The transgender ideologist's delusions occur with a different impetus. He (or she, or whatever supposedly exists between) fancies himself a warrior fighting to destroy the codified notions of Western culture and to institute a new template of cultural understanding that allows his personal fantasy to be treated as reality.

For those who may be unfamiliar, Miguel de Cervantes's novel Don Quixote tells the tale of Alonso Quixana, an elderly (and exceedingly mad) gentleman who fancies himself a chivalrous knight. He takes the name Don Quixote and fights to preserve the moral code of a wondrous past he read about in literature. The novel relates several episodes that signify his disconnect with 17th-century Spain, a reality where Quixote's fantasy is wholly unwelcome and anachronistic.

In the end, both are quite insane, and their fantasies are at odds with the real world around them.

In the novel, the townspeople watch Don Quixote engage in his delusional behavior with curious bewilderment and sometimes pity. Similarly, we Americans watch the players in the transgenderism movement.

For example, there's Cass Clemmer, who "posted a picture of herself bleeding from the crotch captioned 'Periods are not just for women #BleedingWhileTrans.'"

It's not a pleasant picture, and why such an image should ever be offered for the public is anyone's guess (though in Clemmer's case, it appears to be an effort to drum up publicity for her coloring book, "The Adventures of Toni the Tampon"). But that's not the point.

Looking at the picture, it's easy to imagine how one might understand the image purely as a façade. She is not a boy experiencing menstruation. She is a girl who is clearly immersed in the fantasy that she is boy. And she is experiencing menstruation because she is, in reality, a girl.

Her outward assertions to the contrary should be no more convincing to us than to the townspeople first greeting the frail Don Quixote, who appeared to them astride his skinny nag and wearing a worn suit of armor while proclaiming himself a bold and formidable knight.

Then there's the case of Trystan Reese, who is now expecting to give birth to a child. Trystan was "assigned a female gender at birth" and chose to keep the "original parts" – i.e., her uterus. "I just happen to be a man who can carry a baby," Trystan says.

But Trystan is not, in fact, a man who can carry a baby. Trystan can conceive, gestate, and birth a baby only because she is a woman who pretends to be a man. In reality, she is no more a "man" than a windmill is a fearsome giant.

Millions of people derive satisfaction in believing something altogether different from what reality dictates. The challenge when it comes to transgenderism, for us as a culture, is in diminishing any pervasive damage to our society that may result from the indulgence in such fantasies.

In what is a pretty good telling of her varying philosophical interpretations of Don Quixote over at The New York Times, Rivka Galchen writes:

I didn't, on that first reading [of the novel], pay much attention to the way that Don Quixote's delusions often made others suffer. Thirsty mules can't drink from their trough because Don Quixote insists it's a baptismal font; Sancho Panza is roughed up after Quixote doesn't pay his hotel bill; and on and on. ... At a later moment, the book seemed to me to be about what a power move it is to be "eccentric" and how that eccentricity coerces others into serving your fantasy. I found Quixotism in the world to be at times irritating, and at times cruel, and at times I saw the heroism of Don Quixote's friends and neighbors, the "normal" people.

Galchen refers only to the novel and not transgenderism at all, but there is a parallel here that shouldn't be too difficult to discern.

To the question at hand, do we, the "normal" people who observe individuals headlong into fantasies like those described above and appraise them as delusional have redeeming virtue for tolerating their delusions?

Or perhaps to the better question, do people "suffer" as a result of those delusional and eccentric "power moves" to coerce others into "serving their fantasy" as we sit idly by?

Before the efforts to make the eccentricities of transgenderism commonplace, it was widely considered a mental illness. Many doctors (the honest ones, I argue), still maintain that position.

Suicide rates among transgendered individuals seems to bolster that assertion. Delusional social justice warriors will argue that psychiatric trauma leading to suicides among this demographic is caused by "rejection, discrimination, violence, harassment, and negative life circumstances," as Zach Ford of ThinkProgress argues. However, other minority groups pale in comparison to suicide rates among transgendered people. In fact, writes Daniel Payne at The Federalist, other minority groups that suffer "real and perceived amounts of discrimination," like blacks, have suicide rates that pale in comparison to whites, who supposedly endure no such discrimination. The "discrimination theory" doesn't hold water.

But Payne does note that the suicide rate associated with transgenderism is "extremely correlative with conditions of mental illness." Transgendered individuals commit suicide at a rate of over 40%.

He goes on:

Since transgenderism is a deleterious psychological affliction, it is wholly unsurprising to find higher rates of suicide among that class of people. A sane society would be advocating for robust, ameliorative psychological therapy to steer transgender people away from their delusions.

As a society, it seems we are doing precisely the opposite. Children are steered toward embracing their transgender (or "non-binary") delusions at ages as young as three. Medications meant to stifle hormonal development for such children in prepubescent years are offered more readily today than ever.

There are indeed casualties in the faux-science and cultural push to make the delusions of transgenderism our accepted reality. As pediatrician Dr. Michelle Cretella recently told Tucker Carlson, "transgender ideology" is promoting "large-scale child abuse:"

I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal. ... Sex is hardwired from before birth, and it cannot change[.] ... By feeding families these lies (about gender fluidity and the safety of "transition-affirming protocols"), children are having their normal psychological development interrupted, they're being put on puberty blockers which essentially castrates them chemically, followed by surgical mutilation later on. This is child abuse. This is not health care.

The delusions of transgender individuals will undoubtedly persist. But there is nothing noble, and there is plenty that is detrimental, in our continued cultural enablement of the madness promoted by transgender ideology.