Although a profound philosopher, Aristotle did not need any special insight for this observation, for he was merely summarizing a truism. Only a madman acts without purpose, without having in mind some objective good that guides his actions and distinguishes success from failure. By this standard, the Biden administration’s new directives for non-discrimination in healthcare are textbook madness.

Our word “health” comes from the same root as our word “whole”—to restore something to health, it used to be understood, meant to bring it back to its fullness. The art of healthcare was, quite simply, aimed at the good of the body, conceived in terms of its proper functioning. Disease or injury impedes the body from attaining its natural goodness, and it is the task of medicine to restore it.

There were, of course, any number of things that medicine can do, as a matter of pure technique—lop off a limb at random, or cause a patient’s lungs to fill with fluid, but to do these would no longer be medicine, whose first rule is “do no harm.” The current craze for “transgender healthcare,” then, is quite simply a contradiction in terms, no more coherent than “underground aeronautics.”