The wave of media cheerleading for Bruce Jenner’s splashy debut as “Caitlyn” Jenner, his new putatively female identity, is one of those moments that has a lot of us of looking around and wondering if the whole world has gone insane.

Obviously, Bruce Jenner is not a woman. But the fact that so many people want us to think this is true, and that they appear to want to believe it themselves, is ominous.

This has not escaped the feminist left. A “women’s studies” professor laments that she has spent years fighting against crude, over-sexualized stereotypes of femininity, only to see them all glorified in the frenzy over Jenner.

I have fought for many of my 68 years against efforts to put women—our brains, our hearts, our bodies, even our moods—into tidy boxes, to reduce us to hoary stereotypes. Suddenly, I find that many of the people I think of as being on my side—people who proudly call themselves progressive and fervently support the human need for self-determination—are buying into the notion that minor differences in male and female brains lead to major forks in the road and that some sort of gendered destiny is encoded in us…. People who haven’t lived their whole lives as women, whether Ms. Jenner or Mr. Summers, shouldn’t get to define us…. They haven’t traveled through the world as women and been shaped by all that this entails.

This gives the lie to the root claim, which is that Jenner is “psychologically” a woman. But how can he be, if he hasn’t been through the actual, specific, concrete experiences that would form such a psychology? The usual answer to this is a brute materialistic determinism: it’s all genetics and hormones—cited with no explanation of the mechanism by which one is genetically programmed to, say, want to wear lipstick and wear a dress, which is Jenner’s whole concept of what “being a woman” is.

But if this is determined by genes and hormones, isn’t the physical body even more so? Yet the presumption behind Jenner’s “transition” is that it’s easier to change the body than to change the mind. Gender “dysphoria” is defined as distress caused by the conflict between the sex one is physically born with and one’s mental self-image of one’s gender. And the universal assumption now in the field of psychology is that when there is a clash between the image in one’s mind and actual, physical reality, it is physical reality that needs to be cut to fit.

At the very least, this is a confession of helplessness by the science (or proto-science) of psychology. But I’m afraid it’s worse than that. It is very likely a case of mass malpractice.

Studies have produced little evidence that “gender reassignment” surgery yields mental health benefits for those who receive it. In what other field of medicine would it be considered acceptable to perform massive, transformative surgery without any clear evidence of a therapeutic benefit? A more old-fashioned practitioner, a former chief psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins, makes the case that this is an unnecessary and negligent medical intervention.

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into “sex-reassignment surgery”—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as “satisfied” by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn’t have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a “satisfied” but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs…. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

He also offers a more profound and fundamental objection.

Psychiatrists obviously must challenge the solipsistic concept that what is in the mind cannot be questioned. Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry’s domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field.

Perhaps that is the ultimate point: to eliminate the very distinction between a normal psychology and a disordered psychology, even between sanity and outright insanity. And that’s precisely where we are headed.

That is my ultimate concern, not the specifics of this case. I’m not on any kind of jihad against transsexuals or cross-dressers. (I am, after all, a reluctant culture warrior.) I’m not sure psychology, in its current state, has much in the way of alternative treatments to offer them, so they have to make the best of a difficult situation. And their choices, no matter how incomprehensible I may find them, are no direct harm to me. But it feels like we’re being asked to participate in some kind of mass delusion where we’re all supposed to affirm that something is perfectly normal and healthy when it obviously isn’t.

… Notice the way people are attacked for questioning any aspect of this. I have already noted how the actress Alice Eve was forced to recant when she didn’t get on the Jenner bandwagon. Or consider the New York Times author above, who has been dismissed with the derisive new epithet TERF, which stands for “trans exclusionary radical feminist.” This is going to be a great intramural battle: feminists who have fought for years for special rights and the special perspective of women, only to find that the beneficiaries of their efforts are men pretending to be women. Then there is the latest target, sportscaster Bob Costas, who hasn’t even challenged any of the core claims in this case but is merely guilty of being insufficiently enthusiastic.