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Op-Ed: The Transgender Follies – More Madness from the Left

By Joan Swirsky Last updated Jan 18, 2025 Share with new partner:

Arizona mother Lindsey Graham went viral after she showed up to a school board meeting in a cat costume and makeup to mock what she says is the school woke agenda — Arizona mother Lindsey Graham went viral after she showed up to a school board meeting in a cat costume and makeup to mock what she says is the school’s ‘woke agenda’ supporting transgender school events, fundraisers, in front of the children.’

NEW YORK, NY – Growing up in the 1950s, I remember distinctly that all of my high school classmates were obsessed with figuring out who they really were, males or females. Every conversation, the special clubs we formed to talk about this issue, the heated arguments we had with our parents who didn’t “get” that the children they thought were boys or girls were not at all what those dinosaurs imagined sex and gender to be, and the total lack of understanding we got from the powers-that-be, including teachers, counselors, coaches, doctors. It was truly a horrible time to be a girl or boy.

All that my girlfriends talked about, starting about the age of 11 or 12, was having their budding (or in some cases, formidable) breasts cut off, and the hormones coursing through their systems somehow, magically, eliminated altogether. The same with the boys. “How can we cover up our Adam Apples,” they lamented. “How can we hide our penises and put barrettes in our hair and be the girls we were really meant to be?”

After high school, I married and became a young mother at 18. And my son told me that when he was in high school in the 1970s, the same thing took place, although more intensely. “All we talked about,” he told me, was “who was a real boy and who was a real girl, and how the tomboys could become real boys and the guys who liked cooking could become real girls.”

“But at least things had progressed,” he said, “and there were teachers and guidance counselors willing to encourage the girls who were tomboys and the boys who liked cooking to stick to the genders “they were born to be and not to allow parents to interfere.”

REALITY CHECK

Please re-read every word of the above four paragraphs and know that NOT ONE WORD of them is true! In the 1950s––and for centuries before and decades after––girls knew they were girls; boys knew they were boys and that was that.

And in the 1970s, the exact same thing. There was no such word as “transgender.” There was not one micro-syllable of a word that suggested girls with breasts and boys with penises weren’t, ahem, girls and boys!

There was not one case of a surgeon cutting off the breasts of 13-year-old and 14-year-old girls because these far-from-fully-developed females claimed they were “born into the wrong gender.” Nor were there medical doctors prescribing hormone blockers to teenage boys to stem the tide of their surging testosterone.

Same in the 1980s and the 1990s and the 2000s and the 2010s. In fact, right up until about 2015…. just eight years ago!

ARE THERE RARE EXCEPTIONS?

Of course. In the early 1950s, there was––at-that-time––the “strange” case of Christine Jorgenson who, after serving in the U.S. Army as George Jorgenson, traveled to Denmark and underwent a series of operations that converted her from George to Christine, after which she enjoyed a successful career as an author, lecturer and entertainer until she died at age 62.

Christine Jorgenson

In the mid-1970s, former athlete Richard Raskind, who was recruited by the NY Yankees and attended Yale University (where he was the captain of the men’s tennis team), ultimately became a successful ophthalmologist, and an officer in the U.S. Navy. He then became Renée Richards (French for “reborn”), practiced medicine, and died at the age of 88.

Renée Richards

More recently, there was the case of Bruce Jenner, the macho former Olympic gold medal-winning decathlete of 1976.

The handsome hunk married three times and had six children, but came out as a transwoman in April 2015 as Caitlin Marie Jenner.

According to Rachel Scheinerman, with a Master’s Degree from Harvard Divinity School, a Ph.D. in Rabbinic Literature from Yale University, and editor of My Jewish Learning, there were no fewer than eight genders recognized in the Talmud over 3,500-hundred years ago, including:

Zachar, male.
Nekevah, female.
Androgynos, having both male and female characteristics.
Tumtum, lacking sexual characteristics.
Aylonit hamah, identified female at birth but later naturally developing male characteristics.
Aylonit adam, identified female at birth but later developing male characteristics through human intervention.
Saris hamah, identified male at birth but later naturally developing female characteristics.
Saris adam, identified male at birth and later developing female characteristics through human intervention.

But leave it to that leftist bastion, the City University of New York (CUNY) to outdo the Talmud! This vast system, which includes 25 colleges and 243,000 students, lists 15 genders to choose from on one of their forms! As they say, can’t make it up!

WHAT HAPPENED?

Did the massive quantity of estrogens women started taking with the advent of the birth-control pill in 1960 produce future generations of boys who “feel” like girls? And did it produce girls with such an overload of estrogen that they somehow developed an autoimmune disease to their own hormones and now “feel” like boys?

