I follow you and many of the accounts posting the tweets you compiled here, but when I scrolled through the entire list in this post, it really hit me how staggering this is and how complete the ideological capture has become. It’s really disheartening that we are so easily swayed to disavow reality.
I remember reading “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a child and marveling that adults could be so stupid. It never occurred to me that I would be living a version of it when I was older. It’s a shame children and adults no longer read fables—they taught valuable lessons in a concise and entertaining way.
Emperor’s New Clothes isn't so much an allegory about stupidity so much as one about Mass Formation Psychosis. It's in our nature to go along to get along, as the whole covid nonsense proved without a doubt. While some of us still possess the ability to apply critical thinking and recognize an obvious mistruth, this has been systematically conditioned out of much of the populace through academia, MSM, and Hollywood.
agree, the only way I understand this now is as a Mass Psychosis - although I tend to shorten it to MP rather than MFP, in much the same way as I shorten Gender Identity Ideology to Gender Ideology. So many of the GI group traits map exactly onto the individual ie the mass psychosis acting as a detachment from reality mirrors the personal psychotic detachment our daughter demonstrated to us when she claimed we'd been OK as parents (all things considered) despite then coldly erasing us from her life without the slightest trace of empathy or compassion. I know this isn't news for many parents of radicalised young people, but its just interesting to see how often now this group -> individual behaviour mapping goes on
"I remember reading “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a child and marveling that adults could be so stupid. "
That's interesting. I became aware of that story a little late - I was in my late 20s, I think. What I remember thinking was, how could people be so afraid to speak up?
The Wizard of Oz is another good one, once you see and speak with some of the wizened, pathetic, disturbed men who drive this "movement", behind their scary TRA mask
Wesley, following this line of reasoning, are we at a point where parents should consider leaving the country? People always ask why more Jewish people didn’t leave before the Holocaust (not trying to tie a direct corollary here, just an analogy), and it seems for us here, we are approaching a tipping point where there is a bit of clarity over where this is headed and still the freedom to leave.
We have told out 3 teen girls that under no circumstances are they to start their working lives and families here in California. Most families in our position would save for weddings and college. We have also built up a "flee CA" fund of 5 figures for each girl.
Obviously, passports exist for everyone so that they can leave the country rapidly if they need to. We aren't ready to leave yet, since there really isn't anywhere to go, but we have investigated golden visa programs in several countries.
I believe there will be red-state pockets within an increasingly totalitarian blue-America that will be defensible for a long time, possibly our kids' entire lifetimes, and hopefully by then the Lord will have made a clear refuge for serious Christians. Or not. Not everyone survives the lions den.
I would encourage not leaving the country but certainly leaving the public school system and even being incredibly wary of the private. Do not let your children be the next sacrifices.
There's no such thing as "childhood" anymore. Everything that is appropriate for adults to think about is now appropriate for children to think about. Everything that is appropriate for adults to see and witness is now appropriate for children to see and witness. Children are now conceived as adults that have been alive for a shorter amount of time.
There are no longer any legitimate constraints on the fulfillment of ego-driven fantasy. We're at a point where trying to disabuse someone of a persistent and recalcitrant belief that he is a mermaid is regarded as borderline hateful. The fact that a teacher could reprimand a child for hatefulness for refusing to acknowledge a classmates' alleged cat-identity means that notions of justice and mutual respect have become as thin as the air at 35,000 feet.
I want to see more - a lot more - on ideological capture. This notion needs to be mainstreamed. When I first heard you (W. Yang) use it on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, it resonated so deeply. We need this notion to be mainstreamed because I think it has the potential to be as powerful as "sexual harassment" might have been (NO disrespect intended to those who might regard the phenomenon of sexual harassment as more serious in its consequences than successor ideological capture). So many of us have been struggling to understand what happened to public consciousness, and how, to put into words with a single notion or phrase just how things got to be as crazy as they are now. I think many many people will feel empowered to resist the cultural currents if they have the conceptual resources to explain why it is utterly inconsistent with pluralism and democracy. Please please please give us more on ideological capture.
The idea of "childhood" (children as a protected class of individuals) is actually of fairly recent vintage. It was largely created in the 18th and early 19th century Christian / Western world. Adolescent didn't really exist as a meaningful category until the 20th century.
For most of human history children have been seen as "little adults", which usually meant they were made use of (sexually and otherwise) by adults that had power over them. This was true everywhere from ancient Greece to Rome to Persia to Han China to the Ottoman Sultans and is still common in many places today. One of the hardest things for American troops to get used to were the screams of little boys being raped by our "allies" in Afghanistan. It was politically useful for America to ignore it, so they had to.
