Let's attempt a thought experiment and try to guess what would happen to Chris Hayes if he decided to speak truthfully that the Emperor has no clothes, there's no way for any mammal to change sex, that "gender" has no real definition and makes no sense, and that mutilating anxious and confused children is a grotesque crime, a cross between a Satanic panic and the frontal-lobotomy craze:
First, Chris' producers would either disallow it or do everything they could to stop him and change his mind; if they did allow him to go forward, within an hour all his phones would be blowing up with messages from his agent, manager, the president of the network, the ACLU, HRW, and every contact at every NGO and political organization he's ever made in his life warning him that he's about to commit a hate crime that will permanently align him with the dreaded Deplorable class, and if he goes ahead there will be serious consequences;
Second, if he were to go ahead and publicly apply any critical or skeptical analysis to Transmania, by the end of the week he'd lose his show, his career (minus a Substack migration), his business contacts, most of his friends, and just about any future opportunities for his spouse and family (things will get real cold among the Brooklyn mommy set and there will be no more Hamptons invites and no more Ivy League access).
And all this applies not just to Chris but to any member of our elite liberal clerisy working in media or culture. Trans is not just a sacred belief now but also a moral litmus test and a tribal shibboleth: Either you swallow and promote the narrative that "gender affirmation" is the great Civil Rights struggle of our time or else you face total banishment, the ferocious hatred all apostates get, and the destruction of your career, social and personal life.
I know people like to think this will all blow over soon or that the trial lawyers will swoop down and stop the madness, but I really don't think so: our ruling liberal class is using this as a loyalty test for group and party membership and have backed themselves into so many corners (moral, social, political, epistemic etc) that I don't see how they can back down. The Trans child is their sacred symbol now and they would rather fight to the death than relinquish it.
To paraphrase Stalin: “The mutilation of one child is a tragedy. The mutilation of a million is a statistic.”
This is spot on. And they all have ways of convincing themselves that the growing number of people coming out telling their stories of detransition, desistance, harm, or regret are somehow a separate issue they don’t have to factor in or even think about. They feel comfortable dismissing those who both transitioned and detransitioned as adults for being at fault for getting their identity wrong and therefore not worthy of needing to listen to or consider. Then, seemingly without noticing the contradiction, they assume children and teens never get it wrong, or if they do, certainly someone is recognizing that and keeping the temporarily confused kids from being medicalized, so, hey, the system works, and they don’t have to risk anything by going against the narrative. Ironically, the people most often doing that work of keeping the kids people like Chris Hayes think shouldn’t transition and are counting on getting stopped from wrongful medicalization - a “gatekeeping” they’re counting on happening to keep a clear conscience about not listening to uncomfortable facts or having to face the consequences of speaking out - that conscience-saving gatekeeping work is being done by the same parents and professionals they demonize. It’s maddening.
(And yes I know what I wrote implies that there are the “right” children to transition. I’m not trying to argue that. I’m trying to express how people like Chris Hayes are seeing the issue)
I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know here, but I think before the tribalized brain even gets to any kind of "gatekeeping" first comes the main directive or narrative that's not only been installed in their brains but has also ringed them with electric fences (and this most intensely w people in media, culture and academia): that they are engaged in a battle for civilization (our democracy!) with the evil Deplorable bigots who want to commit Trans genocide and install Jim Crow 2.0 and thus every act and word must pass a heavy test: if you agree with any non-approved idea (esp that goes against the feelings of an Official Victim Class) you move beyond the moral pale and thus become the moral equivalent of a Nazi and deserve to be cast out of polite society.
Everything flows from our intense tribal moment, which is fueled and reborn daily by these devices we carry with us everywhere (Smartphones + social media + constant internet access has turned out to be the strongest brainwashing tool ever invented), and I don't think there will be any return to sanity until the tribalism temperature can be turned down somewhat, which will not be happening anytime soon.
I can imagine a trial lawyer like Gerry Spence starting in the Red states and moving into the purple as the slow-learners come to see what they have participated in (and element which they will reject - "we were deceived" and all the other post-war cant). You'd have to be William Kunstler to try this in a Blue state.
But even if they were both resurrected as a 2-headed lawyer monster (good movie pitch!) they'd still have to fight a united MSM, an army of lawyers from our health-care corporations, have to depose and/or get true facts from violently opposed bureaucrats (who may destroy or forge data) and weepy docs who will claim they were just following the Science, deal w whatever tricks any Blue politician can pull, then overcome the pleas of their granddaughters for grandpa not to be a gross old bigot but to step over to the Right Side of History™ and join Team Compassion.
The America we grew up in, and that these men lived in and were created and crafted by, is long dead and has been replaced by something much uglier.
