Exhibit A: The latest New York magazine cover story by transgender journalist Gabriel Mac titled “My Penis, Myself,” which chronicles, in literally painful detail, the author’s phalloplasty.

The long article has many disturbing details: the close-up photo of Mac’s mutilated leg with a large chunk of flesh removed from the thigh to create the penis; the unflinching description of how often and how gruesomely these surgeries fail; the phallic obsession that manifests itself throughout the piece. (Mac, who self-identifies as “an asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina,” talks about craving a very large penis, describes singing songs to it during post-surgery recovery, and reacts to the possibility of failure with, “If it died, I felt certain, I would die.”) The closing paragraph invests Mac’s genitalia with a quasi-mystical significance:

Days before my penis’s first birthday, the warmth and weight of it lay against my vulva, each supporting the other, holding me.

The story becomes more disturbing when put together with Mac’s 2019 GQ story about an earlier phase of gender transition (testosterone treatments, breast removal and hysterectomy) in which the author recalls, in detail, a horrifying history of childhood sexual abuse by a male “formative figure”—abuse that included being pimped out to other men. It’s hard to know what to make of this narrative. The article hints that these are recovered memories, and Mac notes that “[t]he figure, for the record, adamantly denies he did any of this.” But whether or not this happened, Mac recounts growing up with the belief that to be female was to be a sex object and a victim:

I did not know, until I started dismantling that femaleness, that I thought that if I wasn’t a pretty girl, I was worthless. I’d been indoctrinated to believe that if you’re gonna be a person with a vagina, the most important thing to be is nice to look at. By an entire misogynist culture. By movies, where pretty girls became objects of obsession and efforts to save, frequently without even talking. By a formative figure, who used to snake his arm around my waist with his fingers gripping my pelvic bone and ask people, “Isn’t she beautiful?” No amount of higher education or professed feminism or professional success, apparently, had managed to mitigate it.

Indeed, my career as a journalist had often only reinforced it. At a variety of fancy functions, my very presence at which might imply I had other talents, multiple high-ranking editors brazenly talked about my body or having sex with me; a senior male colleague regularly reminded me where my merit lay when he put his hand on my upper arm, my lower arm, my waist, my thigh, my thigh, my thigh. On location, a cameraman leaned his body into me until a producer intervened and said, “I’m gonna need you to tighten it up, man.” Before an interview, a source offered me his hotel-room key; after the interview, he kissed me on the mouth. That’s an incredibly truncated list. You could argue that it was just the purview of predatory men, but that would put aside the female superior who regularly commented on my weight, and it wasn’t until I started transitioning that I understood how thoroughly I, too, had internalized the message that desirability wasn’t an asset but the asset.

In the New York piece, Mac speaks of being groomed “to live as a sexually available cute-lady vessel capable of carrying white babies” as part of “patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, capitalist acculturation.”

I differ from most “gender-critical feminists” in that I think this is a grotesquely distorted portrayal of modern Western society—at best crudely oversimplified and caricatured, at worst completely detached from reality. But I can understand why gender-critical feminists who believe this is an accurate depiction of women’s oppression feel nothing less than fury at Mac’s account and the adulation bestowed on its author. To them, this is a clear example of a woman being encouraged to escape intolerable oppression by joining and mimicking the oppressor (and/​or a woman reacting to sexual trauma by identifying with the predator). To them, it’s the equivalent of a black person horribly victimized by racism embarking on a quest to become white through painful medical procedures—and being applauded and lionized for it.

Again, I don’t share that view of modern Western society. But Mac does. And while Mac recounts an excruciating lifelong struggle with gender dysphoria, it’s an account that also raises obvious questions about whether the dysphoria is really self-hatred brought on by trauma. You don’t need to be a radical feminist to be troubled by the hatred of the female body that oozes from some of the passages in the New York piece. For instance:

I spent weeks before my 2019 hysterectomy up late in bed, hot and sleepless, fantasizing about the moment the medical-waste-disposal team at UC San Francisco would batch-incinerate my uterus, which swirled with dysphoria like nausea from the depths of my soul.

Deeper digging shows more red flags. Since Mac’s pre-transition work as Mac McClelland is out in the open, one of the things that turns up is a bizarre story from 2011 in which McClelland, then a human rights reporter for Mother Jones, chronicled developing post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of encounters with rape victims in Haiti and healing through a staged but very violent “rape” carried out by an ex-boyfriend. Since this sort of thing could be discussed in the progressive media (back then, at least) without fear of “invalidating” or “erasing” the author, some commentators, such as Marjorie Valbrun in Slate, harshly berated McClelland for exploiting horrific human suffering for a self-centered stunt. Valbrun referred to McClelland’s piece as “shockingly narcissistic” and “a stunning example of journalistic malpractice.”

