Would you accept a ride home from this man? Amy Lombard for NBC News
Right-thinking Americans, until very recently, tended to believe that heated arguments over transgenderism were a peculiarly British phenomenon. While the UK had been inexplicably captured by anti-trans bigots, and the country become a “Terf Island”, Americans had largely accepted that the struggle for transgender equality was, in Joe Biden’s words, “the civil rights issue of our time”. Unreconstructed transphobes might lurk on Substack and in GOP-controlled state legislatures, but they could safely be dismissed as cranks, their bills met with massive economic punishment, and their books deplatformed from Amazon.
That all changed last month, when a series of high-profile stories swept trans issues into the national spotlight, starting with the victory of transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the NCAA women’s swimming championship. Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.
The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.
Then, later the same month, Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed the Parental Rights in Education Act into law. The “Don’t Say Gay” bill was vociferously opposed by the White House, much of the media, and major corporations such as Disney and Apple; it prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity from preschool to third grade — roughly ages four to nine — and requires that parents be notified about any medical or mental-health issues with their children. Prominent liberals were scathing, with Biden denouncing the law as “hateful”, Pete Buttigieg’s husband warning that it will “kill kids”, and the hosts of the Oscars chanting the word “gay” in protest. The Right, meanwhile, has launched itself into a frenzy, accusing Democrats of wanting to “groom” children and insinuating that opponents of the law are pedophiles.
It is no coincidence that both pillars of the current trans controversies relate to education. A leitmotif of the post-pandemic world has been parental rebellion against progressive excesses in schools and instruction on issues such as race and gender. Remote schooling allowed parents to peek into their children’s classrooms, where they saw elementary schoolers being instructed to rank themselves on an intersectional privilege hierarchy and to celebrate the “black communism” of Angela Davis.
Republicans, sensing opportunity, have embraced the parental crusade with anti-CRT bills, curriculum transparency bills, and, in some states, new restrictions on trans athletes and “gender-affirming” medical procedures. They are responding to the fact that the woke extremism popular with professional educators is deeply unpopular with voters. Indeed, wokeness in general is unpopular, and “educators”, as a class, are something like the Salafists of social justice. This is a specific instance of a general problem for the Democrats: its professional and leadership class is fond of social positions that strike a lot of ordinary people as wacky or perverse.
Democrats, however, have fallen into what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News fallacy” — the idea that if Republicans are complaining about something, it must be made up. On CRT, for instance, they have used the unconvincing defence that CRT is only taught in law schools and dismissed parental concerns as a product of “disinformation.”
Similarly, they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom — when, in fact the main concern of the bill is gender identity. The strategy, as Leor Sapir has argued, has been to make the debate over the law a debate over gay rights — which are supported by the vast majority of Americans — while dodging the much more contentious issue of whether, and how, schools should be teaching about gender.
This is no idle concern. What evidence we do have suggests that paediatric gender dysphoria is rising at a rate that would be almost impossible to explain purely as a result of greater acceptance or diagnostic sophistication. One clinic in Northern California reported an 500% increase in paediatric referrals for gender dysphoria between 2015 and 2018, while in Sweden, gender dysphoria diagnoses among teenage girls rose by over 1,500% between 2008 and 2018.
Some researchers, such as Brown University’s Lisa Littman, have argued that this rapid increase is consistent with other social contagions such as anorexia or cutting. This suggests that many children are adopting these identities due to peer influences and social media consumption rather than a stable and deeply felt sense of dysphoria. But if these messages are reinforced at school, they may be more likely to stick. This is a particularly explosive issue given that schools have encouraged children to socially transition without notifying their parents, and some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.
Although Littman’s work has been denounced as “misinformation”, it has received support from a number of “detransitioners” who have gone public with their stories. Their stories, on the whole, follow a pattern: a girl who is struggling with an unrelated mental health issue such as anxiety or depression falls down an Internet rabbit-hole, where she learns she is unhappy because she was born in the “wrong body”. She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.
Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue. They are left wondering why the adults in their lives allowed them to damage their bodies in the name of what they later come to believe was a delusion. Due in part to stories like these — and to the lack of solid evidence in favour of “gender-affirming” care — a number of European countries have begun to discourage medical interventions for youth gender dysphoria in favour of psychotherapy.
The Biden administration’s great strength so far has been its ability to recognise when the preferences of the Twitter class are deeply out of step with those of the public and then side with the public. Here, it has done the opposite. Last week, in response to the Florida and two recent Arizona laws (one banning biological males from girls’ sports, the other banning medical transitions for minors), the administration announced that it would be expanding its interpretation of Title IX — a federal law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex in education — to include protections for gender identity.
The full implications of the move are unclear, but they could include denying federal education funds to states that bar trans athletes from girls’ sports. Separately, the Justice Department warned states that any attempt to limit access to “gender-affirming” care for children could be in violation of the Constitution and federal civil rights law.