I read all your comments and I can see that, in spite of everything, there are still sane people in America and, most importantly, people who can judge with their own brains, while all the media is in the hands of the Believers. I lived for 25 years in a communist country under one of the worst dictatorships of the 20 th century, which seemed that it would last forever. And then, when a group of people had the courage to tell the truth, it was all over in a a week. So, I know that here too it will only take a handful of people to tell the truth in public and the veil of insanity will be ripped off. But a few people of courage are needed. Not many. Just a few. What I can;t understand is how in a country of hundreds of millions you can't find 2 or 3 people of courage?
> I don’t share in this punitive attitude toward the growing contingent of former progressives defecting from the latest moral novelty they’ve all been instructed is mandatory for those who wish to remain in good standing with the right thinking to embrace.
My problem with this contingent is that they tend to retain their loyalty to all the previous "moral novelties" prior to the one that finally got them to defect.
They fail to see the connection between, for example: the Pill, no fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, the overturning of prayer in schools, abortion, gay marriage, and trans. They act like "trans" spontaneously sprang up from nowhere, when it is really just the logical outcome of the "if it feels good, do it" / "it's not hurting anyone, so who am I to judge" ideology they themselves have championed.
Aug 4, 2023·edited Aug 4, 2023Liked by Jenny Poyer Ackerman
How many centuries of human progress are we expected to have to reverse to suit your high moral standards? Are you OK with Copernicus? Women's suffrage? Interracial marriage? Right turn on red?
It's possible to make principled defenses of the Pill, no fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, the overturning of prayer in schools, abortion and gay marriage (my particular contribution to the downfall of civilization) while being opposed to gender ideology.
Trans is the logical outcome of the postmodern turn in academia that drew its inspiration from foreign intellectuals, not the principles that underlie the Constitution. My marriage to a man isn't based on an "if it feels good, do it" ideology any more than your parents' marriage was. My same-sex marriage derives its legitimacy from the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, thank you very much.
Well said, Ollie, thank you. I too am having difficulty seeing the dotted line leading from my weakness for background checks and universal healthcare to the overthrow of human sexual dimorphism... definitely gonna pray on it though!😅
Jenny, I didn't mention either of these in my list for a reason.
The path I listed is one centered on maximal individual autonomy as delineated by John Stuart Mill. More specifically, 3rd wave feminism, gay acceptance and trans ideology are all rooted in the premise that men and women are interchangeable, they only differ in where that should apply. 3rd wave feminism wants economic interchangeability; gays want it in the bedroom; trans demands it absolutely everywhere. This is a difference of degree, not kind.
See my response to Ollie below if you're actually interested in more detail.
While there is nothing wrong with your efforts to convince Chris to become more moderate on this issue, I believe most people fail to appreciate how deep the philosophical hooks of trans really are. As MamaBear said elsewhere here, trans is the bastard child of Millian liberalism and postmodernism. So when you say "maybe we shouldn't be slicing the breasts of teenagers", the liberal hears "she wants to limit people's choices", while the postmodernist hears "words have objective meaning". These ideas violate core assumptions of each of their respective worldviews. You think you're being logical, but to them you are assaulting their entire philosophical framework. This is why rooting out trans is going to take much more than just logical argument. People do not give up their deepest beliefs about the world easily. And a failure to acknowledge where those beliefs come only makes it harder to defeat them.
I'm not sure what your position on background checks is. If you mean background checks to own a gun, would you also support background checks for your other rights?
As for universal healthcare, it has many problems. The most obvious one, that we saw with the COVID debacle, is the danger of having a single institution in charge of all medical decisions.
Granted, these issues don't relate relate directly to the trans issue the way the collapse of sexual ethics does. They do relate to the increase and centralization of government power and its ability to crush dissent, including those who object to the trans nonsense.
To follow up about universal healthcare. Now women with breast cancer are being kicked out of public clinics in Oregon for objecting to the trans flag. Imagine what this would be like if all healthcare was provided via public health.
> How many centuries of human progress are we expected to have to reverse
None. I don't favor reversing any progress, in the sense of changes that bring us closer the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. I do however know that not every change is for the better, and just because something is a change, doesn't make it progress.
> It's possible to make principled defenses of the Pill, no fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, the overturning of prayer in schools, abortion and gay marriage (my particular contribution to the downfall of civilization) while being opposed to gender ideology.
Only via extremely special pleading.
> My marriage to a man isn't based on an "if it feels good, do it" ideology
Yes it is. Also on the denial of the telos of sex.
> any more than your parents' marriage was.
My parents' marriage is based on providing a stable institution for raising children. Your "marriage" is based on creating an imitation of a real marriage (similar to how a "transwoman" is an imitation woman) to leach of the respectability.
I respect that this is hard for you to see, but Eugene is absolutely correct. Without natural law, the Declaration of independence doesn't make any sense. Equality and human rights are predicated on the idea that man is uniquely created; if you're just a smart ape, you don't have inalienable rights because no one gave them to you.
