“We ought to think very hard about what and who is driving this extreme transactivist agenda,” is probably the most important line in the recently released film, “Trans Mission: What’s the Rush to Reassign Gender?”
Produced by Jennifer Lahl, founder and president of The Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, and written and directed by Lahl and Kallie Fell, “Trans Mission” is a fast paced, tour de force film, covering the advancements of transgender ideology through American culture, from its burgeoning roots in 2014, when Laverne Cox was rolled out on the cover of Time Magazine, announcing a transgender tipping point, to the present moment.
Encompassing the many iterations of the gender industry, in under one hour “Trans Mission” documents experts, activists, parents, and educators discussing the medical and surgical transitioning of children.
What is unexpected in “Trans Mission,” and is truly shocking, is Lahl’s penetrating gaze on what has been happening behind the scenes of the gender industry, everything we don’t see in mainstream media.
All the things we didn’t know, because mainstream media, especially platforms on the political left, refuse to print anything but a carefully constructed positive narrative of changing gender, are laid bare in quick succession: the pain of children who don’t fit strict sex-role stereotypes, who are then led down a path of transition; the explosion of gender clinics in the United States and elsewhere; and the exponential rise in young girls presenting to clinicians with gender dysphoria.
Before we can catch our breath, Lahl is documenting clinicians discussing the harmful effects of drugs being used on young children to stop their natural growth processes, done to support an ideology.
The pain experienced by parents of young people caught up in the cultish behavior supporting transitioning, driven by social-media culture, is visceral. They face the sudden erratic and inexplicable behavior of their teens wanting wrong sex hormones and surgeries, convinced they’re the opposite sex, upending their families.
On other fronts, parents must contend with teachers at their children’s schools, and medical professionals, who treat them as crazy for knowing something is very wrong, or for pursuing questions.
We find a medical establishment, school districts and entire families captured by an ideology that sells the impossible and hides the harms being generated in ignoring that it is a fiction that anyone can actually change sex.
Professionals in psychiatry, invested in gender affirming medical treatment (transitioning) as an option for children, are given a voice in “Trans Mission,” but they cannot compete with the damage so obviously wrought by this ideology on families and young people, damage that nearly leaps out of the screen.