Inside the Transgender Empire

Christopher Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. He has a well-researched essay here entitled “Inside the Transgender Empire”, that is based upon a lecture he gave at Hillsdale College. Rufo doesn’t pull any punches and calls the transgender movement out for what it is. It is worth reading in entirety.

“In 1818, Mary Shelley wrote the famous novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The premise of the book is that modern science, stripped from the constraints of ethics and nature, will end up creating monsters. “Trans-affirming” doctors are the post-modern version of the book’s protagonist, Doctor Frankenstein.”

Rufo details the origins of the transgender movement in elite academia and uncovers its proponents and financial backers. “The trans movement was hatched, then, on the fringes of American academia.” He gets deep inside the belly of the beast recognizing the attack on creation itself: “If men can become women, and women men, they believed, the natural structure of Creation could be toppled.”

Since Satan cannot direcly attack God, his next best option is to attack creation, focusing on the part of creation (humanity) made in the Image of God (Imago Dei.) “This is the great project of the transgender movement: to abolish the distinctions of man and woman, to transcend the limitations established by God and nature, and to connect the personal struggle of trans individuals to the political struggle to transform society in a radical way.”

A doctor with some sanity at a major children’s hospital warns what puberty blockers do to a child’s mind, body, and soul: “This medication is called a “gonadotropin releasing hormone agonist” and it comes in the form of monthly injections or an implant. And because it simulates the activity of this hormone, it shuts down the activity of the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus is this almond-sized structure in your brain, it’s one of the most primal structures we have, and it controls all the other hormonal structures in your body—your sexual development, your emotions, your fight-or-flight response, everything. . . . And I always think that if someone were to ask me, Where is it that you would look for the divine spark in each individual? I would say that it would be somewhere “beneath the inner chamber,” which is the Greek derivation of the term hypothalamus. To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.“

Notice carefully what he says: “To shut down that system is to shut down what makes us human.“

Rufo calls out the transgender movement for its deceit with respect to the permanent devastating effects of transgender “treatment”: “And despite frequent claims to the contrary, this is not a temporary or reversible process.”

Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transgender professor currently at the University of Arizona, recognizes “transgender power as a spiritual resource.” One is reminded of Paul’s admonition in Epg 6:12 – “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Stryker is not hesitant to affirm his movement as a nuclear strike against “traditional family values’” and represents a “hegemonic oppression” of nature itself.

Rufo uncovers the fatal connection between transgenderism and nihilism: “A less common but more symbolically apt surgery performed by Peters and his colleagues is known as “nullification,” in which a smooth, continuous skin covering from the abdomen to the groin is created following a castration or vaginectomy. In other words, the genitalia are replaced by nothing. Nullification surgery is the perfect symbol for the ideology behind the trans movement: the pursuit of the Latin nullum, meaning “nothing”; or the related nihil, the root of the English word “nihilism.” Trans ideology is animated by a profound nihilism that denies human nature and enables barbarism in the name of progress.”

Transgender activists prey upon the most vulnerable in society: the poor, the young, the uneducated and the mentally unstable. Rufo identifies victims as “kids from the Detroit ghetto who suffer from high rates of family breakdown, substance abuse, mental illness, and self-destructive behavior. As such, one might suppose that they are especially vulnerable to the claim that gender transition will solve all their problems.” Trangender activists represent the target of Christ’s warning in Luke 17:12 – “It would be better for them to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around their neck than to cause one of these little ones to stumble.”

“Jennifer Pritzker, Maureen Connolly, Blair Peters, and their ilk occupy the heights of power and prestige, but like Doctor Frankenstein they will not be able to escape the consequences of what they have created. They are condemning legions of children to a lifetime of sorrows and medical necessities, all based on dubious postmodern theories that do not meet the standard of Hippocrates’ injunction in his work Of the Epidemics: “First, do no harm.” Although individuals can be nullified, nature cannot. No matter how advanced trans pharmaceuticals and surgeries become, the biological reality of man and woman cannot be abolished; the natural limitations of God’s Creation cannot be transcended. The attempt to do so will elicit the same heartbreak and alienation captured in the final scene of Mary Shelley’s novel: the hulking monster, shunned by society and betrayed by his father, filled with despair and drifting off into the ice floes—a symbol of the consequence of Promethean hubris.”

Read Rufo’s graphic descriptions of the barbaric surgeries and chemical experimentation that plastic surgeons perform on children. The fact that degreed medical doctors are capable of such atrocities, indicates an appalling lack of ethics training today in medical schools. What is happening in the transgender movement is akin to the savage “medical” experiments the Nazis performed on victims during the Holocaust. If the culture ever comes back to sanity from its exploratory descent into nihilism, it will be horrified that people could think chemical and surgical transgender “treatment” were both morally right and good . . . they may well conclude that participating “doctors” should be rightfully prosecuted as were the Nazi “doctors.”

As I remarked in my series on moral reasoning, “Ethics are essential because Orthopraxy (right conduct) determines Orthodoxy (right belief.) Your ethical behavior will have tremendous impact on your theology. We shape our theology to justify our behavior. Bad ethics will ultimately manifest in bad theology.” The theology of transgender activists is rotten-to-the-core. Rufo is correct that “they will not be able to escape the consequences of what they have created.”

Next in part 4 is “Transgenderism, Nihilism, and Frankenstein”

Part 4 is here