I throw this back to you, Ollie. How would you argue that gays deserve to be liberated from the social constraints of marriage, but (now that we have the technology to do it) trannies don't deserve to be liberated from the constraints of biology? What is the bright line that you think is so clear?
Remove the curtain from this, and every other American issue of serious political/social/financial/cultural concern, and we discover the keep your mouth shut totalitarian threat of cancellation, career/life destruction, and the maiming firing squad character assassination of the MSM/D.E.I./surveillance state apparatus. Which, serves corrupt international capital. A weaponized totalitarian fear machine bought, paid for, and put in place through the theft of American labor and treasure. How different is the knowing sterilization of a child, from the expanded euthanasia centers across the EU and Canada willing to "humanely" put citizens to sleep over insurmountable debt or depression? It is the narcissistic pathology that allows kings and emperors to declare themselves gods, and tyrants like Mao and Stalin, to place themselves above accountability and human moral reason. They are the disease, and butchery of the child is one of the many, many symptoms of their presence in our lives.
This is all part of an attempted ongoing great leveling of the free peoples of the world and the overlay of a CCP style "rules for thee not for me" surveillance system to allow the ascent of a new world monarchy. Truth/fact based journalism YES!! It matters. But the core reality is a well funded war meant to replace the human dignity enshrined in the American Constitution, and Western Civilization itself, with the rule of totalitarian monsters. "Trans" and a hundred other vampire insanities will be removed from our necks when the DNC/CCP/EU Davos juggernaut is destroyed. As in Nazi Germany, Maoist China and Stalin's Russia it is pathology not politics. A pathology that serves human butchers, lier's and an elitist no consequences aristocracy that considers itself far removed from the "deplorable's" it sees as no more than cattle.
You are correct Sir. For "rule of law" you might like THE NEW CULTURE FORUM six part series on Western Civilization. (About 40 minutes per episode.)
It’s pretty simple - treating men as women in prisons, bathrooms, etc harms women. Children who can’t make informed decisions are harmed by doctors prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. Neither of those have any analogy in gay marriage
The whole justification for the American Revolution and Constitution, and frankly the Enlightenment itself, is based on natural law. But, I suppose you think they have to go because your unnatural passions feel so good in the moment.
I must have gone to a crap law school, because my Harvard-Law-School-educated Con Law professor never said a word about natural law. Neither did the eminent historian George Romani in his course at Northwestern on the intellectual history of Europe.
Where does religion come into this? This is the standard leftist/gay argument. Your arguments are based on religion and are archaic so I refuse to engage. The aim of sexual intercourse is to reproduce the species. Gays and lesbians cannot have children. Therefore, the idea of gay marriage is an oxymoron. Civil unions are fine. Gay marriage is not. Your resistance comes from a refusal to acknowledge the straight and gay relationships are fundamentally different and therefore require different treatment.
That is another similarity between gay and trans ideology. Both believe that the sexes are essentially interchangeable. Gays prefer to restrict that interchangeability to the bedroom while trans extends it everywhere, but this is a difference only of degree not of kind.
So a lack of prayer in schools leads to trans rights? Surely you can draw at least as strong a line from “separation of church and state” -> “no prayer in schools,” so you seem to also have a pretty strong issue with the Constitution
I think that it’s pretty much universal that something good is the philosophical/political inspiration for something bad. This isn’t something that’s unique to American liberalism, and you can also draw lines further back to the Enlightenment and even Christianity itself.
If you don’t think that “no establishment of religion but keep prayer in public schools” isn’t special pleading but “let people marry who they want but men can’t become women” is, then you seem pretty hypocritical.
Ollie, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying I like it, and I agree with you on trans being an extension of postmodernism. However it's also as rooted in Mill's liberalism as any of those other movements. Once we decided "society may not regulate any action unless it harms another person", the train was on the track, and we still haven't stopped it. The pedophiles are lining up behind the trannies, and the transhumanists are at the ticket counter. Mary Harrington is the best articulator of this problem right now. Patrick Deneen wrote an entire book about it (How Liberalism Failed).
You know who has suffered the most from the removal of guardrails in society: the poor, the minorities, the bottom 80%. Take no-fault divorce for instance: the educated and wealthy still get married, but 60% of poor kids are raised out of wedlock. This is an abject disaster! Each of my examples demonstrates similar class divergences, as does free trade and immigration, with are simply the economic aspect of Mill's liberal philosophy. Policies which remove guardrails and liberate people tend to empower the laptop sect but cause misery at the expense of the rest of society, especially the poor and minorities.
