If you're on the left, you believe that the traditional idea that humans come in two sexes (male and female) is not only outdated, but evil.  Instead, leftism insists that human sex identification is an infinitely malleable matter of personal choice, untethered to genetics.  Conservatives respond that it's not a matter of choice.  Instead, people who claim to be transgendered almost invariably have complex mental issues, often stemming from their upbringing.  A recently recovered 1991 study supports conservatives.

During his pre-election town hall, Joe Biden happily accepted that little boys and girls know exactly what sex they really are (separate from their biological sex) and promised that he will ensure that the law lets them make those choices.  By saying this, Biden implied he would encourage allowing children to opt into dangerous hormone treatments and mutilating surgery.  That's not just demented; that's evil.

Just a couple of weeks ago, HBO premiered a documentary about allegedly transgender kids.  Footage made the rounds of a scene in which a woman tries to force her manifestly six-year-old son, Phoenix, to stand in front of an LGBTQ church and proudly identify himself as a girl.  You can see the clip at the beginning of this Matt Walsh video:

Walsh goes on to point out some important insights about the HBO show:

1. The mothers are crazy.  (When Phoenix's parents get divorced and Phoenix finally insists he really is a boy, his mother feels better because she had worked through her issues.  Another boy, whose mother insists he is a girl and lives through his fame, hates his female persona.)

2. The fathers are nonentities or invisible men who go along with overwhelming mothers.  They are eunuchs and seem fine with having their sons take that lack of masculinity one step farther.

3. Many of the children come from broken or breaking homes.

4. Even parents who aren't on board with their children's transgenderism go along meekly with the social pressure.

I agree with everything Walsh says.  I have said for years that transgenderism is a leftist attack on masculinity and a creepy, pedophile-like way to take control of children's sexuality.

What I said doesn't preclude people having body dysmorphia, a term that means they have a wildly incorrect view of their bodies.  Before transgenderism became a "thing," the most commonly known version of this disorder was anorexia nervosa, which saw perfectly healthy young women starve themselves to death because they saw themselves as fat.

Thankfully, we recognized that anorexia was a mental illness and tried to re-orient these women's minds.  If we had treated anorexia the same way we treat the disorder of "transgenderism," we would have offered these women dieting tips and stomach-stapling.

Walt Heyer, who was one of the first Americans to take hormones and have surgery to "change" from a man to a woman, realized that (a) the medical community unconscionably pushed him into these drastic changes and (b) the problem was with his upbringing, not his misgendering.  In his case, he blamed his grandmother, who gave him big ego strokes for wearing girls' clothes and being feminine.

Based on my own experiences living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the company of a lot of people living on the LGBTQ spectrum, I think Heyer's right.  Probably 70% of the people I know on that spectrum had suffered childhood traumas, whether it was absent fathers, overbearing mothers, or abuse at a parents' hands.

It may be that those overbearing mothers, the same ones Matt Walsh focused on, are the biggest factor in transgenderism.  Someone trolling through the literature discovered a 1991 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that compared mothers of boys with gender identity issues to mothers of "normal boys."  (Yes, just 29 years ago, it was still "normal" to call a boy a boy.)  What the study revealed is that, for the boys who identified as girls, 53% of their mothers had Borderline Personality Disorders. For boys who knew that they were boys, only 6% of the mothers had Borderline Personality Disorders.

Seemingly, when boys are transgender, it's not because, baby, they were born that way.  More often than not, it's because they had the spectacular bad luck to be born to a mother with a serious mental disorder.

I've long said that when people claim to be members of the opposite sex, rather than destroying their bodies with hormones and surgery to create a Frankenstein-like simulacrum of that opposite sex, we should first give them a trial treatment of hormones aligned with, not the opposite of, their biological sex.  It seems they also need time with a good psychiatrist who understands the emotional trauma of a disordered mother.

Image: Drag queen and escort at Seattle PRIDE.  Public domain.