The New York Times published an op-ed Tuesday detailing how two major medical organizations are retreating from their positions that “the science” was unquestionably in favor of surgically removing the healthy breasts of girls and injecting boys with estrogen, among other interventions. The decisions to retreat came on the heels of a jury’s decision to award a young woman who had an elective double mastectomy at 16 $2 million after she sued the psychologist and plastic surgeon who participated in disfiguring her body.
Without overstating its significance, the victory should be celebrated and pursued to its logical conclusion: the just punishment of everyone who pushed and profited from the emotional and physical mutilation of children and, as Michael Knowles put it, transgenderism’s complete eradication from public life, along with the redemption of those whose lives the ideology shattered.
It’s important to note, however, that the Times’ op-ed on the American Medical Association’s and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ backtracking is a crack in, not a reversal of, its relentlessly pro-trans coverage. That coverage, for example, includes an attack on Riley Gaines and a recent piece implicitly arguing that halting the transing of children goes too far because, well, what would one do in a world where doctors don’t try to chemically alter the bodies of young children? A true reversal, plain and simple, would mean the Times deciding not to call trans-identifying male mass murderers women.
Similar to the Times, Democrats make occasional feints at dog-paddling back toward sanity on the issue of transgenderism, while positive movement on policy is nowhere to be seen, nor is it likely to be. As Alicia Nieves argued in Compact Magazine, radical activist groups have so much influence over the Democrat politicians that moderation is unlikely without structural changes, even on 80/20 issues like transgender ideology. Democrats’ inability to set a trajectory that coheres with reality and the positions of the American people makes their displays of faux moderation all the more necessary.
Which explains why leftist politicians, journalists, influencers, and institutions will keep pretending they’ve “learned”: like the American Medical Association on transing kids, Hillary Clinton on immigration, The New York Times on marijuana and mask mandates, and Tim Walz on fraud (see, he “fired people“).
Even if these leftists really had learned, the question remains: How much more “learning” can America afford? Recently Zohran Mamdani proudly rolled back the policy of sweeping homeless encampments — and then put it back in place after nearly 20 people died in the cold — and then seemingly reversed course again. It would be more practical than performative to ask him whether or not his policy mistakes will always involve this kind of body count. Yet even this deadly policy failure is a fairly insignificant example of the destruction leftism has wrought in the U.S. within the previous decade.
In all honesty, it’s shocking that Americans still have a country after the threefold assault of Covid lockdowns, Biden’s open border crisis, and the war on the reality of male and female and the immutability of sex. To the extent that the United States’ culture, economy, and people press forward as vibrantly as they do, it’s a testimony to God’s grace, the resilience of the American people, and, yes, the incorrigible persistence of Donald Trump. But it would be a mistake to expect this resilience to last indefinitely.
The damage caused by Democrat “mistakes” demands that the right shift from a policy of reacting to leftist assaults after many lives have been ruined to halting them in their infancy, or even launching preemptive campaigns on fronts the left seems likely to threaten. The success or failure of the MAGA movement will in large part be determined by whether it can catalyze this shift and prove it is capable of stopping the next left-wing manmade disaster before Democrats can “learn” from it. America can only survive so much more of this kind of education.
Joshua Monnington is an assistant editor at The Federalist. He was previously an editor at Regnery Publishing and is a graduate of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