This historical connection to a core piece of the American mythos is precisely what makes trans much harder to fight than many acknowledge. I honestly don't know how to fix this. How do we put guardrails around liberalism's need to liberate without undoing so much good that liberalism has created? I don't want to go back to Jim Crow, or women as second class citizens. But I've read quite extensively on this issue and I don't have an answer. Liberationist ideologies tend to implode, and absent a constraining religious social order (which ain't coming back), I fear we're headed that way.
This is the core political problem that must be solved in this generation. Because if we don't solve it, our social bonds will continue to fray, the "many" in society will continue to suffer, and eventually they will stop just taking it and use the only means at their disposal: voting or violence.
Trans is also a phenomenon of feminism and gay rights. Blaming it all on post-modernists ignores how these two movements laid the foundations for trans ideology. First, men and women are interchangeable and secondly, words can be redefined top down to mean what we want them to mean whenever we want, regardless of history and use.
> Because if we don't solve it, our social bonds will continue to fray, the "many" in society will continue to suffer, and eventually they will stop just taking it and use the only means at their disposal: voting or violence.
And as we've seen over the past decade voting doesn't accomplish anything.
Most will carry on with "Progress, Inc." hoping for a cutout or indulgence for themselves. Sometimes, if enough object, there will be a temporary reprieve in deference to a constituency, before "Progress" must resume.
Hoping to save the nation may prove not possible (though I much prefer the company of the patriotic and grateful to that of the social classes in-question, from whom I originated and have rejected). Perhaps saving some children may be all that we can do.
As you intuit, such persons will carry on and have no gratitude - they will in-fact participate in our very persecution, tomorrow.
Can we please stop calling trans ideology ‘progressive’. Kids’ reasons for feeling transgender are often so superficial and reliant on stereotypes- eg they like gaming with a female avatar, playing ‘girls games’ (whatever that means), experimenting with make up and clothes, are seen as ‘too butch’ or (most alarming) they feel attracted to same sex peers and are afraid they’re gay. The affirmative model is the opposite of left- belief without inquiry, or without providing information that would help a child accept and love themselves in their real biological body. And there’s certainly nothing Left about trans ideology, which has far more in common with right-wing totalitarianism, on that no alternative view is allowed. This has all happened mostly because Stonewall - which has become a lobby group for trans rights, against the best interests of gay and lesbian people, gets large amounts of money from governments, which it uses to then lobby these same governments. Even more amazingly, Stonewall itself then gets to assess and grade public organisations on how ‘transphobic’ it deems them to be! This is fact, as exposed brilliantly in BBC ‘Nolan Investigates Stonewall’ documentary (in which Nolan investigates his own organisation- the BBC- and is (er) stonewalled completely. Have a listen and share widely. People need to know their governments and public institutions are no longer objective and are increasingly beholden to a lobby group with fringe ideas rooted in zero evidence base.
Great post. I am struggling to understand how it is that so many people do not seem to know that there's an exponential increase in "trans" people who are taking cross-sex hormones and cutting off their secondary sex characteristics in exchange for Franken-pieces.
I have posted the summary of the PITT anthology and a woman I knew in grad school called it "right-wing hysteria." She accused me of not thinking critically about all the evidence I've sifted through. Her thinking critically amounted to asserting that all this evidence isn't "real." For each response to her fallacies with evidence, she called me a name; it ended with "fascist" and "mean."
I ended by asking how it is that she doesn't know any of this. And how was it she could look at all the parents' struggles and say it isn't "real" and "the right wing has lost its mind."
“Team Kindness”: this is a literary strength appellation for a thing I’ve seen with many of my politically progressive friends. They believe in kindness as an identity, and are careful to articulate the opinions and attitudes of the team. Some are genuinely kind; some are not. The best way I’ve found to differentiate the two is to interrogate their views towards hateful minorities like religious believers and traditionalists of any sort. People who are actually kind see these hated groups as sets of individuals. People who simply need to be on Team Kindness recognize the importance of maintaining an a defiant, angry and misanthropic attitude towards everyone not on their own team. For what it’s worth, this latter group often displays “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on their front lawns.
“You voted for this. And you’re going to keep voting for this — whatever happens to you and your child is fully deserved.”
This is an unfair characterization, Wesley. The first half of this statement I agree with completely, the second is totally abhorrent. No one deserves this, not the kids, not the parents.
The reason the "I'm a good progressive with reservations about trans" person is so annoying is it pretends our current trans-moment is disconnected from 100 years of liberal/ progressive history, as if trans sprang up last year completely spontaneously. It may feel sudden, but it wasn't. The train was put on this track 100+ years ago by John Stuart Mill's harm principle -- the notion that society has no role limiting ANY behavior unless it is directly harmful to others ("my rights only stop at your nose"). This is quintessential liberalism: a desire to liberate people from unchosen constraints. The ideology which liberated black women from the shackles of slavery now liberates their black great-grand-daughters from the shackles of biology.