Neil Postman wrote in the 90's that the rise of mass media was eroding childhood as a protected time period, since access to adult ideas no longer required literacy. Neil didn't live to see this lunacy, but I doubt he would be surprised by it.
When children are conceived as adults, we all know where this is headed, and I hope you know what I mean by that because there is no way in hell I'm going to type it!
I know what you're implying but more likely is a return to child labor, but with the factories replaced by whatever Internet "content" type economic output the LGBTQBLAHBLAH rainbow crowd produces.
"I’m also asking you to help me process it in the comments section." When asking for our views, you asked, "Why die on this hill" presumably wrt to trans activists desire to queer childhood. This is something I've thought about quite a bit.
This response is an extension of the postmodernist view that reality is actually created by the language we use. Plato (and most philosophers since) believed language was an attempt to describe -- imperfectly at best -- an objective reality of some kind. The Cave can be read as a metaphor for the human struggle to describe a world that we can only partially see. The key is that language DESCRIBES reality. The postmodernists reject that view. Since we really can't know anything about the real world, they claim that language CREATES a shared representation of reality which we then interact with as if it was the real world, essentially a shared delusion.
An old joke:
Postmodernist: "There's no such thing as truth"
Modernist: "How do you know that statement is true?"
If language creates reality, trans-activists behavior suddenly makes more sense. Why is someone questioning gender ideology treated as a violent attack against them? That's nonsensical from a traditional, rational, Platonic position, but is utterly logical from a postmodernist one. If words create reality, then using the wrong ones is violently disruptive of reality. As weird as it sounds, when they say you're murdering them with your words, it's not hyperbole. They really mean it, and from their philosophical frame, it's true.
Why are they willing to die on the "trans-kids" hill? Because postmodernism requires that actual objective reality is either unknowable or nonexistent. So if a man says he's a woman, he actually becomes one. "Man" or "Woman" have to be linguistic categories because everything is just language -- there is no objective reality that words can refer to. A postmodernist can not allow "man" or "woman" to have an objective definition, because allowing it would open the door to other words having objective definitions, and postmodernism rapidly falls apart then, since it has no way of deciding which concepts are objectively real and which are arbitrary linguistic categories. Even if the words being spoken are from a young child, they must be treated as true, since the act of speaking those words created the reality in which those words are true. Even the categories of "true" and "false" imply objective standards, which can't be allowed according to postmodernism (hence my joke above). So why are they willing to die on the hill of slicing the private parts of children? Because they have to. Philosophical consistency requires it, and people will contort themselves into logic defying, intellectual pretzels to avoid altering their deepest philosophical assumptions about the world.
To be clear, I'm not saying all (or even most) trans supporting parents and teachers realize this. Your rainbow-preaching HR director almost certainly doesn't. Most people have never heard of postmodernism and thus don't realize that it is the cornerstone of their worldview. But most Bolsheviks had never read Marx either.
As a side note, if someone pulled a gun and shot at you, you would either run or fight back. Trans activists truly do view your gender critical-words as attempted murder -- you are firing a verbal gun at them to "deny their existence". This belief may be absurd to us, but it must be taken seriously. Those who want to speak truthfully on this issue must be prepared for truly violent, "fight or flight" level, responses from trans activists. We think we're having a national debate; they think we're firing bullets at them and will react accordingly. I expect the "trantifa" to get a lot worse.
I don't know if that's what you meant when you asked for help. I'm not sure if you wanted our opinions like this or not. But there it is, and you're welcome to tell me I'm up a creek. :-) I would actually be very curious what you think.
What a great comment - and it's worth pointing out that this postmodern philosophy also informs other woke "intersectional" issues such as the anti racism and even "fat acceptance" movements. The book Critical Theories is not easy or light reading, but it does connect the dots on all these harmful ideologies, and the link is postmodernism.
Great explanation, thank you. I have been trying to wrap my mind around what "postmodernism" means and I think having specific examples helps. Still, it's all so insane.
I’d just add: the belief that reality is constructed by and resides in words goes back waaaay before postmodernism, all the way back to the nominalism controversy c. 1300... anyone who thinks this craziness is a recent aberration (including our gracious host) is, I’m afraid, way too optimistic.
There's a book you would like called The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory. He traces most of our modern ills to the rise of nominalism in the West and the resulting loss of meaning and impoverishment of non-analytical ways of thinking.
