Follow the Yellow Brick Road
This road to hell is paved with good intentions and if it seems too good to be true, it probably isn't true.
I presume that most readers here will be familiar with the story by Frank Baum called “The Wizard of Oz”. To be honest, I’ve never read the book, but have seen the movie multiple times, starting as a young child. It tells the story of Dorothy, who in the movie version was played by Judy Garland (another young girl led down the garden path of medicalization by the adults around her who were making a profit at her expense). As a result of a storm, Dorothy found herself in a new land that she had never seen before, alone except for her faithful dog Toto.
However, Dorothy soon got support and information about how she could go back and made friends along the way who helped her to achieve her “heart’s desire” to return home, with a new appreciation of the life that she feared she had lost forever.
There are many parallels between Dorothy’s story and the journey that many of today’s young children are embarking on. Except the destination of today’s youth is not to go home to the safe harbor of family, but to escape the very bodies they were born with in the hope of finding their “authentic” selves. As if something that has been created by outside forces for profit and to enforce a deliberately destructive ideology is more real than the body you will inhabit for your entire lifespan.
“Trans kids” are an adult invention
Children are not born with any sense of gender or sex. Gradually over time, as they see other family members’ bodies they figure out that not everyone looks the same or is made the same way. They accept this as normal because that’s what children do; whatever they experience in their lives is accepted by them without question. Most children know if they are a boy or a girl by the time they are celebrating their third birthday.
For obvious reasons, adults dominate the lives of children. Parents have an obligation to keep their children safe and most parents have a desire to nurture and care for their very dependent offspring. This is normal mammalian behavior and is required for the survival of a species. The main difference between homo sapiens and other mammals is the length of time required for parental involvement. We are really slow to mature and the complexities of modern life mean that active parental involvement in children’s welfare can last for as long as 20 years.
Part of normal human development is a vivid imagination; it is the basis for all forms of art and literature. Children are especially tuned to fanciful self made worlds, which can be an enhancement or an escape from the reality of their lives. Tea parties replete with pretend tea served to teddy bears and games with made up rules are a normal part of childhood.
Pretending to be something you are not is also normal for small children (and it would seem, some adults). I can remember being a horse, a mother, and the captain of a pirate ship at various times and I suspect that most of you too, can remember games played both with others and by yourself. Kind adults acquiesce with children; only a churlish parent would point out that teddy can’t drink because he’s not real. Even better is when parents collaborate with their children, following their lead and playing along.
Unfortunately, some parents today believe that imagination is the same as reality, with the same value to be followed even if the consequences are impossible to bring about.
Because although there may be an untold number of “genders” there are only two sexes and no one gets to choose from these in deciding which sex they are. This is decided by the race at conception; if the sperm with the X chromosome wins you will be a girl, and if the sperm with a Y chromosome gets there first, you are a boy. You can’t have ‘a boy’s brain in a girl’s body’ (or vice versa) and absolutely no one in the entire history of the world has been ‘born in the wrong body’.
Because children take their lead from their parents, their entire sense of worth and value is molded by these important adults. Children have an innate sense that their survival is dependent on the care of others and will go to great lengths to keep their parents involved in their lives. So if a rough and tumble, tree climbing girl is told that she might really be a boy (because “only boys like doing this”), this will be a pivotal moment in her development. And the same for the boy who prefers to play with dolls over trucks, who is asked to consider whether he is “really” a girl.
Rather than the adults broadening their ideas about what girls and boys are (and in the jargon of the day, “affirming” children as they are), it’s the adults here who are playing pretend.
Social transition: the first paving stone on the yellow brick road
Socially transitioning a child is the first step on the journey to the mythical land of Oz where apparently you can change your sex at will. This is the easiest step to achieve, given the largely androgynous appearance of young children.
From infancy until puberty, we rely on a combination of given names, hair styles and clothing to determine the sex of children we don’t know because until the emergence of secondary sex characteristics, our bodies are all much the same. It is only with the advent of puberty that the dimorphic nature of our reproductive capacities become manifest.
So, what is the problem when children are allowed or encouraged to pretend to live as the opposite sex?
The problem is that studies demonstrate that social transition is actually a treatment that helps to set in place a sense of gender dysphoria, which means that far from being a benign “be kind” thing to do, it is an iatrogenic intervention that leaves a child unprepared for natural puberty. It does not promote wellness in children, it does the opposite by locking in delusional thinking. Even if a child comes to feel that they maybe are not “trans” after all, how can they backtrack from a position they are so invested it and has made them feel special, perhaps for the first time ever?
It also presents them with developmental challenges that their immature brains are totally unequipped to deal with. As this article explains, socially transitioning a child does not set them up for success as their natal self, but prepares them for failure as a sex they can never achieve.
