OK, let’s actually talk about Nazi doctors

Trans activists have long compared gender-critical women to Nazis. “Nazi” has become a convenient shorthand for “I’m not talking to you and nobody else should listen to a word you say, and—if someone punched your lights out—that would be a win for humanity.” But Corinna Cohn’s right to point out that there’s been an alarming escalation in trans activist rhetoric about Nazism, eugenics, euthanasia, and genocide over the last few months, spiking over the weekend with a wildly dishonest attack on two prominent gender-critical women.

Trans activists want to talk about Aktion T4, so let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about how ordinary doctors went down the dark road to medical experimentation, sterilization, euthanasia, and genocide.

Nazi ideology captured the medical profession in Germany by enlisting the medical profession in a process of social transformation. . .  Robert Jay Lifton calls this medicalized killing—killing in the name of healing—and shows how this concept laid the ideological groundwork for the sterilization and euthanasia campaigns and genocide.

The needs and rights of individual patients—the subject of the extensive medical training every doctor who participated in the Nazi killing campaigns had received—got lost. Doctors became desensitized to what they were doing. Uplifting euphemisms covered ugly realities.

Since disabled patients were defined as life unworthy of life (Lebensunwertes Leben), what was life to them? Life unworthy of life was a mistake, nothing more. Since the prisoners who fell into the hands of concentration-camp doctors were doomed anyway, what could it possibly matter what happened to their bodies in the mean time? Besides, didn’t the doctors have a responsibility to use these walking corpses to advance medical knowledge? Nothing was off limits.

One way of saying this is that doctors—in thrall to a deadly ideology—lost sight of what they were doing. They became wrapped up in medical fantasies and so committed atrocities.

If there are parallels here, they’re inconvenient ones for trans activists.

When it comes to gender medicine, too many affirmative providers conceptualize their patients as defective and broken—just listen to clinicians hand-wave bad outcomes from their interventions. Clinicians argue that their gender-dysphoric patients will never lead normal lives, complete with stable relationships and healthy self-image. Therefore, holding gender ‘medicine’ to too high a standard is unjust (to medical providers). Talk of suicide is everywhere—except in the data itself, which never cooperates. The focus on suicide skews every risk assessment: any outcome is better than suicide—including unethical medical experimentation and butchery.

When doctors define healthy patients as ill—riddled with birth defects (like healthy breasts on a teenage girl), suffering from potentially fatal* (*see suicide inflation) endocrine conditions—then illness and injury already exist, by definition. But, in fact, gender clinicians introduce illness and injury. They injure and sicken patients in the name of health and healing. When that happens, something has gone badly wrong.

Critics of gender identity ideology aren’t the ones sterilizing and chemically castrating LGBTQ people. Gender clinicians even prescribe the same basic types of drugs. They just call sterilization and chemical castration ‘affirmation’ these days. You hardly hear those ugly words at all.

Source: OK, let’s actually talk about Nazi doctors