Biden may be miscalculating. Americans are by and large tolerant of differences and tend to take a laissez-faire attitude when it comes to how individuals choose to live their own lives. But they also have a basic sense of fair play and proportion. Majorities oppose laws, such as Arizona’s, prohibiting “gender-transition related medical care for minors”, presumably because they seem to legislate individual medical decisions. But a solid majority believe that trans athletes should compete on teams that match their birth sex, and polling suggests that even a majority of Florida Democrats supports the language of the Parental Rights in Education Act.
In short, Americans tend to support trans rights when they are analogous to gay rights, meaning when they are seen as a simple matter of accepting those who are different. But they are more sceptical of the maximalist positions pushed by elite progressives — that the Lia Thomases of the world should be permitted to compete as women, or that schools should be allowed to facilitate major medical decisions for children without parental notification or consent.
By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole. For a GOP attempting to rebrand itself as the party of ordinary people, this could be a blessing in disguise.
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SubscribeA good summary albeit from a purely pragmatic point of view. The Democrats will be destroyed by this issue – they’ve dug themselves in too deep and have clearly taken a lot of money to help promote this – on his very first day Biden struck out at women and at biological reality on behalf of this lobby, the likes of erstwhile ‘progressive’ ‘feminist’ Gloria Steinem egging him on. As for Hillary – Jeez. Some feminist sitting silently by while so much harm is being done to women and girls. As a life long left-winger, when it comes to this issue, I have seen more ordinary common decency and respect for women from right wing commentators with whom I normally wouldn’t agree about how to butter a slice of bread. You heard it here first. The Dems will be the party of the perverts for at least six administrations – not because people with dysphoria are perverts but because this administration has made it so easy for actual perverts to take full advantage of the now legally enforced nonsense that says ANY man can delcare himself a woman and into all our private, social, cultural and political spaces on his own mere say-so. If you were to be tasked with giving legal expression to vile misogyny, you couldn’t do better. WTF were they thinking? Did thinking even come into it? Pragmatically speaking the GOP would be stark, staring mad not to take full advantage of this.
Arguably the Democratic Party has become the Woke Party – and a Woke Party has to signal (approved) virtue more and more strongly to be ‘progressive’. Uncritical support for transgenderism is but one of the ‘virtues’. BLM another, uncontrolled immigration another. And such signalling is mostly for internal competitive purposes, nothing to do with the circumstances of the population in general.
Eventually they will realise that they have run well beyond the edge of the Overton Cliff and plummet to the ground like Wile E. Coyote.
Black Lives Matter is rooted in an actual problem even if some of the thinking and conventions around dealing with it have become detached from logic and sense. Racism is nasty, real and endemic. Transgenderism is 100% nonsense. The whole concept of ‘gender’ as a replacement for biological fact or material reality is laughable. It’s the product of overpaid academic minds desperately contriving to be ‘original’ while being fabulously insulated from the real life consequences of being taken seriously and amplified by fools. Judith Butler should be run out of academia on the end of a philosophical pitchfork, exposed for the turgid, bullsh1t thinker and writer she is.
Good comment, except that Black Lives Matter is just a racist hate group.
It’s off topic but anyone can be racist – most of us are, deliberately or otherwise – at the very least we are mistrustful of difference. It was instructive to read about a young black pop singer (I can’t remember her name) who was incandescent about something that an Irish airline steward had said to her. She was challenged about some behaviour – I don’t even remember what. In her rage she said that Irish people were so far beneath contempt that they had ‘zero white privilege’. Pure racism, really. What can’t be denied is that vicious, white-on-black racism is one of the founding stones of white European societies, central to its propserity and imperialism – it is especially true of present day US foreign and economic policy. That situation may one day be inverted but right now it’s a fact to be confronted and examined with honesty, uncomfortable though it may be. But I agree that the white=bad, black=good school of anti-racism is not helpful to anyone.
Not so. In the US, where imported black slaves were the economic foundation of many states, you can probably say that. In Europe the different races did not live there and so generated no antibodies – whether or not the faraway colonies had people of different colour. There was just a general feeling of superiority over weird foreigners. and a willingness to conquer and exploit weak and backwards ‘other’ groups. Go back far enough and you find contempt, servitude and slavery of whites against whites. Or simply check out some left-over boys books from the 1920’s and see the grossly stereotypical and racist treatment they give to – white – Spaniards or Americans.
As you say we all have a built-in suspicion of different groups, which we need to manage. Just do not try to read current US skin colour conflicts back into a different era and continent.