I'm not quite ready to lay the modern Western world at Scotus' feet. But I will lay it at Locke's.
Distinguishing the differences between gay and trans is crucial. Without that, too many normies will continue to consider this “not a big deal” or a matter of “rights” rather than successor ideology. Gay people do not require new names, new pronouns, new birth certificates, new clothing, surgery, or medical treatment to be gay.
Also important is distinguishing between traditional civil rights (no discrimination based on ascriptive characteristics such as sex or phenotype, things you can’t change) and trans “rights” (based on subjective feelings and unfalsifiable claims).
Until we can make these distinctions clear, the TRAs will succeed by painting all such distinctions as “hate.”
BTW, as a female professional class educator with graduate degrees, I used to see myself and colleagues as bringing light and meaning to students, that we were in some sense improving the world. LOL. Today I see the young women educators as the Maoist shock troops, happy to sow the seeds of destruction in the name of the cause.
Yes, this. I keep looking for an article where someone clearly nails this difference, so that people could feel more confident that they aren’t being homophobic when speaking out about concerns with gender ideology.
fundamental to help get normiess to see this - that your sexual orientation is not the same thing, in any way shape or form, as any so-called "gender identity", and that in exactly the same way as TRActivism has benefited from the Sex/Gender conflation, and thereby masking this off from the public at large, so too have the trans cultists benefited from the confusion over SO/GI
I’ve seen a lot of self-righteous “heterodox” writers accuse you of fixating and/or going insane on this topic, Wesley. I have no idea how they can look at all of us and still be too cowardly to touch the topic. It feels like you and a select few others are the sole remaining writers with any sense of sanity to account for. And these critics NEVER address the merits or write on the issue themselves!
The amount of straight couples who have pride flags out in my neighborhood right now is staggering, especially because there are multiple lesbian households and none of them have flags.
Though I fear that many of those homes must have a trans/non-binary child.
I live in SF where the traditional pride flag has now been rendered virtually obsolete. I'm a gay man and I cannot stand the new compulsory "progress" pride flag. It's an embarrassment and an intrusion on a symbol that always stood for the rights and dignity of same-sex relations. I also cannot stomach the profligate displays of pride flags all around the city during pride month. It can no longer be regarded as an authentic act to display a pride flag. Failure to display a pride flag is now conceived as a sign of being "in bed with the enemy" so every business - from nondescript nail salons to high end retailers that cater almost exclusively to an upper-class white straight clientele - has to display it, or else risk public censure. The whole thing has become so forced and absurd - I can understand why the people who once regarded it as a symbol of their struggle feel totally ambivalent, if not downright hostile towards it.
Gay man as well here and I could not agree more. I miss the good old days where Pride was one day a year and was a celebration of, for, and by the greater gay community (such that it was). It has since devolved into a shameless, meaningless, endless, virtue-signaling, commercialized marketing event with mandatory attendance. It's like Christmas on crack. I'm having none of it.
And don't get me started on what they've done to our flag -- which has no business being flown at the White House, especially one occupied by someone who voted for Clinton's vile Denial Of Marriage act.
Douglas Murray is a marvel of intellect on the subject and if you haven't read or heard him speak, it's well worth the time. He had a brief piece the NY Post yesterday on the whole gender-affirming mutilation of children:
"I miss the good old days where Pride was one day a year and was a celebration of, for, and by the greater gay community"
I have friends who would say, "I miss the good old days when pride was seen as a sin to be avoided."
I'm not trying to rag on you, but the idea that there is no connection between your generation's gay normalization push and the current push for queer normalization is just not accurate. I know you want it to be some kind of obvious rupture, but the common thread between those two is liberalism -- the drive to liberate people from unchosen constraints.
Enlightenment liberalism did some amazing things: slavery abolition, equal rights, union organizing, welfare, even gay rights. But you're asking it to stop at "gay rights" and go no further. Andrew Sullivan has a piece on this today (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/gay-rights-and-the-limits-of-liberalism-be4 ) in which he makes the same argument. It can't happen. I actually agree with you. I would love it if liberalism stopped at civil unions personally (somewhere around 2008). But it doesn't work that way.
The same force that freed you from the unchosen constraint of hetero-normativity is now seeking to free others from the ultimate unchosen constraint: human biology itself. It can't stop, because if it stops liberating, it dies.
These flags are all the new "progress" pride flags and I can understand why my lesbian neighbors aren't flying them. It seems like in my neighborhood its just the replacement for the "In this house we believe..." sign.
