It’s Time to Ban Transgenderism

In a free society people should be free to make bad choices—within reason. Innocently enjoying a cigarette on your neighbor’s back patio during a Super Bowl party certainly qualifies as reasonable. If a person wants to risk dying of lung cancer in his mid-fifties, that’s his decision. Smoking is an example of a destructive and annoying habit, which, when practiced in the privacy of one’s home or in pre-designated public spaces, should not be banned. It perfectly demonstrates the leeway libertarians will allow a person to do something bad, as long as the only victim is the person himself.

But smokers do not form an identity group. Yes, smokers often do feel kinship and may draw comfort in having company when lighting up. But these are loose and temporary bonds. Furthermore, smoking tends to be a guilty pleasure. Most smokers know they shouldn’t smoke, yet do it anyway.

But what if smokers did form an identity group—a militant, self-righteous identity group? What would that look like? Well, they would protest loudly over non-smoking areas in public spaces. They would obnoxiously violate such areas—even to the point of being arrested. They would hold marches and other displays proudly exhibiting their smoking habit. They would constantly complain about anti-smoking discrimination through various forms of propaganda. They would proselytize to increase their numbers. And when their numbers became large enough, they would start suing businesses that ban smoking, offering legal protection for pro-smoking activists, and financially backing political candidates who will fight for smokers’ rights. In some cases, they may even physically intimidate anti-smokers and call for punitive measures against anyone who resists their agenda.

Then, if they’re ruthless enough, they would do everything possible to get children addicted to cigarettes, that way ensuring their group’s growth—something all identity groups must strive for. The fact that smoking is grossly unhealthy means nothing in comparison. And if a justifiably enraged smoker shoots up a hockey arena because his wife divorced him over his habit, well, that’s too bad. Maybe we as a society should reevaluate our anti-smoking bigotry and be a little more enlightened and tolerant over divergent lifestyles.

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Under such circumstances, we would be perfectly justified in banning smoking because the victim becomes society, not just the smokers themselves. A pro-smoking identity group has no right to lead all of society off a demographic cliff in a gray, nicotine-infested haze, regardless of their personal freedoms. So if we can agree on banning smoking in such an alternate reality, there is no reason we should not ban transgenderism in our current reality—because transgenderism is what I was really writing about all along. And it is far worse than smoking.

You can order Alain de Benoist’s Against Liberalism here

For one, it’s permanent. Once you surgically change your sex, you can’t return to your original state. Yes, a person can do permanent damage to themselves if they smoke long enough. But this takes place over many years and effects some people differently than others. Bertrand Russell, for example, was an inveterate smoker yet lived into his nineties. Furthermore, people always have the option to quit smoking and mitigate the damage they do to themselves. Not so with transgenderism. And transgender regret is real.

Secondly, unlike smoking, transgenderism destroys a person’s ability to reproduce. It’s funny how the Left has no issue with sterilizing untold numbers of transsexuals with these complex procedures, while simultaneously clutching their pearls over eugenics from a century ago. At least eugenics, for all its flaws and abuses, had the goal of improving society through Darwinian selection—something that can be measured through psychometrics and crime statistics. What is the goal of transgenderism? Treating the amorphous and medically dubious condition of “gender dysphoria?” And studies suggest that it doesn’t even succeed at that.

In any event, if enough people become trans, then a society will not be able to reproduce itself. And that is a cliff much higher and steeper than the one smokers would lead us off of.

Third, it can be argued that transsexuals are mentally ill and that transgenderism is nothing more than surgical snake oil meant not as a curative, but as a way to make this particular mental illness socially acceptable. This, in turn, would encourage others to become transgender when they otherwise wouldn’t, thus growing the perverse transgender identity group. Obviously, this is galaxies apart from smoking.

With two mass shootings caused by transsexuals in the past week, it is tempting to describe them as especially likely to commit this sort of atrocity. There have been seven mass shootings caused by transsexuals in the United States and Canada since 2018. These include the following:

1. February 2026, Pawtucket, Rhode Island: Robert Dorgan killed 2 (1 adult and 1 child) at a high school hockey game.
2. February 2026, Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia: Jesse Van Rootselaar killed 8 (2 adults, 6 children) at a residence and at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School.
3. August 2025, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Robert Westman killed 2 children at Annunciation Catholic Church and School.
4. March 2023, Nashville, Tennessee: Audrey Hale killed 3 adults and 3 children at the Covenant School.
5. November 2022, Colorado Springs, Colorado: Anderson Lee Aldrich killed 5 adults at a gay night club.
6. May 2019, Highlands Ranch, Colorado: Alec McKinney killed 1 child at the STEM School.
7. September 2018, Aberdeen, Maryland: Snochia Moseley killed 3 adults at a Rite Aid Warehouse.

