Pope Francis Raises Alarm About Transgender Madness

A few weeks ago, Pope Francis had some stark words to say about gender ideology. “Today,” the pope told attendees at a conference, “the worst danger is gender ideology, which cancels out differences.”

The title of the conference that the Holy Father was addressing was “Man-Woman: Image of God. Towards an Anthropology of Vocations.” It was held at the Vatican in the first two days of March.

The Holy Father added that he himself asked for the conference to study the topic of gender ideology, which he called “this ugly ideology of our time, which erases differences and makes everything the same.” He added that “to erase difference is to erase humanity.”

As he often has, Pope Francis referred to the dystopian novel The Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson, which the Holy Father said depicts a world in which the political powers seek “to erase all differences.” However, in a healthy world, and in reality, “Man and woman…stand in fruitful ‘tension’.”

The Pope’s suggestion that gender ideology is “the worst danger” to contemporary society shocked some of his more progressive supporters. The heterodox New Ways Ministries issued a statement expressing alarm, dismay, and confusion at the Pope’s words.

While pointing out that Pope Francis has met several times with “transgender” individuals in a way that some have interpreted as demonstrating an openness to LGBT ideology, New Ways Ministries decried the fact that the Holy Father frequently speaks of gender ideology “in near-apocalyptic terms—and without much clarity.”

And indeed, Pope Francis often has singled out gender ideology as a profoundly destructive and dangerous ideology. As he told the Polish bishops last year, “Today children – children! – are taught in school that everyone can choose his or her sex. Why are they teaching this?”

UK Ends Puberty Blockers for Kids

But if New Ways Ministry is shocked that Pope Francis speaks about gender ideology in “near-apocalyptic” terms, they shouldn’t be. The reality is that more and more people, including an increasing number on the political left, are beginning to raise the alarm about the harmfulness of gender ideology, especially for children.

Just a few days ago, for instance, the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which is hardly a conservative organization, announced that the country would no longer be prescribing puberty blockers to children.

“NHS England has carefully considered the evidence review conducted by NICE and further published evidence available to date,” an NHS England spokesperson said. “We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty-suppressing hormones to make the treatment routinely available at this time.”

It is difficult to overstate just how important a development this is. The UK’s decision followed a comprehensive review of the scientific evidence, a review that was initiated after a series of whistleblowers sounded the alarm that the leading transgender “treatment” center in the UK, the Tavistock clinic, was transitioning hundreds of children, with barely any oversight.

In the UK, in the years before the Tavistock clinic was shut down, the rates of children being “treated” for transgenderism, skyrocketed by thousands of percent.

Somehow, however, common sense prevails. Whistleblowers blew the whistle, government agencies listened, and the practice of handing out puberty blockers and hormones to kids like candy was quashed, while the country took stock. Once experts were able to set aside the pressure placed upon them by transgender ideologues, and examine the actual evidence, it became clear that the claims of the ideologues were based in bad data and were wreaking havoc on the lives of children.

Truth and Sanity will Overcome Madness

In the United States, however, transgender clinics are proliferating like mad. The numbers of children “transitioning” is continuing to undergo stratospheric growth. And the transgender ideologues remain firmly in control of policy and the media. While some states are beginning to pass laws prohibiting transgender “treatments” for children, the momentum is still strongly in the wrong direction.

In 2019, journalist Douglas Murray published a book with the title The Madness of Crowds. One of the issues that Murray tackled in the book was transgenderism, lampooning the grotesque inconsistencies that fuel this diabolical movement. Murray pointed out that history is riddled with cases in which crowds, drunk on a mood of the moment, have defended ideas, and engaged in behavior that has caused horrendous destruction.

However, the madness of crowds can only last so long before the spell breaks. There have been other medical scandals in the past, that swept through and consumed not just the uninformed public, but also many groups of experts.

The “recovered memory” craze of the 1980s, for instance, resulted in lives destroyed by false imprisonments and suicides, as so-called “experts” raked in money and prestige by selling psychological snake oil. In the early 20th century, eugenics was widely embraced by the medical elite, and resulted in massive human rights abuses, including mass forced sterilization, and, ultimately, the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

But the spell broke, and sanity and truth eventually reasserted themselves.

Transgender Craze is Medical Abuse

More and more people are predicting that the ideological frenzy of the past few years will soon break in a similar way, and that when it does there will be a reckoning of a sort that will place the transgender craze among the worst medical abuses in all of history. Heads will roll.

Rumblings about this reckoning are not confined solely to conservative publications. Recently, for instance, The Independent ran an article by columnist Janice Turner with the unambiguous title, “One day, we’ll look back on the era of puberty blockers with horror.”

“In years to come,” read the summary of the article, “chemically freezing the sexual development of troubled children will become a topic of gruesome fascination, like lobotomies in the 20th century.”

In reality, of course, “chemically freezing” is only one way that transgender activists mutilate the bodies of children. Despite strenuous denials, evidence is piling up that transgender-promoting doctors have routinely performed surgical procedures on minors, including irreversible double-mastectomies, and even “vaginoplasties” (a gruesome procedure that involves the formation of a fake vagina in a boy or man).

