A Scene from “Planet Unhinged”
I was thinking recently about how I’d respond if my child invited a friend over who “identified” as disabled. Trans ideology is something my family has been dealing with for several years now.
As the laws of logic and reason lie in tattered shreds at our culture’s feet, let’s just play it through, in honor of the lost art of intellectual consistency. Or maybe just for old time’s sake.
A Scene from “Planet Unhinged”
(This isn’t a real play, it’s one scene that I formulated in my mind to try to wrap my head around the absurdity of what is going on in our world. I’m sure you could think of other scenes.)
“Mom, So-and-So is coming over tomorrow. Just so you know, she is trans-disabled. I told her she’d be safe here.”
“What do you mean? Is she actually disabled? What’s ‘trans-disabled’?”
“MOM! Don’t be so ignorant! She’s having her leg removed next month. She’s always known she was only supposed to have one leg but right now she still has both.”
“Good lord! Is her leg okay? Is she sick? Does she have cancer or something?”
“Yes, it’s fine. Geez. She just doesn’t identify as a person with two legs. Appendages exist on a spectrum, you know. Not everyone has two legs.” (Daughter rolls eyes sarcastically.)
“So, what do we have to do?”
“Well, she’ll need to park in the handicapped spot in front of our building. And right now she does have both legs, but she uses a wheelchair, like I said she’s having the left one removed next month, so we’ll need to arrange the furniture so she can get around the living room in her chair. You just need to kind of act like she only has one leg.”
“Can she walk?”
Daughter gasps.
“How can you even ask me that? I mean, how can you be so exclusionary and hateful?”
“I’m just trying to figure this out. Are her parents okay with this?”
“Well, I guess initially they were really upset but then she had a suicide attempt because she was so upset that nobody would affirm her trans-disabled identity, and the doctors finally talked some sense into them while she was in the hospital. She needs to be able to speak her truth, and if her parents can’t accept that she’ll just need to live somewhere else so she can get her surgery.”
“What if she changes her mind in a few years, and thinks she made a mistake by cutting her leg off?”
“MOM! Seriously! It’s called a ‘delimbination,’ not ‘cutting her leg off.’ That’s so offensive! And she’s not going to regret it. Besides, if she does, she can always get a prosthetic leg. It’s pretty much the same thing.”
“And you’re okay with this?”
“Mom, this is her truth. This is who she IS and who she has always been. It’s not up to me to judge. It’s up to me to love her for who she is. I wish you could give her the same respect. You can’t even imagine the kind of hate she faces all the time.”
“Hate? Like what?”
“Like all the stuff you just said! Like asking if she’s ‘really’ disabled, or asking why she can’t walk if she has both legs. Or expecting her to park in regular parking spots, or asking if this is a good decision. That’s all so hateful!”
Daughter storms off set.
Scene.
I’m familiar with many other scenes from “Planet Unhinged,” as I’m sure you are too if you are in the unfortunate position of reading PITT submissions regularly. I prefer to spend as much of my time as I can on Planet Reason, as I find that things tend to work better when I submit willingly to the natural laws that govern all aspects of existence, when I don’t fight against the incomprehensible forces that dictate everything from gerbil DNA to the rising and falling of the tides from time immemorial.
But that’s just me, hateful bigot that I am.
I recently read a definition of mental health by the late psychiatrist Dr. M. Scott Peck: “Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs.” It is the effort to continually align ourselves with what really is, not how we wish it were.
When we say someone is “unhinged,” the assumption is that they are unhinged from something, that they are no longer tethered to something to which they ought to be tethered. We take for granted that they are unhinged from reality and unwilling to accept what really is. If we’re honest, we expect all reasonably well-adjusted people to think through their problems in a way that is consistent with objective truth. Because when we can’t face objective truth, bad things follow.
“I wish we had a different president, but we don’t. I can either live my life and realize that we will have a new president in a few years, or spend my time being angry and resentful, cutting off friends who don’t agree with me, and formulating conspiracy theories.”