Puberty blockers: the second intervention on the road to nowhere
“Puberty blockers” is the street name for a class of powerful drugs that impact all bodily systems through directly changing hormone levels created and secreted through our brains. Gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogs (GnRH) have a wide variety of uses in clinical practice.
In women they are used to treat various conditions including endometriosis, some reproductive tumors, and precocious or delayed puberty. They are part of the IVF protocol.
They are used to chemically castrate male sex offenders, and are part of the protocol in treating men for prostate cancer.
In transland, puberty blockers are presented as an important step on the journey to your new, “real” self. God forbid that natural puberty should overtake the process of altering your body to an unachievable goal. Puberty blockers are presented not so much as a major intervention, but merely as a “pause” to give a child “time to think” about which sex they want to be.
Unfortunately for the trans advocates, puberty is a wee bit more complex than they seem to realize. Blockers stop development; they don’t pause it. And they halt all maturation to adulthood, which includes a few items that adults need to live a healthy life. Things such as incorporating enough bone density to keep our skeletons from randomly breaking for the next six or seven decades and making sure we have a fully matured brain with enough well-developed executive functioning to cope once our parents are no longer doing much of our thinking for us.
And how must it feel for that blocked child to watch their peer group growing up around them, doing all those teen things like getting taller, forming romantic relationships and experimenting with their sexuality, while they remain in the body of a child, with a child’s level of brain functioning? Children lack the capacity to give informed consent to puberty blockers because of the very features they constrain, especially around brain maturation.
Puberty blockers are also the first concrete step in irreversible sterilization. Gametes cannot be ‘harvested’ and saved for later in prepubertal children because it is the process of puberty which prepares bodies for future reproduction. Prior to puberty, there are no viable eggs or sperm to collect.
And for young children who take puberty blockers until they are old enough to go onto cross sex hormones, one pleasure of adult life will forever be denied to them: orgasm. How can anyone expect a young child who has no understanding of what constitutes an adult sex life to give consent to never having sexual relations that are comfortable or satisfying?
Puberty blockers are a life altering intervention. There is no reason, excuse or justification to harm healthy young bodies by unnecessary interventions in the pursuit of an unreachable goal.
Cross sex hormones: you can’t fool Mother Nature
Nearly 100% of children who commence on puberty blockers will proceed to what are referred to as “cross” sex hormones.
“Cross” in this terminology is being used in place of the more accurate word “wrong”. Because if you are a boy who wants to be a girl, you will be taking estrogen and if you are a girl who wants to be a boy, testosterone. Of course every human produces both estrogen and testosterone, but in very different quantities which are wholly dependent on whether you are a woman or a man.
It beggars belief that anyone could believe that taking massive doses of powerful hormones that your body is in no way designed to cope with won’t be harmful, but that seems to be the view of trans advocates.
Every cell in our bodies is coded as male or female and every cell is acting on and responding to hormonal influences. This is how we (and every other mammal on the planet) are designed to work.
Under the influence of wrong sex hormones, the correct secondary sex characteristics that adults acquire will be lost forever. Girls will not grow breasts (news flash: breasts are not there for the purpose of men to ogle, they are there so that babies survive), their eggs will not mature and their overall health is imperiled as their bodies become menopausal many decades in advance of the time they are designed to go through this.
Boys will grow breasts, but their penis will remain at the child size it was before they started their drug “therapy” and they will be much shorter than they were supposed to be.
Administration of cross sex hormones causes bodies to become increasingly unhealthy, while never achieving the stated goal of “changing” one’s sex.
These are not short term therapies, but create a life long commitment to living your life as a permanent medical patient because bodies fight to return to homeostasis. Bodies are what we are and no amount of wrong hormones will change this, ever.
“Gender reassignment” surgeries: have we got to Oz yet?
Because I’m coming from the perspective of birth and breastfeeding, I’m not going to spend much time on surgical procedures that men embrace in their quest to “become” women. A few observations though are in order.
From a surgical point of view, altering the appearance of men so they can go out in womanface is not difficult. Slap some silicone under the skin, on top of the ribs and hey presto, boobs! Some men may have facial feminization surgery to soften the look of their face, some laser hair removal or an op on their vocal cords to change the pitch of their voice, but getting something to stuff in a bra is quite often enough. Fortunately, growing your hair long doesn’t require any medical assistance.
Roughly 85 - 97% of trans women retain their male genitalia. And they wonder why we don’t want them in our private spaces! And remember those men whose penises will be forever at the size they were at age 11? For the few men who do proceed with “bottom surgery”, creating a neovagina is difficult for them as the procedure normally inverts the penile skin into a created cavity that is called a “neovagina”. But those teeny penises don’t even approach the amount of material needed for the job so some skin or a bit of intestine will be used to line the neovagina instead. As you can imagine, this is not going to be anything like the real thing that actual women are born with.