Your final paragraph is spot on
We didn’t import slaves on the industrial scale the US did but our invasion, theft from and oppression of other countries is undeniable – and the advantages of the wealth generated accrue to us all even today. The dice landed that way these last 500 years or so, in another 500 years things may well be reversed. We all share a tendency to greed and some of us are prepared to be violent to feed it. It’s a global human impulse, not unique to white people – plenty of instances of it between and within other colours and cultures too.
Fair enough. You can argue whether this makes us particularly bad or just normal, and how much better or worse colonial rule was compared to what local princes and chiefs would have done otherwise in each individual case. Still, no denying the accumulated wealth, nor the violence of the colonisation. All I am saying is that the European colonial adventures were not caused by white-on-black racism, vicious or otherwise, but just by a combination of greed and opportunity. The Chinese conquest of Tibet was not caused by vicious Han-on-Nepalese racism, nor was the Roman conquest of France cause by vicious Roman-on-Gaul racism. Adding in the racism only serves to obscure what actually happened.
I contend that the feelings of colonisers in India or Africa were no more dominated by racism than the feelings of the VIking settlers in Normandy or the Danelaw, or the Viking slavers who took slaves from Ireland to the Black Sea. Or the feelings of the Norman conquerors towards their Anglo-Saxon serfs. Or, for that matter, the feelings of Xerxe’s Persians or Shaka’s Zulus towards the inhabitants of the kingdoms they conquered. Certainly not by ‘white on-black racism’ as you said originally. You feel solidarity with your own tribe, and are willing to promote its interests at the expense of other tribes; it is a human universal that we need to deal with. Or, to paraphrase Georges Brassens, ‘Skin colour has nothing to do with it; when you are an a__hole you are an a__hole’
Describing this in terms of ‘racism’ is at best misleading noise. At worst it is a deliberate attempt to bolster a modern ideology (faith?) by selectively associating it with violent behaviour from a violent past.
No I would strongly disagree there – I’d recommend reading into for example the pre-colonisation and colonisation of West Africa. Some of first major European settlers there were part of the same anti-slavery movement in England. They made the journey to Africa to try and stem what they saw (and were correct to see) as the root cause of the slave trade.
Now they may have also had strong evangelical underpinnings to their cause – they thought that all humans were equal under god and that the people in West Africa still suffering from Slavery needed saving from humans but also damnation. But their intent was good.
Like Rasmus hints to above, we are transposing modern sensibilities onto their action to solely put it down to control and colonisation. You have to remember that it took months to traverse the globe back then, communications were almost non-existent. Much (if not certainly all) of what became colonies was a bottom up creation of imposing European senses of order and governance – not a centrally controlled power grab.
That’s not to excuse colonial excesses, brutality and racism that undoubtedly caused the suffering of thousands if not millions – but to redress the idea that this was some centralised European project of control and coercion. It’s broadly speaking people leaving Europe to start new lives. Bringing with them European technologies and sensibilities about law and order.
We can argue whether that is wrong or not for sure.
“We didn’t import slaves on the industrial scale the US did…”
Not sure where you are from, but if it is the UK, then yes you did. For one thing, the vast majority of slaves imported to what would become the US was done while it was still British territory; the importation of slaves was banned only fifteen years after the end of the Revolutionary War. And more slaves were shipped to the British West Indies, which remained British territory after the Revolution, than were ever shipped to the North American continent. For that matter, more went to French, Spanish, and Portuguese territory than did to what would become the first 13 states. The Dutch territories had a tally that was roughly the same as the 13 States. And, of course, the thing that eventually drove cotton to becoming the biggest user of slave labor was to fill the raw materials demands of factories in Europe (tobacco and rice had once been the biggest drivers of slave labor until the industrial revolution really got going). It’s all interconnected.
Of course, having said all that, who actually retrieved these people to be slaves? It really wasn’t a handful of Europeans wandering around in Africa against warrior tribes. African tribes sold them to Europeans, including the tribe that so many people went out of their way to honor after George Floyd’s death for some odd reason (because they sent the ancestors of this sainted figure to our shores, maybe???). And eventually Africans even took over some of the distribution centers along the coast, seizing the trading centers and selling directly to the shippers and basically eliminating the middleman. So again, it’s all interconnected, and no one from Africa to Europe to the Western Hemisphere came out of it looking good by modern standards. But then again, they weren’t operating by modern standards.
Re first paragraph – yes, you are right. I knew that some African’s had been involved in the slave trade but not to the extent you say/imply. There are always collaborators. Will read further.
This is sheer ignorance. Slavery has always been endemic in Africa and more than ‘some’ Africans have been involved and continue to be involved in slavery.
Yes, ignorance is no excuse. As I said I should be better informed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_slave_trade
The point is not who did the trading (you are right on that), but that the slaves were not in Europe, and so had no great effect on popular feelings, racist or otherwise. Again, people who make foie gras are not driven by an obsessive hatred of geese. People who eat it even less so.
You are starting to recognize Original Sin. Go far enough and you will be a Conservative.