That sign - and all of its iterations - is the worst! I'm so fascinated by the naming of the new pride flag - because it is called the "progress" pride flag, it forecloses any tendency to question whether there is anything regressive about the gender ideology phenomenon. It also forecloses any tendency to wonder whether there is any real overlap between the goals of the trans-rights movement and those of the gay rights movement, or whether those goals stand in some opposition to each other.
RDS, if he wins, needs to sign into legislation a Detransition Awareness Day to bring awareness to the real victims. Then have a holiday celebrating them. Invite them to the White House. Expand the Identity Politics Religious Calendar to include the other side of the same Idententarian coin.
Helpful to see this whole pictorial array.. The one way I’ve been able to process or make sense of this is listening to interviews with cult survivors (A Little Bit Culty podcast and a couple of BBC4 podcasts). Steve Hassan’s BITE model: cults recruit and maintain control of - Behavior, Information , Thought, Emotions
Yes, I too have been struck by the similarities between cult survivors and detransitioners. Yes, after listening to many former cult members it seems clear that rational fact-based appeals usually drive them deeper into the cult and often cause them to cut off the person making the rational appeal. It seems more important to stay in the cult member’s life, if possible, gently supportive without affirming the cult itself, so that trust isn’t broken. When they leave the cult, it’s those people they will turn to, not the ones who tried the rational appeals. In other words, cults are deeply emotional experiences and rational factual reality is not what pulls people out of them.
One cannot simply walk up to a friend deeply enmeshed in a cult and say “you are in a cult! This is terrible, can’t you see how harmful it is?” This only drives the person deeper into the cult. His or her whole sense of identify and safety is bound up in the cult.
The only thing I’ve leaned from the cult survivors stories is to keep reaching out to the person and trying to gently expose him or her to outside information and experiences. Eventually the demands of the cult will be too much, and the person might “wake up” and try to leave. You may be their safety net.
Some people are hellbent on hurting themselves however. Protect yourself from these people before they hurt you too.
I used to go insane listening to FOX news obsess about Biden/Pelosi (etc) as I cared for my elderly mom. After waking up to the lies - Rachel Levine is the absolute worst - I now think FOX has reason to have at all of them. I often don’t even listen to the details of the rant enough to have an opinion about the topic at hand. It’s that I no longer have a knee-jerk response that “my” side is right.
There's a documentary film called "The Co-Op Wars" that is about a battle that broke out in the food co-op movement between hippies/anarchists and Maoists/Marxists. It is very illustrative of battles that can arise within the left. As this ideological capture continues its course, it is important that we don't let everyone opposed to it get labelled as "far right," but that we keep an emphasis on the fact that there are people on the left who also oppose it.
Usually the left does not regulate themselves, they outsource to conservatives who (eventually) only oppose the worst trespasses of common sense social values or material interests.
"the government’s elimination of parental authority, coupled with subsidized health insurance and medical technology, are necessary for the transgender person to develop their individuality. "
I don't know if it matters, the source of this 'pathological altruism' (any successor ideology) run amok. I do think the answer is to say no to all of it, steel your compassion.
The other angle I’m not seeing in the gender critical spaces is how hormones are being marketed to EVERYONE. Low T for men, HRT, the harmful snake oil kind of testosterone pellets for women with any symptoms of peri menopause or menopause or anything. It’s the wonder drug. Never mind that we all scoffed at juicers at the gym in the 1980’s and said that it served them right to have the terrible side effects of ED. Or how all the sports community in the USA turned from praising Lance Armstrong for his amazing comeback from testicular cancer to hating him for doping.
Isn’t that what we are doing now to our youth? Praising them for doping on T or E? With the added mysticism of a religious cult.
I follow you and many of the accounts posting the tweets you compiled here, but when I scrolled through the entire list in this post, it really hit me how staggering this is and how complete the ideological capture has become. It’s really disheartening that we are so easily swayed to disavow reality.
I remember reading “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a child and marveling that adults could be so stupid. It never occurred to me that I would be living a version of it when I was older. It’s a shame children and adults no longer read fables—they taught valuable lessons in a concise and entertaining way.
Emperor’s New Clothes isn't so much an allegory about stupidity so much as one about Mass Formation Psychosis. It's in our nature to go along to get along, as the whole covid nonsense proved without a doubt. While some of us still possess the ability to apply critical thinking and recognize an obvious mistruth, this has been systematically conditioned out of much of the populace through academia, MSM, and Hollywood.
