What do you think of this Douglas Murray excerpt?
Every age before this one has performed or permitted acts that to us are morally stupefying. So unless we have any reason to think we are more reasonable, morally better or wiser than at any time in the past, it is reasonable to assume there will be some things we are presently doing – possibly while flushed with moral virtue – that our descendants will whistle through their teeth at, and say ‘What the hell were they thinking?’ It is worth wondering what the blind spots of our age might be. What might we be doing that will be regarded by succeeding generations in the same way we now look on the slave trade or using Victorian children as chimney sweeps?
Take the case of Nathan Verhelst, who died in Belgium in September 2013. Nathan had been born a girl and was given the name Nancy by her parents. She grew up in a family of boys and always felt that her parents preferred her three brothers to her. There was certainly plenty that was strange about the family. After Verhelst’ s death his mother gave an interview to the local media in which she said, ‘When I saw “Nancy” for the first time, my dream was shattered. She was so ugly. I had a phantom birth. Her death does not bother me. I feel no sorrow, no doubt or remorse. We never had a bond. ’
For reasons that this and other comments make clear, Nancy grew up feeling rejected by her parents and at some stage settled on the idea that things might be better if she was a man. In 2009, in her late thirties, she began taking hormone therapy. Shortly after this, she had a double mastectomy and then a set of surgeries to try to construct a penis.
In total she had three major sex-change operations between 2009 and 2012. At the end of this process ‘Nathan’, as he then was, reacted to the results. ‘I was ready to celebrate my new birth. But when I looked in the mirror I was disgusted with myself. My new breasts did not match my expectations and my new penis had symptoms of rejection.’ There was significant scarring from all the surgery Verhelst had undergone, and he was clearly deeply unhappy in his new body. There is a photograph of Verhelst as ‘Nathan’ on a sparsely populated Belgian beach. He is squinting from the sunlight as he looks into the camera. Despite the tattoos covering part of his chest the scarring from the mastectomy is still visible. In a photo from another occasion he is lying on a bed in shoes and a suit, looking uncomfortable in his body.
The life that Nathan had clearly hoped for had not come about, and depression soon followed. So in September 2013, at the age of 44 – only a year after the last sex-change procedure – Verhelst was euthanized by the state. In his country of birth euthanasia is legal and the relevant medical authorities in Belgium agreed that Verhelst could be euthanized due to ‘unbearable psychological suffering ’. A week before the end he held a small party for some friends. Guests reportedly danced and laughed and raised glasses of champagne with the toast ‘To life’. A week later Verhelst made the journey to a university hospital in Brussels and was killed by lethal injection. ‘I do not want to be a monster,’ he said just before he died.
It is not hard to imagine future generations reading such a story in a spirit of amazement. ‘So the Belgian health service tried to turn a woman into a man, failed and then killed her?’ Hardest of all to comprehend might be the fact that the killing, like the operations that preceded it, was performed not in a spirit of malice or of cruelty, but solely in the spirit of kindness.
