“When I looked in the mirror, I just saw disgusting fat.”

Those words, spoken by dangerously skinny teenager Emma Stewart, are typical of girls suffering from anorexia nervosa.

“I was convinced I needed to be skinny to look good in a bikini,” Emma told the UK’s Daily Mirror. “I started obsessing about my weight and what I’d look like sunbathing. I was convinced I was too heavy, so I started skipping meals and making myself sick.”

Emma, literally wasting away, as shocking photos document, resembled an emaciated concentration-camp survivor. Yet, the effect her anorexia had on her mind and emotions was to make her see herself as disgustingly fat.

Hold that thought. Now look into the mirror of people suffering from another condition, one wildly fawned over by today’s Democratic Party, popular culture, news and entertainment media, and even corporate PR departments, all hailing it as the latest civil rights movement – namely, being “transgender.”

“When I look in the mirror in the morning, before having shaved, it’s certainly a painful experience. The immediate reaction I get from my reflection is a feeling of very strong dissociation, accompanied by a kind of shock, confusion, or mental jarring. I have the strong, gut-level sensation that whoever is behind the mirror is not me,” says one “trans” individual.

“Transsexuals report feeling out of place, feeling awkward,” explains an online commentator, “and to get others to understand their inner struggle, transsexuals will ask: ‘If you’re a woman, imagine that every morning when you awaken and look in the mirror, you see a man. And if you’re a man, imagine that when you awaken, you see a woman in the mirror. That’s how a transsexual feels.'”

Whether it’s the anorexic or transgender individual staring intently into the mirror and seeing the exact opposite of reality, or millions of others in similar straits tormented from within with myriad obsessions, compulsions, addictions and delusions, people’s minds and emotions are – quite obviously – capable of lying to them, to the point of seriously disrupting their lives.

Take OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), for example, which currently afflicts about 7 million Americans, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. As the International OCD Foundation explains, the condition is all about a person’s mind lying to them. But there are also almost 21 million American adults with a major depressive disorder, 5.7 million suffering from bipolar disorder, 2.4 million with schizophrenia, 40 million with an anxiety disorder, 7 million with a panic disorder, 7.7 million dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, 6.8 million with generalized anxiety disorder, 15 million have a social phobia (fear of any situation where escape may be difficult, like traveling in a car, bus or airplane), and another 19.3 million with some type of specific phobia (marked, persistent fear and avoidance of a specific object or situation).

Moreover, the mental health statistics just cited, which appear to account for around half of all Americans, don’t even include attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, one of the most common diagnoses in children and adolescents, or autism spectrum disorder, which now afflicts 1 in 31 American kids, according to the CDC.

Amputation of healthy body parts ‘the new normal’

Having made this quick survey, something very strange now comes into view.

Every one of these conditions, whatever their symptoms or level of severity, is named and described in the psychiatrists’ diagnosing bible – the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the most recent being the fifth edition (so-called “DSM-5”) published in 2013 – and all are considered “pathological” (that is, “relating to, or caused by, disease”) and classified as “disorders.”

Well, all except one.

Ironically, the most extreme of all these conditions – at least in terms of its preferred treatment, which often involves the amputation of healthy body parts, and whose sufferers have one of the highest suicide-attempt rates of any population on earth – has for some strange reason been de-pathologized, that is, reclassified as perfectly normal.

Indeed, the 2013 renaming of “gender identity disorder” as “gender dysphoria,” thanks to relentless pressure from the powerful and epically intimidating LGBT lobby, means the condition itself is no longer considered abnormal or “disordered” at all, but only the anxiety (“dysphoria”) one may feel over it – anxiety that LGBT apologists blame almost entirely on public ignorance, intolerance and bigotry.

“Transgender” is, after all, the T in the LGBT coalition, which represents itself as a minority community exactly like blacks and Jews – so, no room for mental illness in the mix.

Ironically, criticism has been directed toward the most recent edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual” among mental health professionals, who claim the manual makes it too easy to diagnose people as “disordered.” For example, as one clinical psychologist wrote in Slate, “DSM-5 [changes] the criteria for ‘generalized anxiety disorder,’ a disorder that involves excessive and persistent worrying. Whereas the criteria in DSM-4 required three out of six symptoms of worrying, only one symptom is needed in DSM-5.”

How, then, when today’s mental-health trend is to categorize more and more marginally problematic human behaviors as diagnosable “disorders,” does the mental/emotional state that craves having healthy body parts amputated in a pathetic and literally impossible quest to change genders become magically transformed into something “normal”?

That’s easy to answer: The American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,” cravenly caved to LGBT demands to remove the “disorder” label.

One organization that successfully lobbied for the change, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, confirms that it “conducted a consensus process in order to make recommendations for revision of the DSM diagnoses of Gender Identity Disorders. The [work group] recommended changing the diagnosis to one based on distress rather than on identity, on which the current diagnosis is based.”

