America’s transdemic
There’s a public health crisis sweeping across America right now. A deadly contagion has gripped our population. Children, teenagers, and young adults are most susceptible to it and most seriously harmed by it. No, it’s not COVID-19. It’s worse. It’s the highly contagious and transmissible craze of transgenderism and trans ideology that is spreading like gangrene, infecting the minds and poisoning the hearts of our nation’s children.
The most serious public health crisis in America today isn’t a pandemic, it’s a “transdemic.” And we must do everything we can to stop it, to vaccinate our nation against it, before it infects and destroys another soul.
Postmodernity plus the sexual revolution paved the way for our society to buy into one of the biggest lies in the history of mankind. What was that lie? Gender identity. The lie was that there even exists such a thing as a “gender identity” and that it can be separate from, or opposite to, one’s biological sex. Further, it is said that gender identity must take precedence over the physical reality of the body. This is the core teaching of “gender ideology.”
Get Our Latest News for FREE
A growth industry
If you’re tempted to doubt me, consider this staggering statistic: According to The Gender Mapper, there are now “300 clinics that prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children in North America. In 2016 there were less than 50, in 2013 there was a handful.”
Or this — in 2007 there were only two pediatric gender clinics in the United States — one in New York and one in Washington, D.C. Now, there are dozens all across the country.
Writing for the New York Times, columnist Ross Douthat recently touched on this trend, this drastic uptick in case numbers across the country. He wrote:
“According to Gallup, the share of younger Americans who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender has risen precipitously in the last decade. Almost twenty-one percent of Generation Z — meaning, for the purposes of the survey, young adults born between 1997 and 2003 — identifies as L.G.B.T., as against about 10 percent of the millennial generation, just over 4 percent of my own Generation X, and less than 3 percent of baby boomers. Comparing the Generation Z to the baby boom generation, the percentage of people identifying as transgender, in particular, has risen twentyfold.”
Let that sink in. In less than four short generations, there has been a twenty-fold increase in youth who identify somewhere along the LGBT spectrum.
This contagion was manufactured in the lab of the sexual revolution and slowly released into our society and culture over the last few decades by Hollywood, Marxist revolutionaries, gender studies programs on college campuses, and the radical progressive politics of the Democrat party.
The gender ideology industry is leading our children away, down into the depths of hell. Some may come back, but they won’t ever be the same. As Brandon Showalter, a reporter with the Christian Post remarked, “Some of us won’t be shocked by the scope of the carnage when this mass psychosis breaks … Countless young people with endocrine failure, brittle bones, liver and kidney issues, heart disease, rising rates of cancers, and many rendered sterile.”
Jennifer Bilek, writing for First Things, explains how “The LGBT rights agenda — note the addition of ‘T’— has become a powerful, aggressive force in American society. Its advocates stand at the top of media, academia, the professions, and, most important, Big Business and Big Philanthropy.”
Bilek continues, “Although activists present the LGBT movement as a weak, powerless group suffering oppression and discrimination, in truth it wields enormous power and influence — power it increasingly uses to remake our laws, schools, and society.”
They aren’t just remaking our “laws, schools, and society.” They are also remaking our children.
And this brings me to the story of “Tree.”
A cut-down tree
Whatever you do today, I want you to also do one more thing. I want you to make sure that you take the time to read this one blog, a harrowing and heartbreaking essay shared by a “male de-transitioner” who goes by the name “Tree.” On his Substack, “A Cut Down Tree,” he posted an article entitled, “Purification Rites: An autobiographical essay.”
Tree’s account is particularly moving.
He writes:
“I didn’t want to be a man. I didn’t want to be big and hairy. Men scared me. I’d seen my mom assaulted when I was young, and I didn’t want to be like the man who’d done that to her. The idea of testosterone poisoning made sense to me because maleness itself terrified me. I’d been bullied a lot in school by other boys, and a lot of that bullying involved sexual abuse — groping, inappropriate touching, striking my butt and genitals, and verbal harassment (wolf-whistling and yelling sexual comments at me). These, I felt, weren’t the sorts of things that happened to men. My suffering was only legible if I was a woman.
This background made me vulnerable to the ideology of transgenderism. I had no friends in high school and spent a lot of time online, and I was exposed to the burgeoning social justice/woke movement before it entered the mainstream. When I connected to the internet, I was inundated with messages about the violence of maleness. This wasn’t just “toxic masculinity” — I saw feminists saying all masculinity was toxic, that all men were rapists, all men were oppressors, all men should be killed. As a white man, I was directly responsible for all of the oppression experienced by women and people of color.”
