Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie tackles gender reassignment surgery in his latest book, The Golden House. Satanic Verses earned Rushdie a fatwa from Iran’s Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, and while the left isn’t calling for Rushdie to be murdered for his latest heresy, they are decidedly unhappy with the Golden House.
In this novel, Rushdie reportedly tackles the left’s reckless push for younger and younger children to undergo sex change treatments, even surgery. He does not approve.
Rushdie, it should be noted, was not only anti-Trump during last year’s presidential election but a proud #ImWithHer fanatic.
He is not, in other words, someone one might expect to be concerned about the leftist push for maiming children in the name of LGBTQ politics.
Rushdie points out that gender-reassignment surgery is an unnecessarily extreme response to a little boy who likes to play with dolls or wear pink.
Satanic Verses author Sir Salman Rushdie says society needs to ‘back off’ promoting sex-change surgery to young people.
The 70-year-old writer says he ‘worries’ how children are being affected by more liberal attitudes to gender-reassignment procedures.
He adds: ‘I have quite strong views about the over-insistence on these issues, particularly when you get down to very young people.
. . . . ‘Because, to put it crudely, if there’s a boy who likes playing with dolls and wearing pink shirts it shouldn’t necessarily mean that he has to have gender-reassignment surgery.
‘Until quite recently that would never have occurred to anyone, so I think we maybe need to just back off a little bit.’
However, Rushdie insisted he did not want to be ‘stupidly judgmental’ about the issue, which he tackles in his new novel The Golden House.
While Rushdie may not have intended to be “stupidly judgmental,” it appears that the lefties who’ve heard this are being exactly that.
A common theme amongst those lashing out at Rushdie over this topic is that sex change surgery does not happen on children.
While there is some truth to this (in the U. S., sex change surgery is reportedly not performed on those under 18, though breast removals have been performed on girls as young as 16), the point Rushdie is making is completely lost on these people.
Pumping children (pre-puberty) full of hormones to “delay” or “pause” puberty is a bad idea. The “effects of which can be irreversible and may lead to a loss of fertility.” This pause is intended to make later surgery easier on the person. Furthermore, the child’s mental well-being is also at issue.
Dr. McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, calls such treatments “child abuse.”
The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014:
Then there is the subgroup of very young, often prepubescent children who notice distinct sex roles in the culture and, exploring how they fit in, begin imitating the opposite sex. Misguided doctors at medical centers including Boston’s Children’s Hospital have begun trying to treat this behavior by administering puberty-delaying hormones to render later sex-change surgeries less onerous—even though the drugs stunt the children’s growth and risk causing sterility. Given that close to 80% of such children would abandon their confusion and grow naturally into adult life if untreated, these medical interventions come close to child abuse. A better way to help these children: with devoted parenting.At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. “Sex change” is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.
Instead of tackling a complex issue on which there is little (none?) long-term research on either physical or psychological repercussions to children and teens who undergo sex change “treatments,” the left instead attacks one word, “surgery,” and dismiss Rushdie as a heretic of their latest deeply-held belief system.
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