Will people think transgender issues cost Democrats the election? That’s what Jennifer Boylan (formerly James Boylan) worries. In a piece over at the New York Times, Boylan frets over the social isolation they have dispensed to others, agonizing over the phrase “boutique issue.”
Boylan, who teaches women’s studies at Barnard College, is the new transgender issue editor at the NYT, a publication which has covered transgender issues 1207 times in the last 12 months—eclipsing their coverage of North Korea.
This op-ed comes after weeks of grieving and hysteria over the election. But it also follows a week after a well-known transgender activist murdered two women and one of the women’s sons, and three weeks after a transgender women shot a co-worker. We still hear that never happens. See here and here.
Boylan says, “It was the morning after the election. The bottle of Champagne I’d opened as part of an anticipated victory celebration still sat on the coffee table, only one-third finished, the unconsumed flat remainder marking the exact moment that my future, as a transgender American, became uncertain.”
Although we don’t have Champagne in the Rust Belt marking that terrible moment, we can appreciate the pain and fear.
Women Don’t Want Men And Boys In Their Restrooms
Boylan is wrong, of course. Women and parents do not want boys and men in the girls’ room. And yes, some did vote Republican because they knew HRC’s second largest donor was transgender billionaire Jennifer Natalya Pritzker, formerly US Army Lieutenant Colonel James Nicholas.
But there’s more. And people tried to explain this to the writer in comments left under the piece. One reader wrote,
We Americans are by and large a live and let live people. When gay rights was about keeping the government and employers out of peoples private lives there was broad support. Then on the heels of those victories it suddenly became about forcing Evangelical florists, bakers, photographers, etc., to choose between violating their conscious by actively participating in gay marriages or going out of business. This was immediately followed by insisting that reasonable accommodations for the transgendered weren’t enough. Society at large has to suddenly proclaim that sex is no longer based on Biology or risk a governmental smack-down. Couple this with a lousy economy outside of urban centers, and you have a recipe for the revolt you just saw.
Another person said,
The question came down to: Do some people have the right to demand that law — and the rest of the population — recognizes their ‘identity’ that is based solely on their ‘feelings’? And must society pay for medical costs associated with individuals achieving that identity? If so, why not race? Or any other immutable biological fact? Most Americans believe that all of us should have the same rights, whereas transgender rights activists and various identity groups want special rights which apply only to them. And that is the line in the sand that many people refused to cross.
How Gender Identity Politics Disguises Truth
Identity politics have been dealt some other blows recently. Over at National Review, Maggie Gallagher reminds us that large studies used to win concessions were fabricated:
We saw that in 2015, when a major study published in Science, which purported to show that personal canvassing by LGBT people had an amazingly large effect on people’s opinions, was revealed to have been entirely faked, and in ways that one lone grad student, David Broockman, found easy to debunk. (The “scholar” had even created easily checked fake grants from real foundations, thanking them publicly for grants they had never made.)’ And now A widely reported study on longevity of homosexuals appears to have been faked.
Then there is the issue of all the hoax hate crimes after the election. The day after the election, media reported a rash of transgender child suicides—eight suicides that never happened. The journalist was forced to write a retraction. This comes at a time when many Americans see the academy and media as misdirected and unreliable.
The Bullying Tactics Of Transgender Activists
There’s a swath of unsavory and perhaps illegal tactics used in the service of sexual and gender identity. Activists conduct witch hunts, and have blacklists with names culled illegally from IRS. Recall Brendan Eich.
Last week, BuzzFeed did an out-the-Christians hit piece—of HGTV’s “Fixer Upper” stars Chip and Joanna Gaines for their maybe maybe not religious beliefs. National sexual and gender identity organizations have blacklists of people often based on religious affiliations. They post these publicly on the internet and share these with federal and state agencies.
And it gets worse. Transgender activists have sent threats of violence and death to women, academics, researchers, feminists, and rape survivors, and pressed false charges.
Increasingly, people feel that sexual and gender identity politics traffics in a kind of elite faux intellectualism in which the “isms” and the “phobias” are sui generis practiced by the unwashed masses in megachurches. Yet without real research, and with hoax hate crimes and victim-based identity politics, their only argument is, “because I said so.”
People are realizing how political correctness silences, shames, and bullies. Sexual and gender identity politics amplifies an authoritarianism and caste system based on people’s feelings, with higher castes—the shamers and cry bullies—controlling the discourse. Often, the goal of this is not just to silence but to isolate people from each other: from their jobs, their businesses, their families. “Get you fired,” “you will pay for this,” “good luck being bankrupt,” “kiss your business goodbye,” and “how can you family stand you”?
Transgender Politics Blinds Us to More Important Needs
Another commenter brought the most interesting perspective:
I am a doctor and I spent two decades taking care of every patient I saw. And I saw thousands. Never saw a transgender patient, because on a population basis it is extremely rare. Immune deficiencies (bubble kids) are much more common. We don’t hear a national debate about sterility or sterile rooms. We don’t get justice-department invectives saying every school has to provide a sterility space for bubble kids. The entire national debate on the transgender was misplaced emphasis which turned people away from the more qualified candidate. Of course, everyone is entitled to their rights and freedom, but in their zeal to feel good the Democrats never thought about the feasibility or practicality of letting people use the bathroom of their choice … The immunocompromised patients I took care of never demanded justice department directives. No patient ever did.”
Boylan skirts big issues. In the ever-changing contradictory terms of sexual and gender identity politics, we are told that the condition is called gender dysphoria. Transgender and LGBT activists had the condition downgraded by the APA from disorder in the DSMV. The only treatment is “transition.” While it is no longer a mental “disorder,” we are also told that without transition, death from suicide is certain.
Dysphoria means depression—that’s it. In the high-profile Orwellian malady. Like Boylan, the afflicted are disproportionately middle-aged heterosexual men. People are put off. Where is the attention for conditions with higher rates of suicide—bipolar and schizophrenia? That’s one example of the over-attention given to the narrative that comes replete with made-up words and new pronouns.
What About the Dignity and Privacy of Women?
There is still no medical evidence to back the claim of “woman’s brain trapped in man’s body.” The condition is in dispute. Some experts assert autogynephilia, a male heterosexual inversion fetish. This politicized science is, as Gallagher points out, bad science. What this lacks in scientific support it makes up for in being trendy.
People have not signed a contract saying they are willing to take part in another person’s treatment plan. To “affirm” one person in their gender may, at the same time, put others at risk. Privacy is discarded because “womanhood” is now a feeling a man has. It is a male identity. And to be sure, the real issues are around men and boys in women and girls’ bathrooms, overnights, camp bunks.
That totalitarian impulse was not overlooked by the Times commenters. “It is not the business of the federal government to dictate moral codes to the entire nation,” they advise. “So please do not make a straw man of this issue, the transgendered are innocent. They guilty are those who think they know what is best for everyone. . . .”
We Must Beware Gender Identity Politics
For millions of years, across the animal kingdom, biological sex has mattered. It matters to pregnant women, elderly women, teenage girls, and to millions of victims of sexual violence.
We recognize that identity politics isolates people from each other by shaming and creating social outcasts. Unnoticed is the fact that the ideology isolates reality from people. Reality does not matter. Truth is “a feeling”, and “it could be” true.
Given that, it makes sense that they deploy fabricated research and hoax hate crimes. Propaganda works best with social manipulation, sanctioning, and punishment. Transgender women’s threats to rape them, burn them, get them fired, and harm their families? People can look up the case of Profesor Michale Bailey’s and Bioethits Alice Dreger.
The writer Primo Levi would tell you that lies based in pseudo science and used as biological inference are the most dangerous of all. When these lies are told and employed by a group or a government, others always lose their human rights. More often, thousands or millions lose their lives and freedom. The laws that enshrined slavery were based on “biology.” The Nuremberg laws that declared Jews non-human were biologically base. Trans is a kind of postmodern version of gender identity eugenics, a postmodern suigenics. Legally, “woman” is only a feeling a man has.
When will the DSMV describe the authoritarian narcissism of identity politics? That’s what needs treatment.