Where, through sweat and urine, did this huge amount of estrogens go, which multimillions of women ingested not only with The Pill but with the Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) they took to quell the unpleasant symptoms of menopause? Did all this estrogen go into the soil and plants and foods we eat or into the water we drink? And what about the tremendous amount of xenoestrogens that are found in plants and also introduced into the environment by industrial, agricultural, and chemical companies?

I think about these questions when I remember watching the first gay pride march in New York City in 1970 on TV, featuring several hundred protestors. I didn’t quite understand the march…. was their goal to be accepted or did they simply want me and millions of other Americans to know what they did in bed? Yet today, such marches feature literally hundreds of thousands. Is this numerical explosion the result of the Atlantic Ocean’s worth of estrogens their mothers and grandmothers ingested over the past almost-65 years that permeated our ecosystem and found its way into their bodies?

Notice that every expert and doctor and scientist––and even “woke” companies like Budweiser ––and many other major industries that support and even promote transgenderism––never ever cite even a micron of hard scientific research that either affirms or disproves that this burgeoning phenomenon has a scientific basis at all. Indeed, where are the studies? Where is the empirical evidence? (https://charlesmcdaniel.co/)

Spare yourself the search…. there are none!

WHAT ARE THE NUMBERS?

Today, the Williams Institute – which says it conducts independent research on sexual orientation and gender identity law and public policy––asks: What Percentage of the Population is Transgender 2023 (worldpopulationreview.com)?

They state that transgender people are part of the LGBTQ+ community and there are 1.4 million adults who identify as transgender in the United States. About 0.5% of adults 18-24 identify as transgender, and 0.3% of adults 65 and older identify as transgender.

The Pew Research Center found that five percent of young adults claim that their gender is different from their sex and that “the share of U.S. adults who are transgender is particularly high among adults younger than 25,” then adds that “in this age group, 3.1% are a trans man or a trans woman, compared with just 0.5% of those ages 25 to 29.”

And a Reuters report found that diagnoses of youth with gender dysphoria have skyrocketed in the U.S. in recent years. While there were just over 15,000 cases in 2017, the number has shot up to more than 42,000 in 2021.

Nevertheless, those numbers––even if they add up to a million-and- a-half people––amount to a drop in the ocean when compared to our country’s overall population of over 330 million.

And yet, Transgenderism has become an industry!

THE LEFT’S LATEST FETISH?

Is this transgender shtick simply the Left’s newest fetish––the biggest one being the colossal hoax of global warming, er, climate change, as explained here by Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh, here by the late John Eidson and here by Catherine Salgado. In short, today, according to over 1,540 respected experts, there is no scientific data to indicate that climate change is anything but political propaganda.

Or is the real goal of the transgender movement to separate children from their parents in order to achieve their rosy vision of a Communist America in which these same children look not to their parents but to BIG GOVERNMENT as their caretakers, protectors, providers.

As journalist and author Linda Goudsmit explains in her recent blockbuster article: “Such children raised by the state become adults who want the state to go on raising them. When they’re hungry, the state feeds them, when they’re cold, the state shelters them and when they’re unhappy, the state tells them whom to blame. When their relationships fall apart or when their feelings are hurt, they turn to the state to soothe them with a dose of revenge.”

Revenge––or at least justice––is what increasing numbers of phenomenal female athletes want, now that trans males have, in essence, destroyed women’s competitive sports.

Just recently, as reported by Pamela Geller, a trans biological male marathoner defeated 14,000 women in a race after competing as man months earlier.

And we all know the case of Riley Gaines, the 12-time All-American swimmer with five Southeastern Conference titles, who was forced to share a locker room with and compete against the biological male Lia Thomas–– who ranked #554 competing against men––at the 2022 NCAA Women’s Swimming Championship. When Gaines tied with Thomas––down to the hundredth of a second––she was told that the NCAA hadn’t planned for a tie and that Thomas had to have the trophy for photo purposes.

Gaines is fighting this travesty. “The Democrat ‘Party of Science’ doesn’t believe in biological differences.” she says. “The ‘Party of Women’ doesn’t support women. Democrats are erasing our dreams in the name of wokeness.”

Then there is Austin Killips, a biological man who was awarded first place in the women’s category in New Mexico’s Tour of the Gila cycling race.

Not to omit that before he began taking experimental hormones, Laurel Hubbard competed in men’s weightlifting for New Zealnd at the 2020 Olympics and finished dead last. Nevertheless, Hubbard was named “sportswoman of the year” by New Zealand’s University of Otago.

No less an authority than Caitlin Jenner has recently launched the Fairness First PAC to keep men from competing in women’s sports. “Our advocacy,“ Jenner said, “is to align athletes with sports that are at a chromosomal or DNA level — not birth certificate,” adding that the transgender movement “ boils down to parental rights,” and its true goal is “destroying the family unit.”