Gender ideology is the logical outcome of the very Millian liberalism that Mrs. Ackerman likely prides herself on believing in. That's what makes articles like this so frustrating. It isn't that I think she "deserves" the pain her family is suffering; I have great sympathy for her. But that sympathy doesn't change the role her own ideology and voting patterns played in creating this. And a failure to acknowledge that role is like asking for forgiveness without repentance.
Once you climb aboard the Deconstruction steamroller and aim it towards a Chesterton fence, you never know what will be flattened--might end up being your own home with your own family inside.
In that case, open the Overton window and jump to the ground. Unless you land on an Event horizon. In which case, run toward the light as fast as you can.
I completely share your sentiment. I was a huge fan of Chris Hayes’, to an embarrassing degree, since his days of Up! I thought he was one of the smartest people on TV. Up until a year ago, I rarely missed his nightly show.
When I learnt the truth about pediatric gender transition, i was shocked and disappointed. I felt duped by the media. But I thought, surely, Chris just doesn’t know. If only he took a little bit of time to look into it.
For a while I regularly commented on his tweets, stuff like “there is zero long term research on efficacy and safety of childhood transition” and “systematic reviews of evidence in some European countries...”
He has to know. He found the way to convince himself it’s fine.
Aug 5, 2023·edited Aug 5, 2023Liked by Jenny Poyer Ackerman
What a horrible situation for this mother to find herself in, getting sucked into the radical wing of a once-liberal party that once cared about people more than ideology. And to have a child sucked in in the bargain—unimaginable. But at least she knows what all us mods have known from day one about Hayes. That hack.
I have just retired from the teaching profession, one in which I could provide little help to my indoctrinated students—all girls, all in various stages of transition—that is unless I wanted to help for one day before getting canned. I’m fairly certain that by sheer virtue of my not employing pronouns in emails, and projecting a skeptical attitude in faculty meetings and “trainings”, my retirement was assured whether I wanted it or not.
My lasting memory of my last year will be the time I went to the department head to report the exciting news that a brilliant but troubled girl (very troubled, and socially trans-ing, not clear which came first) had at least temporarily righted the ship and aced a test. In my excitement I mistakenly referred to the student by her biological pronouns. The dry response to the news she might pass the course after all: “They”
Great post! Here’s an interesting (I hope! ) perspective: what if the trans contagion is just one of several social contagions being spread in our children by this approach - what if the depression crisis is similar? What if we’re encouraging kids to be mentally ill the same way we’re encouraging them to be transgender?
We would have to have ICD10 codes for Detransition and all the associated medical problems that comes with it. From what I’ve read there are none specific to this category. No way to keep track or chart and charge to insurance. Even Texas legislators rejected an attempt to require insurance companies to compensate for Detrans care.
Trans is the highest form of identity-politics (with due homage to Lenin). In some very important circles (in the English-speaking world) Trans isn't just the most important issue, it is the only issue. You would think a left-wing party would object to sending a male rapist to a women's prison. You would think and you would be wrong.
I have learned that if you privately approaching someone who has publicly established themselves as supporting child transition, and they respond to your good faith efforts with things like, “I hear you. It’s really complicated. It’s thorny,” that is their polite, non-confrontational way of brushing you off and letting you know they have no intention of listening or reconsidering anything.
It's not hard. Either you are in favor of the sterilization of children, or you are opposed to it. People who pretend it's "thorny and complicated" are either lying to themselves or you or both.
The phrase "thorny and complicated" recalls to mind people's desire to adjudicate the abortion of children on a case-by-case basis, ultimately leaving it up to the mother to decide and calling it "good" to let her decide.
Let's attempt a thought experiment and try to guess what would happen to Chris Hayes if he decided to speak truthfully that the Emperor has no clothes, there's no way for any mammal to change sex, that "gender" has no real definition and makes no sense, and that mutilating anxious and confused children is a grotesque crime, a cross between a Satanic panic and the frontal-lobotomy craze:
First, Chris' producers would either disallow it or do everything they could to stop him and change his mind; if they did allow him to go forward, within an hour all his phones would be blowing up with messages from his agent, manager, the president of the network, the ACLU, HRW, and every contact at every NGO and political organization he's ever made in his life warning him that he's about to commit a hate crime that will permanently align him with the dreaded Deplorable class, and if he goes ahead there will be serious consequences;
Second, if he were to go ahead and publicly apply any critical or skeptical analysis to Transmania, by the end of the week he'd lose his show, his career (minus a Substack migration), his business contacts, most of his friends, and just about any future opportunities for his spouse and family (things will get real cold among the Brooklyn mommy set and there will be no more Hamptons invites and no more Ivy League access).