With all the complexity surrounding mass shooting data, it’s easy enough to massage it to make transsexuals seem more or less bloodthirsty than they really are. For example, if one counts all mass shootings in North America—including inner-city, black-on-black and gang-related ones—then transgender shooters would be greatly underrepresented according to their proportion of the population (which one estimate has at 0.5%). Then again, according to The Violence Prevention Project, there have been 372 K-12 school shootings between 2000 and 2024. Within this timeframe, the two transgender school shootings above amount to almost exactly 0.5%. How about that? Yet, is it fair to include data going back to 2000 when transgenderism was much less prevalent than it is today? Arbitrarily going back one decade, there have been 214 school shootings since the start of 2016 according to the Violence Prevention Project. This puts transgender responsibility at 0.9%.

Then again (again), there have been 30 school shootings from 2000 to 2024 caused by what is known as an “active shooter,” (i.e., a lunatic who indiscriminately shoots up a place for no discernible reason) as opposed to belligerents who shoot known victims for cause. Of these 30, 17 occurred since 2016. So now your percentages rise to 6 or 11% depending upon how charitable or uncharitable you’re feeling towards transsexuals. And this is not counting the two transgender school shootings which occurred since 2024.

I bring all this up to show how murky it is to use mass shooting data to prove how hinged or unhinged transgender people really are. Here is a much clearer finding from 2023:

A new study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law finds that 81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide, 42% of transgender adults have attempted it, and 56% have engaged in non-suicidal self-injury over their lifetimes.

Now, there is a chicken-and-egg aspect to this issue. Are transgender people suicidal because they feel oppressed? Or do they feel oppressed because they are suicidal? The authors of the paper seems to feel that the answer is the former. And not only do transsexuals feel oppressed, but:

A lack of societal recognition and acceptance of gender identities outside of the binary of cisgender man or woman and increasing politically motivated attacks on transgender individuals, increase stigma and prejudice and related exposure to minority stress, which contributes to the high rates of substance use and suicidality we see among transgender people.

And this, of course, is why we need more gender-affirming care.

“Evidence-based interventions are needed to mitigate the risk of serious mental health outcomes among transgender people,” said lead author Jeremy D. Kidd, Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University. “This might include increasing access to gender-affirming care, or improving transgender community connectedness, which are related to lower rates of suicidality.”

The problem here is that in the 2020s, societal recognition and acceptance of transgenderism is at an all-time high. This study was published during the Biden administration when they were flying rainbow flags from government buildings and threatening parents for resisting the trans agenda. Thus, we should expect suicidal ideation and the like from transsexuals to go down during this time, not up. Yet it’s the other way around. It’s becomes a vicious cycle. Increased recognition and acceptance leads to greater suicidal ideation, which in turn requires more recognition and acceptance. Rinse and repeat. If the cause and effect described by Dr. Kidd above were true, then the appallingly high numbers listed in his study would have been much higher thirty years ago, when there was almost no recognition and acceptance of transgenderism at all. If so, then why didn’t the so-called transgender community wipe itself out in 2005?

Furthermore, if “societal recognition and acceptance” is a cure for suicidal ideation, does that mean that the opposite of “societal recognition and acceptance” is a cause for suicidal ideation? That seems to be what Kidd is implying here. And if he is, then he would have to explain why Jared Taylor, Greg Johnson, and Kevin MacDonald—and their thousands of dissident followers—aren’t also tempted to off themselves with Pepe-flavored Kool-Aid. The Dissident Right has its problems, no doubt. But threatening to morph into a hysterical Jonestown suicide cult because we’re exiled from mainstream America isn’t one of them.

Anyone who thinks they can cure suicidal ideation among transsexuals by showering them with recognition and acceptance—as well as plying them with hormones and cutting off their private parts—is not looking at the facts. Transsexuals who are fixated on suicide and self-harm are mentally ill—just like non-transexuals who are fixated on the same thing. If a person sincerely believes he’s Eleanor Roosevelt, we don’t pat him on the back and then perform plastic surgery on him until he resembles Eleanor Roosevelt, do we?

Since the Surgeon General declared that smoking was hazardous for your health in 1964, the anti-smoking pushback has been both powerful and popular. People recognized the dangers of smoking, and over time, began eschewing cigarettes. Of prime concern during this pushback was—and still is—protecting children. They are banned from buying cigarettes and—at least when I was a kid—are subject to anti-smoking propaganda. By targeting children in this way, the overall numbers of smokers over time could only shrink—which even many smokers would tell you is a good thing.

Because transgenderism is far worse than smoking, we should have a far stronger pushback against it to the point of banning it entirely. It’s more permanent than smoking, it’s dysgenic, and it enables mental illness. Further, because transgenderism forms an identity group, it must expand as all identity groups do. This means proselytizing among children. This means sabotaging the future of civilization. A libertarian might override his distaste for transgenderism for the sake of adults who can pay for their own transitions. But such respect for personal freedom is shortsighted, because any society that accepts and promotes transgenderism in the name of preventing suicide, will ultimately commit it.

https://counter-currents.com/2026/02/its-time-to-ban-transgenderism