Ongoing problems, rather than being rare, are expected. Online forums provide a space for men to talk about their regrets about their decisions to have surgery which is so incredibly mutilating. And of course, once that penis is gone, it is gone forever.
For women it’s a lose/lose proposition. For those who have been sterilized by taking the wrong hormones, they will have lost the ability to ever become a mother by getting pregnant and birthing their baby. I know that motherhood is not a desire that all women have, but after working with women for 40 years I also know the bottomless grief of women who either discovered too late that they would never be able to have a baby or left this too long to make pregnancy a reality.
No nine to eleven year old girl can state with eternal certainty that she “never” wants to become a mother.
For those women who mature into their gender and stop hormonal mutilation before permanent damage is done, successful pregnancies can still be achieved, but the next step in women’s reproductive cycle, breastfeeding, will be impossible if she has had the most common surgical procedure that is performed on trans men: “top surgery”. This benign phrase hides the reality of the brutality of what this involves.
“Chest masculinizing surgery” is the removal of most of the fat and glandular tissue of the female breast. The nipples are removed and either reattached in a more masculine placement or in some cases, not put back at all.
You cannot breastfeed a baby after this surgery.
Those who have gone down the path cleared by the trans lobby are lying to women when they state that breastfeeding (or “chestfeeding”) may be a bit tricky, but hey, every drop counts! Unfortunately, babies need more than a drop of milk to eat every day to thrive. This can lead some women who choose to birth as trans men to 1) blame someone else for their decision to mutilate themselves and 2) rely on the kindness of other women to come to their rescue and spend their own time being the woman they have scorned by becoming a “dad” through pregnancy. Spending hours spent sitting attached to a breast pump is no picnic when you are doing it for your own baby, but to do it for a woman who denies their own sex is beyond altruistic. That “trans dads” are trying to source breast milk is presumably because even they understand the importance of mother’s milk in optimizing the lifelong health of their babies.
But by far the largest cohort of ex-trans men having babies are women who are filled with regret, sadness and the profound guilt that accompanies any action that causes harm to another person; in this case their babies who they are unable to breastfeed.
One consequence of mother-to-mother support groups abandoning their mission to support mothers to breastfeed is an unhealthy quest to support “everyone” to breastfeed babies.
In the Olden Days, “everyone” was understood to be well, just those who had the physiological capacity to breastfeed (that is, women), but now “everyone” means both sexes (and includes breastless women). Both La Leche League International (LLLI) and the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) have abandoned women as mothers (because “not everyone who has a baby identifies as a woman or mother”) and are actively promoting male lactation.
Their volunteer mother supporters who protest this are sanctioned, kicked out or lied to. How can these organizations reconcile both telling their volunteers that they are only supposed to give support and assistance around the normal course of breastfeeding (because that’s all that their own experience and training is based on), while at the same time requiring them to work with men and pseudo-men? What is “normal” about this?
Arriving at last: when Oz turns out to be a false horizon
The last step of the process in the transgender experience is probably the worst. Because by the time you have arrived here, the realization is dawning that your hoped-for life is a mirage.
You are now a lifelong medical patient.
The thing about any quest for the impossible is that the most important component is hope. As long as you are moving forward, as long as you feel that progress is being made, you can put up with a lot. A lot of physical pain, a lot of psychic distress… just about anything really as you tell yourself that it will all be worth it in the end. As long as there is something more to hope for, you can see a happy future.
But when you finally reach the point at which nirvana should be evident and it’s not, what then? Regret and suicide are both reactions that are well documented.
Neither of these are surprising because transgenderism would appear to be the only mental health condition for which harmful drugs and mutilating surgeries are considered to be “treatments”. No anorexic teen has ever been treated with a restrictive food diet and a gym membership, but a 14-year-old girl who suddenly declares that she is really a boy will be put on massive doses of testosterone and booked in to get rid of those pesky female breasts.
At least Dorothy could go home again
At the end of the movie “The wizard of Oz” there is not a dry eye in the house as Dorothy tells her Aunt Em about all her adventures and how very happy she is to be home at last.
Unfortunately, for the children who are being sent down the yellow brick road that is the transgender journey today, this happy homecoming will not be possible. All the adults who support, affirm and lie to these children will have to live with the complicity of their words and their actions, but their suffering will be nothing compared with the psychological distress of those grown children who are unable to fully participate in the rich lives they could have lived as intact adults, rather than pretend simulacrums of the opposite sex.
Brilliantly written....so very very sad on them poor kids.
Heartfelt and divinely written.