The University of Connecticut Medical School has recruited people who identify as transgender to act as practice patients this month. Conducted explicitly for social conditioning, the experiment reads like something out of the Objective Room in C.S. Lewis’s dystopian science-fiction novel, “That Hideous Strength,” where inductees into a secret society had to endure deliberately bizarre sensory inputs to eliminate their human reactions.

In the exercise, medical students will role-play a doctor’s visit with the trans-identifying “patients,” after which the “doctors” and “patients” will review the interactions together and discuss ways to improve.

The exercise came from the school’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and is promoted by Dylan Bachmanm (an apparently deliberate spelling), a UConn employee who will act as one of the trans-identifying patients. According to The Connecticut Register-Citizen, Bachmanm “shares his health care experiences with the medical students at the University of Connecticut to show them how they can foster a safe clinical environment for trans patients.”

However, based on the description in the article, Bachmanm’s definition of a “safe clinical environment” is likely a bit more demanding than the understanding of any person on the street:

“Take Dylan Bachmanm of Litchfield, who said he needed to be convinced by emergency medical services to get care after a serious car accident, despite fears of mistreatment from hospital staff. His worries came true when he said emergency room staff misgendered him and dismissed his pleas for a non-prescription pain killer. The experience left Bachmanm feeling vulnerable, ‘on display’ and said it will affect his willingness to seek emergency room care in the future.”

The article goes on to cite a 2022 survey finding that a quarter (24%) of trans-identifying individuals refused to seek medical care due to fear of mistreatment. But, assuming they receive “mistreatment” of severity equivalent to Bachmanm’s experience, their fear would seem to be a case of misplaced priorities. If someone is unwilling to visit the emergency room after a serious car accident because they might quibble with staff over pronouns and an aspirin, they are elevating their subjective self-perception over their physical well-being (which, in other contexts, is called “rashness” or “pride”).

At the most fundamental level, Bachmanm’s discomfort with the medical care he received seems to reflect discomfort with the practice of evidence-based medicine in general. The basic reality is that male bodies are different from female bodies, which means that professionals trained in the art of healing should treat male and female bodies in different ways, even if a person is confused about his or her gender.

Additionally, those seeking medical care are often in “vulnerable” situations (such as undressing in an examination room) which are an unavoidable part of receiving the care they need (such as treating an abdominal wound). Patients admitted into most modern hospitals are often literally on display, in the sense that computer screens display information about their vitals to hospital staff.

Due in part to the intrusive nature of these practices, most people would rather not be in a hospital, but they understand that such care, administered by competent professionals, can be life-saving, so they submit to it. I don’t doubt that trans-identifying individuals find hospitals uncomfortable places, but that does not mean they can claim some sort of unique victimhood status because of their experiences. They simply perceive themselves as victims generally.

This leads us back to consider the UConn Med School exercise, with which Bachmanm intends “to diversify the types of patients students work with before they head into the field to foster a more inclusive workforce” — a description that is self-conscious in its social engineering.

According to former program director Sandra Scippa, the med students typically work with retirees within the community. Retirees are a convenient group for medical schools because they often need more medical care and have more flexible schedules because of their lack of full-time jobs. (As a group, transgender-identifying individuals fulfill the first condition and, given their high incidence of other mental issues, perhaps also the second.) It’s unclear what rationale caused the school to jump from “retirees” as a group to “transgender-identifying individuals” as a group, while neglecting other, much larger identity groups.

The school solicited 10 transgender-identifying volunteers and received 40 responses. “It’s so nice to have people that want to do this and want to help students understand and be comfortable and get the quality care that they deserve,” Administrative Curriculum Coordinator Teresa Sapieha-Yanchak said.

This fourfold response suggests that transgender-identifying individuals are eager to provide input to medical students. That is, people living in denial about the biological reality of their bodies want to tell future doctors how to care for them. The analogy is limited, but this is rather like NASA conducting listening sessions with flat-earthers.

This program doesn’t make any sense, except for the fact that powerful diversity departments act as miniature activist organizations to push transgender ideology within universities. While wokeness may have suffered some recent defeats, even in academia, this new program in Connecticut demonstrates that it isn’t going anywhere just yet.