Dr. Walter Freeman, an earnest advocate of experimentation on the human brain in order to “cure” mental illness, developed an inexpensive way to lobotomize mentally ill people. He inserted a kitchen ice pick -- later refined into an instrument called a leucotome -- into the eye orbit, punched the pick through with a hammer and swished the object back and forth in order to sever the part of the brain deemed responsible for mental illness, or even just bad behavior.

In the United States and elsewhere, lobotomies were once seen as the cure-all for some mental illnesses.

Freeman was able to bypass the tedious process of peer review and established medical ethics because the well-publicized experimental operation seemed to produce permanently tranquil specimens who no longer writhed in fits or threw excrement on the walls. His tactics “worked,” and that was what mainly mattered to heads of institutions for the insane.

Because his lobotomies seemed successful, Freeman soon found he had freedom to experiment on thousands of patients in psychiatric hospitals.

Even mere children were not exempt from the tender mercies of Dr. Freeman, who lobotomized a four-year-old. He also operated on twelve-year-old Howard Dully, who was merely mildly aggressive. But the lad was deemed so much trouble that he was trundled to the hospital by his exasperated and vengeful stepmother, who gave her permission for the procedure. Dully had no idea what was going to happen to him, though photographs tell part of the tale.

Dully’s operation.

Dully after his lobotomy.

Miraculously, Dully was one of the few patients who actually remained somewhat normal after the procedure. Most, like Rosemary Kennedy, who was the sacrificial lamb on the altar of Kennedy clan’s political ambitions, were infantilized or become zombies.

America, though certainly not the only susceptible nation, has had a particular vulnerability to snake oil medical procedures that hacks call “scientific” in order to establish their legitimacy in the public mind.

Be it eugenics designed to purify the human race, lobotomies to cure the mentally ill, or even something as seemingly harmless as using x-ray machines to fit shoes properly, what amount to amateur and inherently dangerous experiments grab the medical community, educational institutions, and the public mind.

It was the mono focus of Nazism on racial purity as the end all and be all that permitted the medical experiments on non-Aryans at the death camps. It was the idea that the elimination of class distinctions and the establishment of egalitarianism that justified the starvation of the kulaks of the USSR and ratified the imprisonment of dissenters in psychiatric wards, where they were given drugs that destroyed their minds. It was the American eugenics movement that saw blacks as inferior and therefore dispensable members of society, thus paving the way for the Tuskegee experiments on syphilis. It was radical feminism’s absolute empowerment of women over the “clumps of cells” in their wombs that has resulted in some 60 million abortions since Roe vs. Wade.

The fact is that here in America, we are once again seized by medical experimentation on humans; but this time it is the transgender movement that is victimizing America’s children and young adults. Such is the power of those who are recommending mutilation just as radical as lobotomies that in my former home state of Delaware a proposed regulation (Regulation 225) would allow mere children to choose either gender or race. (Yes, you read that correctly -- gender or race.)

Children’s fantasies are being given the imprimatur of infallibility by a wacky ideology that holds as a core tenet that gender is “fluid” and can be ineluctably determined by a child or youth who has the idea he or she was born with the wrong sex. The fantasies of such young people supposedly are sound grounds for giving the green light to quacks who then experiment on mere children with puberty blockers, hormone therapy and draconian surgeries designed to make them into a scarred and irreparably damaged facsimile of the sex opposite from that they were born with. (These are the surgical procedures used to turn a female into a “male.” The “sex change” requires hormone injections, plus the removal of breasts, womb and ovaries.)

That the fantasies of tormented children and youths, some of whom will do just about anything for approval, love and acceptance, are being considered as legitimate; that gender “choice” should even be debated in a state legislature, is a sign of how rapidly a cult like the transgender movement has achieved power among even the supposedly educated and among our political elite.

A simplistic and thoroughly distorted ideology has reverted to pre-science idiocy resulting in barbarism once undreamed of in former generations; and this by advocates who cringe when a murderer is administered a lethal injection.

Legislators are being told justificatory tales better suited to mythology and fairy tales than science; namely, that a medical miracle is available that will transform males into females and females into males.