“I wish I didn’t have bipolar disorder, but every time I go off my meds, I wind up spending all my money, having sex with strangers, and being involuntarily hospitalized. I can either accept that I need the meds, or risk an untimely death.”
“I wish my wife wanted to stay married to me, but she doesn’t. I can get angry and drink myself to death, or I can face the truth that I’m getting a divorce that I never wanted and find a way to be something close to happy again.”
I wish I’d gone to college. I wish I had invested in Bitcoin. I wish I had a better job. I wish I wish I wish.
I wish I were a boy.
But you’re not.
What comes after that is where our culture has been flung so terribly, terribly afield. Do we accept reality or try to cobble together a forgery? At what point did, “I guess I will have to learn how to be happy in my own body even though it’s really hard” become “I guess I’ll need hormones and surgeries to cut off my healthy organs and change the delicate balance of my endocrine system to try and pass for a member of the opposite sex, and insist that everyone in my life play along”?
And at what point did so many thinking people decide that the latter is somehow preferable to the former?
People ask me, “Why do you care about this? It’s such a small number of people.” The reason I care is that this ideology and its adjacents are an attack on reality. And reality matters. Truth matters. And if it isn’t patently obvious to you why truth matters, you might be an inhabitant of Planet Unhinged.
The tentacles of the postmodern experiment have slithered their way into every aspect of our lives. When an accepted truth is upended, the aspects of life that used to revolve around this truth are knocked off course. When we have verifiable evidence to support this new finding, such as Copernicus’s sixteenth century discovery that our planet actually revolves around the sun and not vice versa, our understanding of the world falls more harmoniously into place to accommodate our enlightened knowledge. Many more things make sense because we have true knowledge about how things really work.
But when we try to force our lives to revolve around a lie, the fallout is incalculable. Nothing makes sense. I’m beginning to wonder if that’s the point.
It is one of many contemporary ironies that the party which rails about the environmental devastation resulting from a single disruption in our planet’s delicate ecosystem seems blind to the damage wrought on a prepubescent child, whose hormones are purposely disrupted by chemicals to prevent the complicated processes that will make their bodies and brains into fully-formed adult humans. And then, insisting that forcibly trying to get every cell in their body to reject what is written in their DNA by taking a hormone that their body was not designed to metabolize at such levels is not harm, but is actually lifesaving “gender-affirming” care.
How does one square this circle? The contradictory rules of Planet Unhinged are strange indeed.
Whether or not you believe in God, this is an affront to the one who has ordered the universe and has told us through His creation What Is and What Is Not. It is a daring proposition to tell the maker of all things that we know better. This was Satan’s original mind game in the garden: “Did God really say that you’d die if you ate the fruit? Are you sure that’s what He meant?”
Yes, it’s what He meant, He had a plan, and we screwed it up. And, to our mule-headed peril, we’ve been trying to ram square pegs into round holes ever since.
As the Lord asked His servant Job in the book of the same name,
“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?
Tell me, if you understand.
Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!
Who stretched a measuring line across it?
On what were its footings set,
or who laid its cornerstone—” Job 38: 4-7
Tell me, smart guy. Come on. Where were you?
When we refuse to align ourselves with what is, with what really exists, things cannot help but go badly. The concessions we are required to make in order to accommodate a false reality are legion (and yes, I did use the term “legion” purposely. See Mark 5:9.) If we must accept that a man can be a woman because he “feels” like one, despite all evidence to the contrary, we must also accept that an able-bodied person can “identify” as disabled. (I have been told this is a false equivalency, but have not heard a valid explanation as to why. How is a “felt sense of being a woman” any different from a “felt sense of being disabled”? Or a felt sense of being black? Or Asian? Or Native American? Or a cat?)
German entrepreneur and author Rolf Dobelli advises that “Accepting reality is easy when you like what you see. But you’ve got to accept it even when you don’t – especially when you don’t.”
The inhabitants of Planet Unhinged ignore this sage guidance to their peril, as all their other understandings teeter crazily on their axes.