Recently, Republicans in the House have introduced a bill that would ensure that biological girls will have an equal playing field. But Joe Biden is threatening to do just the opposite – to cement into law the destruction of women’s sports.

A MENTAL DISORDER?

Writer Larry Sand calls this extreme form of gender-bending a dangerous fad, but unlike the various eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia of the 1970s, which “were treated as physical disorders and serious mental-health problems,” Sand writes. Today, “they have been replaced by gender dysphoria, which is being used as a political cudgel by many with a nefarious agenda.”

Sand quotes Dr. William Malone, a board-certified endocrinologist: “We are dealing with what may be the biggest medical and ethical scandal of modern times. Transgender medicine is big business, and youth who are transitioning today will be medical patients for life…for the next 60-plus years.”

“We know we are living in a psychotic world,” writes Jason D. Hill in FrontPage.com, “when professors are explicitly told that under no circumstances can they ever utter these words in class: Men cannot give birth to children. We know the psychosis is real when two men who look and act like linebackers, but who identify as women, claim they are in a lesbian relationship because they identify as women…”

We know that the small identity alterations that trans people make are simply to change their names from Gordon to Gigi or from Jenny to Jasper. Much more extreme, according to urologist Maurice Garcia, MD, director of the Cedars-Sinai Transgender Surgery and Health Programs, males who claim to be females agree to the following:

Adam’s apple reduction.
Placement of breast implants (breast augmentation).
Removal of the penis and scrotum (penectomy and orchiectomy).
Construction of a vagina and labia (feminizing genitoplasty).

And females who claim to be males agree to:

Breast reduction or mastectomy.
Removal of the ovaries and uterus (oophorectomy and hysterectomy).
Construction of a penis and scrotum (metoidioplasty, phalloplasty and scrotoplasty).

In fact, it’s gotten so depraved in the Golden State that a California School Board voted to uphold a “parental secrecy policy” that withholds the gender transition of its students from parents.

Significantly, the American College of Pediatricians has stated that there is no evidence that transgender interventions are safe for children. “There is not a single long-term study to demonstrate the safety or efficacy of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries for transgender-believing youth,” the ACPeds.org stated.

“This means that youth transition is experimental, and therefore, parents cannot provide informed consent, nor can minors provide assent for these interventions. Moreover, the best long-term evidence we have among adults shows that medical intervention fails to reduce suicide.”

In fact, puberty blockers may cause depression and other emotional disturbances related to suicide, and they may cause permanent physical harm.

To compound the horror, many of the treatments children are subject to can have catastrophic side effects. For instance, Lupron, the number one prescribed puberty blocker––an experimental drug used to chemically castrate violent sex offenders––lists mood disorders, seizures, and “emotional instability” as side effects and warns prescribers to “monitor for development or worsening of psychiatric symptoms during treatment.

And studies indicate that females who receive testosterone can develop multiple psychiatric problems such as mania, major depression, and psychosis.

In The Left’s Disposable Transgender Children, Scott Hogenson writes: “Transgenderism was classified by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) as a mental disorder until 2012. But the behavior of transgenders mirrors the APA’s definition of delusions: “an often highly personal idea or belief system…that is maintained with conviction in spite of irrationality or evidence to the contrary.

“If a man maintains with conviction that he is a woman in spite of chromosomal, anatomical, endocrinological and other evidence to the contrary, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that man is delusional. This, according to a WebMD item reviewed by Dr. Smitha Bhandari, is “a type of serious mental illness called a psychotic disorder.”

Hogenson goes on to write that Leftists exploit these young and confused people because they are “politically useful.” Instead of dissuading them from obtaining the medical treatment they need, “they instead force them deeper into mental illness by promoting the lie that they can simply alter natural law on a whim.”

According to writer Laurel Duggan, adolescents with autism are over-represented in the youth transgender population, and some medical professionals attribute this to autism spectrum traits such as obsessive thinking, vulnerability to body image issues, and a sense of social rejection and isolation.

Dr. Susan Bradley, a Canadian psychiatrist, who began working with gender dysphoric children in the 1970s, said she believed most of the children who sought gender transitions had high-functioning autism and were being exploited by the medical industry.

As just one of many such victims, Chloe Cole, a young woman who underwent cross-sex hormones and a double mastectomy between the ages of 13 and 17 and now regrets medically transitioning, said that doctors failed to meaningfully address her autism spectrum traits and the ways they had an impact on her gender identity.

