Stunning and Brave New World

How Gender is Lived Today, Part 1

Today’s post inaugurates a series of vignettes I’ve been collecting, all by speaking with the parents of former and current trans-identified youths to paint a portrait of American childhood in the age of Queer Normativity education. Since 2019, American schools — its librarians, teachers, and social workers — have proven that in fact you can overturn millions of years of primate evolution through the repetition of copypasta for three years. We lack a synoptic account of this Stunning and Brave New World, one that I lack the resources of a whole newsroom to provide, but I’ve taken on the role of a humble documentarian assembling representative fragments of a world in dramatic flux.

Molly Myers' 14-year old son recently got into trouble at school. He told two classmates --  one who is trans-identified and the other who is nonbinary identified -- that he considered non-binary identities to be "BS". His mother recounted the story to me on Zoom this weekend.

"They started getting angry and shouting at him," she says of her son’s trans-identified classmates.  "And then he got written up, right? So I'm wondering, like, why he did get written up just for saying 'non binary is BS.' That doesn't sound like free speech to me." 

Myers has a colorful Brooklyn accent, but is addressing me from a small town in Vermont, where she sends her two biracial -- half Indian -- sons to a local public high school. She provided an illuminating glimpse into How Gender Is Lived Today by a rising generation who have been taught from the earliest ages that each of us can be a man, woman, both or neither depending on how we feel inside.

"I told them many times: he will not use they/them pronouns. (His counselor is a they/them.) He will not be using any wrong sex pronouns for any students, or any teachers, or anything. He will not be forced to speak this way." 

"And so then the Vice Principal said to me, 'Well, there's a federal law against misgendering.' And I said to him, 'No there's not!'" 

Myers is intent on taking a stand for on behalf of her son’s rights to freedom of speech and conscience. She muses idly that she may seek out the same lawyers, from the Alliance Defending Freedom, suing on behalf of a father and daughter punished for misgendering a trans-identified male who changed in the girls locker room in the northern part of the state.

Her son’s lawsuit seeking to vindicate his Constitutional right to declare that “nonbinary is BS" and refuse the use of any and all “wrong sex pronouns” for students and staffers alike, (the basketball coach is also a they/them) will be a very colorful case should it ever come to pass. For Myers’ son, whom we will refer to by the pseudonym Anil in order to spare him unwelcome publicity until such a time as he chooses to accede to it — if he ever does — in court filings, is a very special kind of dissenter from the gender dogma that’s been recently imposed on American schools.

Just two years ago, Anil was a transgender girl.

There is, as Myers went on to note, a Vermont state anti-discrimination law that includes “gender identity” among its protected categories. The law is the basis for discipline recently meted out to a father and daughter who objected to a trans-identified male classmate using the girl’s locker room. The daughter was given a choice of punishments: a two-day suspension or a “restorative circle” for referring to a male who identifies as a girl as “a literal dude” in class after — so she alleges — the trans-identified male watched a group of natal girls changing in the locker room. The father, a middle school soccer coach, was suspended without pay for referring to the male who identifies as a girl as “your son” to the trans-identifying male’s mother in a Zoom call. The actions are presently being litigated in federal court.

Wesley Yang @wesyang

Super interesting to see how rural Vermont normies think and talk about school mandate to let a trans-identified male with intact genitals change with their 14 year old daughters. The rubber is hitting the road all across the country.

youtube.comHigh School Girls Push Back Against Trans Student in Locker RoomHigh school girls in Randolph, Vermont are facing backlash for pushing back against a biologically male student using their locker room. These girls tell The...

The Biden Administration is in the process of rewriting Title IX regulations to add those who “identify” as women to the category protected by the civil rights law enjoining equal treatment of women and men in education. But litigants who have faced discipline or been fired for misgendering have had success petitioning the courts to protect their First Amendment rights. So whether and to what degree the Democratic party will be able to enforce a will to compel recognition by students and faculty members alike of those who adopt cross-gendered — or non-binary, or a growing menagerie of esoteric “gender identities” minted on the Internet and recognized by the civil rights apparatus seemingly 18 months later— is an open question that only time and the legal process will bear out. The proposed Title IX regulations that are undergoing the formal rule-making process as we speak, will themselves be subject to litigation and could end up scrapped by a Republican administration, should one take the White House in 2024.

The courts will have to resolve the contested question of whether the desire of some people who were born male to be recognized as and addressed as the women they believe themselves to be confers a legally enforceable obligation onto others to participate in affirming those desires. Is declining to participate in someone else’s belief that they are a woman (because they have an internal, subjective sense of a being a woman that has been defined by those in pursuit of a legal right of recognition of that desire as the sole factor dispositive of the question of whether one is a woman or not) an act of illegal harassment or discrimination against them — or do we all have a right to decline to believe that a man can be a woman or that people can be neither male nor female, and do we all have a right to decline to act as if we share in a belief with which we do not share?

If the courts finds that my feeling that I am something I believe myself to be because I have redefined what it means to be that thing as “having a feeling that I am that thing” imposes a duty of obligation onto others to affirm that I am the thing that I feel that I am, it will have expanded the meaning of what it means to have a right onto a whole frontier — an expansion that comes charged with the power to extinguish all other rights.

If this movement succeeds in its goals of extinguishing all other rights in order to manufacture a vastly expansive set of new ones applicable only to a miniscule minority for whom a total transformation of the language of human identity must be effected in order to affirm their feelings, it will do so by virtue of the conjoined powers of all the organs imbued with the authority to shape the constructed reality of the Western world — the culture industries, the educational and medical establishments, the NGOsphere, the political system, the tech oligarchy, and the major corporations — which have pledged themselves to obtaining this goal at any cost without regard for any externality or trade-offs made along the way. If it fails in its goals, it will do so because the courts recognize a limit to what those reality shaping institutions can impose on individuals, recognizes that individuals retain the right not to perform obedience to beliefs they do not share, because judges still regard themselves as guardians of the rights of individuals rather than the vanguard of an astroturfed utopia. That the outcome is so uncertain tells us the condition of each of those institutions.

In the meantime, vice-principals throughout Blue jurisdictions are likely to continue behaving as if federal law compels punishment of 14-year old girls who call non-medically transitioned natal males (people with penises) looking teenaged girls changing in the locker room “literal dudes” — and ex-trans-girls who believe that “non-binary is BS.”

Myers’ wish to defend her son’s freedom of speech and conscience has become an imperative for her because the social worker who oversees his Individual Education Plan has begun to refer to her son by she/her pronouns. The social worker reviewed the records from his prior school in Upstate New York, to which he had moved in the summer and showed up in his transitioned state for his first day at school and where he lived as a girl for two years, unbeknownst to any other students, before desisting and returning to his male identity in advance of moving to southern Vermont, where he showed up for his first day of school in his detransitioned state — as the boy he always was.

To Be Continued — First in a Series