And I do not see any way out of it.
agree, the only way I understand this now is as a Mass Psychosis - although I tend to shorten it to MP rather than MFP, in much the same way as I shorten Gender Identity Ideology to Gender Ideology. So many of the GI group traits map exactly onto the individual ie the mass psychosis acting as a detachment from reality mirrors the personal psychotic detachment our daughter demonstrated to us when she claimed we'd been OK as parents (all things considered) despite then coldly erasing us from her life without the slightest trace of empathy or compassion. I know this isn't news for many parents of radicalised young people, but its just interesting to see how often now this group -> individual behaviour mapping goes on
"I remember reading “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a child and marveling that adults could be so stupid. "
That's interesting. I became aware of that story a little late - I was in my late 20s, I think. What I remember thinking was, how could people be so afraid to speak up?
I think I was around 7-8 when I first read it. Since covid, it’s taken on a whole new meaning for me.
The Wizard of Oz is another good one, once you see and speak with some of the wizened, pathetic, disturbed men who drive this "movement", behind their scary TRA mask
Wesley, following this line of reasoning, are we at a point where parents should consider leaving the country? People always ask why more Jewish people didn’t leave before the Holocaust (not trying to tie a direct corollary here, just an analogy), and it seems for us here, we are approaching a tipping point where there is a bit of clarity over where this is headed and still the freedom to leave.
We have told out 3 teen girls that under no circumstances are they to start their working lives and families here in California. Most families in our position would save for weddings and college. We have also built up a "flee CA" fund of 5 figures for each girl.
Obviously, passports exist for everyone so that they can leave the country rapidly if they need to. We aren't ready to leave yet, since there really isn't anywhere to go, but we have investigated golden visa programs in several countries.
I believe there will be red-state pockets within an increasingly totalitarian blue-America that will be defensible for a long time, possibly our kids' entire lifetimes, and hopefully by then the Lord will have made a clear refuge for serious Christians. Or not. Not everyone survives the lions den.
I would encourage not leaving the country but certainly leaving the public school system and even being incredibly wary of the private. Do not let your children be the next sacrifices.
Honest question. Where would you go?
Not a clue
There's no such thing as "childhood" anymore. Everything that is appropriate for adults to think about is now appropriate for children to think about. Everything that is appropriate for adults to see and witness is now appropriate for children to see and witness. Children are now conceived as adults that have been alive for a shorter amount of time.
There are no longer any legitimate constraints on the fulfillment of ego-driven fantasy. We're at a point where trying to disabuse someone of a persistent and recalcitrant belief that he is a mermaid is regarded as borderline hateful. The fact that a teacher could reprimand a child for hatefulness for refusing to acknowledge a classmates' alleged cat-identity means that notions of justice and mutual respect have become as thin as the air at 35,000 feet.
I want to see more - a lot more - on ideological capture. This notion needs to be mainstreamed. When I first heard you (W. Yang) use it on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, it resonated so deeply. We need this notion to be mainstreamed because I think it has the potential to be as powerful as "sexual harassment" might have been (NO disrespect intended to those who might regard the phenomenon of sexual harassment as more serious in its consequences than successor ideological capture). So many of us have been struggling to understand what happened to public consciousness, and how, to put into words with a single notion or phrase just how things got to be as crazy as they are now. I think many many people will feel empowered to resist the cultural currents if they have the conceptual resources to explain why it is utterly inconsistent with pluralism and democracy. Please please please give us more on ideological capture.
The idea of "childhood" (children as a protected class of individuals) is actually of fairly recent vintage. It was largely created in the 18th and early 19th century Christian / Western world. Adolescent didn't really exist as a meaningful category until the 20th century.
For most of human history children have been seen as "little adults", which usually meant they were made use of (sexually and otherwise) by adults that had power over them. This was true everywhere from ancient Greece to Rome to Persia to Han China to the Ottoman Sultans and is still common in many places today. One of the hardest things for American troops to get used to were the screams of little boys being raped by our "allies" in Afghanistan. It was politically useful for America to ignore it, so they had to.
Neil Postman wrote in the 90's that the rise of mass media was eroding childhood as a protected time period, since access to adult ideas no longer required literacy. Neil didn't live to see this lunacy, but I doubt he would be surprised by it.
When children are conceived as adults, we all know where this is headed, and I hope you know what I mean by that because there is no way in hell I'm going to type it!
