By Joseph Backholm

America is facing a crisis of trust. A recent Gallup survey, which measured the degree of trust Americans have in long-standing institutions, showed that Americans are losing trust in everything. Unsurprisingly, given the controversies surrounding the COVID-19 virus and the response to it, the medical system is one of the institutions the American people are most skeptical of. Only 38% of Americans trust it, but unfortunately, the medical establishment seems not to know or not to care.

As if intent on accelerating the growing distrust, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) recently published new guidance for “health equity considerations” which essentially describes how to inject social justice objectives into your local hospital. Included in the guidance is the reminder that “an individual does not need to have given birth to breastfeed or ‘chestfeed.’”

If you’re a normal person, you have no idea what the term “chestfeed” even means, but it includes — and please don’t read the rest of this paragraph if you’re eating — what happens when doctors give men who think they’re women a chemical cocktail that allows their bodies to excrete a substance similar to breast milk that is intended to be fed to infants, because the whole experience is supposed to make men feel more like a woman.

Missing from the “Health Equity Considerations” document is any discussion about the impact “chestfeeding” might have on the infants who would be required to participate. The FDA has already warned that one of the drugs used to create this phenomenon in a male body, domperidone, “can pass into breast milk in small amounts and can sometimes give babies an irregular heartbeat as a result” — but that wasn’t mentioned. Presumably this is not mentioned because the goal of this paper is “health equity” not health. A document committed primarily to health would note that the female body was designed to feed babies after birth, and men who wish to have this experience should seek professional psychological help and leave the children out of it.

When the definition of marriage was being debated at the Supreme Court in 2015, social conservatives were often accused of being alarmist for suggesting the redefinition of marriage would have downstream consequences if we rejected the idea that men and women are meaningfully and wonderfully different. If you suggested children would be harmed by pretending men and women are interchangeable or that people would lose their religious freedom, you were accused of the slippery slope fallacy.

What is now abundantly clear is that slippery slope they said would never materialize was much, much more slippery than any of us could have imagined. Suing a bakery because they declined to decorate a “gender transition” cake seems downright innocent now that adults are applauding as children put money in the underwear of drag queens and infants are fed secretions from the bodies of mentally ill men.

Of course, not everyone denying the existence of the slippery slope a decade ago did so deceitfully. Most Americans who were swept up in the cultural tide simply wanted their neighbors to be happy and honestly believed no one would be harmed in the process. However, a few short years later, children are being chemically castrated and racing to cut off healthy body parts as a way of addressing mental distress. The path to hell really is paved with good intentions.

While many had good intentions at the start, it is also becoming clear that many of us don’t actually care if someone gets hurt. The north star for the sexual revolution is not happiness or human flourishing, but autonomy — and if the quest for autonomy requires us to tolerate medical experiments on infants if those experiments will further the delusion that a man can be a woman so be it. The greatest good is not the well-being of the next generation, it’s the ability to “live your truth.”

This belief is everywhere. It’s at Anheuser-Busch, Target, and Disney. It’s in the White House, the military, colleges, elementary schools, the criminal justice system, media, and even your local hospitals. If anyone wants to understand why Americans no longer feel they can trust once revered institutions, start with “chestfeeding.”

Joseph Backholm is Senior Fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council.