Inside the transgender empire by Christopher F. Rufo
The transgender movement is pressing its agenda everywhere. Most publicly, activist teachers are using classrooms to propagandise on its behalf and activist health professionals are promoting the mutilation of children under the euphemistic banner of "gender-affirming care". The sudden and pervasive rise of this movement provokes two questions: where did it come from, and how has it proved so successful? The story goes deeper than most people know.
In the late 1980s, a group of American academics, including Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker, established the disciplines of "queer theory" and "transgender studies". These academics believed gender to be a "social construct" used to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They denounced the traditional categories of man and woman as a false binary that was conceived to support the system of "heteronormativity", which, they argued, had to be ruthlessly deconstructed.
Susan Stryker, a male-to-female transgender professor currently at the University of Arizona, described transgender ideology in 2008 as one that "unabashedly advocates embracing a disruptive and refigurative genderqueer or transgender power as a spiritual resource for social and environmental transformation". He contends that the "transsexual body" is a "technological construction" that represents a war against Western society. Moreover, Stryker continues, it is destined to channel its "rage and revenge" against the "naturalised heterosexual order"; against "traditional family values"; and against the "hegemonic oppression" of nature itself.
The great project of the transgender movement is to abolish the distinctions between man and woman, to transcend the limitations established by God and nature, and to connect the personal struggle of trans individuals to the political struggle to transform society in a radical way.
The trans movement was hatched, then, on the fringes of American academia. But how did it move so quickly to the centre of American public life? Like many other things, it began with a flood of cash, as some of the wealthiest people in the country began devoting enormous sums of money to promote transgenderism.
One of these people is Jennifer Pritzker, who was born James Pritzker in 1950 and inherited a sizable part of the Hyatt hotel fortune. In 2013, he announced a male-to-female gender transition and was celebrated in the press as the "first trans billionaire". Almost immediately, he began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals and activist organisations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.
This money was allied with political power, as Pritzker's cousin, Illinois Democrat Governor J.B. Pritzker, signed legislation in 2019, his first year in office, to inject gender theory into the state education curriculum and to direct state Medicaid funds toward transgender surgeries.
Pritzker-funded activists at Lurie Children's Hospital (the largest children's hospital in Chicago) provide local schools with training, materials and personnel who promote gender transitions for children, using the hospital's reputation to give their ideology a scientific veneer. And the more one investigates, the worse it gets. Children are exposed, for instance, not only to trans ideology, but to concepts such as "kink" (unusual tastes in sexual behaviour), "BDSM" (bondage, domination, submission and masochism), binders to flatten breasts, and prosthetic genitalia.
Lurie Children's Hospital, through its outreach presentations in Chicago public schools, encourages teachers and school administrators to support "gender diversity" in their districts, automatically "affirm" students who announce sexual transitions, and "communicate a non-binary understanding of gender" to children in the classroom. The objective, as one version of the presentation suggests, is to disrupt the "entrenched [gender] norms in Western society" and facilitate the transition to a more "gender creative" world. School districts are encouraged to designate "Gender Support Coordinators" to help facilitate children's sexual and gender transitions, which, under the recommended "confidentiality" policy, can be kept secret from parents and families.
In effect, this results in a sophisticated school-to-gender-clinic pipeline. Teachers, counsellors, doctors and activists push children in the direction of what Chicago-area "detransitioner" Helena Kerschner, recalling her own experience, calls "the trans identity rabbit hole". And despite frequent claims to the contrary, this is not a temporary or reversible process. Of the children who begin puberty blockers, the medical literature suggests that approximately 95 percent move on to cross-sex hormones, and that 50 percent of the females who begin cross-sex hormone treatments move on to "trans-affirming" surgeries.
According to survey data, up to 80 percent of trans individuals suffer from serious psychopathologies and one-quarter of black trans youth attempt suicide each year. "Gender-affirming care" largely fails to solve these problems.
Organisations such as Do No Harm have filed lawsuits and launched advocacy campaigns to curb transgender procedures on minors. And increasing numbers of doctors, who had previously been cowed into silence, are beginning to speak out. Earlier this year, I worked with whistle-blowers at Texas Children's Hospital to expose child sex-change procedures that were being conducted in secret. The exposé attracted the attention of Texas lawmakers, who immediately passed the final version of a bill to ban such procedures.
Jennifer Pritzker, Maureen Connolly, Blair Peters and their ilk are condemning legions of children to a lifetime of sorrows and medical necessities, all based on dubious postmodern theories that do not meet the standard of Hippocrates' injunction in his work Of the Epidemics: "First, do no harm."
Christopher F. Rufo is author of America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything (New York: HarperCollins, 2023). The above article is from his essay in the September 2023 edition of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, Michigan.