Despite this latest lunacy, I remain confident that the trans madness will come to an end, though sadly not without significant human carnage. Those responsible for this child abuse—the doctors, the clinics, and the pharmaceutical companies—are going to be sued and will pay a heavy price. This is America, folks: The establishment’s ideology is ultimately only plausible as long as it is making, not costing, money. Once those groups start paying out to settle such suits, as if by magic their beliefs will change overnight. 

In a strange but eloquent example of irony, the news that the U.K.’s National Health Service is banning hormone treatment and transgender surgeries for minors arrived just as I was reading the text of a proposed California bill that would make refusal to affirm a child’s transgender confusion an offense for which a parent could lose custody. The bill, called the Transgender, Gender-Diverse, and Intersex Youth Empowerment Act, would require courts to consider a parent’s acceptance of his or her child’s gender identity when deciding custody and visitation cases.

One lesson to be drawn from this is that America is once again determined to be exceptional. As Europe apparently becomes a tad more sane on the trans issue, America’s gender dementia only deepens, with the full weight of the law behind it. The political leadership of the U.S. is committed to the transgender cause, though it is likely that few in the White House or Congress have bothered to read any of the gender theory that legitimates it. And it apparently has the kind of backing from sections of the medical establishment that would make Trofim Lysenko drool with envy. Apparently we must follow the science—but only where the demands of our anarchic identity politics lead. Both bode ill for the nation’s future: Politicians mortgaged to the latest therapeutic fad and scientific knowledge based on lobby groups do not inspire confidence.

Yet while the trans issue is the presenting problem, the California bill points toward something of much broader significance: the rise of the notion that parents are defined by function rather than biology. Now, according to the Oxford Dictionary, “parent” as a verb existed as early as the sixteenth century, but it did not gain currency until the twentieth. And its prominence today is likely significant, reflecting a world where “parent” is primarily something you do rather than something you are.

In one sense, parents have always “done” things. They care for and protect their children, nurture them, raise them to be adults. That we can talk of “good parents” and “bad parents” indicates that parenthood involves functions. But the assumption has always been that the biological relationship is basic and that the judgment of “good” or “bad” is understood relative to the moral obligations that relationship necessarily implies.

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