“Trans Kids” Are the New Totem of the American Left

President Biden wants to codify child sex change operations into federal law
—revealing a disturbing new metaphysics. 

President Biden has announced that he would support federal legislation
requiring states to administer hormone treatments and sex change
operations for “transgender kids.” He blasted recent restrictions on such
practices in Florida as “close to sin” and said that so-called gender-affirming
care should qualify as a basic civil right.

The president’s message is dystopian on its face, but, at a deeper level of
analysis, reveals the disturbing new metaphysics of the American Left, which
has elevated the “transgender child” into a totem. In primitive societies,
tribes in places such as North America and Aboriginal Australia would use
totems to connect with nature, mediate their relationship with the spirit
world, and honor the categories of the masculine and the feminine. In
modern America, political activists use the “transgender child” as a post-
modern totem to connect with a utopian, technologically-perfected future
and to create a new category beyond man and woman. Through chemical
and surgical intervention, they believe, they can smash the patriarchy and
transcend the limitations of human nature.

In truth, however, these procedures will not usher in a utopia. As we are
beginning to see with the first cohort of “detransitioners,” so-called gender-
affirming care denies biological reality and often results in horrific
complications and regrets. The American doctors who are performing double-
mastectomies on healthy young girls and penectomies on healthy young
boys are not the saviors of the future—they are the butchers of the present,
enacting a benevolent form of child sacrifice.