I truly believe that the majority of people who accept “woke” ideology (critical race and gender theory, mostly) are simply trying to be compassionate toward others.

When we speak of wokeness as “weaponized compassion” that is what we are referring to. Most of the time wokism’s demand is that we buckle under to the demands of others because they are, in some manner, either oppressed or don’t otherwise fit into society’s understanding of normality.

It is a compelling plea, and in many cases acting out of compassion is the morally right thing to do, or minimally the polite thing to do if you can’t actively help somebody.

But what makes something “woke” is that the appeal to compassion is actually a demand for submission on your part, and usually not in the service of actual compassion but rather as part of a power play. Perhaps even worse, the woke are demanding that we affirm things that are actually morally wrong.

This dynamic plays out in many aspects of life but is particularly obvious when it comes to gender ideology. I have no doubt that there are people who genuinely suffer from gender dysphoria as it has been commonly understood for decades–in a population of human beings numbering now in the billions, it is unsurprising that some fraction of people suffer from extraordinarily rare syndromes.

I also have no doubt that the vast vast majority of people who claim to suffer from gender dysphoria have been duped into believing that their more pedestrian unhappiness and mental illness, or just anxiety due to the traumas that often attach to going through puberty and Junior High School are caused by an exotic malady that seems very “cool” at the moment. It’s not like similar phenomena haven’t occurred in the past.

Only those similar phenomena haven’t been accompanied by a vast multibillion-dollar industry and a political and cultural elite determined to use this normal phenomenon as a means to destroy the nuclear family.

There are so many fundamental lies wrapped up in alphabet ideology that I won’t even try to discuss them all in one essay, but one, in particular, stands out and is easier to argue than the medical disputes.

That lie? That affirming a “perceived gender” as real is a compassionate act. It is actually much crueler than the alternative.

“Gender affirming” just means reinforcing a delusion. Somebody who is experiencing dysphoria is experiencing some sort of break from reality, and gender dysphoria is a particularly damaging version of that. Just as depressed people suffer from a sense of doom out of proportion to one’s real situation, anxious people are experiencing an outsized reaction to manageable dangers, gender dysphoric people are uncomfortable in what is indisputably their own body and demand that it be something it cannot be.

The compassionate thing is obviously finding a way to reconcile a person with the reality to which they are born–to make them happy in their healthy body–and not to destroy the body they were born with and intentionally make it less healthy. To do so is obviously much worse than to tell somebody who believes they are Napoleon that reinforcements are coming.

States have been banning counseling for children diagnosed with gender dysphoria, claiming that it is “conversion therapy.” They have literally made it illegal to help children become happier in their own bodies while mandating policies that permanently disfigure them and likely shorten their lives.

There is only one conceivable rationale for going down this path: the alternative is suicide, and that is the rationale that is repeated again and again.

There are many reasons to reject this rationale. One is based on scientific studies that show that the highest risk for suicide occurs after, not before, “gender-affirming” treatment.

A second reason is pure observational evidence: the incidence of “gender dysphoria” has skyrocketed in recent years, yet in the years prior to kids “coming out” there was no trail of the dead bodies of undiagnosed and untreated kids who never got the care we are told they needed.

In fact, the opposite is true. Actual suicides, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation have also skyrocketed in recent years, at exactly the same time as alphabet ideology has taken off. It seems indisputable that the spread of alphabet ideology and suicidality are directly correlated. That in itself is not proof that alphabet ideology causes suicidality, but it is decisive proof that embracing gender-affirming care and other aspects of “social and emotional learning” have had no positive effect, and likely a negative one.

True compassion is meeting kids where they are and helping them become prepared to succeed and be happy in the world in the body they have, with the skills they learn, the intelligence they were born with, and the family they grew up in. Telling people that they are defective when they are actually healthy is hardly the route to making people happy.

Compassionate people help people become happier and healthier; they surely don’t work hard to convince people to hate who they were born to be.