The Transgender Children s Crusade | City Journal
The party was partly an escape from serious worries. Surgeons generally use tissue from the penis to sculpt a new vagina. But because Jazz had started puberty blockers at such a young age, the penis in question remained too small for the job. Doctors planned to take tissue from her stomach lining to complete the vaginal construction. The surgeon conceded that the surgery involved some risks, including internal hemorrhaging and damage to the intestine; sure enough, four days after the operation, Jazz experienced crazy pain. It seems what surgeons call her neovagina had split apart. To fix the problem, she would need two corrective surgeries.
Though she denied that it had anything to do with her transition, after her surgeries she fell into a depression and had to defer her college admission. Over the next two years, she gained 100 pounds due to a newly diagnosed eating disorder. Last we heard, though she had begun her college education, her libido is basically nowhere ; she has never experienced an orgasm and likely never will. This has been a real journey, hasn t it? her doctor said in an episode filmed after the surgery. That s one way to put it.
Jazz s journey captures many features of a strange turn in coming of age in America. It s not that many kids sign up for bottom surgery; on the contrary, those numbers remain extremely small. But trans and gender questioning minors have been joining a little-understood revolution in striking numbers. The gender journey, the search for one s authentic gender identity, is reshaping the biographies of the susceptible young into a radical and damaging new form. The crusade has been urged on by social and corporate media and their celebrity representatives, endorsed by a shockingly complicit medical establishment, promoted by educators, advanced by judges, and applauded by politicians at the highest levels. ( Incredibly brave transgender children, is President Biden s characterization.) Whether they realize it or not, supporters are showing a willful ignorance about child nature and endorsing views completely at odds with child psychology and legal and cultural traditions. In the process, they are undermining children s understanding of, and parental confidence in, the most basic human realities.