And more: a couple of years later, McClelland discussed an extensive history of schizophrenia among close relatives. (None of McClelland’s writings at the time, by the way, even hinted at gender dysphoria—even though gender dysphoria was hardly an unknown phenomenon in 2011 or 2013.)

The New York cover story by itself leaves little doubt that its author, and subject, has issues way beyond gender identity. But it omits troubling, and relevant, aspects of Mac’s history.

I think “stunning example of journalistic malpractice” sums it up pretty well.

It also seems likely that therapeutic malpractice is involved. Did the therapists working with Mac (then McClelland) explore non-gender-identity-related causes of the patient’s extreme distress before approving and encouraging transition? The question is especially pertinent because Mac’s own narrative makes it horribly clear what a grueling process this is. One could argue that it was all worth since Mac is (apparently) happy and at peace in the end. But will that be “the end”? At present, Mac seems to think that the beloved penis is the perfect answer to everything; in 2019, Mac thought the earlier solutions of hormone therapy, breast amputation and hysterectomy were “perfect”—until they weren’t. Near the end of the piece, Mac acknowledges ongoing problems “passing” as male, despite flat chest and facial and body hair, because of a body shape and vocal inflections that remain stubbornly feminine. The author’s response is to be angry at “systems that had worked to erase me and people like me for centuries”—even though such people could not have existed until the advent of modern medicine and reconstructive surgery.

Many critics of the transgender movement, whether feminist or conservative, claim there is no such thing as “gender identity,” only biological sex. Broadly, conservatives claim that gender dysphoria is mental illness and delusion while gender-critical feminists claim that “gender identity” is nothing but a social construct made of sex stereotypes.

I don’t think any of us, at this point, understand the human psyche well enough to know whether “gender identity” (which can be mismatched with biological sex) is real. The well-known story of David Reimer, the boy who was reassigned female as an infant after his penis was irreparably damaged during botched surgery, suggests that an innate sense of gender identity does exist: while David was raised as a girl, he had, from early on, a strong sense that he was really a boy. If this can be true of a biological male raised as a girl and taught to see himself as a girl, it can also presumably be true in cases where some hormonal or neurological misalignment causes a mismatch between anatomical sex and “brain sex.” And no, I don’t mean rambunctious girls who love sports and toy weapons and quiet boys who love art and play with dolls, but a core sense of the self as male or female unrelated to sex stereotypes. I think it’s presumptuous to insist this kind of dysphoria is never real, and I agree that people should have the option to transition and be legally and socially recognized as belonging to their reassigned gender (though some aspects of transition, such as a trans athlete’s ability to play women’s sports after undergoing male puberty, cannot be reduced simply to “civil rights”).

But in recent years, the claims and demands of transgender advocacy have gone far beyond that. It is now, for instance, a mainstream progressive norm that to question the authenticity of anyone’s trans identity is transphobic and hateful—even when there are strong reasons to believe that a particular person’s self-identification as transgender may be due to opportunism (e.g. starting over with a clean slate after “cancellation”), sexual predation (e.g. access to women’s locker rooms or nude spa facilities for voyeurism), or trauma or mental disorder.

The point isn’t to suggest that transgender people are crazy. It’s that, when trans identity is highly visible and culturally trendy, troubled or mentally ill people may latch onto such an identity as an answer to a host of problems, or a promise of dramatic transformation that will “make everything better,” or a way of belonging to a “community.”

The New York magazine story, especially in combination with Mac’s previous work, strongly suggests that in this case, trans identification is probably an expression of mental illness combined with sexual trauma and discomfort with being female (not to say self-hatred) based on hyperbolic perceptions of female oppression. In other words, it seems likely that someone who needed serious help—as in mental health intervention—was instead encouraged to go down the road of excruciating and irreversible surgeries on healthy tissues.

If “wokeness” hasn’t paralyzed our critical thinking, the New York article should prompt some serious soul-searching and perhaps move the needle on discourse around transgender advocacy. At the very least, this controversy should put to rest the notion that progressive orthodoxy on transgender issues is about nothing more than decency and compassion.

Sometimes, decency and compassion demand questioning the orthodoxy.