Whaddya mean, ‘our’?
How many slaves did YOU own or oppress, Miriam? Just how old are you?
The Moors of north Africa delighted in their white European slave girls.
O how very human! Besides, just about everyone has slave ancestors at some point or other.
Speak for yourself.
No, white on black racism is not a foundation stone of European societies. David Olusogu has shown that there have been some black Britons for centuries and they were quite accepted until the 19th century when colonial exploitation made it expedient to dehumanise dark skinned folk.
In my little corner of the Europe (England),I think you’ll find that historically we hated the French the most and we’re equally hated by the Welsh, Irish, Scottish and the French! Even today there is more suspicion and unease with those of Pakistani heritage than those of African heritage. The US view of white privilege and racism does not translate to Europe as much as you want it to.
“Conquest breads contempt”.
It certainly can be denied.
“What can’t be denied is that vicious, white-on-black racism is one of the founding stones of white European societies, central to its propserity and imperialism”
You haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. African colonies almost never turned a profit, and the number of black Africans in Britain in 1930 was in the low thousands.
“Racism is nasty, real and endemic.” – Sorry. Tribalism has existed forever. We try to suppress that but affinity groups always remain. It exists in every known society, more so, in multi-cultural societies attempting to cooperate. I think we all are trying.
Let us pray that happens sooner than later.
They are also being destroyed by the idiotic “defund the police” narrative. And abolishing prisons? Really? Where do they expect us to put all the killer cops they want to see convicted? Should we let Derek Chauvin sit in a healing circle with George Floyd’s family as an alternative to prison? And don’t even get me started on Jacob Blake. The cop who shot that predator deserves a medal.
Spot on Miriam.
“As a life long left-winger”
Are you not part of the problem?
Not in the least! 🙂
…the sexual variation in question is “Autogynephilia”…in which female-attracted males derive excitement from imagining themselves as women…and yet greater excitement from actually dressing as women…just guessing, but I’m thinking that excitement might grow positively… tumultuous? If they were allowed to explore their fantasy in a place where actual women (and girls) were also present in the same state of undress as they are…
The late Ernest Marples MP and Tory Cabinet Minister was rather keen on that type of behaviour. Sadly the Judge who would later become the revered Lord Denning, supinely failed to expose him, to his eternal shame, due it is said to Prime Ministerial pressure.
Lord Denning was a stain on the Bench. His notorious ‘appalling vista’ speech – concerning the first Birmingham Six appeal – would alone condemn him as a man so contemptuous of hard evidence, as against the interests and reputation of the State as to be morally unfit for Judicial office.
It’s pretty important to them that they be seen dressing and acting as stereotypical women by others–enlisting us, without our consent, in their sexual gratification.
In their tumultuousness, tumesence happens…
Thanks for such an image! Same sex stuff and acting in parts relieves the angst of admitting such an evil depravity of, well, forever.
Yep. Sadly, the Dems sold out working people long ago in favor of overeducated, self-congratulatory urban liberal elites.
My dad was a truck driver who would’ve cut his throat before he voted Republican. “It’s the party of the rich,” he said. “They don’t give a shit about the working man.” My dad voted for McGovern in 1972, though he agreed with McGovern in virtually nothing. He wasn’t about to pull the lever for Nixon.
My dad wouldn’t recognize today’s Democratic Party.
Won’t be anything new. We just are now aware via these platforms. Something about an apple in an old story.
“some states, such as California, consider failure to affirm a child’s gender identity as grounds for stripping a parent of custody rights.”
Occasionally a single fact or incident perfectly encapsulates the ridiculousness, moral vacuity, and illegitimacy of a social phenomenon or ideology. Further elaboration is superfluous.
Well said – this is what has proved so challenging for those of us who have been trying to raise the alarm. Trying to find the form of words that conveys the enormity of what is being done simply and directly. I’m waiting for the qualified recanting to begin. The ‘I never meant’ or ‘What nobody knew’ sh1te. We’ll know sanity is returning when we begin to see those pieces.
At the moment, they are digging in deeply. We need at least 10 years more to see the damage.
Chirst! If it takes that long we may be doomed. I’m a bit more hopeful. There are some tentative signs of people drawing back – even in Keir Starmer’s ‘daring’ to say that there might be some safety issues for women in certain instances. He wouldn’t have said as much even three months ago.
True that we are looking at a limited political retreat in the UK. But the entirety of academia and professional medical bodies are captured to say nothing of the media.These are very important gatekeepers and they are digging in right now.
Indeed. I’m at a complete loss to understand how that attitude can a) be considered in the slightest degree different to removing, Gypsy, Australian Aboriginal or Native American children from their parents to “civilize” them, and b) how it is not considered to be more brutal, savage and barbarian by an order of several hundred times.