It is ironic that the folks telling us these patently false fables are the same people who accuse Christians of being irrational for believing God made human beings male and female and who dismiss as superstitious myth the children’s hymn -- “Red and yellow, black and white; they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

But as is usual with simplistic ideologies, the supposedly magical transformation of the human race, this time the change to another sex, comes at an awful price. It comes not by waving a magical wand, but by a surgeon’s knife. It comes not by drinking a magical elixir, but by being injected with dangerous hormones. It comes not by uttering spells of enchantment that will turn a boy into a Cinderella, but by turning him into a creature deformed for a lifetime; unable later to break the spell by any conjuring.

The truth is that no “abracadabra” or “open sesame” will ever reverse the deformations of body and soul being advocated by the transgender movement and enabled by surgeons who know they are violating the Hippocratic oath and Western medical ethics. The “doctors” know the fairy tale is a dystopian fabrication that actually ends in “Never, ever after.” There is no going back to the former existence as male or female.

In addition to allowing children the right to choose gender and race, the proposed Regulation 225 also would deny parents and counselors the right to try to guide the deluded children and youth to acceptance of the body they have been born with. Delaware’s parents are being told that to interfere with their child’s wishes would be “disrespectful.”

Something similar happened to Howard Dully, who had no idea of what Dr. Freeman had done. As the Guardian related:

“What he [Dully] didn't know was that he had been subjected to one of the most brutal surgical procedures in medical history. He had undergone a lobotomy and no one, not his parents, not the medical community or the state authorities, had intervened to stop it. More disturbingly, there seemed to have been no obvious necessity for the operation.”

Yes, lobotomizing Howard Dully was and is still is “disturbing.” A kid was brutalized and no one intervened. A kid became an adult who never knew what his full potential as a man might have been.

Do any of the wretched advocates and enablers of mutilation and torture remember how little boys and girls think and dream? They were once boys and girls, too. They know in their hearts that kids are fantasists just as they once were.

They know children and even adults love fairy tales in which the prince becomes a toad and then a prince again; in which the beast becomes a man because of Beauty’s love; in which noble horses talk like humans and wicked humans become dragons because their souls are bad.

But this does not mean we indulge childish fantasies about being animals to the point of having those kids surgically altered into “otherkins.” It does not mean surgeons have the go ahead to make a child resemble a horse.

Nor does it mean sufferers of other mental maladies like apotemnophilia should have their legs amputated because the patient thinks his limb is a mere excrescence he’d be better off without.

So far, the doctors who sever perfectly normal legs suffer some opprobrium from the larger medical community; as has been the case with a surgeon in Scotland who acceded to the request of a twenty-eight-year -old man to have his healthy leg removed.

The fact is that nearly every boy or girl grows out of these fantasies and begins to accept his or her destiny as a man or woman. Thank the Creator of mankind. Otherwise the human race would suffer so many deformations the world would resemble the Island of Dr. Moreau.

The blame for the drugging and mutilation of perfectly normal children does not lie with deluded children and youths who deserve our compassion and help before and after operations; but with adults who know perfectly well what they are doing. It lies with the malicious ideologues who have something to gain from their agenda, most often power to force medical institutions to tell lies and to facilitate the madness of the deluded.

It lies with so-called educators who know perfectly well they are promoting an ideology that defies common sense and scientific reality. It lies with the timidity and blindness of legislators who refuse to stand up against the lies and for the truth. It lies with the doctors who know what they are actually doing to perfectly normal children and youth. It lies with the churches that once recognized and sought to heal deformations of the spirit, but that are now preparing liturgies to celebrate the “transformations” resulting from willful mutilation of the body. It lies with those who with malice aforethought, take huge sums of money essentially for torturing human beings because they wish to be tortured.

Lobotomizing children like Howard Dully was finally phased out once people understood the true nature and results of such a horrible medical experiment.

Thank God.

Even so, it is well past time to put an end to the medical experimentation on our children being fostered by the transgender movement. It is well past time to stop an ideological fad that is ruinous to true science and is the absolute antithesis of sound medical ethics.

It is well past time to protect our children and youth.

Hat tip to Harold A. Maio for a suggested rephrasing of the first sentence.

Fay Voshell holds a M.Div. from Princeton Theological Seminary, which awarded her its prize for excellence in systematic theology. She is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Her thoughts also have appeared in many online magazines. She may be reached at fvoshel@yahoo.com.