Modern medicine, to a large degree, emerged in Germany during the second half of the 19th century. It reached its apogee in 20th century America which also imported the eugenics movement from the United Kingdom. When the Nazis achieved power in 1933 they added eugenics to their views of “racial purity”. The party fired the approximately 7,000 Jewish doctors practicing in Germany, while about half of all remaining German doctors joined the Nazi party compared to 10% of the rest of the population.
The German Medical Association blamed the medical atrocities committed during the Nazi regime on 350 doctors, but that seems like a gross misstatement of the facts. The medical carnage started before the Holocaust. Coercive sterilizations proceeded to the killing of children, and then adults; fictive medical reasoning was used to justify the actions of Nazi doctors. The progression to the killings began legally with the sterilization laws and then turned into illegal actions that were permitted by the government such as “euthanasia” and bizarre medical experiments. Doctors were present at every concentration camp. German medicine was hopelessly corrupted and never fully held to account after the war despite the Doctors’ Trial in Nuremberg, 1946–1947.
Soviet medicine was equally corrupted by a harshly authoritarian regime. Psychiatric hospitalizations were used to silence dissident voices under the assumption that a critic had to be deranged to oppose the government.
A large segment of American medicine is starting down a similar path. The trail to perdition began with the stifling of opposing views on the origins and treatment of the COVID pandemic. Abandoned was the hitherto conventional view that new medical problems required vigorous debate if their underlying natures were to be uncovered. The next step was the imposition of Critical Race Theory by many medical schools and professional organizations. This move was accompanied by the abandonment of standardized tests as a tool for medical school admission. The discarding of merit based selection of medical professionals has yet to play out to a degraded denouement. None of the previous actions are on a par with those of the Nazi doctors, but it is the current assault on children that is taking the profession to a dangerous place.
The belief that gender as opposed to genetic sex is fluid and subject to reassignment has taken hold of a large swath of public opinion based on nothing more than a distorted ideology. Worse, much of the medical profession has embraced this scientifically empty doctrine. Empty because it lacks evidence. There are no prospective studies of the effectiveness or utility of gender reassignment therapy. No randomized control comparisons. No long-term observations of risk/benefit ratio. In short, no science.
Yet a huge marketplace for this pseudo-scientific therapy has developed. A market that would be impossible without the intimate involvement of the medical profession. The Journal of the American Medical Association published a scientifically vacuous article Standards of Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse People that promotes the mutilation of children with a statement that hitherto would embarrass the effort of a first year medical student.
A treatment without conclusive benefit, which involves bodily mutilation, which takes advantage of the gullibility of the very young and the credulity of the ill informed and confused parents of these children is beyond opprobrium; it is evil. The Tuskegee Syphilis Study is considered one of American medicine’s great ethical catastrophes. Terrible as it was it involved only 400 people. The assault on children may result in the ruin of countless young victims.
Why has an inherently ignorant ideology achieved such purchase among a large segment of the medical community, a group supposedly versed in science and its method? The reality is that unless physicians have received specialized training in a branch of medical science, they are not well versed in its structure, limitations, and evidence based analysis. They are easily influenced by authority figures even when these “role models” go wildly astray as many are currently doing.
The transgender movement is based on a lunatic ideology that has emerged in a segment of society that has lost its grasp on reality. A man can’t become a woman, nor is the reverse within the limits of possibility. When the next justice of the US Supreme Court is asked to define a woman and concedes she can’t, a rational boundary has been passed.
When someone derides the reality of transgenderism the response of its supporters is not an argument, it’s an ad hominem attack (sometimes to the point of violence) and labeling the dissenter with the appellation transphobic. One needn’t be phobic about something that isn’t real. One should just tell the truth.
Particularly striking has been the silence of the medical ethicists usually so voluble on even the most trivial medical issues. They have failed their calling
It’s hard to foresee how or when the current descent into medical barbarism will end. Those looking back at the state of medical practice as it relates to “transgender medicine” from the vantage point of lapsed time will doubtless be shocked and confused as to how a supposedly learned profession went so badly wrong. But it has done so and must stop or be stopped from the mayhem it is wrecking on countless young people. Primum non nocere needs to be tattooed on the face of every transgender practitioner. Medical practitioners complicit in the current therapeutic outrages must be held accountable.