“There was consensus,” the group reported, “that a transgender identity is not pathology. Gender variant individuals are not inherently disordered; rather, the distress of gender dysphoria is the psychological problem.”

If that line of thinking seems confusing, just wait: A report in the peer-reviewed journal Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry uses opaque academic lingo and tortured multicultural logic to rationalize why there’s nothing at all wrong with people who want to cut off healthy breasts or genitalia in pursuit of “gender transition”:

As a diagnostic category, gender identity disorder remains problematic with ongoing debates concerning etiology, definition and ethics of treatment. Inherent in the current DSM definition is a Western model of the relationship between sex and gender which epitomizes the tension existing between essentialist and constructivist accounts of gender development. This model determines that gender-aberrant behavior and gender variation are, by definition, pathological, and reinforces a binary gender model. Studies of non-Western cultures reveal variations in models of gender and in the understanding of gender deviance. Cultures vary in their definition of gender roles and show varying degrees of tolerance for atypical gender behaviors and gender change. An understanding of cultural context is important in the clinical assessment of atypical gender development and challenges current models of sex and gender.

Translation: If you think there’s something wrong with people who want to amputate healthy parts of their body, it’s only because you are biased in favor of oppressive Western culture, and hung up on the outdated notion that there are just two genders. If you were more multiculturally enlightened, you would realize it is just your own prejudice, bigotry and narrow frame of reference that is the real problem here.

But back in the world of reality, transgenderism (or transsexualism) is not normal. In fact, it’s so abnormal and unnatural that a staggeringly tragic 41% of all transgender individuals living in the United States have reportedly attempted to commit suicide, according to one widely cited study.

In fact, the former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Paul R. McHugh, M.D., confirms what virtually everyone knows, but cannot admit – that transgenderism is indeed a serious “mental disorder.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, McHugh, currently Hopkins’ distinguished service professor of psychiatry, cited a long-term Swedish study that followed transgendered people for up to 30 years, revealing that “beginning about ten years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost twenty-fold above the comparable non-transgender population.”

What about those special transgender camps now springing up in the United States, where parents of young children who like to play or dress as the opposite sex take their kids, presumably to affirm and celebrate these poor youngsters’ supposed “transgender identity”? As McHugh reveals: “When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London’s Portman Clinic, 70-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings.”

How tragic, then, that some parents, cheered on by irresponsible journalists and agenda-driven “experts,” would set their children on the path of a lifetime of profound confusion and needless suffering.

Meanwhile, the same politically influenced psychiatric elites that see fit to diagnose millions of fidgety schoolboys with the “mental disorder” of ADHD (and then “treat” them with powerful and poorly understood drugs), have recategorized the undeniably extreme transgender disorder as normal.

Why did the American Psychiatric Association give in to activist pressure with regard to transsexuals?

For the same reason the same psychiatrist organization, coming under similar pressure, declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, while its sister organization, the American Psychological Association, followed suit two years later.

Stunningly, the former president of the American Psychological Association – indeed, the man who actually introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975 – later came around to sounding the alarm. Dr. Nicholas Cummings says the psychologists’ organization has become dominated by “ultraliberals” under the thumb of the “gay rights movement.” Since the mid-1990s, warns Cummings, the group’s positions have become based on “political stances” that “seemed to override any scientific results,” adding, “Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA.”

Question: If transgenderism is totally normal, amputations and all, then what about “transabled” people who, like the transgendered, experience powerful feelings that their true identity is other than what they appear to be? In this case, we’re talking about people craving disability.

“We define transability (also known as body integrity identity disorder) as the desire or the need for a person identified as able-bodied by other people to transform his or her body to obtain a physical impairment,” Alexandre Baril, a Quebec-born academic knowledgeable on the “transabled community” explained to Canada’s National Post. “The person could want to become deaf, blind, amputee, paraplegic. It’s a really, really strong desire.”

One “transabled” individual, who now goes by the name of “One Hand Jason,” literally amputated his own right hand above the wrist and now claims he is very happy with his stump, or “amp,” as he told a popular body modification website. Both groups – transgendered and transabled – are obsessed with changing their bodies to recreate themselves in accord with strange, persistent inner feelings they have determined represent their “real” self.

Yet while the “transabled” (who want to cut off various healthy body parts so they can feel whole) are considered seriously mentally ill, the transgendered (who likewise want to cut off various healthy body parts so they can feel whole) are being lionized not only as normal, but as a protected and courageous minority.

It turns out, there are no outer limits to today’s explosion of fluid, you-are-what-you-feel reality. According to MedicineNet, a U.S.-based online “health information website,” there are 72 different genders, not just the two – male and female – that populated planet earth from the beginning of human life until about a decade ago, and it names and describes each of them. Reading through these 72 genders (some sources claim there are well over 100) and pondering the brief description of each provides a quick tour of an alternate reality of total mental and spiritual derangement, a worldview entirely disconnected from objective truth.

There’s more. Beyond fluidity of gender identity, what about other once-immutable but now-fluid realities – like race, age and even species?