I know what you're implying but more likely is a return to child labor, but with the factories replaced by whatever Internet "content" type economic output the LGBTQBLAHBLAH rainbow crowd produces.
https://theweek.com/articles/551027/how-christianity-invented-children
https://angelusnews.com/faith/the-christian-familys-radical-roots/
"I’m also asking you to help me process it in the comments section." When asking for our views, you asked, "Why die on this hill" presumably wrt to trans activists desire to queer childhood. This is something I've thought about quite a bit.
This response is an extension of the postmodernist view that reality is actually created by the language we use. Plato (and most philosophers since) believed language was an attempt to describe -- imperfectly at best -- an objective reality of some kind. The Cave can be read as a metaphor for the human struggle to describe a world that we can only partially see. The key is that language DESCRIBES reality. The postmodernists reject that view. Since we really can't know anything about the real world, they claim that language CREATES a shared representation of reality which we then interact with as if it was the real world, essentially a shared delusion.
An old joke:
Postmodernist: "There's no such thing as truth"
Modernist: "How do you know that statement is true?"
If language creates reality, trans-activists behavior suddenly makes more sense. Why is someone questioning gender ideology treated as a violent attack against them? That's nonsensical from a traditional, rational, Platonic position, but is utterly logical from a postmodernist one. If words create reality, then using the wrong ones is violently disruptive of reality. As weird as it sounds, when they say you're murdering them with your words, it's not hyperbole. They really mean it, and from their philosophical frame, it's true.
Why are they willing to die on the "trans-kids" hill? Because postmodernism requires that actual objective reality is either unknowable or nonexistent. So if a man says he's a woman, he actually becomes one. "Man" or "Woman" have to be linguistic categories because everything is just language -- there is no objective reality that words can refer to. A postmodernist can not allow "man" or "woman" to have an objective definition, because allowing it would open the door to other words having objective definitions, and postmodernism rapidly falls apart then, since it has no way of deciding which concepts are objectively real and which are arbitrary linguistic categories. Even if the words being spoken are from a young child, they must be treated as true, since the act of speaking those words created the reality in which those words are true. Even the categories of "true" and "false" imply objective standards, which can't be allowed according to postmodernism (hence my joke above). So why are they willing to die on the hill of slicing the private parts of children? Because they have to. Philosophical consistency requires it, and people will contort themselves into logic defying, intellectual pretzels to avoid altering their deepest philosophical assumptions about the world.
To be clear, I'm not saying all (or even most) trans supporting parents and teachers realize this. Your rainbow-preaching HR director almost certainly doesn't. Most people have never heard of postmodernism and thus don't realize that it is the cornerstone of their worldview. But most Bolsheviks had never read Marx either.
As a side note, if someone pulled a gun and shot at you, you would either run or fight back. Trans activists truly do view your gender critical-words as attempted murder -- you are firing a verbal gun at them to "deny their existence". This belief may be absurd to us, but it must be taken seriously. Those who want to speak truthfully on this issue must be prepared for truly violent, "fight or flight" level, responses from trans activists. We think we're having a national debate; they think we're firing bullets at them and will react accordingly. I expect the "trantifa" to get a lot worse.
I don't know if that's what you meant when you asked for help. I'm not sure if you wanted our opinions like this or not. But there it is, and you're welcome to tell me I'm up a creek. :-) I would actually be very curious what you think.
What a great comment - and it's worth pointing out that this postmodern philosophy also informs other woke "intersectional" issues such as the anti racism and even "fat acceptance" movements. The book Critical Theories is not easy or light reading, but it does connect the dots on all these harmful ideologies, and the link is postmodernism.
Great book. I agree. Not an easy read, but worth it.
Great explanation, thank you. I have been trying to wrap my mind around what "postmodernism" means and I think having specific examples helps. Still, it's all so insane.
I’d just add: the belief that reality is constructed by and resides in words goes back waaaay before postmodernism, all the way back to the nominalism controversy c. 1300... anyone who thinks this craziness is a recent aberration (including our gracious host) is, I’m afraid, way too optimistic.
There's a book you would like called The Unintended Reformation by Brad Gregory. He traces most of our modern ills to the rise of nominalism in the West and the resulting loss of meaning and impoverishment of non-analytical ways of thinking.
I'm not quite ready to lay the modern Western world at Scotus' feet. But I will lay it at Locke's.
Distinguishing the differences between gay and trans is crucial. Without that, too many normies will continue to consider this “not a big deal” or a matter of “rights” rather than successor ideology. Gay people do not require new names, new pronouns, new birth certificates, new clothing, surgery, or medical treatment to be gay.