At least the ‘civilizing’ ideal was well meant, based on the belief that children were blank pages, and that racial differences could be overcome by early childhood education and experience, nurture over nature. Apparently this was untrue but that is another story.
No. The knife has to be stuck in as far as possible.
I don’t imagine young Ukrainian couples with very young children, if compelled to live in America as war refugees, wanting to go to California to live.
Sadly I believe only the coming tsunami of de-transitioners will put this post modern nonsense to bed.
Agree. A couple more Lia Thomas’ would probably speed things up too.
Exactly. The annihilation of women’s sports will expose all this deranged, sick nonsense
Can you imagine… Once the likes of Russia or China latch on, at the Olympics all the female races will be won by men. A bit like when East Germany used to win first and second place in all the woman swimming competitions.
Hence the genius of the Ancient Greeks in insisting that all the Panhellenic Games were performed Gymnos*.
(*naked.)
And were castigated for it. Now , we’re expected to celebrate it.
Yes, the koolaid swallow is a deep one and a generation of mutilated kids, suicides and lawsuits is what will put this to rest. Nearly all the mainstream LGBT organisations will suffer for their role in this.
The actual gay and lesbian groups are quite angry at their efforts being hijacked. A real minority whose minds among my like friends are unique undermined by an even smaller minority who, to my observation, are not generally creatives.
Name these groups. Are they separate from the 100 odd LGBT organisations that scuppered the government’s upcoming LGBT conference this week? The LGB alliance and several GC women’s groups are regularly hounded as hate groups by the vast majority of gay organisations.
Agree on the sports issue. Disagree with the author on the importance of the bans on “gender affirming” (a farcically misleading euphemism) healthcare for minors.
The evidence that puberty blockers are simply a “pause” on a critically important part of a young person’s development and that they are completely reversible does not exist and blockers are the gateway drug (>90% conversion rate) to cross-sex hormones, which have serious permanent impacts on someone, especially a young person. A women’s voice cannot unbreak and a boy’s p***s will not develop past its pre-pubescent state, among other things, following PBs + cross-sex hormones (assuming no surgical interventions have been undertaken).
As the # of detransitioners increases (which it will – maybe is at this point) even more rapidly than the number of girls – it is mostly girls – undergoing these affirmative treatments and procedures has parabolically increased, public outrage will grow and the Biden admin’s (and Dem’s) position on this issue will come back to haunt all them.
I predict that when all is said and done the gender care craze and all that it has entailed will be a medical scandal on the scale of the lobotomy fiasco (perhaps the opioid crisis as well).
Except in this case, the result with be lost breasts, irreversible loss of sexual function and infertility, if not loss of life due to suicides driven by regret.
At last, a commenter who has picked this up. There is nothing unreasonable about prohibiting medical interventions on troubled minors who have persuaded themselves that their problems will cease if they become the opposite gender. Especially as there has been no conclusive research that this is not down to other psychological conditions.
This to me is the biggest scandal of the gender cult.
All that preaching of equity and inclusion, all that moral posturing as the ones who care, as the sole purveyors of compassion and empathy – it’s all now having real life consequences that are becoming increasingly difficult to defend: the farce of “women’s” sports, the mutilation and sterilization of children, the facilitating of rape, the condoning of crime (depending on the skin colour of those involved) and in education the sidelining of the gifted (again depending on skin colour). The mounting hysteria and hyperbole (anti-white TV shows, the refusal to define women in any meaningful way) is surely indicative of the creeping realization that this is not going to end well. I hope I live long enough to see the peddlers of this iniquity behind bars.
Douglas Murray talks about ‘St George in retirement syndrome’: the dragon is dead; what do I do now? What began as g*y rights in the 60s was achieved and, not simply accepting that, now demands things which bear no resemblance to those original fair objectives. The camel was allowed equitably to put its nose in the tent and has now taken over the tent: L G has become L G B T Q I A 2 and probably more.
The impending tsunami was seen in 2004 during the Civ*l Partn*rship debates, when in Parliament it was clearly stated that there was no intention to press for marriage rights too: that promise didn’t last long! I remember reading g*y activist articles years ago seeking to abolish marriage as a social aim.
So now we are here: politicians don’t know what a woman is and youth are being offered life-changing medication and surgery without parental approval or even knowledge. No wonder there is a push back.
It’s debatable whether the Biden administration has avoided a single trap that they have laid for themselves.
Completely agree.
YES!!! The article has a few tone deaf misfires, like:
“By picking a national fight over these issues, the Biden administration risks stepping into a trap it has so far avoided: siding with the common sense of college-educated progressives against the common sense of the electorate as a whole.“
Name one that Biden has avoided – calling the new Georgia voting law the new Jim Crow, strangling the energy industry with regulations, lack of final permits etc to appease the Twitter crowd and then begging Venezuela to pump more oil, hiring that old fat Man in a Dress with long, grey hair who “transitioned” at age 54 as assistant secretary of health so that the Cathedral could dub him “woman of the year. “.
