Truth finds a way — sometimes even in The New York Times. The Times recently published a long article by columnist M. Gessen (a woman who identifies as something other than a woman) complaining about Kansas. Gessen was angry over two state laws, one requiring driver’s licenses to report biological reality, rather than so-called gender identity, and another requiring “multiple-occupancy private spaces” (e.g., bathrooms and locker rooms) in government and public buildings to be single-sex.
These statutes are, Gessen informed readers, fascist. She was determined to spin tales of woe about their effects, but ugly truths about transgenderism kept seeping out. For example, Gessen described one subject as a “trans woman who doesn’t particularly try to pass — and at 6-foot-4, probably couldn’t.” This is meant to evoke sympathy, but instead it is alarming: Why does Gessen want hulking men who don’t even particularly try to look like women to have unquestioned access to women’s spaces?
The abolition of protected female spaces is enabling predators and perverts from coast to coast. In Virginia, a convicted pedophile was allowed to hang out in female locker rooms for weeks despite repeated complaints. In the Seattle area, a man with an erection was permitted to remain in the women’s locker room during a children’s swim meet. The left has literally even made a federal case out of a man’s right to wander naked around a spa’s female-only spaces.
Nor are these the only female spaces Gessen wants men to invade. She conveyed one subject’s fears that “Kansas might be placing transgender women in men’s prisons.” But “transgender women” are men, many of whom still have intact genitalia. Placing them in women’s prisons, as was done by the Biden administration and is still being done in many blue states, has predictably resulted in women being assaulted and raped. Yet the left is still committed to allowing rapists and murderers to self-identify into women’s prisons.
Another ugly truth Gessen let slip is that under Obama and Biden the military was used as a means to provide free “gender-affirming care.” Recruiters were even using this as a selling point. But wrong-sex hormones and sex-rejecting surgeries are always physically damaging, sometimes debilitating. Nonetheless, trans wokeness was preferred to military readiness.
Transgenderism is also prioritized over family. Gessen wrote of one servicemember who, before Obama changed military policy, “came out and was forced to take a medical discharge. [His] wife took the kids and left.” Gessen expressed no sympathy for the wife whose husband blew up his career and their marriage — you’re a lesbian now, honey! — or for the children whose father chose delusions of womanhood over being their dad.
In Gessen’s inverted morality, it is the family whose lives are upended by sudden claims of transgenderism who are the real villains. For instance, she reported on a man who changed his name to “Tracy” and, while leaving the courthouse, “exclaimed excitedly, ‘My mother is going to hate this!’” The backstory is that this man “was around 13 when [he] was caught in the girls’ locker room trying on someone’s clothes. Things at home got tense enough that [he] ended up moving to Kansas to live with [his] father,” who is now deceased. Tracy also has a daughter whom he does not see very much.
This anecdote illuminates much of transgenderism’s darkness. There is seething hatred toward those who will not go along with its lies. There is family destruction. And there is the sexual fetishism that motivates many post-puberty males to claim to be women. This was also illustrated by the above-mentioned 6-foot-4 “trans woman,” who, Gessen reports, is dating a “trans man.” Which is to say that a man in a dress is dating a woman pretending to be a man. It’s just a sexual fetish, perhaps with some self-loathing thrown in.
This is what adults are pushing on “trans” children, who are being irrevocably harmed. Gessen reported on the start of a summer camp for “queer kids,” where parents “placed their progeny’s duffel bags in the designated pile and handed over their medication bottles and prescriptions to the designated staff members” who would oversee the “orderly distribution of whatever antidepressants, A.D.H.D. medication or hormones the campers had been prescribed.” Once again, Gessen’s own observations undermined her pro-trans ideology. It is bad that so many of these kids are on a pharmacological cocktail, and worse that some are taking wrong-sex hormones. Chemically castrating teenage boys is wicked, and so is destroying adolescent girls’ health with huge doses of testosterone.
Gessen called Kansas’ laws dehumanizing. But they just recognize reality. What is really dehumanizing is transgenderism, which rejects our embodied being, hating and mutilating natural, healthy bodies. Transgenderism is literal self-dehumanization. It is war with reality, one’s neighbors, and even oneself. And that is a truth that is hard to hide.