Furthermore, we now have evidence that even some of the transgender activists who claim (publicly at least) that the “treatments” they are promoting are completely “safe” and evidence-based, know that they have profoundly negative repercussions.

Leaked Documents Reveal Disturbing Truth 

Recently, the journalist Michael Schellenberg leaked a series of internal messages from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which is at the forefront of promoting so-called “gender-affirming care” for children with gender dysphoria. In the WPATH model, doctors and therapists are encouraged never to question a child’s professed transgenderism, but instead to promptly put a child on a pathway towards so-called “social transitioning,” puberty blockers, and surgery.

Privately, however, some of the doctors and medical professional involved with WPATH expressed serious misgivings about the treatments they were pursuing. One doctor, for instance, questioned WPATH’s public (and widely repeated) insistence that puberty blocking drugs are completely “reversible.”

“I think when we just say, ‘Oh, puberty blockers are just reversible and it’s a very noninvasive treatment,’ I would say it’s more invasive than oftentimes the media makes it out to be or other people,” said Dr. Scott Leibowitz. “One cannot be on puberty suppression endlessly. You get to a place where physiologically we need hormones.”

Another doctor noted that artificial hormones frequently prescribed as a transgender “treatment” carry a high risk of leaving children permanently sterile. However, the doctor worried, many of the children being prescribed these drugs are simply incapable of making an informed decision about whether lifelong sterility is a price worth paying to explore a so-called “transition.”

“We try to talk about it, but most of the kids are nowhere in any kind of a brain space to really, really, really talk about it in a serious way,” the doctor says in one leaked video. Noting that some of the children taking these drugs are only nine or ten years old, she concludes that the problem of how to deal with this problem has left her “stumped.”

Mutilated Children: The Real Impact of Transgender Craze

Hidden behind these discussions among doctors, are the very real stories of children whose bodies have been mutilated, because of the madness of crowds—i.e., because of a passing movement, fueled by psychologically unbalanced and arguably sociopathic activists, who need to validate and normalize their bizarre worldview by recruiting children into it.

Sometime soon, however, the spell will break. Indeed, as we saw in the UK, it is already beginning to break. And when it does, we as a society will be left struggling to figure out what to do with the tens of thousands of children whose bodies have been sterilized, drugged, and mutilated, and who are now old enough to realize that the “experts” who pushed them down this path were part of a passing medical fad based upon bad data and even worse ideology.

Amazingly, the mainstream media, which typically rushes to tell the stories of people who have been abused or traumatized by powerful interests, will not touch any of these stories. Instead, the families who are dealing with the real-world impact of the propaganda of groups like WPATH, are left struggling to get their stories out to the world by going to brave, independent journalists, or platforms like Substack. One such group is Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT).

In one recent post on the PITT site, one mom pointed to the leaked videos from WPATH, which she blames for destroying the life of her daughter. After becoming convinced that she was transgender, this woman’s daughter went on puberty blockers and hormones, following the WPATH’s influential “standard of care.”

“Six years later,” writes the mom, “she is still on T [testosterone]. She dropped out of that college … She spent a year estranged from us, working menial jobs, living God knows where. Her complexion is bad. She is overweight. She is balding. She has had a series of infections prompting visits to the emergency room. She takes 14 medications. Meds for depression. Meds to prevent infection. Meds to treat male pattern baldness. And, of course, T.” The posts on the PITT site recount a litany of such horrors.

The subtitle of the woman’s post says it all, “Let the lawsuits begin.”

Gender Ideology is Apocalyptic

If Pope Francis speaks in “apocalyptic” terms about gender ideology, who can blame him?

As the Holy Father noted in the quotations above, grown adults are encouraging children in school to question their gender, actively pushing them down a path towards permanent medical and surgical mutilation.

The evidence is overwhelming that the transgender movement has produced one of the most horrific instances of medical malpractice in history. The bodies and minds of children have been treated as a mere tool of experimentation for a horrific worldview based upon diabolical notions of “freedom” and “self-determination.”

As Cardinal Robert Sarah wrote in The Day is Now Far Spent, echoing, and expanding upon the warnings of Pope Francis:

Gender ideology aims to deconstruct the specificity of man and woman, to abolish their anthropological differences. It works relentlessly to fabricate a new unisex global culture, without masculinity, without femininity, which will make possible the coming of a new age of humanity. But in a world where everything is produced by man, there is nothing human left! Our planet runs the risk of resembling those industrial areas where no room is left for nature, which then become inhuman. The absurdity and perversity of our own inventions out to make us dizzy.

We must resist this androgynous, post-modern, anti-human, self-loathing, child-destroying worldview, which is simply the latest manifestation of Satan’s promise to Adam and Eve that they would “become like God” if they ate of the tree of good and evil. We are not God. We cannot make the world in our own image. When we do, all we do is create ugliness.

We must learn to receive, and to teach our children to receive, that which is given to us as a gratuitous gift, including the God-given gift of our sex.