And all this applies not just to Chris but to any member of our elite liberal clerisy working in media or culture. Trans is not just a sacred belief now but also a moral litmus test and a tribal shibboleth: Either you swallow and promote the narrative that "gender affirmation" is the great Civil Rights struggle of our time or else you face total banishment, the ferocious hatred all apostates get, and the destruction of your career, social and personal life.
I know people like to think this will all blow over soon or that the trial lawyers will swoop down and stop the madness, but I really don't think so: our ruling liberal class is using this as a loyalty test for group and party membership and have backed themselves into so many corners (moral, social, political, epistemic etc) that I don't see how they can back down. The Trans child is their sacred symbol now and they would rather fight to the death than relinquish it.
To paraphrase Stalin: “The mutilation of one child is a tragedy. The mutilation of a million is a statistic.”
This is spot on. And they all have ways of convincing themselves that the growing number of people coming out telling their stories of detransition, desistance, harm, or regret are somehow a separate issue they don’t have to factor in or even think about. They feel comfortable dismissing those who both transitioned and detransitioned as adults for being at fault for getting their identity wrong and therefore not worthy of needing to listen to or consider. Then, seemingly without noticing the contradiction, they assume children and teens never get it wrong, or if they do, certainly someone is recognizing that and keeping the temporarily confused kids from being medicalized, so, hey, the system works, and they don’t have to risk anything by going against the narrative. Ironically, the people most often doing that work of keeping the kids people like Chris Hayes think shouldn’t transition and are counting on getting stopped from wrongful medicalization - a “gatekeeping” they’re counting on happening to keep a clear conscience about not listening to uncomfortable facts or having to face the consequences of speaking out - that conscience-saving gatekeeping work is being done by the same parents and professionals they demonize. It’s maddening.
(And yes I know what I wrote implies that there are the “right” children to transition. I’m not trying to argue that. I’m trying to express how people like Chris Hayes are seeing the issue)
I'm sure I'm not telling you anything you don't know here, but I think before the tribalized brain even gets to any kind of "gatekeeping" first comes the main directive or narrative that's not only been installed in their brains but has also ringed them with electric fences (and this most intensely w people in media, culture and academia): that they are engaged in a battle for civilization (our democracy!) with the evil Deplorable bigots who want to commit Trans genocide and install Jim Crow 2.0 and thus every act and word must pass a heavy test: if you agree with any non-approved idea (esp that goes against the feelings of an Official Victim Class) you move beyond the moral pale and thus become the moral equivalent of a Nazi and deserve to be cast out of polite society.
Everything flows from our intense tribal moment, which is fueled and reborn daily by these devices we carry with us everywhere (Smartphones + social media + constant internet access has turned out to be the strongest brainwashing tool ever invented), and I don't think there will be any return to sanity until the tribalism temperature can be turned down somewhat, which will not be happening anytime soon.
Short of repentance before God, it is hard to imagine...
aint happenin...
No.
I can imagine a trial lawyer like Gerry Spence starting in the Red states and moving into the purple as the slow-learners come to see what they have participated in (and element which they will reject - "we were deceived" and all the other post-war cant). You'd have to be William Kunstler to try this in a Blue state.
But even if they were both resurrected as a 2-headed lawyer monster (good movie pitch!) they'd still have to fight a united MSM, an army of lawyers from our health-care corporations, have to depose and/or get true facts from violently opposed bureaucrats (who may destroy or forge data) and weepy docs who will claim they were just following the Science, deal w whatever tricks any Blue politician can pull, then overcome the pleas of their granddaughters for grandpa not to be a gross old bigot but to step over to the Right Side of History™ and join Team Compassion.
The America we grew up in, and that these men lived in and were created and crafted by, is long dead and has been replaced by something much uglier.
I read all your comments and I can see that, in spite of everything, there are still sane people in America and, most importantly, people who can judge with their own brains, while all the media is in the hands of the Believers. I lived for 25 years in a communist country under one of the worst dictatorships of the 20 th century, which seemed that it would last forever. And then, when a group of people had the courage to tell the truth, it was all over in a a week. So, I know that here too it will only take a handful of people to tell the truth in public and the veil of insanity will be ripped off. But a few people of courage are needed. Not many. Just a few. What I can;t understand is how in a country of hundreds of millions you can't find 2 or 3 people of courage?
Yes.
Your point about formation is even more to the point, and more mournful yet.
I always respected Kunstler - what a bastard. I think that he just hated the State. He really put his money and time into his dubious vocation!
Good to "see" you, Clever.
Hey, same to you!
We seem to haunt the same spots ;)
They will try to cut up so many that it is "established as fact."
As you said of Stalin...
You wrote:
> If it hadn’t come for my child; if I hadn’t felt the urgency of what would become a compulsive seven-year interrogation, who knows?
So do you suppose there are other issues on which the progressive orthodoxy is similarly wrong, that just haven't personally affected you in this way?
