I Regret to Inform You That the Trans Lunacy Isn’t Abating
The assault on sex-based protections for females continues.
Last night, the UK’s Ultimate Pool Women’s Pro Series Event 2 in Wigan, UK had its final match.
Normally this wouldn’t have grabbed headlines, but this year’s event was different in that there were no women in the final. The match was played between two trans men.1
Thursday, The Washington Post published a feature story lamenting how “transgender rights, particularly for young people, have become a political target for conservative leaders,” which has forced “trans girls” (biological males) to compete with boys (biological males)—a grave injustice, if ever there was.
CBS News followed up a day later with this:
And as I highlighted in Friday’s Quotes of the Week post, a man was recently inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
I have repeatedly railed against this contemptible insanity, and I will continue to do so. It is dangerous, toxic nonsense that has made considerable inroads into mainstream culture thanks to a highly sympathetic media environment and a degree of mainstream coverage wholly disproportionate to the actual number of trans people. This is due in large part to 1) transgenderism being not just a movement driven by individuals with gender dysphoria, but a distinct political and social community of activists who preach gender ideology; and 2) advocacy required by all those who subscribe to the progressive faith and worship at the Church of Woke, congregants of which are all too happy to oblige. Now that the major civil rights victories of the late twentieth century are pretty much secured, agitators must look to new areas to initiate change, because Progressivism is all about the blind desire to uproot whatever currently exists.2
But no one has a civil right to force others to share their subjective identity beliefs, and no one has a civil right to identify into biological categories warranting differential access to protected spaces to which they do not belong. Allowing anyone to identify into a demographic category on the basis of inner feelings knowable only by self-report is a laughably untenable project.
The problem is that, today, more so than ever before, there is no degree of insanity that the administrative state — which is predominantly comprised of progressive clerics seeking to put their fundamentalist view of how the world should be into practice via the logics and compliance architectures of neoliberal governance, gradually expanding their influence so as to establish the dominant ethos of western high culture and institutions — won’t treat as a “civil right.”
At a policy level, it’s indecent to lie and deny biological reality. It’s an affront to reason. And it’s a civilizational threat if you obliterate one of the most fundamental verities of human existence and replace it with a requirement that we capitulate to the disordered thinking of a small percentage of the population. In an individual encounter with a trans person, indulging in their preferred fiction doesn’t seriously threaten the social order. But when the lie is enforced by the state or institutions, or is promulgated by the scientific community, civilization comes to reside on a foundation of sand.
Activists have gone to great lengths to present their success in forcing society’s acquiescence to gender ideology as stemming from a wholesale shift in public opinion, but in reality this is just another instance of a tyrannical minority coercing others into abiding by lunacy. There’s a reason these messianic morons prefer to have social changes enforced from the top down, rather than having to go through the effort of winning people over to their ideas: those ideas can’t stand on their own and collapse under minimal scrutiny.3 Transgenderism in practice is the submission by one party to the libido dominandi of another. It forces a subjective and manipulable view of one person’s self to become a defining reality for everyone else. It’s a demand for the validation of others. But in an actual democracy, the minority — and, a fortiori, the individual — cannot force the majority to conform to individual predilections.
And it’s not a stretch to say the transgender movement is basically left-wing misogyny on steroids. The root idea — that “trans women are women,” a marvel of pretzel logic used in response to any criticism of gender ideology and any objections to biological males inserting themselves into female spaces and sports — reduces womanhood from a biological, social, relational phenomenon to some sort of garish costume that “men who feel like women” can pull on as they please. This is nothing less than an assault on women’s sex-based rights, the specificity of their experiences, and their desire for safety, privacy, and dignity.
The new norms and mores that the movement insists the rest of society follows have long since passed the absurd. We’ve reached the point where neither surgery nor a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is required for someone to be a trans woman. The entire sex category has been opened to any male who says he’s female. This isn’t about “inclusivity,” it’s forced participation in an alternative reality dependent on positive public regard and the redefinition of what it means for someone to be a woman—a total rewriting of societal rules and the legitimation of a regressive set of beliefs requiring the active, conscious, and affirming disposition of every member of society, who must identify you as a member of the sex you proclaim.
If any man can claim to be a woman and just like that we must treat him as one, “woman” becomes a meaningless word and women’s rights cease to exist. You have to be willfully obtuse not to understand that treating gender as simply a matter of self-identification sets up a direct conflict between sex-based protections for females and rights based upon gender identity, instantiating ideas that are harmful to women’s equality.
Trans women are not women. They haven’t had to live their entire lives as females, with all the safety concerns, biological trappings, and societal and cultural expectations that involves. Womanhood is not a choice. And a society that places the feelings of trans people — 0.6% of the population — over the safety and liberty of women, who have historically been forced to fight tooth and nail for equality, is a society in terminal decline.
Democrats and progressive jihadists are defending this by arguing that when it comes to shooting pool, which is not a physically demanding game, the differences between men and women are negligible. But it seems pretty obvious to me (as well as British pool star Lynne Pinches, who refused to play against a trans opponent at the Denmark Open last year), that men do still enjoy some significant advantages. Anyone who’s gone through male puberty will have, on average, a much wider wingspan and be much taller than someone who hasn’t, resulting in greater power and speed affording easier shots. Moreover, there’s substantial evolutionary evidence underscoring why men tend to dominate chess, pool, darts, and even poker.
There must always be new enemies, new emergencies, new liberatory projects. Progressives know nothing but dissatisfaction because the refusal to entertain the possibility that things have improved is literally built into their worldview, which is predicated on the notion that the present must always be compared to unrealized and often unattainable standards that are kept intentionally vague and rarely delineated so as to always have a reason to be dissatisfied with the status quo. Everything must be problematized. Compromise is impermissible because Progress™ is framed as a consummate good—there can never be too much of it. Hence the intolerance of opponents and the inherent hostility to moderation. On all things trans-rights and whether or not it’s appropriate to teach minors about gender fluidity, for example, there’s only one acceptable position: Full approval, or else.
People with such illogical, irrational, unscientific, untruthful beliefs and ideologies cannot convince others through rational arguments. They must instead impose their will on others through deceit, lies, intolerance, bullying, and wresting control of courts and politicians. The main political goals of progressives aren’t achieved through votes but the use of the administrative state to coerce others into implementing their Progress™ project. The transgender movement is a perfect example of how conceptual engineering can be effectuated through the non-electoral politics of institutional capture.
"Trans" is a sacred category for the Social Justice left-liberals now, meaning it is "set apart" and cannot be debated or abandoned, cannot be compromised, it must be defended like a citadel is defended from foreign attackers.
And the lie is too big to be swept under the rug, the Trans movement and its supporters have been complicit in the castration and mutilation of thousands of children, not to mention that at the apex of their coalition are the rich white coastal elite, many of whom have a Trans or "NB" child, as this is the must-have item for our age of conspicuous compassion and the ultimate status marker to show how cool, tolerant and un-MAGA you are.
There is no way back and no way out here, no matter how many elections it costs the Dems. Something you consider sacred is more important than any party, politician or election.
Great work, Brad!
Absolute respect to women athletes who courageously refuse to compete with transistors.....