Birth Control Prefigured Transgenderism

Many chemical disruptors — antibiotics, immuno-suppressants, anticoagulants — are administered for a time to promote patient healing. In contrast, the birth control pill is the first medical intervention that intentionally disrupts normal, healthy functioning for the sake of “liberation,” while ultimately harming the patient. This evolution in so-called medical “care” has contributed to our current transgender health craze and a degradation of the healthcare complex as a whole.

I have described elsewhere why the birth control pill is harmful to women’s minds and bodies. What is less clear is how the introduction of the contraceptive pill led to a huge demand for abortion and eventually, the demand for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and double mastectomies. This connection I will elucidate presently.

Nominally, the advent of the hormonal contraceptive pill was supposed to lessen the need for abortion. “Do not kill, do not take, but prevent,” was Planned Parenthood’s first motto. This emphasis on the prevention of illicit abortions was one reason doctors got on board with the effort at first — another motivation was a misguided fear of overpopulation, especially among the undesirable poor and minority groups.

After famed eugenicist Margaret Sanger (above) funded the first clinical trials of the pill (on nonconsenting psychiatric patients no less), the pill was introduced into the American market in 1960. In short order, demand exploded, lining the pockets of the nation’s burgeoning pharmaceutical industry. Upon release, the false sense of control the pill imparted to women was palpable. Women expected the magic pill to be foolproof; thus, the thought of an unplanned pregnancy went the way of the dodo.

At the same time women’s hopes for birth control were soaring, the pill had a surprising side effect — it legitimized sex outside of marriage and abortion. Post-pill, “consequence-free” sex was now possible as men could more readily assume their female partners to be sexually sterile. However, pill failures and the sheer rise of sex outside of marriage led to more pregnancies out of wedlock and consequently, more single mothers left in the lurch. The demand for abortion only grew.

Researchers could have made the pill even more effective. However, the more potent the hormones in the pill, the more likely they will generate long-term health risks and daily struggles. Even so, the pills of the 1960s had far higher levels of synthetic estrogens and progesterones than the pills made today. At these high doses, a host of side effects were revealed, including a risk for deadly blood clots. These symptoms prompted women to not take their pills with regularity, thus driving the demand for abortion still further when unintended pregnancy occurred.

Women and men sitting in front of Margaret Sanger’s clinic in Brooklyn, 1916

Abortion only exists in its institutionalized form today due to women of the 1960s and 70s demanding a still more foolproof solution to vacate their wombs. This left the medical community in a bind. Many doctors stated that for the sake of public health, they should be allowed to perform abortions without losing their medical licenses. Others no doubt held to the American Medical Association’s original view — that abortion was an “unwarrantable destruction of human life” and that to perform one would violate the Hippocratic Oath’s injunction to “abstain from harm.” 

The problem is that the precedent was set — the birth control pill was already doing harm. But because it was tied up with women’s rights, population control, and liberation from social mores, it was untouchable, a private matter. Denying women the ability to harm themselves with the pill (and later, abortion) was akin to “enforced motherhood” and the “complete denial of a woman’s right to life and liberty,” in the words of Margaret Sanger (and many modern activists).

Despite all of its promises for liberation, the contraceptive duties fell even more heavily on women in the wake of the Sexual Revolution. Half of the feminist camp had believed that the pill and abortion would allow women to have consequence-free sex, just like men. The reality was a lot stranger. Women had all of the control over childbearing now and men had even less of a reason to respect a woman’s potential for fertility. In the new sexual paradigm, if a woman forgot to take a pill one time and got pregnant, her male partner could easily blame her and walk away from her and the child. And walk away they did.

We have yet to progress from the 1970s status quo. The only development is that instead of Big Pharma only lining their pockets with the profits of the birth control pill, they are adding the profits of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol to the mix. Mirroring the introduction of the birth control pill, abortion drugs have become a new political football, with liberal Democrat officials berating non-pill-purveying pharmacies as missing a market opportunity, while conservative interest groups are threatening the same companies with action should they sell the drugs.

What lies at the root of this bickering is money, especially as abortion pill and birth control patients have the potential to be paying customers — err… I mean, patients — for 10, 20, or even 30 years. In a similar way, transgender “healthcare” is also intimately tied up with profit, as transgender individuals must stay on cross-sex hormones for life to achieve the feminization or masculinzation they desire.

Birth control enabled this progression by blowing through the boundaries of medical ethics. It opened the door for harm to be done to a woman’s body so that her self-determination and liberation could be assured. As a result, health can now be defined as a displacement of our normal physiology. This allowed trans-identifying individuals to open the door still further and argue that using hormones to block puberty, masculinize, or feminize them is a human and medical right.

I really cannot blame those with gender confusion. Now that women have been reduced to their appearances through sterilizing the one thing men cannot have — fertility and the potential for motherhood — it does appear that a man can more easily “become” a woman. All he would have to do is put on all the outward appearances of womanhood — the clothes, the hair, the makeup, and an airy soprano voice. 

Currently, there are a myriad of cases going before the American courts arguing that the putting on of the skin of a woman — as well as the accompanying sterilization procedures — is a right. Plaintiffs claim that insurers must pay for elective transgender surgeries such as mastectomies, vaginoplasties, and facial feminization surgery.

Insurers are fighting these claims hard, but they are losing and we should not be surprised. In this country, we are consumed by the fight for abstract “rights,” including the so-called right to “define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Transgender individuals believe that they are doing just that. They are reinventing themselves, molding their bodies like potters mold clay. And as long as they only cause harm to themselves, à la John Stuart Mill, they believe they are in the clear, just like their sisters on birth control.

Liberalism and its much-older heresy bedfellow gnosticism would have always ended in something akin to the transgender delusion we find ourselves in. But birth control hastened it along, just as Pope Paul VI predicted in his encyclical Humanae Vitae. Unfortunately, the war of men and women against their God-given bodies will not stop until women stop strangling their own with contraception. As the Holy Father said in his encyclical, “because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions” there are limits to what humans can do to themselves. We need to respect those limits.

Further Reading: 

Emily Hancock’s “Vindicating the Female Body”

The Rights of Women by Erika Bachiochi

The Genesis of Gender by Dr. Abigail Favale