All the while his popularity hovers in the high 30’s. What could go wrong?
No too mention the Afghanistan withdrawal, “that was four or five days ago!”
What is is specifically about the Democrats that they always faceplant straight into the wet cement of these idiotic “progressive” ideas? 100 years ago — as is always conveniently ignored by the political activists who call themselves journalists in the US media — it was the Democrats who were the ones foursquare behind the then progressive ideas of eugenics and racial segregation. If there’s a stupid, evil, or harmful idea out there, you can bet your last penny it’ll be some leftie pushing it.
Could it be that party affiliation often correlates to a given person’s world outlook or ‘personality type’?
Some people are early adopters of whatever it may be: fashion, hairstyle, choice of music, the latest technology, the most recent model of car. Other people don’t really care that much about such matters.
In the mindset of some lurks a positive dread of being unfashionable, and therefore somehow backward, unworthy, or unlovable.
Add to that the fear that being unfashionable somehow extends to being wrong, in the sense of morally wrong – actually vile or despicable.
So maybe many Democrats are by disposition afraid of being seen as unfashionable … and therefore bad.
I think you may be right about this. Many people, and probably most young people, want to be part of what is fashionable, hence always aiming new things at the young, not because older people are stick-in-the-mud, just more sceptical. It’s also a matter of fitting in; again this affects younger people, as they only mix with their peer group, and also those in “closed communities” such as small, remote rural villages, some professions and universities. Most older people, and youinger people who go to work and not university, mix with others from different age groups and back-grounds and therefore get different takes on many issues. All this is why I challenge statistics which prove things like the vast majority of educated people voted to remain in the EU, when what is really meant is the vast majority of PEOPLE WHO WENT TO UNIVERSITY voted to remain. The difference is that the university educated (especially in the humanities where differences of opinion are rarely tolerated) want to be part of what is fashionable among their friends/peers, and are afraid to dissent.
In the mindset of some lurks a positive dread of being unfashionable, and therefore somehow backward, unworthy, or unlovable. Add to that the fear that being unfashionable somehow extends to being wrong, in the sense of morally wrong – actually vile or despicable.
An interesting hypothesis. I like the contention of unfashionable extending to new morally wrong.
You’ve got it. I’ve thought about this long and hard, and I can’t find any other explanation for a total failure to see the obvious sheer stupidity of the ‘gender identity’ ideology by otherwise intelligent people. It’s even more terrifying that they’re completely blind to the enormous harm it’s creating. In fact it’s so strange that I’ve come to believe that they DO see and know everything, but there’s something very deep in them that makes them ignore it, or explain it away – it has to be something essential to their concept of self, and you’ve put it perfectly.
Or possibly discrediting eugenics and segregation?
I just read GKChesterton’s short book on eugenics, and cant resist recommending it here. The first 40 pages are simply the most stupendous sustained polemic I have ever read.
Overall a very good article, except for the puzzling part of claiming Biden usually sides with public opinion over Twitter. I honestly can’t think of a single issue where he had done that. It’s why he has Dems who are up for reelection this year so frustrated: he is turning the party into the kind of ultra hard left party that has already made Obama’s second term seem moderate. He is neck and neck with Woodrow Wilson for most authoritarian, but he’s only been in office a year.
All this for a party that, while it has housed leftists for over a century, also housed a lot of conservatives, many more dedicated and genuine conservative than what one would find in the republican party. Tribalism will provide some votes no matter what, but eventually the electorate catches on, and his threats towards parents who want to control how their kids are raised is the absolute surest way to make people pay attention. He clearly didn’t learn any lessons from progressive defeats in Virginia and, of all places, San Francisco
‘Only later, sometimes after painful surgeries, do the girls realise that whatever was bothering them was not gender dysphoria but another unresolved psychological issue’
There you have it.
I see Boris has been reading this article!
He spelled out his position today:
Seems like an outbreak of common sense and backbone.
Refreshing even if overdue.
Good, sensible stuff.
And now we can go back to women footballers and tennis players whining about how it’s sexist to treat women’s sports as inferior, or to pay a woman less than a top ranked sportsman.
“The Biden administration’s great strength so far has been its ability to recognise when the preferences of the Twitter class are deeply out of step with those of the public and then side with the public.”
Is the author kidding with this ludicrous assertion?
On energy, immigration, Covid, education, inflation and now transgenderism, the Biden Administration’s monumental blindness to the middle class’s preferences has been behind its condign fall in the polls.
I’d like the author of this piece to give me the case for his belief that transgender policy is some kind of singular error in Biden’s political judgement, rather than being the rule of thumb.
I couldn’t agree more.
