Villains at Vanderbilt

Listen to the radio broadcast here.

Well, you might have heard the controversy about Vanderbilt. If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking out the Matt Walsh Show and listening to his case against Vanderbilt – it is quite compelling. But more interesting and more disturbing than the fact that the good folks at Vandy will happily violate the Hippocratic Oath by mutilating and sterilizing children, is the fact that the ire that this has drawn has, predominantly, been ire directed towards Walsh. It is difficult for me to decide which better illustrates the banality and repugnance of evil. On one hand, the sterile, clinical, profit-centric, euphemistic language of hospital officials, as well as the peppy, smiling, first-day-orientation videos, centered around how to mutilate and sterilize children are disturbing. Reminding us all that you don’t need pitchforks and red pajamas to make a Hell – indeed, a smiling, cheerful, clean, efficient bureaucracy makes for a much more well-ordered godless malevolence. On the other hand, the simple fact of the matter is that that people are aware that there are hospitals where children are mutilated and sterilized, and the response is largely – how dare anyone point that out! that’s going to get someone hurt?

Wait!? What?! The concern is that someone will get hurt!? You mean someone OTHER than the children being mutilated and sterilized?! Oughtn’t they to be the focus; shouldn’t the children who are going to be brainwashed, deluded, drugged, castrated, and mutilated be the primary focus of our concern?

Now listen; I do not advocate violence. But just imagine if this weren’t a clean, respectable, university hospital, and instead were some creep in his basement. Imagine if someone were mutilating children in a cabin in the woods. This is the stuff of nightmares. This is the content for horror films. This is the stuff that Orwell dismissed because it was too fantastic.

If some creep were castrating kids in an abandoned warehouse we’d cry out for him to hang. But a creep in a labcoat does it, and we need to be concerned for his welfare. Because let’s not pretend that the creeps at Vanderbilt aren’t creeps. They are deeply evil and corrupted men and women. And the fact that they are doing it out of a combination of ideology and profit make it, in some ways, more disturbing than if it were some demonic slasher. The fact that it’s so crisp and clean and tidy hides the monstrosity that it is. The enormity of it all somehow escapes us because, well, they’re Doctors, and they have Guidelines, and their Professional Organizations have Codes of Conduct. As though that somehow made it better! As though me being a theologian made it OK for me to tell people to worship Satan and blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

NO! It makes it worse.

Some ghoul torturing children in his basement is an aberration; and we recognize it as such. And, chances are, such a person is psychotic and or demonically possessed. But someone who has gone through the training to become a doctor and knows about the body and ought to have some kind of training in ethics – it’s so much worse for them to mutilate children, because they know better and because we give them a pass because they’re doctors.

Friends, let me say it clearly. Earning a medical degree does not make someone moral or wise or good. There are bad people who are doctors. There are doctors who are fools. There are doctors who are evil.

In the 19th and 20th centuries everyone was afraid of the Mad Scientist who conducted his experiments in basements and castle dungeons—the medical and scientific establishments wouldn’t accept their work. The deranging drive to push the boundaries of the possible, to expand knowledge at any cost, the distracting need to know and to experiment, these things were considered beyond the pale, so the mad scientists of yore had to do their work in secret.

But CS Lewis knew better. He knew that some day a godless bureaucracy would place the mad scientists on the dais at the professional conferences and have them at the podium giving the keynote addresses. What Lewis understood, and makes so clear in That Hideous Strength, is that once academia becomes godless all the disciplines will follow and the mad scientist will become the norm, and the good doctor will become the outlaw.

But again, I want to return to the question of WHY? Why has Matt Walsh – the person publicizing what Vanderbilt is doing the bad guy? Is Vanderbilt not performing these surgeries? Are they not giving puberty blockers to kids? If they weren’t doing these things, then why did they delete their pediatric transgender clinic webpage? If they aren’t doing these things why did they have a pediatric transgender clinic? I mean, if you don’t intend to actually give puberty blockers—which at least in the case of Lupron are just chemical castrators—and if you don’t intend to perform surgeries—or mutilations as I and all non-delusional people call them—then why does such a clinic exist? And if such a clinic exists to offer therapy and no surgery, then the website should exonerate them, right? But it doesn’t because they do. They, along with many hospitals, do, in fact, chemically and then physically castrate and mutilate children.

Now, you might say, well, Luke, this is different than some psycho because they have parental consent…umm, that’s worse! That’s so much worse. We used to call that Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy. If you drop your kids off at the mad scientist’s castle and fill out a consent release form that’s more horrifying than an abduction because the parents are supposed to protect their children from these goblins. Parents are supposed to give their lives to defend their children from falling into the hands of these villains, not ensure the insurance forms are correct!