> I don’t share in this punitive attitude toward the growing contingent of former progressives defecting from the latest moral novelty they’ve all been instructed is mandatory for those who wish to remain in good standing with the right thinking to embrace.
My problem with this contingent is that they tend to retain their loyalty to all the previous "moral novelties" prior to the one that finally got them to defect.
They fail to see the connection between, for example: the Pill, no fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, the overturning of prayer in schools, abortion, gay marriage, and trans. They act like "trans" spontaneously sprang up from nowhere, when it is really just the logical outcome of the "if it feels good, do it" / "it's not hurting anyone, so who am I to judge" ideology they themselves have championed.
How many centuries of human progress are we expected to have to reverse to suit your high moral standards? Are you OK with Copernicus? Women's suffrage? Interracial marriage? Right turn on red?
It's possible to make principled defenses of the Pill, no fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, the overturning of prayer in schools, abortion and gay marriage (my particular contribution to the downfall of civilization) while being opposed to gender ideology.
Trans is the logical outcome of the postmodern turn in academia that drew its inspiration from foreign intellectuals, not the principles that underlie the Constitution. My marriage to a man isn't based on an "if it feels good, do it" ideology any more than your parents' marriage was. My same-sex marriage derives its legitimacy from the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, thank you very much.
Well said, Ollie, thank you. I too am having difficulty seeing the dotted line leading from my weakness for background checks and universal healthcare to the overthrow of human sexual dimorphism... definitely gonna pray on it though!😅
Jenny, I didn't mention either of these in my list for a reason.
The path I listed is one centered on maximal individual autonomy as delineated by John Stuart Mill. More specifically, 3rd wave feminism, gay acceptance and trans ideology are all rooted in the premise that men and women are interchangeable, they only differ in where that should apply. 3rd wave feminism wants economic interchangeability; gays want it in the bedroom; trans demands it absolutely everywhere. This is a difference of degree, not kind.
See my response to Ollie below if you're actually interested in more detail.
While there is nothing wrong with your efforts to convince Chris to become more moderate on this issue, I believe most people fail to appreciate how deep the philosophical hooks of trans really are. As MamaBear said elsewhere here, trans is the bastard child of Millian liberalism and postmodernism. So when you say "maybe we shouldn't be slicing the breasts of teenagers", the liberal hears "she wants to limit people's choices", while the postmodernist hears "words have objective meaning". These ideas violate core assumptions of each of their respective worldviews. You think you're being logical, but to them you are assaulting their entire philosophical framework. This is why rooting out trans is going to take much more than just logical argument. People do not give up their deepest beliefs about the world easily. And a failure to acknowledge where those beliefs come only makes it harder to defeat them.
I'm not sure what your position on background checks is. If you mean background checks to own a gun, would you also support background checks for your other rights?
As for universal healthcare, it has many problems. The most obvious one, that we saw with the COVID debacle, is the danger of having a single institution in charge of all medical decisions.
Granted, these issues don't relate relate directly to the trans issue the way the collapse of sexual ethics does. They do relate to the increase and centralization of government power and its ability to crush dissent, including those who object to the trans nonsense.
To follow up about universal healthcare. Now women with breast cancer are being kicked out of public clinics in Oregon for objecting to the trans flag. Imagine what this would be like if all healthcare was provided via public health.
https://wholistic.substack.com/p/breast-cancer-patient-barred-from-ohsu
> How many centuries of human progress are we expected to have to reverse
None. I don't favor reversing any progress, in the sense of changes that bring us closer the True, the Beautiful, and the Good. I do however know that not every change is for the better, and just because something is a change, doesn't make it progress.
> It's possible to make principled defenses of the Pill, no fault divorce, the Sexual Revolution, the overturning of prayer in schools, abortion and gay marriage (my particular contribution to the downfall of civilization) while being opposed to gender ideology.
Only via extremely special pleading.
> My marriage to a man isn't based on an "if it feels good, do it" ideology
Yes it is. Also on the denial of the telos of sex.
> any more than your parents' marriage was.
My parents' marriage is based on providing a stable institution for raising children. Your "marriage" is based on creating an imitation of a real marriage (similar to how a "transwoman" is an imitation woman) to leach of the respectability.
"Telos of sex." There we go. The penny drops. Goodbye Enlightenment, hello Opus Dei. Natural law and all that. When is the auto da fe?
I refuse to have a conversation with the pre-modern world. Byee!
I respect that this is hard for you to see, but Eugene is absolutely correct. Without natural law, the Declaration of independence doesn't make any sense. Equality and human rights are predicated on the idea that man is uniquely created; if you're just a smart ape, you don't have inalienable rights because no one gave them to you.
I throw this back to you, Ollie. How would you argue that gays deserve to be liberated from the social constraints of marriage, but (now that we have the technology to do it) trannies don't deserve to be liberated from the constraints of biology? What is the bright line that you think is so clear?
