Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the drive to institutionalize radical gender ideology is the damage done to the children its proponents sacrifice.
Take Luka Hein.
The Minnesota 21-year-old is suing the doctors who performed a double mastectomy on her when she was just 16 as part of her gender transition.
By her own account, she was suffering emotional turbulence made worse by her parents’ divorce and the violence of being groomed by a man on the internet.
In trying to deal with it all, she fell under the spell of online trans influencers who praised the virtues of hormones and surgery.
At a University of Nebraska clinic in the summer of 2017, after a 55-minute consultation, Hein was diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
By October, her double mastectomy had been scheduled.
In other words, a confused kid roiled by the onset of adulthood, real family problems, and traumatic online abuse was somehow allowed, in less than an hour, to sign up for and undergo life-altering surgeries and hormone treatments. (One of her doctors, barbarically, recommended she have a hysterectomy.)
Not because she needed them.
But because of an ideological crusade by progressives in the medical community and their political allies.
Hein’s lawsuit argues she was incapable of consenting to such treatment at 16 — and that’s correct.
“I don’t think kids can ever consent to having full bodily functions taken away at a young age before they even know what that means,” Hein said.
Yes. We recognize as a society that 16-year-olds are too young to vote, to serve in the armed forces, to drink or smoke tobacco, and to get tattoos.
Surgeries and hormones have far more serious and immediate consequences. Worse still, there’s no good evidence suggesting they help kids at all.
Hein’s terrible story echoes the sad tales of other prominent detransitioners.
Like Chloe Cole, who’s testified before Congress on the issue, calling herself — again, correctly — “a victim of one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of the United States of America.”
Or Ash Eskridge, who like Hein has highlighted the power social media has in convincing impressionable kids (especially girls) that they’re actually the opposite gender.
Progressives, whose modern bywords are safety and harm, are heartbreakingly indifferent to the irreparable damage that trans ideology does — far more real and lasting than any microaggression.
Unless and until the nation as a whole adopts common-sense laws like those in Missouri and elsewhere barring these procedures for kids, the tragedy will only continue.