It’s a bit like Scarface saying you’re too much of a thug or Cheech & Chong warning that you smoke too much weed. When the left-wing Atlantic says liberals have jumped the shark on youth “gender medicine,” serious soul searching is warranted.

Oh, this doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. As Atlantic writer Helen Lewis laments, liberals exist in “media bubbles” and embrace “zombie facts” (pseudo-truths that just won’t die).

Youth “gender medicine” is, of course, a euphemism. At issue are sexual-distortion treatments (SDTs) — e.g., puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and genitalia mutilation — designed to “transition” a boy or girl. That they do, too, but only into a simulacrum of the opposite sex. But for people to whom image is reality and the objective is fantasy, perhaps that’s enough. It’s not enough, though, for Lewis and others who, though late to the game, are questioning “trans” dogma on youth.

Lewis opens her second paragraph writing:

“We often ask parents, ‘Would you rather have a dead son than a live daughter?’” Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles once explained to ABC News.

Lewis added that the Biden administration essentially used this appeal last year before the Supreme Court. Being adjudicated was the constitutionality of Tennessee’s law prohibiting SDTs for minors. The writer then continued:

But there is a huge problem with this emotive formulation: It isn’t true. When Justice Samuel Alito challenged the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio on such claims during oral arguments, Strangio made a startling admission. He conceded that there is no evidence to support the idea that medical transition reduces adolescent suicide rates.

Of course, this has long been known, as The New American has been reporting for years. Oh, MUSS (Made-up Sexual Status, aka “transgender” — we must control the language) individuals do have a high suicide rate. But this isn’t, as the activists claim, because “society” stigmatizes their “identity.”

It’s because such individuals are deeply troubled. Just imagine, for example, living with the intense, reality-contrary feeling that you’re “stuck” in the body of the “wrong” sex. As one sufferer, who was not an activist, put it online once, “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

This condition is known as “gender dysphoria,” mind you, but that’s another euphemism; sexual-identity disorder (SID) is a better label. Yet know that most MUSS youths today don’t even have SID. As ex-gender clinic worker and hard-left whistleblower Jamie Reed pointed out in 2023, however, they do have problems. Among them are, she wrote, “depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity,” and autism.

So the reality with these troubled people is that there’s something “mutilated” in their mind. A MUSS practitioner then comes along and says, “Well, here’s an idea: Let me mutilate your body!” It’s a classic case of trying to correct a flaw with a flaw.

Returning to Lewis, her essay is quite long and presents many argument-buttressing facts. But they largely fall on deaf liberal ears. There are plenty of demagogues trying to keep them deaf, too. Lewis mentions, for example, that ACLU boy Strangio would “like to scuttle Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Damage, a skeptical treatment of youth gender medicine.” Censoring it “is 100% a hill I will die on,” he resolved. (And we should resolve to make sure he dies on it.)

Lewis also mentions that another MUSS activist, Marci Bowers, likened skepticism of SDTs to “Holocaust denial.” “There are not two sides to this issue,” she proclaimed.

MUSS activists are quite cavalier about the youth SDT phenomenon, too, even though it’s nothing less than child abuse. For example, the aforementioned Olson-Kennedy “has referred girls as young as 13 for double mastectomies,” relates Lewis. And what if they later regret the rash act?

“Adolescents actually have the capacity to make a reasoned logical decision,” Olson-Kennedy claimed. “If you want breasts at a later point in your life, you can go and get them.”

Yeah, I mean, why not let all those wise 13-year-olds vote and enter into contracts, too? And replacing breasts and other lost private parts? That’s just like getting a spoiler for your car.

So how should we respond to this agenda? Well, prohibiting youth SDTs is necessary but not enough. Rather, we should understand and proclaim a simple truth: “Transgender” people do not exist.

This is because people don’t have “gender” (words do), but the quality known as “sex” — and you can’t change sex. “Transgender” is not a legitimate medical classification. It’s a political one and a marketing label (and politics is about marketing itself). Remember here that tens of millions of dollars are made yearly off youth SDTs.

The deeper issue, however, is that, as this commentator laments, the MUSS issue is just part of a larger problem. That is, leftists won’t yield to reason on anything. Why is this?

Painting very broadly, there are only two ways of making decisions: by Truth or by taste. As I’ve oft pointed out, too (again, speaking generally), conservatives are more likely to believe in Truth, objective by definition. Thus, when problem solving, they tend to instinctively try to discern what is objectively correct.

Liberals, on the other hand, as a group reject Truth’s existence; they tend to be relativists. And because they don’t have the Truth to reference when making decisions, they rely on the most compelling thing they have left: emotion.

What happens then? In our world there are matters of Truth (e.g., murder is wrong) and those of taste (e.g., preference in ice-cream flavors). Remove Truth from the equation, though, and matters of taste are all that remain. The ultimate distillation of this “thinking” is Aleister Crowley’s maxim, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

This results in the sports-team mentality. You support your sports team not for some objective moral reason, but because you want to. It feels right — it’s your team. (European soccer fans sometimes even get into fights over such frivolity.) No one can logically talk you out of this passion, either. Taste is taste, and everyone has a right to his tastes.

And this is why leftists cannot be reasoned with: Again, everything is a matter of taste, from flavors to facts. They root for their team because it’s their team, and they support a given position because it’s their position. Taste has no basis in reason — and it won’t yield to it.

In other words, begin with mutilating your conception of moral reality and you may end up mutilating kids — and everything else great and good.