‘they have cast the Parental Rights in Education Act as a homophobic attempt to “force kids back into the closet” and prevent gay teachers from discussing their home life in the classroom’. Let’s pretend that it was not gay teachers, but ecumenical Christians, and that what they were discussing with their little charges was the salvation of their eternal souls, and what their Church service was like last Sunday. Now imagine the same media outlets reactions.
What I find inexplicable is that the writer presents the trans-movement societal changes as almost a side issue, compared to “How does this affect the Democrat Party?” This is a uniquely Democrat posturing. The Republicans and Fox News are “whipped into a frenzy” but, gosh, maybe they have a point. Well I’m glad you started caring about children being coached to permanently disfigure themselves because it has started to affect Democrat polling! Coaching gender reassignment surgery of children is pure evil. It’s Nazi Germany Josef Mengele level of evil. The moral priority of the Left totally blows my mind.
It’s incredible how vehemently young, highly educated people support this mad narrative about gender. They get red in the face and denounce their parents for wanting to keep changing rooms and NHS wards single sex, rather than single gender. They purport not to see any problem with males competing in women’s sport. They have invested so heavily in it, they are going to find out difficult to roll back to commonsense in the future.
This will be a problem. When one’s gets so heavily invested emotionally in any issue, as many are, it’s very difficult to admit one’s mistake. Often there’s a tendency to dig in rather than face the truth, also there is a price to pay for people who change their minds, and not only from the group they are leaving but also from those with whom they now agree, there seems to be little joy for the repentant sinner.
That’s why the Lefties are so angry about the Florida law – their control over schoolchildren and their indoctrination is a central part of their strategy.
Imagine “classroom instruction on sex” and teachers discussing their sexual orientation and views with 5 year olds – if the said teacher was a straight white male.
That what I thought when I read that teachers believed that they wouldn’t be able to speak about their home lives. I knew nothing about my teachers’ home lives in infant, primary or secondary school, and I didn’t want to; as far as I knew, or even cared, they disppeared at 4.20 when the school day ended. Children ought not to be brought into their teachers’ lives, even if those lives are totally, boringly vanilla.
Boris has made a good start. However sex dysphoric men are not women in any circumstance. If they wish to create a space separate from men it cannot be at the expense of, or imposition on women. Whether or not you agree with quotas for women, or prizes for women (literary or whatever) – sex dysphoric men should not be included with women. Either we are saying that men can be women, or we are not. Clearly we must not. It’s as impossible as it is dangerous to be monkeying around with reality like that. This does not exclude any man, however he ‘identifies’ or presents, from anything – he can write, or sing, or stand for election as he chooses – but he must do it as he truly is [trans identified man/man] – not as a woman. If you allow this lunacy in at a single point, you allow it in everywhere.
That all changed last month,
Not really. Sharp-eyed women have been seeing the writing on the wall here for a while now, with growing concern about the intrusion into women’s spaces by transwomen. That does not make us transphobes. Most of the American public has been asleep about this, even after the Wi Spa incident, but it looks like Lia Thomas finally woke them up.
‘The college educated progressives’ are not exhibiting common sense at all on this issue. They are in thrall to a quasi-religious cult (a phenomenon the average ‘college educated progressive’ thinks is limited to the unwashed and uneducated masses). Gender ideology and activism is the Q Anon of the Left.
Common sense, critical thinking and attachment to material reality have been short-circuited on the Left. The course correction will be brutal. I say that as a lifelong leftist feminist lesbian who now, like many other women, finds myself politically homeless.
I think the key point raised in the article is that these issues directly impact peoples children. During Covid friends of mine who are not political at all became fierce advocates over the issue of school closures. They weren’t prepared to just accept them – and were prepared to take public heat and condemnation by fighting for more class time. I think that is what is going to make this political suicide for progressives – don’t mess with peoples kids. It was trans day here last week and a Mom friend of mine with young kids told me – quite fiercely – that she was going to find out what the h@$& they told her kids that day. She is not a conservative at all – but she doesn’t trust the school on this issue any more.
Forgive me for being too lazy to look it up, but does anyone know how many people identify or wish to identify as trans in, say the UK or the USA, or even in a single American state? It’s very well to cite percentage increases but what are the numbers?
More than one but less than three.
I’ve read general statistics that show approximately 3% of the US population is gay and .58% identify as transgender.
0.58%! My goodness, so much noise from so small a group. So much fear generated by so small a group. But then much of the noise and fear is being generated by the “allies” of transgender people. They are like children pushing mummy and daddy until they find the boundary, but there doesn’t seem to be a boundary so they just keep pushing; it’s fun, after all, seeing mummy and daddy giving in all the time.
All this noise and fear has one goal: to increase that number. The lobby is literally pushing to turn gay kids into ‘trans’ ones, on pain of social isolation – the ultimate catastrophe in the mind of a teenager.
