As Aldous Huxley laid out in excruciating detail in his seminal novel Brave New World, the totalitarian state of tomorrow will prop itself up not by brute force of the type seen in Orwell’s 1984, but rather via social conditioning and a pharmacological social control tool called medicalization:
“Medicalization can be defined as the process by which some aspects of human life come to be considered as medical problems, whereas before they were not considered pathological.”
Toxic masculinity, white fragility, five distinct classes of anxiety disorders, 7 classes of depression, “gender dysphoria” even in children as young as 2 years old – these are the products of medicalization.
In a remarkable letter penned to Orwell following the publication of 1984, Huxley further explains this theoretical divergence from Orwell in terms of how future rulers will exercise social control:
“Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that… the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.”
-Aldous Huxley, 1949
How the hands on the clock have come around. In this pursuit, social control and the profit motive converge:
“The pharmaceutical industry is very interested in developing mood brighteners or happiness pills to meet increasing demands…. Medicalization is rooted in the field of mental disorders. For instance, individuals lacking personal resources to face certain life events (i.e. marital discord) are displacing the ‘usual’ psychiatric patients (i.e. those with schizophrenia).”
Here is how the process works in the context of “gender dysphoria” – a diagnosis, incidentally, which did not exist in clinical literature until 2013:
- Young person feels insecure and unsure of their identity as they emerge from the cocoon of childhood into adulthood
- Young person visits a psychiatrist and becomes a patient
- Psychiatrist makes a “gender dysphoria” diagnosis according to the industry standard DMS-V. Young person now has a diagnosed psychiatric disorder which did not exist 8 years ago
- Psychiatrist prescribes medication, the first and most common route of “treatment” (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail)
- Young patient pays for and receives gender transition “therapy” with no red tape attached. The standard stages of “treatment” for gender dysphoria go like this:
- Stage 1, puberty suppression
- Stage 2, gender-affirming hormones
- Stage 3, gender-affirming surgery
- Doctors get paid.
- The pharmaceutical corporations that produce the irreversible puberty blockers and hormones used in “therapy” get paid
- Politicians who set the laws pertaining to transition “therapy” get their campaigns funded to the tune of billions of dollars in “donations” (read: investments) from said multinational pharmaceutical corporations
- The government regulatory authorities – for example, Health and Human Services – theoretically responsible for policing said pharmaceutical manufacturers leave office and take up multi-million-dollar lobbying gigs at the companies they were previously tasked with regulating. This phenomenon is known as the public-to-private sector “revolving door“
All across the West – North America, Western Europe, Oceania – referrals for teenagers to receive hormone therapy have skyrocketed exponentially in the past 10 years.
Source: Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS)
Once the gender dysphoria patient is referred to a clinic for treating transgender youth, he or she begins a regimen of pharmaceutical “therapies” to start the transition process.
Source: Trans Youth Can!
As a result, pharmaceutical profits skyrocket – as they have for decades and will likely continue to do so long as no meaningful regulation is imposed on their profiteering.
Source: Statista
This isn’t rocket science – more bodies to inject puberty-blocking hormones into equals more profits for pharmaceutical companies. These publicly traded multinational corporations like Pfizer and Merck not only have an interest in maximizing profit regardless of negative social impacts – they have a legal responsibility to do so. In corporate legal jargon, this is called a fiduciary responsibility.
Of course, when one of the growing numbers of adolescent hormone therapy patients later regrets his or her “transition,” there is another legal jargon term for that: externality.
Here the “externality” of medical experimentation on vulnerable adolescents is illustrated in the suicide death risk in transgender people:
Source: Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
Overwhelming evidence indicates that, far from helping “transgender” patients, “gender transition therapy” actually increases the incidence of psychiatric illness and even suicide rates among those who receive it:
“Ten to 15 years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to 20 times that of comparable peers.”
In the meantime, though, the cash rolls into the pharmaceutical coffers. Transgender suicide is an externality – filed under “someone else’s problem.”
Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Contact him via his blog, Armageddon Prose. Support his independent journalism at Patreon.
