Published April 3, 2024
Science has confirmed that men squashing their junk is, in fact, painful and unhealthy. A new study found that a supermajority of gender-confused men who “tuck” their genitalia in an effort to avoid a telltale bulge “experienced at least 1 side effect,” with “gonad pain reported most frequently.”
The more a man tucked, the more he risked ill effects, some of which (infection, testicular torsion, infertility) are severe. The Daily Mail helpfully illustrated the point by dredging up the experiences of trans-identified TikTok influencer Dylan Mulvaney — best known for tanking Anheuser-Busch’s stock and sales — to confirm that tucking is indeed “very painful and involved.”
You don’t say.
This study demonstrates the reality of so-called gender-affirming medicine, which is that it is not actually medicine. As the study and follow-up reporting demonstrate, tucking is painful and risky while providing no physical benefits whatsoever. Nonetheless, the study’s authors not only tell doctors “to ask patients if they would like to discuss risks, benefits, and safe methods of tucking” but also to “ask about preferred anatomy terminology, as the words penis and testicles may be offensive to this population.” Instead of healers, doctors are expected to be facilitators of each patient’s whims, no matter how illusory and unhealthy they are.
And so, as Joe Biden elevates “Transgender Day of Visibility” above Easter, we ought to make visible the truth about “gender-affirming care,” which is that none of it is medically necessary and that it all comes with risks and side effects. In contrast, there is never any physical harm from not transitioning. This is why transgender activists and their allies constantly invoke the threat of self-harm, especially when trying to persuade reluctant parents to approve radical procedures for their children. Without the threat of suicide, the transgender movement collapses. Only the direst of threats — children dead by their own hands — can justify, for example, castrating boys and amputating the breasts of troubled teenage girls.
Using the suicide narrative as cover, activists are pushing gender ideology as far as they can, especially when it comes to children. For example, the retailers who sell specialized underwear and other products for tucking also manufacture them for, and market them to, minors. The same is true for breast binders for girls, which likewise tend to be painful and can cause injuries. Activist teachers and school systems encourage these and other steps in “transition,” which they also work to hide from parents who might object.
Worse still, the physical harm caused by transition is only increased with each new step in the process. The puberty blockers that are given to children inhibit normal development, including of the bones and the brain. Contrary to the claims of transgender activists, they are not a fully reversible “pause button” but are a powerful disruption of the body’s natural, healthy development. The Dutch Protocol, in which puberty blockers are used to inhibit natural puberty in young boys, which is followed by cross-sex hormones, inevitably sterilizes those subjected to it. It also precludes sexual development, leaving them permanently anorgasmic.
These cross-sex hormones are medically unnecessary and physically dangerous, whether given to children or adults. Subjects taking these drugs may suffer significant side effects, which run from the painful (e.g. vaginal atrophy and clitoral enlargement in women taking testosterone) to the deadly (potential heart problems). Thanks to the release of the WPATH files, we also know that some of the medical providers giving them out believe they can cause deadly cancers.
And, of course, “gender-affirming” surgeries have a high rate of complications that can range from the awkward (incontinence) to the incredibly painful to the deadly. For example, Jazz Jennings, the trans-identified reality TV star, suffered severe complications after his genital surgeries. As bad as tucking can be, trying to turn male genitalia into a facsimile of a woman’s (or the reverse) is often much, much worse.
Even though the physicians doing these procedures have admitted that children cannot really give informed consent to them, trans activists are nonetheless arguing that children have a right to all of them, and they are pushing them relentlessly in schools, medicine, and culture while also trying to cut parents out of the loop.
All of this is the result of the superstitious belief that there is an epidemic of children somehow being born into the wrong bodies. This view is propped up with junk science, which in turn is ratified by medical organizations run by cowards who are too afraid to stand up to the radical activists in their midst.
But the harms inflicted by gender ideology’s takeover of the medical establishment are undeniable. There is nothing healing about “gender-affirming care,” and a reckoning is coming. Instead of the superstition of gender ideology, and the injuries it inflicts through its revolt against reality, we need a return to medicine that does no harm. Doctors should help patients accept their natural, healthy, sexed bodies, rather than encouraging them to smash, amputate, and inject them away in a vain attempt to become the other sex.
Nathanael Blake, Ph.D. is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His primary research interests are American political theory, Christian political thought, and the intersection of natural law and philosophical hermeneutics. His published scholarship has included work on Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Alasdair MacIntyre, Russell Kirk and J.R.R. Tolkien. He is currently working on a study of Kierkegaard and labor. As a cultural observer and commentator, he is also fascinated at how our secularizing culture develops substitutes for the loss of religious symbols, meaning and order.
