Sit down and read this essay in The New York Times by Andrea Long Chu. It is, inadvertently, an icon of our radically disordered culture. Here’s how it starts:

Next Thursday, I will get a vagina. The procedure will last around six hours, and I will be in recovery for at least three months. Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound; as a result, it will require regular, painful attention to maintain. This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it./blockquote>

Could there possibly be a more succinct statement of our very particular cultural madness? What I want is against nature, and I believe it will make me miserable, but I want it, and you had all better give it to me.

Chu goes on to say that being on estrogen has made him even unhappier than he was to begin with:

Like many of my trans friends, I’ve watched my dysphoria balloon since I began transition. I now feel very strongly about the length of my index fingers — enough that I will sometimes shyly unthread my hand from my girlfriend’s as we walk down the street. When she tells me I’m beautiful, I resent it. I’ve been outside. I know what beautiful looks like. Don’t patronize me.

I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am.

I won’t go through with it, probably. Killing is icky. I tell you this not because I’m cruising for sympathy but to prepare you for what I’m telling you now: I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. Transition doesn’t have to make me happy for me to want it. Left to their own devices, people will rarely pursue what makes them feel good in the long term. Desire and happiness are independent agents.

More:

But I also believe that surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want. Beyond this, no amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.

Nothing, not even surgery, will grant me the mute simplicity of having always been a woman. I will live with this, or I won’t. That’s fine. The negative passions — grief, self-loathing, shame, regret — are as much a human right as universal health care, or food. There are no good outcomes in transition. There are only people, begging to be taken seriously.

Read the whole thing.

Do you see what’s happening here? Chu says that the treatments doctors have given him are making him sicker, even making him desire suicide. But if he wants to suffer and to die, then he should have that right. Satisfying desire is the only thing that matters.

This poor man with asparagus-colored hair is going to submit to mutilation next week, and will have to spend the rest of his life inserting an object into the wound surgeons will have made in his pubic area, to prevent his body from healing itself. This man — “like many of my trans friends” — expects this medical procedure to make him no happier, and in fact may make him feel more miserable, even suicidal.

But he wants it. People like him want all of society to upend its laws, its customs, and its norms to facilitate that desire, and to act like there’s nothing wrong with it. And society is giving them what they want, and punishing those who deny that this is paradise.

Freeing the autonomous will from sex and gender norms is the summum bonum of contemporary American progressivism. The insatiably miserable Andrea Long Chu is its incarnation.

From The Benedict Option:

“The significance of sexual difference has never before been contingent upon a creature’s preferences, or upon whether or not God gave it episodically to a particular creature to have certain preferences,” writes Catholic theologian Christopher Roberts. He goes on to say that for Christians, the meaning of sexuality has always depended on its relationship to the created order and to eschatology—the ultimate end of man. “As was particularly clear, perhaps for the first time in Luther, the fact of a sexually differentiated creation is reckoned to human beings as a piece of information from God about who and what it meant to be human,” writes Roberts.

Contrary to modern gender theory, the question is not Are we men or women? but How are we to be male and female together? The legitimacy of our sexual desire is limited by the givenness of nature. The facts of our biology are not incidental to our personhood. Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male-female pair mirrors the generativity of the divine order. “Male and female he made them,” says Genesis, revealing that complementarity is written into the nature of reality.

Easy divorce stretches the sacred bond of matrimony to the breaking point, but it does not deny complementarity. Gay marriage does. Similarly, transgenderism doesn’t merely bend but breaks the biological and metaphysical reality of male and female. Everything in this debate (and many others between traditional Christianity and modernity) turns on how we answer the question: Is the natural world and its limits a given, or are we free to do with it whatever we desire?

Andrea Long Chu’s sexualized wound that will never heal is progressivism’s answer. More from The Benedict Option:

Future historians will wonder how the sexual desires of only three to four percent of the population became the fulcrum on which an entire worldview was dislodged and overturned. A partial answer is that the media are to blame. Back in 1993, a cover story in the Nation identified the gay rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

We have gone beyond gay people to allow transgender people — fewer than one percent of the population — to change America forever.

Progressives! They make a desert and call it peace. They carve a gash and call it a vagina. They make us all insane, and call the sane crazy.

If you want to save yourself and your children from this doom, turn your back on it now. Let the dead bury their dead. Let our finest surgeons gouge holes into our mentally ill young people, and call them heroes.

What about the Hippocratic Oath? Here you have someone declaring on the pages of The New York Times that the surgery he is about to have will not make him happier, and in fact may drive him to suicide. But he doesn’t care. He wants that he wants. In a just order, those surgeons would be charged with a crime if they go through with this. Desire is the only criterion of health, is that where we are now? What if someone desires to have their legs amputated? Or to commit suicide? Where are the limits?

Nihilists. We are nothing but nihilists. We are wicked and deserve to be judged.

Freaking weird ... what America has become.