Also important is distinguishing between traditional civil rights (no discrimination based on ascriptive characteristics such as sex or phenotype, things you can’t change) and trans “rights” (based on subjective feelings and unfalsifiable claims).
Until we can make these distinctions clear, the TRAs will succeed by painting all such distinctions as “hate.”
BTW, as a female professional class educator with graduate degrees, I used to see myself and colleagues as bringing light and meaning to students, that we were in some sense improving the world. LOL. Today I see the young women educators as the Maoist shock troops, happy to sow the seeds of destruction in the name of the cause.
Yes, this. I keep looking for an article where someone clearly nails this difference, so that people could feel more confident that they aren’t being homophobic when speaking out about concerns with gender ideology.
fundamental to help get normiess to see this - that your sexual orientation is not the same thing, in any way shape or form, as any so-called "gender identity", and that in exactly the same way as TRActivism has benefited from the Sex/Gender conflation, and thereby masking this off from the public at large, so too have the trans cultists benefited from the confusion over SO/GI
I’ve seen a lot of self-righteous “heterodox” writers accuse you of fixating and/or going insane on this topic, Wesley. I have no idea how they can look at all of us and still be too cowardly to touch the topic. It feels like you and a select few others are the sole remaining writers with any sense of sanity to account for. And these critics NEVER address the merits or write on the issue themselves!
The amount of straight couples who have pride flags out in my neighborhood right now is staggering, especially because there are multiple lesbian households and none of them have flags.
Though I fear that many of those homes must have a trans/non-binary child.
I live in SF where the traditional pride flag has now been rendered virtually obsolete. I'm a gay man and I cannot stand the new compulsory "progress" pride flag. It's an embarrassment and an intrusion on a symbol that always stood for the rights and dignity of same-sex relations. I also cannot stomach the profligate displays of pride flags all around the city during pride month. It can no longer be regarded as an authentic act to display a pride flag. Failure to display a pride flag is now conceived as a sign of being "in bed with the enemy" so every business - from nondescript nail salons to high end retailers that cater almost exclusively to an upper-class white straight clientele - has to display it, or else risk public censure. The whole thing has become so forced and absurd - I can understand why the people who once regarded it as a symbol of their struggle feel totally ambivalent, if not downright hostile towards it.
Gay man as well here and I could not agree more. I miss the good old days where Pride was one day a year and was a celebration of, for, and by the greater gay community (such that it was). It has since devolved into a shameless, meaningless, endless, virtue-signaling, commercialized marketing event with mandatory attendance. It's like Christmas on crack. I'm having none of it.
And don't get me started on what they've done to our flag -- which has no business being flown at the White House, especially one occupied by someone who voted for Clinton's vile Denial Of Marriage act.
Douglas Murray is a marvel of intellect on the subject and if you haven't read or heard him speak, it's well worth the time. He had a brief piece the NY Post yesterday on the whole gender-affirming mutilation of children:
https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/gender-affirming-surgery-puts-a-feel-good-phrase-on-child-butchery/
And a really good take-down of what Pride has become (just ignore the bitter lesbian/feminist): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YysgbnBohhc
"I miss the good old days where Pride was one day a year and was a celebration of, for, and by the greater gay community"
I have friends who would say, "I miss the good old days when pride was seen as a sin to be avoided."
I'm not trying to rag on you, but the idea that there is no connection between your generation's gay normalization push and the current push for queer normalization is just not accurate. I know you want it to be some kind of obvious rupture, but the common thread between those two is liberalism -- the drive to liberate people from unchosen constraints.
Enlightenment liberalism did some amazing things: slavery abolition, equal rights, union organizing, welfare, even gay rights. But you're asking it to stop at "gay rights" and go no further. Andrew Sullivan has a piece on this today (https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/gay-rights-and-the-limits-of-liberalism-be4 ) in which he makes the same argument. It can't happen. I actually agree with you. I would love it if liberalism stopped at civil unions personally (somewhere around 2008). But it doesn't work that way.
The same force that freed you from the unchosen constraint of hetero-normativity is now seeking to free others from the ultimate unchosen constraint: human biology itself. It can't stop, because if it stops liberating, it dies.
These flags are all the new "progress" pride flags and I can understand why my lesbian neighbors aren't flying them. It seems like in my neighborhood its just the replacement for the "In this house we believe..." sign.
That sign - and all of its iterations - is the worst! I'm so fascinated by the naming of the new pride flag - because it is called the "progress" pride flag, it forecloses any tendency to question whether there is anything regressive about the gender ideology phenomenon. It also forecloses any tendency to wonder whether there is any real overlap between the goals of the trans-rights movement and those of the gay rights movement, or whether those goals stand in some opposition to each other.
