I certainly don't want to offer too many details for the sake of protecting her deserved anonymity. But when I was in college, one of the girls who was in our large friend group went through a terrible break-up. She had dealt with body image issues her entire life, and the manner in which this relationship dissolved, the things that were said, and how they were said, greatly exacerbated all of Satan's lies that he had been whispering in her ear for years.
We became very concerned as she descended into the throes of anorexia. She became increasingly reclusive, ashamed of her appearance. Eventually some of her closest friends staged what I might describe as a forced institutionalization. She was taken against her will to the hospital where she could get the help she needed.
That was two decades ago. The last I saw from her, she was married with 3 children, still skinny as ever, though I pray not haunted by those same demons.
I thought about her recently as I read a letter sent by President Biden's Justice Department to every state attorney general in the country, warning that the federal government would come after them if they denied minor children the ability to receive "gender-affirming care." For the uninitiated, that would mean an array of services – surgical, psychiatric, medical – all designed to "affirm" the trans identity.
In real world terms, that means giving a young boy puberty blockers if he is convinced he is a girl. It means adopting policies that allow girls in men's restrooms and vice versa, as well as mandates requiring the use of preferred pronouns. It means hormonal therapy to children in early adolescence, estrogen to little boys and testosterone to little girls. It means "top" and "bottom" surgery on sex organs, including removal and cosmetic visual enhancements.
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki reiterated the Biden administration's position in a verbal warning to states run by conservative governors and legislatures who have written laws to prevent chemical castration and surgical mutilation of children in the name of trans-affirmation.
As I mentioned, watching all this unfold, I couldn't help but think about my former college friend dealing with a debilitating self-image that convinced her of something that was completely at odds with observable reality. She wasn't obese. She wasn't close to fat. Yet she was convinced that the fleshy part of her cheeks were fat deposits. She wanted them cut off but settled for walking around sucking them in whenever she would pass people.
I thought about her and wondered what might have happened to her if our culture at the time had decided that the loving thing to do, the accepting thing to do, the moral thing to do, was to accept and affirm her delusion. More than that, what if society said that she had to be given the ability to mutilate herself to the point where she found peace?
And what if in doing all this, in some sort of macabre Orwellian way, we referred to this approach as "image-affirming care"?
On the one hand, what my friend needed wasn't "straight talk" or "tough love." She was well beyond the ability to make any will-power driven course correction. On the other hand, she certainly didn't need acquiescence and agreement with her frightening delusion. Doing so would have left her irreparably harmed if not dead. What she needed was professional help.
The Biden Administration's current policy is to advocate for social compliance with gender dysphoric misconceptions, puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and delusion-affirming surgeries. Social compliance is reversible, but the others are not. And let's remember these policies aren't being implemented for college-aged young adults. They're being enacted for minors; for children.
Should our culture continue walking this path, I can't fathom the millstone that is being fashioned by heaven for our necks.