“There is also unpublished evidence that after a year on [puberty blockers], children reported greater self-harm, and the girls also experienced more behavioral and emotional problems and expressed greater dissatisfaction with their body—so puberty blockers exacerbated gender dysphoria.”

THE MEDICAL PROFESSION IS COMPLICIT

So, why on earth do doctors participate in these drastic measures and why do hospitals allow it? Here is now it works. When the administration in power––in this case the Biden regime––sends out a mandate to hospitals and doctors, they must comply or be deprived of all federal funds that literally keep most medical institutions and doctors’ practices alive.

Simple as that, exactly what we witnessed with the highly dangerous Covid19 vaccines, which found pilots experiencing blood clots in mid-air, thousands of young athletes dropping dead on playing fields across the world, huge numbers of teenage boys contracting myocarditis, a mountain of miscarriages, the horrific list of casualties goes on and on. Here, Dr. Joseph Mercola describes exactly how this malevolent scheme worked and works to this day.

Writer David Strom sums it up nicely when he writes: “Insanity is being normalized.”

To prove it, here are some recent headlines:

PARENTAL FAILURE

At 12 years old, Johnny starts each school day by downing two shot glasses of Scotch. When his mother dares to question him, he says that the liquor “gives me energy and makes me feel good. You know that Mom because you and Dad drink the same thing every night!” Of course, a sane mother would punish Johnny for transgressing house rules and take him to a psychiatrist. But a mother who worships the Feelings God would “respect” Johnny’s emotions and maybe even suggest that he substitute vodka to avoid detection.

Then there is 13-year-old Keisha, who has developed a habit of lighting fires because, she said, “it gets rid of my bad feelings and makes me feel good. Besides, Mom, you clapped and cheered when you and Dad watched Antifa and Black Lives Matter light cars on fire and smash windows and you even sent them money!” Of course, a sane mother would take the young girl to a psychiatrist, but the Feelings God worshipper would “understand” and let it go, maybe buy the young girl a portable fire extinguisher.

Let’s now take the case of 14-year-old Sebastian who has taken to wearing his sister’s skirts and his mother’s make-up. “I think I’m more girl than boy,” he tells his parents and I want to become a girl.

Of course, sane parents would tell their son––or daughter––that he or she is not old enough to make such a life-changing decision, that he can’t vote, and he can’t drive, and he can’t even get a paying job, so no! Wait until you’re 18 or 21 to see how you feel, and then explore your options.

But thousands of modern parents never say this to their preteen or teenage children. They simply accede to their feelings and their demands.

Why? Because they are afraid of their children! They don’t want to alienate them or make them angry. They want to be their pals, not their parents. They want to smoke pot with them, not discipline them and be the grown-ups in their lives who set boundaries, discourage blind conformity, exert authority.

All of these parents should be compelled to watch Lindsay Graham, a mother from Arizona, dressed as a cat, speak to her local school board. As described by Sloan Oliver, she greeted them with “meow, meow” and then asked if they believed she was a real cat. Not one person did because––ta da–– they knew she was not a cat.

And yet, displaying both weakness of character and moral cowardice, they unquestioningly believe a son who says he’s a girl and a daughter who says she’s a boy.

Few sane people could disagree with Elon Musk, who recently tweeted, “Any parent or doctor who sterilizes a child before they are a consenting adult should go to prison for life.”

FIGHTING BACK

You would think that women who call themselves feminists would be at the forefront of fighting for the young girls who are genuine victims of incompetent parents and depraved doctors, but with very very few exceptions, all we’ve heard from this retro cult is a thunderous silence.

Only word limitations require that I include a very short list of those who are fighting this abomination:

Lawyer Harmeet Dhillon, the Founder and CEO of The Center for American Liberty, has launched a landmark case against the hospitals and doctors who coerced Chloe Cole to transition to a “boy” at the age of 13.
Sharron Davies, a female Olympic swimmer, is leading a boycott against Nike after the brand partners with trans biological male to promote women’s sports bras.
The World Athletics Council has banned transgender track-and-field athletes from international competition.
11 States Move to Ban Child Sex Changes as Surgery Demand Soars.
More than twenty bills aimed at criminalizing child sex changes have been introduced at the beginning of the 2023 state legislative sessions, reports the Associated Press.
Republican state lawmakers are seeking to ban so-called gender-affirming care for youth due to the complete lack of quality evidence to support it, the invasive and irreversible nature of the interventions, and the sharply rising rates of detransition and regret.
Eleven states––Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia––have proposed legislation to protect children and adolescents from what one pediatric neurosurgeon recently called “an extraordinary medical atrocity.”
Lawmakers in South Carolina and Kansas seek to ban doctors from performing experimental sex changes on anyone under 21, while similar legislation in Oklahoma would ban sex changes for all youth under age 26.