Comparing trans identity to Nazi pseudoscience and Stalinism
Andrew Gold said:
“whether it be the Nazi white supremacist stuff, whether it be the Stalinist kind of humans can work in a kind of, you know, communist society. You would know that you know, we need to stick to truth no matter what.”
Invoking Bertrand Russell and the principle that truth must not be sacrificed to wishful thinking sounds philosophically serious. The examples of Nazi and Stalinist pseudoscience are genuine historical cases where ideology overrode evidence with catastrophic results, so the rhetorical move borrows real moral weight.
The historical principle is sound: ideology should never override evidence, and those two examples are genuinely chilling reminders of what happens when it does. But the analogy holds only if gender-affirming care is itself ideology dressed up as medicine, and that is the claim being made, not a fact that has been established. The actual scientific picture runs the other way: gender incongruence is recognised by the World Health Organisation, the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and every major professional body, meaning the consensus here sits with affirmation, not against it. When you borrow the moral weight of Nazi racial science and Lysenkoism and attach it to trans healthcare, the people who feel that weight most directly are trans people and the clinicians who care for them, who are left implicitly compared to perpetrators of ideological atrocity for doing what the evidence supports.
Trans people and their clinicians, who are implicitly compared to perpetrators of ideological atrocity for providing or receiving evidence-based care.