Leftism Promotes Ideology Over Kids’ Welfare

What is it about leftism that makes its adherents go to the mattresses to preserve the infrastructure that allows minors to have irreversible medical interventions performed on them that many children later will regret, an attitude in sharp contrast with medical practice worldwide outside the U.S.?

Currently, the fate of HB 648 from the recently-concluded Louisiana Legislature regular session hangs in the balance. The bill would disallow prescribing of drugs or surgery designed to alter the physical sex of a minor.

The state of science at present on the issue notes that of the small but growing proportion of all children who begin medical interventions to alter their sex about 30 percent within a few years want to stop, if not reverse, it. Unfortunately, the effects are irreversible, causing major psychological trauma for those who want to stop the transition and major physical trauma – and even for those who don’t – that has significant psychological impacts as well.

Additionally, there is a significantly higher proportion of mental disturbance among those wishing to transition that suggests this desire is an outgrowth of underlying mental states unrelated to identification by sex, so interventions treat symptoms, not the disease. Further, there is still much unknown about this phenomenon, and much of the research that purports to support the view that any expressed uncomfortableness with physical sex by children must initiate medical interventions to change this has significant validity problems that severely limits its use.

Those are the scientific facts that lead objective observers to support extreme caution in allowing humans lacking physical and emotion maturity to have hormonal manipulations and radical surgery performed on them. Yet leftist ideologues, as they are doing in Louisiana including Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, are putting up fierce political resistance to measures like HB 648.

That’s because of the core tenets of leftism. In the area of personal conduct, conservatism posits that over the epochs of human existence there has become recognized an optimal set of values by which to organize society and reflected in individual behavior. Conceptualized as a set of universal truths often reflected in religious belief, government is to codify these into law.

By contrast, leftism declares all “truths” contingent on individuals and their contexts in time or space, or that there are no universal truths – an inherent self-contradiction since that very statement itself articulates a universal truth. To use another social issue as an example, conservativism believes the truism that life begins at conception and so people cannot decide whether to abort an unborn human unnaturally as that violates another universal truth, that the taking of life intentionally outside of self-protection violates natural law. But leftism believes whether abortion is murder is up to the individual to decide, given her unique placement in the universe.

Leftism, then, is an exercise in denying fixed realities. And, along with the other genetically-defined trait of human existence of race/ethnicity, sex is as fixed and immutable as one can find in a human. Sexual characteristics that stubbornly resist alteration mocks liberal faith that truths are what people choose for themselves, not things that simply are that we must adjust to.

Thus, in organizing human interactions, the left insists we use “gender” rather than sex as one of its concepts, where physical sex must bend to the will of the psychological gender. And, as a bonus, with children this process attacks what the left sees as a retrograde and rival force in preventing imposition of itself onto the polity: the family. No other institution so effectively resists leftism’s indoctrination attempts, so it supports vigorously any sociological superstructure that cuts out the family such as having schools propagandize gender identity among youth to unmoor the fixed.

Therefore, despite the harm that too often results from medical interventions to change a minor’s sex that includes a significant portion who regret it, involving people not emotionally developed enough to give informed consent, the left is full steam ahead on facilitating this and willing to go to fanatical lengths to support its continuance despite the self-evident harm that occurs. After all, to the left human welfare always is secondary to fulfilling its ideological imperatives.