World War T

With the Supreme Court poised to sanction the incoherence known as gay marriage, the left has begun to wage what Steve Sailer calls World War T. 

In light of that development, here is a cogent take on the latest absurdity:

Our mental faculties, like our physical ones, are ordered toward various ends. Among these ends is the attainment of truth. To this extent, it is perfective of our mental faculties to recognize how we truly are (and thus apprehend a truth). It is for this reason that we can make sense of mental disorders such as anorexia nervosa as disorders: they involve persons' having persistent, false beliefs about their identity or how they really are. In the case of the anorexic, someone who is dangerously underweight believes falsely (but tenaciously) that he is really overweight. It would be a proper procedure of medicine, then, for a therapist to help an anorexic individual to do away with his anorexia, restoring the individual’s mental faculties to their properly functioning state.

Well put.  The entire premise of mental illness presupposes an objective good that exists outside of the patient's subjective frame of reference.  If my uncle insists that he is King Henry VIII that does not make him so.  Nor would we be doing him any favors if we went along with the conceit.  If he is otherwise a well-functioning member of society, we may not press the point too hard, but that would not mean we had granted the argument.

The analogy with anorexia is a helpful one because those who fight against us in World War T positively loathe the Henry VIII argument.  To sane individuals, they are seen as analogous, but they only get so far as the comparison with one who is mentally ill before erupting into a paroxysm of rage. 

No wonder they have such trouble thinking clearly.  All those emotions are always getting in the way. 

To continue:

But what are we to make of this “gender reassignment” surgery? Insofar as such a surgical procedure involves the intentional damaging and mutilating of otherwise perfectly functioning bodily faculties by twisting them to an end toward which they are not ordered, such a thing cannot, in principle, possibly be considered a medical procedure. And because love compels us to seek the good for another, it is thus a grave evil to condone such surgical procedures.

This is also well articulated, and dovetails nicely with what I posted about previously.  As Chesterton once put it, "There are some desires that are not desirable." 

Read the rest of the piece.  It's all quite good.

Anyway, this war for the transgendered is only going to accelerate.  If these coherent arguments aren't liable to be taken seriously in our degenerate times, it nonetheless profits us to be familiar with them, both for our own edification, and on the off chance we meet someone who has yet to be taken in by what passes for the left's system of thought.