It is puzzling that the response of so many social conservatives has been so timid and uncertain.

Last week, when Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner was enjoying a fresh 15 minutes of fame, a number of social conservatives passed around this Wall Street Journal article by Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Arguing against transgender surgery, he shared a number of politically incorrect facts, including a sobering corrective to those parents who seem eager to embrace transgenderism in their young kids, going so far as to administer puberty-delaying drugs. (It turns out that 70 to 80 percent of kids who report transgender feelings “spontaneously” lose those feelings.)

But most sobering of all was a study out of Sweden demonstrating that ten years after sex-reassignment surgery, transgendered people experience “increasing mental difficulties” — culminating in mortality from suicide at a rate 20 times greater than that of the “comparable nontransgender population.” While the gay community has long suffered from extraordinary rates of attempted suicides, the number McHugh reports for the “T” portion of LGBT is horrifying. Yet what does the Left demand? That we double down on transgenderism by celebrating it in all its forms, including the most surgically extreme.