My new favorite political commenter, David Strum, is at it again

Gender dysphoria and transgender ideology are very different things.

Gender dysphoria is a very real phenomenon. One which up until recently has been a recognized mental illness (it should never have been reclassified, and was because of transgender ideology), and about which there has always been controversy regarding how best to treat it.

Dysphorias are mental and emotional phenomena. Anorexia is also a dysphoria, for instance, in which the person experiencing the dysphoria genuinely feels disconnected from their body and has a distorted view of themselves and their body. As we know, dysphoria can lead to death.

Suicidal depression and dysphoria are connected, obviously, and people experiencing dysphoria need treatment and to be treated with respect and compassion. Simply because you cannot understand the reasons behind the feeling doesn’t invalidate them. The feelings themselves are real and no different in kind than PTSD or other disorders of the mind. No compassionate person would berate somebody who thinks themselves worthless for whatever reason. They, too, are a child of God.

Dysphorias are not the result of choices.

Gender ideology, and most modern transgender-identifying people, exist because of critical gender theory which asserts that gender dysphoria is not actually a real thing, despite their using the term. Rather than having a mental illness, this kind of gender dysphoria is the result of a conflict between the self-identity of the “dysphoric” person and the societal expectations of behavior for that gender.

People with gender dysphoria of this type “feel” they belong in a different body or have identities that differ from the gender expectations of society, but most do not have the actual sense of dissociation from their birth body. They choose to change it, but more in line with the way people do other body modifications which have become so prevalent.

If they are children they clearly have no sense of the long-term consequences of this, and gender ideology actively seeks to hide them.

It is the adoption of a personality, and changing genders is more like changing clothes than anything else. This is why there is so much emphasis on “safe, reversible, impermanent” medical treatments. While these are all lies; gender surgery and hormone treatments for children are entirely experimental, if they were presented as such and as last-ditch treatments in order to deal with genuinely life-threatening conditions they would be discussed as such.

More in line with using experimental drugs for a terminal patient than something advertised on TikTok. Instead we get propaganda about how these treatments are safe and effective ways to save lives. That is clearly false, and is destroying lives.

We often hear about doctors telling parents that they have a choice between a dead child and a live transgender child, the actual reality is that in almost all cases no other treatments are even offered to parents, despite the dangers of using experimental and dangerous treatments. We don’t resort to force-feeding anorexics before counseling, but we do with gender dysphoria diagnoses often made after one visit to a doctor. Any attempt at counseling is called “conversion therapy,” and it is banned in many states.

I repeat: counseling children for gender dysphoria is BANNED in many states, and derided at every turn in the media. There is an anti-counseling movement for children suffering from identity crises. It would be as if we banned counseling for anorexia.

….

That’s because the diagnosis is not medical, but ideological. Transgenderism is not seen as a disease or dysphoria to be cured but as a positive good. It is a positive good because gender ideology, or critical gender theory, sees breaking down the gender binary as a necessary step to reforming society away from bourgeois values.

The trans-activist movement is, at the base, yet another line of attack in the war against capitalism and the West. If you actually listen to what the ideologists preach, it is tangentially related to gender, but ultimately directed at bourgeois culture. The church, the family, and the education system. All of it needs to be destroyed or taken over.

That is the goal, and it is succeeding in many areas. K-12 is filled with ideological warriors, and Drag Queen Story Hour exists in order to further the cause. They are recruiting child drag performers now for the pleasure of adults. It is all of a piece, and has nothing to do with any naturally occurring mental illness.

It is an ideological movement taking over society.