In Long Beach they replaced the rainbow crosswalks with the new "progress" pride graphic.
Thank you Thank You Thank you.
Before this I only strongly suspected. I now know for sure.
You took the “they/them/ze/etc” firehose full in the face so I didn’t have to. Thank you.
RDS, if he wins, needs to sign into legislation a Detransition Awareness Day to bring awareness to the real victims. Then have a holiday celebrating them. Invite them to the White House. Expand the Identity Politics Religious Calendar to include the other side of the same Idententarian coin.
I believe detrans awareness day is March 12 or 13, although probably not legislated.
Fascinating. Hey, have you seen my wig around?
She takes a swing, man she can’t hit. She don’t mean no harm, she just don’t know what else to do about it.
Re: Moore's "It's castrating them." We used to call that a Freudian slip.
Wait, castrating kids is wrong now...??
Helpful to see this whole pictorial array.. The one way I’ve been able to process or make sense of this is listening to interviews with cult survivors (A Little Bit Culty podcast and a couple of BBC4 podcasts). Steve Hassan’s BITE model: cults recruit and maintain control of - Behavior, Information , Thought, Emotions
Yes, I too have been struck by the similarities between cult survivors and detransitioners. Yes, after listening to many former cult members it seems clear that rational fact-based appeals usually drive them deeper into the cult and often cause them to cut off the person making the rational appeal. It seems more important to stay in the cult member’s life, if possible, gently supportive without affirming the cult itself, so that trust isn’t broken. When they leave the cult, it’s those people they will turn to, not the ones who tried the rational appeals. In other words, cults are deeply emotional experiences and rational factual reality is not what pulls people out of them.
One cannot simply walk up to a friend deeply enmeshed in a cult and say “you are in a cult! This is terrible, can’t you see how harmful it is?” This only drives the person deeper into the cult. His or her whole sense of identify and safety is bound up in the cult.
The only thing I’ve leaned from the cult survivors stories is to keep reaching out to the person and trying to gently expose him or her to outside information and experiences. Eventually the demands of the cult will be too much, and the person might “wake up” and try to leave. You may be their safety net.
Some people are hellbent on hurting themselves however. Protect yourself from these people before they hurt you too.
I used to go insane listening to FOX news obsess about Biden/Pelosi (etc) as I cared for my elderly mom. After waking up to the lies - Rachel Levine is the absolute worst - I now think FOX has reason to have at all of them. I often don’t even listen to the details of the rant enough to have an opinion about the topic at hand. It’s that I no longer have a knee-jerk response that “my” side is right.
This excellent article by a pediatrician confirms and explains some of the capture of Medicine by TRAs and should be required reading for those in the profession who care about children: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/a-pediatricians-manifesto-for-the
I'm doing everything I can to protect my young children from this nonsense. I can't believe how many people fall for this.
There's a documentary film called "The Co-Op Wars" that is about a battle that broke out in the food co-op movement between hippies/anarchists and Maoists/Marxists. It is very illustrative of battles that can arise within the left. As this ideological capture continues its course, it is important that we don't let everyone opposed to it get labelled as "far right," but that we keep an emphasis on the fact that there are people on the left who also oppose it.
One of the best pushbacks to the trans lunacy and identity politics generally has come from Jacobin Magazine. They're actual commies.
Usually the left does not regulate themselves, they outsource to conservatives who (eventually) only oppose the worst trespasses of common sense social values or material interests.
Thank you Wes.
Your fellow substacker, 2CB:
"the government’s elimination of parental authority, coupled with subsidized health insurance and medical technology, are necessary for the transgender person to develop their individuality. "
I don't know if it matters, the source of this 'pathological altruism' (any successor ideology) run amok. I do think the answer is to say no to all of it, steel your compassion.
The other angle I’m not seeing in the gender critical spaces is how hormones are being marketed to EVERYONE. Low T for men, HRT, the harmful snake oil kind of testosterone pellets for women with any symptoms of peri menopause or menopause or anything. It’s the wonder drug. Never mind that we all scoffed at juicers at the gym in the 1980’s and said that it served them right to have the terrible side effects of ED. Or how all the sports community in the USA turned from praising Lance Armstrong for his amazing comeback from testicular cancer to hating him for doping.
Isn’t that what we are doing now to our youth? Praising them for doping on T or E? With the added mysticism of a religious cult.