Wow! The Mouse that Roared!
Excellent, some figures. Where did you read them?
The number of trans* before the last few years was extremely low, IIRC well below 1%–something like .01%. We don’t have current figures because the number of trans identifiers has exploded in the past few years. It’s also unevenly distributed–there are reports by adults familiar with particular woke-type schools that over 30% of the teen girls are identifying other than straight and cis.
We can see mid school girls holding hands and nobody bats an eye, but later the girl cliques form. The out girls find comfort in becoming trans and they get new respect. Boys, of course, are never seen holding hands lest the worst be said given male fears. The outs there might be more accepted by the girls as less of a threat. But in those tender years, I see girls being among the least civilized particularly as interest in boys arrives. We aren’t helping kids during those hormone years.
Past numbers suggest that 3-10% of the population would identify as gay/lesbian (can’t use q anymore). In the past some 0.5-1% would identify as “trans” – some form of gender misalignment. Today that latter figure has exploded as being trans has become an excuse for simply being different or sensitive. Teen years are filled with the burst of hormones that we once took with a grain of salt about the absolute confusion. Now we must assign some other meaning to the confusion.
America under Biden is actually going to add the question to the next Census. The activist community wants it on to ‘prove’ 1 in 10 Americans are LGBQRST+ or Trans so they can REALLY push their agenda. My fear is how many people will ‘tick the box’ as a joke? There is no way the question should be added. Truly sick of identity politics, always carving real people up into smaller and smaller communities.
…I was actually at school with a chap who went on to become an olympic athlete. He was by some distance the most peculiar, obessesive and driven teenager I ever met…and as I understand it from those who remained in touch (through a sibling…the athlete was civil enough, but had absolutely no discernible relationships at all that were not instruments of future sporting success), I understand he only made any kind of move into “normal” well after his career was over…and even then, not by much.
In that context, I’d say a mid-table teenage athlete deciding he was a girl because he could then win seems to me at least as likely and his discovering he was “Gender Dysphoric”…quite possibly more so…
The US Democrats have just two and a half years left. The experiment is dying already and the mid terms will render them impotent for the latter half. Even Obama seems to mock Biden and Harris can’t keep her staff for five minutes. Like the Japanese after Pearl Harbour a ‘Sleeping Giant has awoken’. The centre right are awake. Red necks and conservatives went about their business. Now they go about armed and we see an exodus from blue States.
Changing gender surgically is madness. Disturbed men have always dressed up and some women can pass as men with a haircut and a zip front fly. And nobody cared, just part of the tapestry. Women athletes can beat couch potato men in any activity already. Trans men are just cheating. Gays have been with us forever. The Bible reaching the printing press didn’t help.
BLM are a societal malaise exploiting the angry and not very bright. A typical leftist trick. Educated and sensible western black folk are surely embarrassed. BLM have erected barriers previously knocked down and are making life uncomfortable for both sides, who previously weren’t on a side.
“The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over her competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude she hadn’t had a competitive advantage.”
*The pictures of the broad-shouldered, 6’1” Thomas towering over his competitors, were striking. Long-winded explanations about the role of testosterone in athletic performance aside, it was hard for the average person to conclude he hadn’t had a competitive advantage.
The world is simply going mad!
The left declares others are in a “panic” about transgender issues when, in fact, it is trans activists who have decided it is “urgent!” to not only fully accept, respect and provide trans people basic rights (which I and the great majority of Americans do), but to accept their entire ideology. If we are not teaching kindergartners that there is nothing intrinsically male or female, that gender is entirely a social construct, “children will die!” Parents are told that if they don’t immediately affirm their child’s new gender “they will die!” “Accept your son or buy your daughter.” The blackmail is repulsive. And of course, if you don’t mouth every bit of their rhetoric, you are a hateful, troglodytic bigot.
It’s ironic that this group, which states that gender identity is a fluid as the winds, puts such intense pressure on children to determine “who they are” and to “come out” as X.
“Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to her presence on the team.”
*Although Thomas was, for the most part, lauded by the press, the victory was accompanied by protests, complaints from the parents of other competitors, and a string of anonymous tabloid leaks from Thomas’s teammates — at least some of whom seemed opposed to his presence on the team.
“She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets them on the road to medical transition.”
*She visits a psychiatrist who, instead of interrogating her feelings, “affirms” that she is actually a boy and sets her on the road to medical transition.
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The progressives are captured by Malthusians and the Trans community. This isn’t going to end well for them. A couple of definitions from the progressive community …
White supremacist = anyone that disagrees with a progressive
Transphobe = anyone that doesn’t want children of any age able to modify their body and hormones at will with no parental supervision
Bigot = anyone to the political right of you
Racist = any organization or person that doesn’t contribute and kowtow to BLM
Diversity = Believing whatever a progressive says it means
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