promise that they can find true happiness by changing everything about themselves.
Just like you can never change your sex, you can never put the pieces back together; it’s impossible to return to some status quo antebellum before you waged war on your own precious body.
As these transitioning, and detransitioning, kids come to terms with their new reality, guess who will not be there to comfort them? Activists like Chu care aboout an agenda, not individuals.
No, it will be up to family, friends and parents — the very people Chu seemingly aims to push away.
The truth is, she and her army of ideologues are losing the battle.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
