Ruben Noe holds the distinction of being the first male transsexual in Spain to become pregnant. Born Estefania, the woman began hormone treatments designed to shrink her breasts, stay her cycle, and eventually become a man.
But then the maternity urge struck, with predictable results. In Ruben’s words, “They induced the female hormone cycle with pills and prepared my womb so that it would once again be suitable to carry an embryo. Then they inseminated me.”
Ruben Noe is not a medical freak. Hospitals across Spain now offer sex-change services as part of their standard package of healthcare services.
In Malaga, the Carlos Haya Hospital has 800 patients who are in the process of switching their sexual identity. These sex-change services are made available to persons as young as 15 years old. In Barcelona, the Gender Identity Unit at the Hospital Clinic has already altered the sex of 25 minors, according a January 24, 2010 article in El Pais.
One 15-year-old girl told the reporter, “I only know I want to have the operation. I hate what I’ve got. I don’t want my vagina in order to f___, but just to be myself.” One young man recounted his sexual epiphany: “I looked on the Internet and when I entered transsexual forums, I said to myself, ‘That’s me.’”
These persons have the Spanish Gender Identity Law to thank for their sexual re-awakening. Passed in 2007 at the behest of Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, every Spanish citizen now has the “right” to select his or her own gender identity.
As feminists willingly explain, “gender” is the social construction of biologically based sex roles. “Sometimes people of one sex or another disagree with the gender identity that society assigns to them,” according to Spain’s controversial Manual for Citizenship Education.
Following this logic, acolytes in the Religion of Gender view the maternal instinct as just another tool of the patriarchy: “The myth of the maternal instinct is a clear example of the use of biological facts…in order to confine women in relation to their biological function,” the manual goes on to explain.
Once sex roles become fluid and interchangeable, the basis for heterosexual marriage begins to crumble.
Within the space of a month in 2005, Zapatero succeeded in revamping the country’s civil code, allowing homosexuals to wed and adopt children, and altering the country’s divorce code. Dubbed the Express Divorce Law, the new policy eliminates the waiting period before divorces become legally effective, and allows either person to break up the union without cause. The new law also contains a provision mandating that husbands “share domestic responsibilities and the care and attention” of children.
The effects of the new policy were as immediate as they were devastating. Over a four-year period, the number of marital dissolutions more than doubled, climbing to 121,923 in 2008.
Not to be passed over is the Act for the Effective Equality of Men and Women. Despite its innocent-sounding the name, the law soon became a basis for construing every social difference between men and women as proof of sex discrimination.
But Zapatero’s monumental quest to reorder the traditional family remained incomplete, because women seeking an abortion still had to travel to a specialized facility, a requirement that was viewed as burdensome and stigmatizing.
So the Zapatero government instituted a series of measures that made the Morning-After Pill available — without a medical prescription and at no cost — to girls as young as 16. But even early-teenagers can procure a pharmaceutical abortion because the law contains no requirement to inform girls’ parents.
On the very day that the Spanish Upper House passed the new abortion law, Zapatero was able to declare with Orwellian insouciance, “Nobody has the right to take life away from another human being.”
The effect of these policies was breathtaking. From 1997 to 2007, the number of abortions in Spain increased 49%. Not surprisingly, by 2010 the country’s fertility rate plunged to 1.5 children born per woman, making Spain’s fertility rate one of the lowest in the world.
On a historical scale, the Zapatero Project can be likened to the October Revolution of 1917. But while the Bolsheviks merely sought to realign Russia’s economic structure, Zapatero’s gender agenda is far more ambitious — it seeks to recast Spain’s social order according to a feminist and totalitarian vision.
As Ignacio Arsuaga and Miguel Vidal Santos explain in The Zapatero Project, “faced with the fact that it is impossible to bend the family to its will and make it serve its own interests, the Zapatero Project has decided to destroy it.”
On March 29, 2009, Spain experienced its moment of moral re-awakening. On that day, a half million people joined the March for Life in the streets of Madrid. One hundred other demonstrations were held throughout the country and outside Spanish embassies around the world.
But Zapatero recognizes a historical opportunity when he sees one. As of this writing, his government is now preparing to introduce the Equal Treatment and Anti-Discrimination Law, an act that would criminalize criticism of his radical gender agenda.
Carey Roberts probes and lampoons political correctness of all political stripes. His work has been published in The Washington Times, ACU Battleline Online, Pajamas Media, WorldNetDaily, Townhall.com, LewRockwell.com, feminists.net, and elsewhere.