Honesty is always the best policy, whether it be in the university or workplace. But as everyone who has ever lived can attest to, honesty does not always come easily. Especially when a favored political or social policy is at stake. During the cultural revolution of the 1960s, many traditions and social mores were questioned — some rightly and some wrongly. One of those cultural mores was the West’s understanding of proper sexual boundaries. In America, prior to the upheaval of the 1960s, the vast majority of Americans held to views on sex (both sexuality and gender) that have essentially been turned on their head today.

Much of the nation views premarital sex as the norm. Abortion, while remaining a contentious issue, has been the law of the land since 1973. Homosexuality gradually became an accepted practice by much of the mainstream culture leading eventually to the Supreme Court redefining marriage. There’s also pornography and its continuing impact upon Americans. And now Americans are witnessing the steady march of the transgender crusade. The Left views all of this as progress, a maturing of the nation’s culture as it were. What they conveniently seek to ignore are the devastating consequences these culture changes have created. And if they can’t ignore them, they seek to suppress their significance or deny their root cause.

A recent example of this suppression of truth was experienced by James Caspian, a psychotherapist from Bath Spa University in the United Kingdom. Caspian specializes in working with transgender people, and he is by no means “anti-trans.” Since 2001 he has worked with transgender people and has been a trustee of a charity that is “dedicated to education about and support of transgendered, transsexual and cross-dressing individuals.” So, it came as a surprise when Bath Spa University rejected his proposal to research the growing numbers of transgender people who were seeking reassignment reversal surgeries. The university believed the subject to be “potentially politically incorrect.”

If any scientific research were to produce evidence that brought into question the ethics of normalizing and promoting transgenderism, then it must be prevented. If the research were to show that gender reassignment surgery and hormone treatment did little to alleviate the psychological condition of gender dysphoria, and if in fact research were to show that these “treatments” actually proved to exacerbate the problem, then it could derail all the “progress” made by the transgender crusaders.

This is the result of being more concerned with falling in line with political correctness than seeking after the truth. In a climate such as this it is both individuals and society at large that loses.