On Trans Lunacy

It is time to call out the trans revolutionaries:

There are plenty of lunacies out there. The latest book by J. Budziszewski lists 30 of them. If you are not familiar with this important American philosopher, I have discussed him before. And given that I have most of his 20 books, it is clear that I believe he is well worth being aware of: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/08/17/notable-christians-j-budziszewski/  

In his brand-new volume Pandemic of Lunacy (Creed & Culture, 2026), he looks at the prevailing madness that has overtaken much of the West. One should not be surprised that trans insanity is one of the lunacies he focuses on. Chapter 14 examines the lunacy that “Manhood and womanhood can take any shapes that we wish”.

Budziszewski starts the chapter by making two observations:
-“Plainly, some aspects of the roles men and women play really are variable”.
-“Equally plainly, some people are uncomfortable with their sex”.

He goes on to discuss these matters in more detail:

As to the first observation – sex roles are culturally variable – there are limits to cultural variation. Psychological research shows that many sharp differences between the sexes hold consistently across countries, educational levels, ages, and years in which the research was conducted. And guess what? The contrasts correspond closely with traditional views of sexual differences – for example, concerning average levels of aggressiveness and nurturance. In fact, not only do we find the same differences everywhere, but we also find much the same views about these differences everywhere – even in countries like ours, where confessing that we hold them is slandered as prejudiced and retrograde. We can now confirm, by advanced sociological methods, that what everyone used to know without them is really true.

 

As to the second observation – some people are uncomfortable with their sex – thinking one is a member of the other sex doesn’t make it so. There is no scientific basis whatsoever for the idea that a biological man can be a woman, or that or biological woman can be a man, or that one can change into the other. All the evidence for “transmen” really being men, and for “transwomen” really being women, comes down to the mere fact that they say they are or feel they are. How could a man who says that he “feels like a woman” know what a woman feels like anyway? He only feels what he imagines a woman would feel, or he feels a desire to be one.

He goes on to say this:

We are embodied persons. Our minds are parts of what we are, but so are our bodies. They are not just containers or prisons for our true selves, but aspects of them. Indeed, the brain is indelibly stamped male or female. Injecting hormones doesn’t erase the stamp, and general surgery doesn’t affect it at all; sewing a penis on a woman does not make her a man any more than sewing a trunk on a man makes him an elephant. Brain physiologists tell us that large parts of the brain cortex are thicker in women than in men. Ratios of grey to white matter vary, too. The hippocampus, which plays a role in memory and spatial navigation, takes up a greater proportion of the female brain than of the male brain….

Much more detail on all this is offered here, and then he continues:

External circumstances such as chronic stress, act on male brains differently than on female. Brain diseases also diverge in men and women. Even the neurological aspects of addiction differ between the two sexes.

 

[Writing in Psychology Today,] David Schmitt comments, “It is ironic that just when science is rapidly improving its fundamental understanding of sex differences and documenting the sometimes subtle ways that biology and culture interact, the progress has come under assault.” Yet there seem to be no limits to the delusion that manhood and womanhood are endlessly redefinable.

Budziszewski speaks of the arbitrary nature of the various never-ending gender lists being proffered by the trans activists, and then writes:

According to a widespread view, even if gender ideology is deluded, people can’t help how they feel, and therefore the path of compassion is to reassure them that their feelings are all right. This makes no more sense than if a patient told his doctor that he wanted to be intoxicated all the time, and the doctor concluded that his drunken self must be his true self, so that it would be unkind to discourage his drunkenness. Or if he told his doctor that he felt like a fox (some do say this!), and the doctor concluded that he must really be a fox, so that it would be insensitive to deny his inner fox-hood. Suppose the man then had the frontal lobes of his brain cut out, his limbs surgically altered for running on all fours, and his skin stimulated to grow a furry pelt, and was left in the wilderness to live in a burrow and eat mice –  living as what novelist Gene Wolfe calls a “zooanthrope.” Will this make him a fox? No, it would only make him a cruelly damaged human being. In the same way, a woman who has had hormone treatments and sexual surgery to resemble a man will not be a man, but a cruelly damaged woman.

 

Unfortunately, delusion has widening effects….

He looks at those harmful and damaging effects, and then concludes the chapter as follows:

Research shows that “transitioning” does not eliminate the very great problems of the person suffering from dysphoria about their sex – this despite popular media claims to the contrary. An important large study finds that post-surgery, transitioners have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Another finds that contrary to widespread claims that gender-confused persons who don’t “transition” are more likely to kill themselves, nevertheless, when other relevant variables are accounted for, “the suicide mortality of both those who proceeded and did not proceed to GR [gender-reassignment] did not statistically significantly differ from that of controls. This does not support the claims that GR is necessary to prevent suicide. Just as this book was going to press, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a comprehensive 409-page review of the evidence concerning paediatric medical “transition,” finding that evidence of benefits is “based entirely on subjective self-reports and behavioural observations, without any objective physical, imaging, or laboratory markers.” On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence about possible harms, including “infertility, sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret.”

 

Speaking of regret: One man who eventually had his “transition” reversed writes, “Nothing made sense. Why hadn’t the recommended hormones and surgery worked? . . . Why wasn’t I happy being Laura? Why did I have strong desires to be Walt again?”

 

Today, those who say such things are punished. As another man who sought reversal of his “transition” remarks, “Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative pariah.” Within hours of the release of the HHS report, it was already slammed as a politically motivated “fever dream.” At the mention of anything so vulgar as a fact, mental barriers drop like barred gates at castle entrances.

His chapter on trans lunacy, along with all the other important chapters on other equally problematic forms of lunacy, are a must read. Thank you J. Budziszewski for keeping us in the world of rationality and reality.

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