“Listen to the experts,” we’re often told. Sometimes, that’s smart. For example, I generally heed my doctor’s medical advice because I trust him to pursue my health interests based on the best data available.
The crafting of wise public policy also depends on recommendations of those with relevant expertise. But how can we trust that these expert opinions will be based on objective and thorough analyses of all relevant information and that diverse views will be heard?
Alas, too often, we can’t, especially when expert advice is based on who’s paying the expert’s salary, or even more insidiously, on “experts” promoting their own zealously held ideological beliefs in the guise of learned expertise.
I often witnessed this corruption during my days practicing law. In personal injury cases, lawyers and judges all knew which medical “experts” testified for “plaintiffs” and which for the defense. Predictably, these plaintiff and defense doctors offered radically different opinions as to the cause, severity, and long-term consequences of the same litigant’s injury.
At least in the legal adversary system, each side can challenge the other’s “experts” on the witness stand. But what would happen if only one side’s “experts” were allowed to testify? Courts would quickly descend into kangaroo proceedings, and verdicts would be predetermined outcomes.
That’s precisely the corrupt game the World Health Organization (WHO) tried to play to justify issuing guidelines on sexual health and the treatment of gender dysphoric children. This all took place in the context of the WHO publishing an advocacy bulletin representing its preferred policies that define “sexual health” as essentially allowing anything goes when it comes to personal sexual expression.
No reasonable person supports coercion and violence in matters involving sex. Rape is an atrocious crime. Forced marriage is a true human rights abuse. Sex trafficking is abhorrent.
But these terrible wrongs were not the bulletin’s primary focus. Rather, the authors seemed intent on creating policies that reject traditional cultural and religious sexual norms such as celibacy, chastity, fidelity in marriage, and sexual restraint and redefine them as abuses that undermine “sexual health.” Thus, the bulletin states: “Upholding sexual health is a moral obligation. Immense suffering is caused when people lack bodily autonomy; control over their fertility; and the freedom to experience safe, consensual and pleasurable sexual relationships.” Consequently, “policy-makers must enact progressive laws and policies to expand access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive services” such as abortion, contraception, gender transitioning, and the decriminalization of prostitution.
Even more subversively, the WHO’s “progressive” sexual health agenda wanted to target children suffering from intense feelings that they are not the sex they were born. Toward that end, the WHO empaneled an advisory committee consisting exclusively of transgender activists as the “experts” to help the organization craft official guidelines on treating gender dysphoric children and adolescents.
Clearly, the fix was supposed to be in. These “experts” would almost surely have recommended “gender-affirming care,” as the only and best approach to caring for such children, interventions that include “social affirmation,” such as using a child’s desired pronouns, to medical affirmation, i.e., puberty blockers and the administration of cross-sex hormones (that can cause sterilization), and even, surgeries such as mastectomies and facial reconstruction operations.
And, when critics later objected to these radical recommendations, the plan was for the WHO to justify its guidelines with the excuse, “We have to listen to the experts!”
Luckily, the world became aware of the game that was afoot. For example, The Heritage Foundation—a conservative think tank—filed objections to the WHO’s stacking of the expert deck, noting that appointed members of the advisory board “have ideological precommitments to a highly controversial and contested standard of care.” Unsurprisingly, several committee members were part of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—an ideological and activist medical association that unreservedly pushes “gender-affirming care”—as the WHO concomitantly excluded expert critics of that approach.
Quick, somebody tell the Biden administration.
The ruling class and international community clearly intend to impose a radical view of “sexual health” on us all—including setting “gender-affirming care” as the standard of care for treating gender dysphoric children—policies not shared by or agreed with by billions of the world’s people. But this important episode demonstrates that authoritarian impositions can sometimes be easier planned than accomplished—particularly when an informed public and child-protecting groups refuse to take the ruling elite’s ideological imperialism lying down.
