Yes, the surgeries are immoral
Medicine, with any understanding of “purpose” removed from it, becomes nothing but a consumerist catering to patient preferences.
A couple of days ago I was watching the Star Trek: Voyager episode “State of Flux”. It’s interesting because… well, Star Trek is often considered a “progressive” show within the meaning of that word at the time. These days, though, yesterday’s progressivism may be the exact opposite of today’s.
The following is going to make way more sense to you if you know the Star Trek universe… sorry. In the show, a character named Seska (above), was actually a Cardassian agent who was both cosmetically and genetically modified to pass as a Bajoran and so infiltrate the Maquis, an anti-Cardassian group. She later ended up on Voyager, a Federation starship, but while there took to secretly working with the enemy Kazon, again while still claiming to be Bajoran. But as part of the resolution of the episode, the ship doctor notices a non-Bajoran marker in her blood and finally tells her, you’re not fooling anyone anymore Seksa, “you are Cardassian, ensign”.
Whoa whoa whoa you holographic bigot. She has been identifying as Bajoran for years and even underwent cosmetic and genetic alteration to pass as a Bajoran! Who do you think you are to tell her she was born a Cardassian and you can’t just change something like that?
Yes, the surgeries are immoral
A while back I expressed my frustration that conservative leaders in the US are often bizarrely afraid to make the explicit moral case for their position. My big example at the time was opposition to a pro-abortion amendment to the Michigan constitution. The great slogan the Official Pro-Life Powers had decided to unify the opposition around was “confusing and extreme”… which was so bad that people who were vehemently against the amendment were embarrassed to put those signs in their yard. We know why we’re opposed to abortion, and it’s not because the amendment is confusingly worded. Tell people what we really believe already, give them an actual reason to care.
So I wanted to mention, there was an article in The Public Discourse yesterday making this very sort of argument, called “The Surgeries are Immoral”. Florida has now prohibited doctors from surgically altering the genitals of minors to treat gender dysphoria. (Now there’s a dystopian phrase to even have to type.) A few months ago, when the Florida Board of Medicine took an initial step toward banning such procedures. Joseph Lapado, the Florida Surgeon General who, I must say, does seem to be a genuinely good guy:
praised the board’s members for “ruling in the best interest of children in Florida despite facing tremendous pressure to permit these unproven and risky treatments.”
That’s all true but here is the problem… are we against these procedures because they are “unproven and risky”? That might give the impression that maybe with some better data, or if we refined what we are doing or found a way to make them more reversible, why then they might be fine. Is that right? No, the first problem is that God made them male and female, and it violates his intended order for the cosmos for men to pretend to be women or for women to pretend to be men. Can we say that?
Feel free to read the rest of the piece. The author appears to be an orthodox Jew, and much of the rest of the piece involves sort of Aristotelian considerations for, what makes a surgery justified or unjustified, anyway? (We might follow up the cosmic considerations above with questions like, “what is a hand? Why did God make hands? What is the proper function of a hand?” And then continue that thinking to the rest of the body.) Medicine, with any understanding of “purpose” or proper or intended function removed from it, becomes nothing but a consumerist catering to patient preferences.
Science is our friend. Christians should embrace it. Life really does begin at conception. God created only two brands of humans--males and females. Centuries later, it was verified chromosomally--XX or XY. (As if we ever needed proof of this obvious fact...)
Forgive the crudeness of the following, but it is 100% true: the mouth and the anus are, respectively, the start and end points of the digestive tract--the alimentary canal. They are not sex organs. As a grad student during the AIDS scare 30 years ago, my histology professor displayed slides of the lining of the vagina and the anus and calmly explained that only one was designed for intercourse.
All these scientific facts are conveniently disregarded by the "I effing love science!" crowd, for some reason.
The strongest moral objections to most of what's happening in the world today are rooted in centuries of Christian moral tradition, and trying to dislocate them from that tradition creates weak language that feels like its trying to catch the opposition in a web of lawyerly technicalities. At the same time, I think that center of the culture has shifted to the point where any stronger case loses too, just in a cleaner way.
The idea of spending a generation losing status while building generational pedagogy and incrementally dragging back the Overton drift is not at all appealing to politicians above a certain age. That kind of long-horizon project is a young man's game, and this is why losing the participation of younger generations is especially disastrous for an outgroup movement.