For Tree, a straight, white, male, the message was loud and clear — everything he was by birth, by nature, was wrong. He was the worst of the worst. His mere existence was a scourge on society. The mind worm of madness had begun to infect him.
Tree hauntingly remarks that, “My transition wasn’t driven by fetishism or misogyny. I was just a lonely, wounded child. All I really wanted was to be loved.”
Unfortunately, he found “love” in all the wrong places. He notes that, “This trans phase might have also passed on its own — if it weren’t for the Queer Youth Center.”
At the Queer Youth Center, they “affirmed my identity, introduced me to trans activists, and encouraged me to engage in activism myself,” he wrote, adding, “(The activism is a central part of the trans movement — these people don’t want you to just transition, they also want you to spread the ideology. This moral drive to proselytize is part of how the movement has spread so quickly.)”
Note again the religious language. It’s not enough for you to catch the disease, they demand that you disciple others into the illness as well.
And so, with his mistaken “female gender identity” Tree felt like he “had to transition.” He would pursue the self-purification — even though he clearly didn’t know what he was doing.
"I saw the surgery as a rite of purification. I felt that by removing a part of myself I would become whole. Years of online grooming and ideological brainwashing had made me delusional, but no one pushed back on it."
He immediately regretted the surgery. But there was no going back.
A call to present action and the hope of future wholeness
Assuming you are moved by the same pathos that I am for this man, then logically the next thought must be, “What can we do?” What can be done to help put an end to the writing of such tragic stories?
Christians across the nation must put all of their political energy, at every level, into purifying our society of trans ideology. It must be banished from the public square, the public schools, and our public imagination.
We need a shutdown — of all gender clinics. We need a lockdown — of all “Queer Youth Centers.” We must do what it takes to stop the gender ideology-driven trans madness that is maiming and killing our kids. So-called “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors must be made illegal. Whatever it takes — that’s what we must do.
To that end, let me recommend four resources that you can begin using to inoculate yourself, and others, against this deadly — this demonic — virus.
- Reporting on the Transgender Movement, by Brandon Showalter
- When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, by Ryan Anderson
- Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, by Abigail Schrier
While we must hate the ideology and those who are willing to push it on children for their own nefarious agenda, we must also have great compassion and love for those who have been made to suffer under it. As we fight, we must hold out Gospel hope. At the heart of the trans sickness is the same sickness that has infected mankind from the beginning: sin.
The trans movement acts as if Romans 1 is a list of instructions to be followed and not the ringing indictment of sin that it is. The trans movement is the apotheosis of self; men and women seeking to play God over their plastic bodies, as they now reach down into their flesh, trying to turn men into women and women into men. It’s ultimately an act of high-handed rebellion. So whatever else it is, it is a sin — and so we need a Savior to solve it.
Praise God that a Savior is provided in the form of a God-man, who took on flesh for us. Far from demanding that we purify ourselves, which always was an impossible task, Christ instead bore the wrath of God so that we might be made pure, be made holy, through Him.
We cannot redeem our fallen nature, as sinners, without humbly asking for a heart of flesh that only comes through the new birth by the Spirit. In that sense, Tree was onto something. He needed to be remade, reborn. Not on the outside, but from within.
I fear much ground has already been gained by the transgender movement. Still, Christ is King, and we are His subjects, willing or not. And He is a gracious King, who may yet bring restoration now even as we await future redemption.
After all, this is the King who had a word of hope specifically for eunuchs, to those like Tree, who feel “cut down” or “cut off.” A word of promise that they can, in fact, be made whole. Perhaps not entirely in this life, but most assuredly in the life to come, in eternity. This word comes from Isaiah, and with it, we will close:
“Let no foreigner who is bound to the Lord say,
‘The Lord will surely exclude me from his people.’
And let no eunuch complain,
‘I am only a dry tree.’
For this is what the Lord says:
‘To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant —
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters;
I will give them an everlasting name
that will endure forever.’”
Isaiah 56:3-5
Originally published at the Standing for Freedom Center.
William Wolfe served as a senior official in the Trump administration, both as a deputy assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon and a director of legislative affairs at the State Department. Prior to his service in the administration, Wolfe worked for Heritage Action for America, and as a congressional staffer for three different members of Congress, including the former Rep. Dave Brat. He has a B.A. in history from Covenant College, and is finishing his Masters of Divinity at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Follow William on Twitter at @William_E_Wolfe
