LGBTQIA: Tolerance Is Not Endorsement

Scrolling on 4 Chan last year, I stumbled upon a video of a man cutting off his erect penis with a mini circular saw. I was shocked to see this kind of self-mutilation. I wondered what’s happening in a human being that brings them to that point.

That question pulled me into researching biology, psychology, and philosophy. What I found didn’t fit neatly into either side of the political debate. It was more complicated than what most people understand.

Why does witnessing extreme body modification, or homosexuality, produce a visceral reaction in most people?

We are genetically wired around reproductive imperatives. Disgust toward non-reproductive sexual behavior and toward self-destruction of reproductive anatomy appears consistently across cultures, history, and populations that have had zero contact with each other. That pattern doesn’t emerge from culture.

When I watched that man sever his own sexual organ, something in me recognized it as a catastrophic violation of biological integrity.

My research led me to learn that some men who castrate themselves are in acute psychiatric crisis. The man who severed his penis was almost certainly not making a rational, considered decision. That’s a psychiatric emergency, a moment where psychological suffering overwhelmed the normal value system entirely.

But others are not in crisis. Other men voluntarily choose castration deliberately, over time, with full awareness of what they’re giving up. Some identify as eunuchs by choice. Some do it to eliminate a sex drive they experience as a burden. Some do it as part of a gender transition.

The question that follows is the one nobody wants to ask plainly: at what point does society have an interest in intervening between a person and a permanent, irreversible decision about their own body?

I don’t have a clean answer, but I know the question matters. And I know that watching a man destroy his own anatomy with my own eyes made it impossible for me to treat it as abstract.

What does the science say about gender identity in adults? The evidence for a biological origin is strong. Twin studies, prenatal hormone exposure research, and birth order effects—all point toward something that is neither chosen nor caused by trauma or environment.

But adolescent gender dysphoria is a different conversation, and conflating the two is either intellectually lazy or deliberately dishonest.

The data on gender identity claims among adolescents shows a demographic shift that is historically anomalous. We’re not seeing the same population that was always there becoming more comfortable coming out. We’re seeing a new population, predominantly female adolescents, with a profile that doesn’t match the clinical presentation of gender dysphoria as it was understood even fifteen years ago.

Researcher Lisa Littman used the term “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” to describe this phenomenon. The academic establishment attacked her for it. That response should tell you something.

Social contagion in adolescent identity formation is not a conspiracy theory. It’s one of the most well-documented phenomena in developmental psychology. Adolescent brains are specifically vulnerable to peer influence, identity experimentation, and social modeling. We accept this in literally every other context, and yet the moment you apply it to gender identity, suddenly the science is hate speech. It is clear to me that there is some kind of agenda to push these ideas into our children’s minds while they are young, driving them into confusion and experimentation.

A confused teenager going through a phase is not a crisis. Teenagers have always experimented with identity in all forms, which is developmentally normal. But a confused teenager receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgical intervention before their psychology is fully formed—and then detransitioning years later, having lost fertility, sexual function, or both—is a manufactured crisis.

Detransition rates are rising. The young women coming forward now describing what happened to them during adolescence is not right-wing propaganda. Those are human beings whose suffering deserves to be taken seriously, not dismissed to protect an ideological framework.

You can’t consent to permanent medical intervention when you’re fifteen years old. Your brain isn’t finished developing, nor is your identity. The entire premise of age restrictions on alcohol, contracts, and military service is that we recognize this developmental reality.

So why pretend it doesn’t apply here? Who benefits from that pretense?

I’m a father and have the primary responsibility for what my children are exposed to and what values they develop. That’s not a privilege granted to me by the state or by public consensus. It’s a natural right that predates every institution that might try to curtail it.

I will teach my children that men and women are different. That marriage is between a man and a woman. That their bodies are not mistakes. That identity isn’t something you construct out of social influence and then chemically enforce. I’ll do everything in my power to protect them from those who want to impose an abnormal lifestyle onto them.

What I won’t teach them is contempt. The difference between “I believe this is abnormal” and “I hate people who do this.” I will teach them to have compassion, especially for those who are truly suffering.

People tolerate things they don’t like for the sake of peace. But tolerance doesn’t mean I must expose my children to those things. It doesn’t mean I must affirm those choices as equally valid within my own household. And it absolutely does not mean I must watch medical professionals perform irreversible procedures on confused minors and call anyone who objects a bigot.

The tolerance being demanded now isn’t tolerance. It’s submission. And as a father, I will never submit.

I’m fine with “live and let live.” If I am fine with letting people live the way they want to live in peace, then they should also be fine leaving my children out of the way they wish to live.

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