WARNING! DISGUSTING AND EMOTIONAL AND DISTURBING AND CONTROVERSIAL TOPICS
So in the Dean Phillips thread I mentioned that Jordan Peterson now favors banning ALL transition surgeries, which my first reaction, as a libertarian (small “l”) is, no, if you’re an adult and you want this, no matter how stupid it is, go for it. Just don’t make me pay for it.
After listening to just the first ten minutes of this, I’m starting to see where Peterson is coming from. As long as the truth about these surgeries is suppressed, how can an adult make an informed decision?
Scott was 42 when he had the fake penis surgery. Anyone would assume he was mature enough to understand and consent, and he
was mature enough, but the medical community and media withheld information he needed for informed consent. Yet another reason the First Amendment is so important. In this case it is capitalist “greed” on the part of the gender reassignment industry that is to blame, but it is vastly enabled by the sick transgender activist movement which has wormed its way into the leftist ideological propaganda machine. Without that part, the truth about these surgeries would quickly come into the open.
But the problem with simply banning these surgeries for everyone is that the right has the tendency to go to the extreme, making problems for people who aren’t the targets of the policy. My biggest beef with the right at the moment is the movement to ban IV fertilization. The issue is that the fertilized egg is now a full set of human DNA and in order to produce one live baby, you have to sacrifice a few more of the zygotes. The right, being pro-life, considers this equal to abortion.
My objection to that characterization is that rather than subtracting a human life as the net result, which regular abortion does, you are actually
adding a human life to the world by using this process, that otherwise would not exist. Yes, you must create and then sacrifice one or more other zygotes to get one to survive, but in this case they are actually literally a “clump of cells”. Unlike what they become just a few short weeks after implantation into a womb. They are not differentiated cells; there is no central nervous system so no possibility of consciousness. Yes they have a full set of human DNA but so does any one of your skin cells: that doesn’t make a discarded skin cell a “person” with a right to life.
I don’t
like the idea of needing to make several zygotes to get one of them to grow into a baby, but that’s where the technology is right now. I’ve heard conservatives suggest you should just make one and implant it, but they lack understanding of how this works. If you try to do it that way the odds are you will need to make many attempts before you’re successful if ever, and women have a clock running out on their ability to carry a pregnancy. To me the goal is to make more babies. IVF is doing that. Leave it the hell alone.
I suspect that what’s got a bee in the bonnet of the conservatives against IVF is the fact that gay couples are now using it to have children. To that I say, you are against abortion, so you are fine with a low IQ welfare mom in the ghetto having the unwanted baby who will grow up to be a criminal thug, but you have a problem with a gay couple who might be well off tax paying citizens having a baby. I admit that’s not ideal: I firmly believe children are best raised by one man plus one woman in a committed marriage. But I’m talking about public policy and the unintended consequences. The majority of IVF clients are heterosexual married couples with financial means. You ban abortion
and IVF, you get fewer children of traditional straight couples, and more children growing up without fathers in poverty.
Anyway how this relates to gender surgeries, is if we were to ban these surgeries for adults, what about the soldier who had his junk blown off in war? What about men with penile cancer who would like some sort of package approximation rebuilt? Oh we can make exceptions for that; well that didn’t work out so well for banning the abortion pill. They made exceptions for miscarriage, but in the real world women ended up unable to get the pills to treat miscarriage because of doctors’ legal fears. They had to let the dead baby rot inside them for a while and then undergo surgical removal. This damages a woman’s ability to try for another pregnancy. If the goal is to have more babies, and I think that should be the goal, we need to be very careful not to address these matters with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel.
I have the same reservation about Peterson’s proposal to ban transition surgeries for adults. But if I had to vote on it right now I might well vote to ban, but I prefer dismantling the whole grip the left and their sick ideologies have on society right now.