Surprise, surprise:

A transgender man sued a Roman Catholic hospital on Thursday, saying it cited religion in refusing to allow his surgeon to perform a hysterectomy as part of his sex transition. Jionni Conforti’s sex and gender discrimination lawsuit comes as new regulations hailed as groundbreaking anti-discrimination protections for transgender people are under legal attack from religious groups. Conforti had scheduled the surgery at St. Joseph’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson in 2015. He says a hospital administrator told him the procedure to remove his uterus couldn’t be done because it was a “Catholic hospital. “I felt completely disrespected,” said Conforti, whose transition began in 2004. “That’s not how any hospital should treat any person regardless of who they are.” The hospital said Thursday it follows ethical and religious directives from the U.S. Conference of Bishops in making decisions about care and treatment. The directives say procedures judged “morally wrong” by the church don’t have to be performed.

Madness. You cannot dissent from what they want; you’ve got to give them everything, or they’ll do what they can to destroy you.

You’ve probably heard by now about National Geographic‘s celebratory “everything’s coming up trans!” issue. Writing in The Public Discourse today, Andrew T. Walker and Denny Burk eviscerate author Robin Marantz Henig’s report from the magazine Excerpts:

First (and most problematic): Henig offers no substantive argument for why one’s internal, self-perception of his or her “gender identity” ought to determine one’s gender or have authority greater than one’s biological sex. The essay offers testimonies of people who say that their gender identity is at odds with their biological sex. But testimony is not sufficient. Asserting a claim does not demonstrate the authenticity of that claim. Readers are given no explanation for why we ought to regard the claims of one’s gender identity as reality rather than a subjective feeling or self-perception. Indeed, this is the crux of the matter that plagues the transgender movement. It is based not on evidence, but on the ideology of expressive individualism—the idea that one’s identity is self-determined, that one should live out that identity, and that everyone else must respect and affirm that identity, no matter what it is. Expressive individualism requires no moral argument or empirical justification for its claims, no matter how absurd or controverted they may be. Transgenderism is not a scientific discovery but a prior ideological commitment about the pliability of gender.

More:

The final page of Henig’s article celebrates the mutilation of minor children with a full-page picture of a shirtless 17-year old girl who recently underwent a double mastectomy in order to “transition” to being a boy. Why do transgender ideologues consider it harmful to attempt to change such a child’s mind but consider it progress to display her bare, mutilated chest for a cover story? Transgender ideologues like Henig never address this ethical contradiction at the heart of their paradigm. Why is it acceptable to surgically alter a child’s body to match his sense of self but bigoted to try to change his sense of self to match his body? If it is wrong to attempt to change a child’s gender identity (because it is fixed and meddling with it is harmful), then why is it morally acceptable to alter something as fixed as the reproductive anatomy of a minor? The moral inconsistency here is plain.

And:

Henig makes a surprising and startling admission near the end of her essay: “Biology has a habit of declaring itself eventually.” On this, Henig is right. Humanity cannot escape the limits inscribed upon it. It is impossible to transgress biological boundaries stamped on human nature without the basic categories of human existence unraveling. If the National Geographic story tells anything, it tells of a society going down a path of self-willed experimentation that will lead to misery and a denial of human telos. In truth, this movement born of effete academics and progressive mythology is nothing more than dressed-up barbarism.

Read the whole thing. It is a detailed and systematic demolition of Henig’s piece.

On a number of occasions over the past few years, I’ve cited a lecture I once attended in Cambridge, delivered by the literary critic Dame Gillian Beer. She spoke about the way various elements within Victorian society seized upon Darwin’s findings and claimed them as scientific evidence for various ideologies to which they had a prior commitment. Abolitionists claimed that Darwin clearly showed why slavery was wrong, because deep down, we’re all the same. Imperialists claimed that Darwin clearly showed why it was the destiny of Europeans to rule over “lesser” races in the colonies, because survival of the fittest. And so on. Dame Gillian’s point was that the findings of science are always received within a particular cultural milieu that bends our interpretation of them, and that we must take great care to make ourselves aware of the difference between what is true scientifically, and what is a non-scientific conclusion to which we wish to make the facts conform.

Last February, New York magazine’s Jesse Singal wrote a frankly terrifying piece about how militant transgender advocates bullied a cowardly Canadian clinic into firing Dr. Ken Zucker, one of the world’s top researchers in the transgender field, because he, though a public advocate of accepting transgenders, did not believe that the science justified some of the more radical claims trans activists were making. If you missed it back then, read it now. This actually happened, and it’s going to keep happening, until people push back hard.

The stakes for all of us could hardly be higher. From an important interview with Dr. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian <del>psychiatrist</del> clinical psychologist who is being persecuted for his refusal to use the new panoply of Orwellian pronouns: