For many Americans, Father’s Day is an opportunity to spend time with family and show the dads in their lives (and specifically their own fathers) how much they appreciate all they do. Which means that for the legacy media outlets like The New York Times it’s a day to run propaganda for mentally ill women who think they become dads by removing female body parts and growing facial hair.
Left-wing media are no strangers to belittling dads, but there are different phases to the anti-father campaign, and the Times is apparently in the “anyone with a testosterone-injection-induced beard is just as good as a dad” phase. In a 25-frame cartoon “opinion piece” the Times ran Sunday, Clair “Zach” Ellams describes “living as a trans man since I was 18 years old” and then says she had to “learn how to be a trans dad” when she had a daughter, Elliot.
Of course, the op-ed is everything one might expect: Ellams’ daughter displays childlike honesty and asks perfectly reasonable questions about how Ellams got a mustache and how long she had breasts. And then Ellams presents her daughter as making her “happy and secure” by affirming her new identity. In fact, Elliot is purportedly the one teaching Ellams how to “embrace” her trans-identification: Elliot lives like a kid who has fun and who’s comfortable with her personality, which is (somehow) clearly analogous to Ellams “embracing” her identity by undergoing body-mutilating surgery and cross-sex hormones.
See, it all makes perfect sense, and it’s not at all strange that one of the nation’s leading papers would be printing this sort of illustrated delusion. To be fair to the Times, the cartoon artist portrays Ellams as a somewhat large figure with a baseball cap, facial scruff, and hairy legs, so readers might understand why an outlet with the perspicacity of the Times might conclude those features automatically make Ellams a dad. But the op-ed’s clumsy absurdity is hardly the deepest issue here.
First, note the legacy media double standard: If the media want to run cover for a never-before-tried sociological experiment where kids stand to lose a lot, what they need is first-person anecdotes, because they’re powerful and authentic. If conservatives want to suggest that maybe there might be consequences for doing family the opposite of the way humans have done it for thousands of years, the media demand data and double-blind studies and randomised controlled trials. If normies suggest natural immunity exists, they consult scientists and experts to “debunk” such conspiracy theories. But the corporate media are unquestionably objective, so their crusades to change the definition of things like fatherhood on the basis of absurd reductionist thinking that says growing a beard or cutting off breasts makes you a dad have far more credibility than the beliefs of everyday Americans, or so the theory goes.
The “trans dad” cartoon isn’t a Times one-off either. There’s a whole Times and legacy media narrative of anecdotes about fatherhood “changing.” Dads are learning to braid their daughters’ hair, which ostensibly means they’re “challenging the norms of fatherhood.” Culture is engaged in a “fitful movement away from archaic, cinching gender roles” (says an NYT writer who admits he’s not a father). And to tackle the question of America’s “Masculinity Crisis” last month, the Times brought in “experts” who equated “the patriarchy” with white supremacy and decried the concept of “positive masculinity” because it might “slightly reinforc[e] gender stereotypes.” Being a dad doesn’t mean what it used to mean, according to the Times. Dads don’t even have to be male, because … anecdotes.
A more serious problem with the propaganda piece is that it promotes neurotic, narcissistic adult behavior in which the parent co-opts the kids into the parent’s personal social experiment. Manipulated into going along with her parent’s delusion, the child’s “affirmation” is heralded as if she’s a 60-year-old psychiatrist with the wisdom of Solomon instead of an apparent preteen who likely doesn’t know how to change a tire, let alone evaluate the long-term effects of amputating body parts and cosplaying as the opposite sex. Bravo, though. Everyone knows that kids have never been mistaken in their concept of right or wrong or what’s a good idea.
It’s an absurd form of behavior, and the media promoting it is designed to produce more of it. How marvelous for children. Smartphones, social media, and AI have made a child’s world more uncertain and challenging, but what if major media outlets also reminded parents of how awesome it is for them to cosplay as the opposite sex? When children need stable adults in an unstable world, leftists are eager to encourage adults to act as if everything moves and nothing is stable.
The “trans dad” cartoon is also a reminder that the legacy media have a sneering disdain for real fathers — plumbers, coders, truck drivers, preachers, and so forth, males who work for a living and spend much of their lives making sure their kids have a bed to sleep in, food to eat, and a solid chance at living a successful, meaningful life. Men who change diapers and kiss their girls on the forehead and tell their sons to suck it up and stop whining (because men have to do that a lot, and sons have to learn to be men). In reality, leftists simply hate fathers and the real world more generally — a world where tough men and tough women still pursue divisions of labor and duties that acknowledge physical realities and the sex differences are too obvious to ignore.
The inquisitive reader might go a step further and ask why leftists like those at the Times have such an antipathy to fathers generally and seem so willfully blind to the reality (and necessity) of sex differences. Political conservatives would provide a variety of different answers: upbringing, ideology, culture, and so forth. But those who are Christian and conservative might point out that the issue can be traced back to leftists’ troubled (or nonexistent) relationship with the One who created fathers and sex differences and everything else worth celebrating.
