--With apologies to Jonathan Swift--
Given the recent cutting edge advocacy for Gender Affirming Care and Surgery (GACS) for transgenders(sic), including minor children, why not expand this coveted GACS to the pet world, and then to the entire animal kingdom? Starting with pets, this therapy could be expanded to other owned animals (beef cattle, chicken flocks, Budweiser Clydesdales), and then to feral animals in the wild. The main benefit of expanding GACS is the massive new revenue stream to veterinarians, doctors, hospitals, and big pharma.
The number of Americans who dote over pets is enormous. Pet owners spare no expense ensuring their beloved pets are treated like royalty. The number of species that serve as pets is virtually unlimited, including dogs, cats, birds, fish, snakes, pot bellied pigs, and horses.
A plethora of random controlled studies could keep academia focused on this topic for decades. Medical and veterinary school deans would dole out vast sums of taxpayer money to support such studies, including but not limited to the following:
- Measuring the impact of GACS on different pet species. Is GACS more effective in horses, dogs or fish?
- Given the connection between mental illness and GACS, what is the effect that there are no participation trophies awarded to the losers in major animal competitions like the Kentucky Derby, The Preakness and the National Dog Show? Could those animals who consistently fail to succeed in such prestigious events benefit from post--loss GACS? How could such trauma be identified to predict the best candidates for GACS from all the losers? What are the true equity issues and unconscious biases in animal sports?
- Could squirrels and raccoons be less problematic for suburban homeowners, and rats for urban ones, if male to female GACS was maximized for them, presumably reducing toxic masculinity and making them less aggressive?
- The Intersectionologists would love to study the comparative effects of GACS on white Samoyed Huskies as compared to black Labrador Retrievers. They could further test the results of throwing in a control group of albino black Labs. The possibilities are simply limitless, as is the source of taxpayer funds, in this quest to determine the hierarchy of victimization and mental illness among pets.
- The salient differences between a properly licensed and trained Service Animal, be it a dog, miniature horse, or Iguana, and a mere "Comfort Animal," is a key study as the latter suffer devastating mental illness as they, unlike Service Animals, are banned from most retail establishments.
Some thorny obstacles must be addressed, including informed consent. Who gives informed consent for the minor child? Parents or guardians? Member of the child's school's teachers' union? Hospital GACS counselors? Who gives informed consent for the pet? Owner? Member of PETA? Operator of the local pound? Executive Board of the Cattleman’s Association once this therapy is extended beyond pets? Can the pet him/her/themself be inclusively engaged in informed consent?
Widespread societal acceptance is challenging if the public awakens to how much money the practitioners of this art will be making, or if some still cling to pre--Woke notions of natural beauty and existence. This hesitancy could be overcome with the development of a political commissar class to monitor dissent, engage in censorship, suppress opposing views to the official narrative, and staff the government/corporate medical/social and legacy media leviathan which could work round the clock in surveillance activities to destroy misinformation and any independent thinking that challenges Critical Race or Gender Theory.
Photo credit: public domain