Pray for our wicked, depraved nation

Rod Dreher's column today at The American Conservative is such essential reading that I'll be excerpting most of it here.

I actually read the referenced NYT column by this Chu person yesterday. Erick Erickson tweeted about it. (And today he makes note of the vitriol he came in for in the response thread.)

Here is what post-America is supposed to shut up about and accept as somehow just, compassionate and sane:

Sit down and read this essay in The New York Times by Andrea Long Chu. It is, inadvertently, an icon of our radically disordered culture. Here’s how it starts:

Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.

Could there possibly be a more succinct statement of our very particular cultural madness? What I want is against nature, and I believe it will make me miserable, but I want it, and you had all better give it to me. 

Chu goes on to say that being on estrogen has made him even unhappier than he was to begin with:

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

I won’t go through with it, probably. Killing is icky. I tell you this not because I’m cruising for sympathy but to prepare you for what I’m telling you now: I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.

More:

But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman. I will live with this, or I won’t. That’s fine. The negative passions — grief, self-loathing, shame, regret — are as much a human right as universal health care, or food. There are no good outcomes in transition. There are only people, begging to be taken seriously.

Read the whole thing. 

Do you see what’s happening here? Chu says that the treatments doctors have given him are making him sicker, even making him desire suicide. But if he wants to suffer and to die, then he should have that right. Satisfying desire is the only thing that matters.  

We are committing the sin of thinking we can surmount God's design for this universe. We are all Victor Frankensteins now:

Freeing the autonomous will from sex and gender norms is the summum bonum of contemporary American progressivism. The insatiably miserable Andrea Long Chu is its incarnation.

From The Benedict Option:

“The significance of sexual difference has never before been contingent upon a creature’s preferences, or upon whether or not God gave it episodically to a particular creature to have certain preferences,” writes Catholic theologian Christopher Roberts. He goes on to say that for Christians, the meaning of sexuality has always depended on its relationship to the created order and to eschatology—the ultimate end of man. “As was particularly clear, perhaps for the first time in Luther, the fact of a sexually differentiated creation is reckoned to human beings as a piece of information from God about who and what it meant to be human,” writes Roberts.

Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together? The legitimacy of our sexual desire is limited by the givenness of nature. The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order. “Male and female he made them,” says Genesis, revealing that complementarity is written into the nature of reality.

Easy divorce stretches the sacred bond of matrimony to the breaking point, but it does not deny complementarity. Gay marriage does. Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female. Everything in this debate (and many others between traditional Christianity and modernity) turns on how we answer the question: Is the natural world and its limits a given, or are we free to do with it whatever we desire?

Andrea Long Chu’s sexualized wound that will never heal is progressivism’s answer. More from The Benedict Option:

Future historians will wonder how the sexual desires of only three to four percent of the population became the fulcrum on which an entire worldview was dislodged and overturned. A partial answer is that the media are to blame. Back in 1993, a cover story in the Nation identified the gay rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

We have gone beyond gay people to allow transgender people — fewer than one percent of the population — to change America forever.

Dreher considers how she's framed her situation on her Go Fund Me page.

Give me money for surgery or I might kill myself. Or, according to me in The New York Times, give me money for surgery and I might kill myself anyway. It’s my right!  

He also notes, by reprinting a tweet, that a fellow gender-dysphoria sufferer takes Chu to task for the "wound" characterization:

It is always good to have diverse trans voices on the page. I love that. But calling the business “a wound” instead of the gooshy miracle it is? Emphasizing misery and suffering and self-loathing? Is that what is most needed to be shouted into the megaphone at this perilous hour?

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

“Gooshy miracle.”

And then this. Had you ever heard of sissy porn?

UPDATE.3: On Chu’s website, he posts a PDF link to a paper he delivered earlier this year at a Columbia University conference. This is the kind of thing they’re talking about at one of America’s great universities. The paper is titled “Did Sissy Porn Make Me Trans?” There are no images, but don’t click through to it and start reading unless you are prepared to go to an extremely dark place. I almost didn’t post this here, but after thinking about it, I concluded that it’s actually vitally important to know.
I’m going to summarize the paper for those who don’t want to read it. Again, I cannot caution you strongly enough about its content, and the pornographic images Chu describes in detail in the paper.
The paper’s title comes from a comment Chu saw on an online forum. “Sissy porn,” we learn from the paper, is a genre in which submissive men are forced to have sex with other men, in such a way that their masculinity is forcibly taken from them. Chu says this genre is also called “forced feminization porn.” Chu says that sissy porn explicitly intends to turn male viewers into transsexuals, in part by “instruct[ing] them to understand their addiction to the genre as constitutive of their own feminization.” Chu writes:

Now Jon would hardly be the first closeted trans woman whose gender dysphoria felt like porn addiction. Indeed, the internet is full of women like this, if you know where to look. The phenomenon is common enough, in fact, to have given rise to an entire subgenre of anxiety fielding on the popular discussion website Reddit. In typical post from 2014, titled “Did sissy porn make me trans or was I trans all along?,” one user writes: “About 3 years ago, I discovered sissy hypno videos [that’s “hypno” like short for “hypnotism”], which in a nutshell are flashing subjective images telling you to wear panties, be girly… and even take hormones. I became completely obsessed with these videos….”

This person is now “95% sure she is trans,” writes Chu.

Now, imagine a confused 12-year-old boy — perhaps one experiencing same-sex desires — finding sissy porn on his smartphone, and giving himself over to it. It’s only a few clicks away.

Chu goes on to talk about the dynamics of sissy porn. Here’s is a key portion, one I can quote here

Sissyhood is not the obliteration of subjectivity, but its diminishment. Sissies have selves, in other words, but these selves are simplified, emptied, dumb. The technical term for this is bimboification. Numerous captions instruct spectators to submit themselves to hypnosis, brainwashing, brain-melting, and other techniques for scooping out intelligence.

Chu describes, unprintably, that the porn video’s explicit instructions order the viewer to surrender his entire to the sexually dominant male’s desires. The act of sexual submission is not only castration, and the willed destruction of the submissive’s masculinity, it is — this is crucial — also the willed destruction of personhood. Of sexualizing the desire for obliteration.

Almighty God, pry Satan's fingers from post-America's throat. In Jesus's name I pray. Amen.