Article: Butchers and Liars Reprise

Hi everybody. I want to read to you a piece I wrote recently called "Butchers and Liars Reprise." Not much more than a week ago, I wrote a rather incendiary piece for The Telegraph about the mutilation of young people in the name of so-called trans rights. I also read it on my YouTube channel and broadcast it, or soon will, on my podcast. The Telegraph entitled it "We Are Sacrificing Our Children on the Altar of a Brutal Far-Left Ideology," which wasn't too bad, focusing as it did on the analogy I developed between our current practices and the literal sacrifice of children to false gods.

I was somewhat more direct online, calling the piece "Doctors and Psychotherapists Butchers and Liars," which was about as blunt, let's say, as it was possible to be. I was very nervous when writing and even more when reading this piece; I was, after all, calling out the casual, pathetic, and cringing compliance of the psychotherapeutic community, and suggesting again, somewhat bluntly, that the sadistic and greedy surgeons, masked by an appalling moral self-righteousness, should be jailed for practicing their fiendish and ghoulish craft on children.

I have had my fair share of conflict publicly as a consequence of opposing the increasingly insistent encroachments of the radical, compassionate left, but I thought I might have finally signed my death warrant, culturally speaking, with the "Butchers and Liars" piece. But no, almost all the comments on the YouTube posting, which has been watched by 1.4 million people and responded to by 15,000, were positive. I removed some of the more purely asinine and juvenile criticisms, mostly of the "urine anti-Semitic nazi fascist, so you and the horse you rode in on" variety, and the YouTube comments algorithm removed some with similar intent. All things considered, however, positive.

The same thing happened on The Telegraph website, where some 1,200 comments have been posted. This came as a genuine shock, not only to me but to the editor I had been working with most closely at The Telegraph, who emailed me two messages. Quote: "I've had multiple conversations with fairly die-hard liberals over the past few weeks that this issue is leading them to flip-flop on the trans debate. They are usually ending up going too far in response to the trans kids situation and end up aligning with the right-wing fundamentalist Christians on trans as a whole. This is what it looks like when we say that the left will end up eating itself."

New quote: "It was remarkable the near-universal support this piece received and how high its readership figures were and continue to be. We expected more of a backlash from the usual suspects. It just underlines how the views of a tiny minority have infected the mainstream. As always, evil flourishes when good men stand aside. It's all part of the same authoritarian mindset and too many people being happy to let others make decisions for them—a symptom of a general absence of critical thinking or feeling of powerlessness in Western populations at large."

I fear perhaps there's a follow-up piece to be written commenting on this before we publish the next one, remarking on how well received your essay was and offering some solutions as to how to defeat the liars and butchers. I'm often struck by the yearning among readers for writers to offer solutions as well as insight. End quote.

Why are we butchering children if no one thinks it's a good idea? I would ask those reading and watching, listening to think very hard about that question and consider the mere fact that it has to be asked at all. Why are we butchering children if no one thinks it's a good idea? Well, there's a financial moral hazard at hand. Each so-called trans kid is a veritable lifetime gold mine for the pharmaceutical industry. All those hormones, and then all the drugs necessary to deal with the oft-catastrophic physical and psychological consequences of the surgery.

Then there's an issue, I believe, of the genuine sadism combined, in some cases, with personality disorder of a very pathological sort. There are always going to be a small percentage of medical personnel, including surgeons, who have a dark triad personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, just like there are in every other profession. But nurses, psychiatrists, and most of all, surgeons with those characteristics are in a prime position, first, to hurt others to gratify their own hellish impulses, and second, to do plenty of damage merely by being narcissistic.

Then there's the issue of the mob. For at least a decade now, anyone who spoke out against any manifestation of this modern hyper-compassionate constellation we know as woke idiocy was very likely to be vilified, ostracized, and shamed. To be threatened seriously on the employment front, to be tarred and feathered and transported out of town on a rail. I have conversed in detail and length with at least 100 people to whom this has happened, and it’s no joke. I would consider it roughly equivalent to being cursed with a serious illness. It hurts people a lot, as well as constituting a genuine threat to employment and personal safety.

This is particularly true of conscientious, reliable, dutiful, hard-working people who are also prone to guilt and who can be manipulated by the dark triad types because of their moral nature. And social media rewards this. Nothing goes viral like an accusation; nothing can make a nobody somebody like the accurate delivery of a poisoned dart. And if you add a bit of cowardice to the mix, and the willingness, even on the part of so-called mental health professionals, to take the easy short-term pathway forward, you have the makings of a sociological disaster.

The issue of the mob and its amplification by social media is further complicated by the disproportionate potential impact thereby generated of a tiny minority. I asked recently the journalist Andy Ngo, a very brave person (Asian and gay, for those of you who care), soft-spoken and gentle, but with a spine of steel. A good thing too, because Mr. Ngo has been beaten half to death three times by the compassionate radicals. How many active cells might be operating in the U.S., and how many full-time employees, so to speak, might make up the committed core personnel of those cells? He estimated 40 and 20.

40 times 20 is 800. 800 people in a population of 320 million—that's one in four hundred thousand. That's practically zero. But that's what the moderate Democrat types, skeptical of the very existence of Antifa, note essentially when expressing their doubts about the dangers of the radical fringe; that's the wrong conclusion.

What's the proper moral of the story? A very tiny minority, left unchecked, can exert a disproportionate and deadly influence on an entire society. It was hardly any communists, after all, who overthrew the Tsarist regime in Russia and instituted the many decades of vicious horror that characterized the Soviet world. All societies struggle with the problem of free riders, narcissists, Machiavellians, and criminals.

