Should the Government Allow Gender-Affirming Care?

For a while, I was thinking with regards to so-called gender affirming care. I'm not exactly sure even what terminology to use. It's, it's, it's what? It's surgical mutilation, essentially. Yeah, hormonal manipulation and surgical mutilation.

Okay, should you have the right to do that to yourself as an adult? Yes, I thought. Sure, why not? Knock yourself out. But you know, I'm starting to wonder about that. There are two ways you can approach that. One would be, well, you might be able to request it, but that doesn't mean the surgeons should be allowed to provide it.

Oh sure, right? And I think they've actually showed their absolute inability and unwillingness to police themselves in that regard. That's just clear. And then it's also the case that you don't know the limits to what people are willing to do to themselves to stand out, and the answer to that is there are no limits.

So you saw the recent case in Canada, I presume where we have a diaper fetishist, because that's a fun class of people, um, who's just pursuing his own thing after all. Who wants to have a neo-vagina created somewhere down below, while maintaining his penis intact? And he couldn't find anyone skillful enough to perform that particular act of butchery on him in Canada.

Found someone in Texas and then sued the Canadian government, right, for paying for it. Right? And they, that's the key. And they're going to— that's the key, that's the key for me, right? So, all right, so at some point, I'm sort of thinking, no, we're done with all this. We're just not doing sex reassignment. I don't care if you're 90, right?

There's no surgeons that have the right to do that to another person. So now, if it's a slippery slope argument— well for me, it's sort of, for me, it's more like I've just had enough of this argument. I saw where this went. We started with this in 1960 something or rather with the first sex change operation, which I think was a dubious enterprise back then.

And the cascading consequence of this has been like the worst medical malpractice in maybe ever. Uh-huh, probably not, you know, 'cause ever is a long time and there's been some dark things done. But in terms of mass assault on children, it's certainly in the top two. But children are different, right?

Right, but, but that's the thing is that, you know, at what point does your— the perversity of your desire to go to hell in a handbasket your own particular way start to actually become in and of itself a social threat? Okay, well, well, yeah, but let's— but let's put the kids aside because the kids are a special case, right?

Right, and you got— then you got the problem of, you know, who gets to decide? The parent or the state? The easiest case to resolve and find agreement on are with adults. So let's ask this question: Is there anything that an adult, full adult, competent, should not be allowed to do to themselves if they're not imposing upon other people, not coercing them, not interfering with them, not taking their stuff?

And my answer is nothing. I can't think of anything. Now that does not mean that I think the state should be involved in running the healthcare system. I don't think they should be funding it. I don't think they should be providing services.

I mean, we shouldn't have, from my mind, we shouldn't have a public healthcare system. But, so if you take that away, it's like, in other words, you should be allowed to go if you can find a doctor to do this strange thing that you want done to yourself. And the doctor agrees of his own free will and you agree of your own free will and you're willing to pay the doctor.

As far as I'm concerned, the fact that I think it's weird and strange and wrong and harmful, I'm not the king. So I don't— I don't think my opinion about it has any relevance to it, and that applies to gender surgery, it applies to assisted suicide, it applies to prostitution, it applies to drugs, it applies to anything.

Because it's not my— it's not my life, it's their life and I don't want to impose. There's also the danger there of deciding who's going to make the judgment. It's not like it's a risk-free prohibition. There's no prohibition that's risk-free.

It's just the— see, the problem I've having with that more and more, Bruce, is that there's kind of no end to the number of monsters who are going to crawl out from underneath the woodwork, as we've seen. That's going to get worse. And so, you know, you say if you can find a doctor who will do that, I mean, I could— I would respond if I was making the contrary case is that there are things that if they were actually doctors, they wouldn't do, right?

Right. And so we already saw in Canada, I think, the removal of two fingers that was a month ago, could, right, because the person had a form of body dysmorphia and, right, claimed to be at suicide risk unless the fingers were removed.

Well, let's take it— let's take an easier one, then. How about assisted suicide? Now, there are three models of assisted suicide. The conservative one is no, can't do that, it's not moral, can't outlawed, no assisted suicide.

The progressive version is the one we have in Canada, which is it's publicly funded. The government provides it, directs it, supports it, promotes it, pays for it, and it comes with a free reign unicorn kill yourself, we'll help you. And they encourage it by not giving you timely service on other things that you really need so that your life becomes miserable, and so the best way out is to kill yourself.

That's untenable. Okay, I am not advocating that at all. The third version is the government has nothing to do with it. If you want to kill yourself with the help of a doctor, that is your business and I might not approve but it's got nothing to do with me.

Well, that's kind of where we were before the assisted suicide law practice. That's kind of where it landed, but the conservatives will not put up with it. Yeah, yeah, right?

So if I'm in my old age and I have some kind of difficulty and I'm not having any fun anymore, I want to be able to kill myself and I do not want to be under the thumb of conservatives any more than I want to be under the thumb of the woke. And this is the problem that we have between these two philosophies.

The conservatives portray themselves sometimes as virtue people. I've called them that— virtue people in the sense that they put virtue before freedom, and there's something to be said for that. So here's the way the argument goes: in order to be truly free in your own heart or your own mind, you have to be virtuous in your own heart.

You have to understand things, you have to have discipline, you have to understand the good, or some notion of it, you have to have faith in something in order to— it's even the purpose of freedom exactly. You have to have meaning so that you don't give into your base desires and your animal instincts.

Okay, but that's not about the law. And the conservatives, a lot of them anyway, say no, the law should make you behave virtuously. Yeah, enforced virtue. Enforced virtue. And my answer to that is, enforced virtue is not virtuous.

It's obedience. In order to be virtuous, you have to decide. You have to have free will to decide between dark and light, and if you don't have the choice, then the fact that you are made to behave in this way— right.

So part of the— like part of the reading of your more libertarian argument there would be— I guess part of the reason that I've often always believed that people should be allowed to go to hell in a handbasket in their own particular manner is because you're going to learn. You are going to learn.

That's right. And that's— and then you'll know. Absolutely. And that's the libertarian version of responsibility. Yes, right? Right.