Now, you might say, well, Luke, you’re using some pretty strong language. Yep. I’ve called the people who castrate and mutilate children: monsters, demons, ghouls, creeps, villains, and Mad Scientists, I’ve compared them to kidnappers and torturers and deceivers. Yep. And if and when the time comes to use more descriptions I will. These people are modern day Mengele’s with the exception that we know that Mengele was evil and we think these people are compassionate.

Except the Nazis convinced themselves they were compassionate too. By killing off the sick, the feeble, the mentally retarded, the deformed, and the Untermenschen, they were relieving them of the burden that was their own lives. They were mercy-exterminating. They were so compassionate, you see.

And if you try hard enough and don’t care about truth, moral logic, coherence, or fundamental decency then you can come up with a rationalization for just about anything.

“But Luke,” you might say, “these kids are suffering from Gender Dysphoria, they need treatment.” Yes. Yes they do. First, many of this current wave of confused children are just sad and lonely kids who want to feel special and important and are trying to get attention. Second, many of them have nightmarish mothers who are grooming their own children into a life of misery. Third, puberty is hard, and when we start telling children that if you feel uncomfortable in your body you belong in another body, at a time when everybody feels uncomfortable in their bodies, you’re likely to convince some of them. Fourth, some children have been abused and as a result of their abuse have become sexually confused. Fifth, some children may have gender dysphoria really and truly and without an obvious cause.

But in NONE of these instances is castration and mutilation the solution. Many kids need to just grow out of it. Literally, according to the most up to date research, 80% of children grow out of gender dysphoria once puberty is over. Which is good news for confused children. It’s terrible news for those who wish to mutilate children for love or money. But even of those children who don’t grow out of it, castration and mutilation is not the solution. MANY children need friends or caring adults in their lives to help them develop their identity apart from attention-grabbing gimmicks. Many children need their parents in prison. Many children need therapy and to go to a bible teaching church.

The solution is NEVER (except in possibly some of the monumentally rare case of intersex people, the term that has replaced, and probably for good reason, hermaphrodites) mutilating their bodies. The mutilation of healthy sex organs or body parts bearing secondary sex characteristics is never the solution.

But maybe you’re thinking, “well, maybe for YOU Luke, but these kids have rights.” Except no. No they don’t. They are minors. You see, in our society, as in all not-insane societies, children are not considered adults. In our society we recognize that children are children. We do this legally. You can’t operate a motor vehicle on the road while under 15 and a half in Ohio. You can’t buy cigarettes or dip until you’re 18—no that was back when I was a kid; now you can’t buy tobacco until you’re 21 in Ohio. You can’t buy alcohol until you’re 21 in Ohio. You can’t legally enter into any kind of contract until you’re 18 in Ohio. You can’t join the military until you’re 18. You can’t vote until you’re 18. You have to go to school until you graduate or emancipate yourself, normally about 17 or 18. You can’t get a credit card until you’re 18. You can’t rent a car until you’re 21 in Ohio. You can’t go to some movies until you’re 17. You can stay on your parents health insurance till you’re 26!

Now, frankly, I disagree with some of these age requirements or at least the contradictory logic behind them. I think minority is minority and majority is majority. But that’s not the point. The point is that we all agree—or we agree enough to still have these laws, that kids can’t be trusted to make certain decisions.

Our laws say you can’t go to the movies if you’re under 17 and watch the Breakfast Club, but you can decide to get your genitals mutilated and be castrated. At Vandy they’re doing these procedures on 14-year-olds—and their logic is that you can’t start these kids early enough on their mutilation schedule because the more these boys and girls become men and women the more likely it is they might just decide not to give the hospitals their big payday—a 12-year-old is much more pliable than an 18-year-old.

Because that’s the dirty secret. If 80% of these kids grow out of it, post-pubescently then you gotta strike when the iron’s hot and mutilate those kids before they change their minds. We’re talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars per mutilation. You can’t leave that kinda money on the table!

So again, a 14-year-old can’t do anything without custodial consent. Nothing. BUT, they CAN decide to have themselves mutilated. In what world does that make sense? Because it isn’t any world that exists or could exist. There is no world where a minor with no legal agency can also make the decision to be castrated and mutilated.

And yet, that’s the world we inhabit.

How did it come to this?

Well, there are lots of answers to that question—answers with merit that are certainly PART of the answer. People point to the rise of atomistic individualism where everyone is their own center of truth. People point to the rise of Emotivism, the idea that feelings are the basis of truth. People point to the disintegration of social norms, the disintegration of communal life, the disintegration of the nuclear family, the disintegration of personality.

All of these are real problems. All of these are issues that the Bible deals with and the Church has answers for. All of these, certainly, contribute to the psychosis of our society.

But at root, the answer isn’t all that complicated. It’s what Solzhenitsyn said: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” My heart breaks for kids being swept up in this horrific hysteria. It’s demonic and cruel and ghoulish and ogreish and perverse and corrupt and fiendish and diabolic and vicious and evil. It’s also happening. And if we want to see it stop happening then men need to remember God.