My Experience With Government-Required Wokeness

Government promoting madness in health care

Almost overnight the evangelists of the religion of wokeness have converted many of the key players in some of our critical industries and institutions, from small businesses to the World Bank. The practitioners of this religion now prostrate themselves before the golden calf of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” It has infected such safety-critical functions as airlines and even the military. The contagion dominates our colleges and universities where it has spread to the hard sciences, including STEM courses such as mathematics and engineering. Casting aside long-established scientific and biological realities, as Professor William Jacobson has shown at Legal Insurrection, Critical Race Theory has even contaminated the medical schools, from where it has spread to hospitals and medical clinics. The most recent manifestation of this trend is the adoration of one of its patron saints, so-called transgenderism. It, too, has metastasized to medical providers at the behest of the U.S. government. 

I recently experienced my own personal encounter with this propaganda when filling out a pre-surgery questionnaire at my hospital. This is the story.

I am a cancer patient. Since last January I have been diagnosed with two types of cancer that have necessitated three surgeries so far. For my most recent surgery, I was referred to an oncological surgeon at the VCU Medical Center, which is associated with Virginia Commonwealth University.

At this point, I must add a personal advisory note: The VCU Medical Center enjoys a superb national reputation. Other members of my family have been treated there and have received superb care. Nothing I say here is intended to disparage any of the individual care-givers at the hospital in any way. All, from my surgeon to the kind lady who escorted me to my car after my overnight stay, were uniformly kind and professional. Any criticism I may have is directed at the government-sponsored infection of the medical system with the WOKE virus, not at any individual physician or other medical or support staff.

When I checked in at the hospital for my pre-surgery consultation, because I was a new patient for them, they gave me the usual medical history form to complete. After completing it, I turned to a second two-page form. I printed my name at the top and, rather unthinkingly, began to fill it out. I was in a bit of a hurry to complete it before I was called back to see my surgeon, so at first I did not pay a great deal of attention to it. So, I dutifully answered the first question, which asked, “What is your “Sexual Orientation?” That should, however, have been an immediate red flag, causing me to wonder, “What on earth does this have to do with cancer surgery?” But out of habit and without thinking, I checked the block for “Straight (Not lesbian or gay).” Had I read it closer and given it a moment’s thought, I would have been nonplussed by the other answers on the menu: “Lesbian,” “Gay,” “Bisexual,” “Something else,” or “Don’t know.”

The next question roused me out of my inattentiveness: “How do you describe your gender?” It then gave a menu of six possible answers: “Male,” “Female,” “Transgender male,” “Transgender female,” “Other” and – again – “Unknown.” Like the other questions it also included an option “not to disclose.” My surgeon’s notes from our consult include the notation that I was a “79 year old male.” In view of that rather obvious observation, how or why I was given an option to refuse to disclose my gender is unclear.

At that point I knew something was very wrong.

For me, the final straw was the third question: “What was your sex assigned at birth?” The options were “Male,” “Female,” “Unknown” (again), or “X.  I was left to guess what “X” is; it was not defined.

Because I was there to consult about treatment for a life-threatening disease, I did not think that it was the time to make waves about this form. It was, however, extremely off-putting, to say the least, that a hospital affiliated with a teaching medical college was taking the position that my gender was “assigned at birth.” The notion that my mother’s obstetrician had made some sort of arbitrary decision and “assignment” is so bizarre that I had to question whether VCU Medical Center’s policies are being dictated set by the latest leftist political fads or by settled science , basic biology and sound medical practice.

The questions continued on a second page with more inanities.

It asked, for example, what pronouns I use, and – again – the option to say that I what pronouns I use is “unknown.” It occurred to me that a person who is unaware of what pronouns they use may belong in a hospital ward other than the cancer ward. A separate question inquired whether I “presently have” breasts, a vagina, a penis and “prostate/testes,” (They apparently think a man cannot have one without the other.) with instructions to check off all that you have. The most unintentionally hilarious part of the form was the instruction to “write in the space beside the organs listed if there is another word you would like your healthcare provider to use to refer to that body part.” Had I been thinking more clearly at the time, I could have had a lot of fun with that one.

I answered all the questions after the first one by only a single printed “I am a man.” Enough said.

After my surgery, a nurse came into my hospital room and told me that they had been instructed to verbally ask the same questions of all patients, even though all would already have been given the form to complete. The nurse decided that in my case this was not necessary, given my prior four-word printed response, and we laughed about it.

Later when I had returned home to complete my recovery, I began to investigate the origins of this form. I quickly found that a very large number of hospitals and medical schools use this or a similar form. For example, the University of Utah health care system has a similar set of questions that it says it will ask each patient every six months.

I discovered that this agenda is being pushed by the federal government. The CDC’s web site lists the questions that medical providers should ask. Its recommended questions are substantially the same as those on the VCU Medical’s questionnaire. However, there are some differences. In addition to the options provided by VCU Medical for “Gender identity,” the CDC recommends an option to specify “Genderqueer/gender nonconforming neither exclusively male nor female.” For “Sexual orientation” it adds, “Queer, pansexual, and/or questioning.” The CDC also suggests other possible pronouns such as “Ze,” “Zim,” and “Zirs.”

The CDC does attempt to offer a general rationale for these questions and suggestions: “Without this information, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) patients and their specific health care needs cannot be identified, the health disparities they experience cannot be addressed, and important health care services may not be delivered.” (all bolding is in original) Although I can see the need for physicians to question a patient about their sexual practices (including those who engage in what the CDC calls “survival sex work”), in order to treat syphilis or HIV, I searched in vain for any rationale for a valid reason to put these questions on a form given to, say, all incoming cancer patients. The CDC does suggest, “Avoid asking unnecessary questions,” with no sense of irony about putting these questions to a patient who is checking in solely for cancer or appendicitis.

As part of its justification, the CDC also notes that “[t]ransgender people have been shown to have higher odds of depression and attempted suicide over non-transgender (cisgender) people” and that 41% have attempted to kill themselves at some point in their lives. It avoids any attempt to address the cause of such high depression and suicide rates. In context, the CDC suggests that the extraordinarily high suicide rates are the result of societal discrimination, rather than a reflection of even the possibility that transgenderism is itself a “mental disorder” as identified in the DSM-IV (the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), prior to its revision to DSM-5 in 2013. 

For its part the federal government’s National Institute of Health has published statistics on what it calls the “Required Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Reporting by US Health Centers.” Get that? The government, to whom medical providers look for grants and dollars says this is “Required.”

Any comprehensive analysis of the government’s suggested approach, questions, and requirements, including its detachment from science and its sheer nuttiness, could go on for pages, but the above sampling gives the reader an understanding of its general approach. It shows that the United States government is pushing hospitals and medical schools to allow the latest political fad to override established science. Make no mistake about it.  These government bureaucrats are the same people who are saying that a child born with a penis and a pair of XY chromosomes can be a girl and that men can have periods and get pregnant. And, of course, they will also tell you that you are a hater and even a Nazi if you do not agree.

No modern-day Cassandra can foretell all the results of this surrender to this madness. But madness it is, and our only option is to resist it at all turns.