The last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi, lifted his sweet, high voice in the Sistine Chapel for three decades until around 1913, when the quality of his singing declined due to age. Recordings of his performances are easily found online. It is haunting to listen and think he was the final vestige of a barbarous practice — the preservation of a boy’s inimitable vocal purity through a dangerous and painful sterilizing procedure, resulting in that same voice backed by an adult’s powerful lungs. The boys chosen for this fate were invariably poor, with families willing to damage their sons’ health for their economic security and social advancement.
It would be easy (and wrong) to look down haughtily upon our ancestors’ unethical treatment of children. Today we do the same (and worse) to thousands of prepubertal boys and girls each year in the U.S., although for different reasons.
In what we think of as our enlightened times, the sterilization of children, the stunting of their growth, the removal of their breasts and genitals, their subjection to grotesque surgical reconstructions — these practices have become a roaring business — a subset of the larger gender industrial complex with a market valued at around $4 billion and growing rapidly.
Harming children’s healthy sex organs and shutting down their normal sexual development is no longer done to lift them out of poverty and to provide permanently angelic voices for the opera. Instead, it is done to “liberate” them from the constraints of being male or female, and in service of the poisonous idea that a boy could be trapped in a girl’s body. The awful results of trying to correct what isn’t broken are heavy burdens laid on the backs of young people who have developed a revulsion for their healthy bodies through social contagion or mental disturbance.
Thankfully, the tide of child gender-abuse seems to be turning.
In a spectacularly consequential case (U.S. v. Skrmetti), the Supreme Court last week ruled that Tennessee’s law banning puberty blocking and mutilating surgeries for minors suffering from gender dysphoria is constitutional. This is a great and welcome development in the 26 states where these child-protective laws exist, and in other states that might be contemplating similar moves.
Although the decision turned on the narrow issue of whether the law violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, which guarantees that every person will be treated equally under the law, the case naturally demonstrated the irreconcilable differences between the opposing camps.
The liberal dissenting justices expressed full belief in the claims of gender activists that “gender affirming care is not merely beneficial but critical” to relieve suicidality in dysphoric youth. Justice Samuel Alito, however, during oral arguments, sharply criticized the research arm of the gender industry for ignoring studies that showed no long-term mental health benefit for children subjected to sterilization and worse. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “such treatments pose risks outweighing their benefits for those too young to fully consent.”
As always, the arguments bandying research studies miss the simple point. If children are suffering acute mental distress about their bodies, does it make any sense to subject them to violent physical alterations that happen to be permanent, which they cannot fully comprehend, and which incidentally may not fix their distress at all? Wouldn’t a conservative approach of therapeutic support, counseling, root cause evaluation, and analysis for possible comorbidities such as autism make more sense?
It helps to imagine a specific scenario. A girl of 12 who has spent too much time on TikTok and has been encouraged by her school’s misguided guidance counselor sets off down the path of “gender transition.” With the blocking of her puberty, her growth is stopped and she is made infertile for life. The administration of testosterone causes her wild emotional swings. Her breast buds are removed, leaving ugly scars across her chest. She develops male pattern baldness if it runs in her family. Her voice deepens and she grows a faint beard. She gets a phalloplasty, where her arm is farmed for muscle and a strange and nonfunctioning phallus is concocted, and suffers many complications.
The end result is a painful life on the social margins, hoping for love and acceptance, with the chance of forming a family almost nonexistent. Who in their right minds would expect suicidality to decrease in this not uncommon situation?
Recent polls show that around 60% of Americans wish to protect girls and boys from these miserable “treatments.” Sadly, the medical and psychological professional organizations are ideologically captured by small vocal cadres in their ranks. It falls to lawmakers at the state level to regulate hormonal and surgical attacks on children out of existence. Now that the Supreme Court has weighed in on the side of sanity, it may just be possible to imagine a federal law protecting all American children, whether in Tennessee or California.
And it just may be possible to imagine a near future in which the thought of castrating a child in the name of gender ideology will be just as unthinkable as doing so to preserve his career on the operatic stage.