All societies struggle to control those who build false inflated reputations, who are willing to sacrifice others to their own selfish and narrow short-term interests, who will rob and steal to attain, and worst of all, who will burn everything to the ground just to gain the opportunity to dance demonically in the resultant ashes.

Then there's some genuine confusion: sex and gender are different. If you regard gender as an appallingly ill-defined term, people do differ widely in their temperament. There is a rather large percentage of women who have a masculine temperament and vice versa, and also a large number of intrinsically creative people who have more mutable identities. This cross-sex temperamental proclivity has long been noted; there are and have always been tomboys and more feminine girls.

My personality has many feminine features. I am agreeable, compassionate, polite, and have rather high levels of negative emotion, leading me, for example, to cry too easily. This did not at all mean that I was born in the wrong body, whatever that means, or that I was really a woman.

There's also confusion about the meaning of the term identity. Someone's identity is a very complex phenomenon. Some of that identity is by necessity socially negotiated. In a very basic sense, identity is the pattern of perception, assumption, and action an individual manifests while interacting with others. That is not all of what makes up identity, but it's not a bad start.

Identity is certainly not merely what someone feels from moment to moment. First of all, that's a very bad measurement, and psychologists in particular, who have fallen pathetically prey to the woke mob-enforced propaganda, once knew this. Second, what does "feel" mean exactly? And by exactly, I mean precisely, validly, reliably, scientifically.

Third, it is clear, as the developmental psychologist Jean Piaget took great pains to establish, that identity is and must be negotiated with others. That means knowing what you feel moment to moment is not your identity and can't be if you want to get along with others, and shouldn't be if you want to live without undue conflict and misery.

There are other reasons for our cowardice and mendacity and silence, but that's not a bad start. What should be done here is a concrete proposal. Are you listening, classic liberals? Are you listening, small-c conservatives? How about legislation absolutely ensuring the right of transitioned minors to sue their counselors and physicians when they attain legal adulthood?

And even more firmly, how about making the medical conversion of boys into girls and girls into boys illegal? We don't allow minors to get tattoos; they can't drink or drive, or both; they can't vote. And plenty of them are confused enough and hurt enough and starved for attention enough to drift into the hands of the villainous woke propagandists to allow the butchers to cut off their breasts and their balls.

We have already passed legislation in much of the Western world outlawing so-called conversion therapy, which was a pseudo-problem to begin with because it was virtually never happening, except among more explicitly fundamentalist counselors who were sporadically attempting to remediate— is there a more politically correct word?— homosexuality.

I don't know if anyone noticed, but the most severe form of conversion therapy is precisely the double mastectomies, removal of ovaries, uteri, and testes, and hormonal transformation of hapless children. So now a counselor or physician or social worker risks his or her license, reputation, and livelihood if she or he dares talk to a minor about identity.

But a butcher masquerading as a benevolent surgeon can castrate with impunity and be celebrated as a moral paragon. How about we stop doing this? It's wrong. Do I really have to say this? It's not just wrong; it's Auschwitz and Gulag-level wrong. It's Nazi medical experiment-level wrong. It's Unit 731-level wrong, and I'll put a trigger warning on that. Look up Unit 731 at your extreme peril, and I'm dead serious about that.

I might also touch on something else in closing before offering my practical solutions. I've been asking for years, and it's a genuine question that’s difficult to answer with sufficient precision: I've often posed the question to moderate leftists, even to true liberals—when does the left go too far?

The right goes too far when it becomes ethnocentric, nationalist, or racist. That was established, I would say, by William F. Buckley in the late '60s, and that has stuck. I personally believe that the left goes too far when it advocates for "equity," or even uses the term, which is the damnable and impossible to attain an accusatory attempt to establish equality of outcome.

But that seems to be too subtle a point for people, particularly on the left, to grasp. I say this without undue rancor; it certainly doesn't have the emotional weight, say, of objecting to lynching. The moderate Democrats with whom I have discussed this at length inevitably reject my suggestion. They, the radicals, just mean equality of opportunity. No, they don't.

That's why, folks, they use a different word. But even if some radicals do mean only that, the system of ideas that animates them knows better. The spirit that animates the system works to implement the forceful demolition of all differences of rank, competence, ability, and wealth, and we've seen where that leads, haven't we? Or is 100 million corpses not enough?

I was recently in Albania. Go to Albania, you despicable neo-communist moralizers, and see if you dare to continue your propagandizing and self-aggrandizement. Here, then, is something a bit more solid than when they promote equity as an answer to the question: when does the left go too far?

When it insists that the surgical mutilation of children has become a moral necessity. When it insists that believing that is a sign of moral virtue. When it insists that opposing such action is unethical or downright criminal. Anyone care to dispute any of that?

Practical solutions: psychologists, stop cowering in the woodwork. Announce that you will abide by the dictates of valid and reliable measurement that your profession so rightly insists upon, still on the statutes governing your behavior as clinicians and researchers. Drop your idiot and hypocritical adherence to this idiot and pathological notion of feeling.

Physicians, adhere to the Hippocratic Oath. Stop your colleagues from butchering children and lobby for legal responsibility to be returned to or imposed upon those who dare continue. Political leaders, take the legislative steps necessary to ban the surgical conversion of children and restore to the clinical and counseling professions the right to ask questions about identity.

It's on you folks, particularly you in those three groups: psychologists, physicians, politicians. Every castrated child, every young woman made artificially barren, every budding beauty so ashamed of her breasts that she lets a Machiavellian psychopath cut them off—have some courage and some fortitude. Man the barricades and keep the degenerates away from the children.