Former NAACP official Rachel Dolezal (who has since renamed herself Nkechi Amare Diallo) has long claimed to be African-American, even though she is genetically entirely Caucasian – a white girl born of white parents. Another “transracial” person, Florida resident Ja Du, is a white man who claims he is a Filipino woman – because, well, he feels like a Filipino woman. After all, that’s what he sees when he looks in the mirror.

A Toronto man in his 50s, “Stefonknee” Wolscht, concluded he was transgender at age 46, left his wife and seven children in order to go live as a 6-year-old girl with his adoptive “mommy” and “daddy.” Yes, really.

Another “trans-age” man, 38-year-old Joseph Roman of Chicago, was arrested on felony sexual assault charges for attacking three girls, aged 6 to 8, but reportedly told police there was an extenuating circumstance – that he was actually a “9-year-old trapped in an adult’s body.”

Then there are the “therians,” who identify as various non-human animals. These are not the “furries,” so ubiquitous these days, folks who are fascinated by and like to dress up as animals. Rather, as one Chicago-based, LGBT-oriented counseling practice explains,
“‘Therian’ is short for ‘therianthrope’ It means a person who identifies integrally as a nonhuman being, such as a wolf, polar bear, or even earthworm.”

When our reality is determined by our feelings – whether we are uncomfortable with our “assigned” gender and feel “trapped in the wrong body,” or are starving and dangerously anorexic but believe we’re fat, or believe we are actually a wolf or an earthworm, or are so uncomfortable with one of our arms or legs we have it amputated, or we dislike being able to see, so we make ourselves blind, or deaf, or paraplegic (yes, all of these things actually happen in the “transabled community”) – truth, sanity, happiness, and ultimately civilization itself are all casualties.

Americans are in desperate need of some serious self-reflection and a radical course correction. Perhaps more than ever before, we need to take a good, long, hard, uncompromisingly honest look at ourselves in the mirror.

But what will we see staring back at us?

Will we – like the starving and emaciated anorexic girl who sees in the mirror only “disgusting fat,” or the man with transgender feelings who sees the reflection of a woman beckoning – continue to be drawn into a dark and delusional world where intense emotions of mysterious origin drown out obvious reality?

Or, will we finally be able to see past all the seductive illusions and catch a glimpse of our true selves once again – human beings, made by a great Creator God in His image – “male and female He created them”? Will we realize that this amazing life is ultimately a war zone, whose battlefields are every human mind, where forces of truth and deception, light and darkness, good and evil vie daily for our embrace and our loyalty?

The truth is, the vast majority of Americans know full well that any ideology authoritatively claiming there are 72 different genders for human beings – from “Astral gender,” “Cloud gender” and “Existigender” to “Genderfuzz,” “Gender witched” and “Omnigender” – is stark raving mad.

Nevertheless, far too many people, especially those in positions of political, corporate, media, medical, psychiatric and cultural power and influence, don’t dare speak the truth for fear of the inevitable accusations of “prejudice,” “bigotry” and “hate.”

They are all cowards – the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association, which absurdly declare gender identity disorder to now be totally normal. And athletic boards that have allowed women’s sports to be effectively destroyed while subjecting women to injury (although this situation is starting to improve after a massive public outcry). And corporate giants like Bud Light, Starbucks and Gillette that have elevated transgender activists to represent their products, making them righteous in the eyes of the “woke” despite their huge financial losses. And a legal system that allows male criminals to suddenly decide they are women so they can be confined in women’s prisons, where – what a surprise! – they sexually abuse and rape the women prisoners, a horror that has occurred in prisons across the U.S.A.

Worst of all are the medical “professionals” who commit unspeakably horrendous medical crimes against children, perfumed by Orwellian euphemisms like “gender affirming care.” Minors – kids too young and immature to vote or drive a car – are subjected to having their breasts or sexual organs amputated. As if that were not sufficiently ghastly, they are also given cross-sex hormones that cause irreversible changes in their bodies. That’s right; from breast development to voice changes, to facial and body hair to loss of fertility, even if these precious children awaken from the transgender nightmare into which they have been seduced and stop taking the hormones, these and other changes are permanent.

Future generations will look back in stunned amazement at all of this and ask: How on earth could all of these people possibly have gone along with – and indeed encouraged, by either their complicity or their silence – this demonically inspired barbarism?

George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, admonished future generations of Americans never to abandon their blessed grounding in the twin virtues of “religion and morality.” Let’s add to that “courage” – and stop pretending such severe mental illness/spiritual oppression is somehow perfectly normal, and that anyone who says otherwise is an ignorant and hateful bigot.

Finally – speaking of “future generations” – let us, for the sake of our children and grandchildren, fervently pray for this nation’s healing. And specifically, that today’s Americans – all of them – may come to recognize and embrace who they truly are called to be, adopted children of their Heavenly Father through the redeeming sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ. And that they might live out the uniquely great inheritance of grace, forgiveness and love bequeathed to them by a merciful but righteous God.