Remove the curtain from this, and every other American issue of serious political/social/financial/cultural concern, and we discover the keep your mouth shut totalitarian threat of cancellation, career/life destruction, and the maiming firing squad character assassination of the MSM/D.E.I./surveillance state apparatus. Which, serves corrupt international capital. A weaponized totalitarian fear machine bought, paid for, and put in place through the theft of American labor and treasure. How different is the knowing sterilization of a child, from the expanded euthanasia centers across the EU and Canada willing to "humanely" put citizens to sleep over insurmountable debt or depression? It is the narcissistic pathology that allows kings and emperors to declare themselves gods, and tyrants like Mao and Stalin, to place themselves above accountability and human moral reason. They are the disease, and butchery of the child is one of the many, many symptoms of their presence in our lives.
This is all part of an attempted ongoing great leveling of the free peoples of the world and the overlay of a CCP style "rules for thee not for me" surveillance system to allow the ascent of a new world monarchy. Truth/fact based journalism YES!! It matters. But the core reality is a well funded war meant to replace the human dignity enshrined in the American Constitution, and Western Civilization itself, with the rule of totalitarian monsters. "Trans" and a hundred other vampire insanities will be removed from our necks when the DNC/CCP/EU Davos juggernaut is destroyed. As in Nazi Germany, Maoist China and Stalin's Russia it is pathology not politics. A pathology that serves human butchers, lier's and an elitist no consequences aristocracy that considers itself far removed from the "deplorable's" it sees as no more than cattle.
You are correct Sir. For "rule of law" you might like THE NEW CULTURE FORUM six part series on Western Civilization. (About 40 minutes per episode.)
It’s pretty simple - treating men as women in prisons, bathrooms, etc harms women. Children who can’t make informed decisions are harmed by doctors prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries. Neither of those have any analogy in gay marriage
One of the unintentionally funniest tweets a saw was by a self proclaimed "atheist humanist" who listed his beliefs as including:
Human rights are absolute.
Humans are just bags of chemicals.
> Natural law and all that.
The whole justification for the American Revolution and Constitution, and frankly the Enlightenment itself, is based on natural law. But, I suppose you think they have to go because your unnatural passions feel so good in the moment.
I must have gone to a crap law school, because my Harvard-Law-School-educated Con Law professor never said a word about natural law. Neither did the eminent historian George Romani in his course at Northwestern on the intellectual history of Europe.
Anyway, I'm done with this homophobic tar baby.
Where does religion come into this? This is the standard leftist/gay argument. Your arguments are based on religion and are archaic so I refuse to engage. The aim of sexual intercourse is to reproduce the species. Gays and lesbians cannot have children. Therefore, the idea of gay marriage is an oxymoron. Civil unions are fine. Gay marriage is not. Your resistance comes from a refusal to acknowledge the straight and gay relationships are fundamentally different and therefore require different treatment.
That is another similarity between gay and trans ideology. Both believe that the sexes are essentially interchangeable. Gays prefer to restrict that interchangeability to the bedroom while trans extends it everywhere, but this is a difference only of degree not of kind.
> Civil unions are fine.
Um, no. The only purpose of civil unions was to ease people into the idea of gay "marriage".
> Only via extremely special pleading
So a lack of prayer in schools leads to trans rights? Surely you can draw at least as strong a line from “separation of church and state” -> “no prayer in schools,” so you seem to also have a pretty strong issue with the Constitution
Sorry, but "separation of church and state" isn't actually in the Constitution.
The phrase isn’t, but the concept is.
I think that it’s pretty much universal that something good is the philosophical/political inspiration for something bad. This isn’t something that’s unique to American liberalism, and you can also draw lines further back to the Enlightenment and even Christianity itself.
If you don’t think that “no establishment of religion but keep prayer in public schools” isn’t special pleading but “let people marry who they want but men can’t become women” is, then you seem pretty hypocritical.
Ollie, you misunderstand me. I'm not saying I like it, and I agree with you on trans being an extension of postmodernism. However it's also as rooted in Mill's liberalism as any of those other movements. Once we decided "society may not regulate any action unless it harms another person", the train was on the track, and we still haven't stopped it. The pedophiles are lining up behind the trannies, and the transhumanists are at the ticket counter. Mary Harrington is the best articulator of this problem right now. Patrick Deneen wrote an entire book about it (How Liberalism Failed).
You know who has suffered the most from the removal of guardrails in society: the poor, the minorities, the bottom 80%. Take no-fault divorce for instance: the educated and wealthy still get married, but 60% of poor kids are raised out of wedlock. This is an abject disaster! Each of my examples demonstrates similar class divergences, as does free trade and immigration, with are simply the economic aspect of Mill's liberal philosophy. Policies which remove guardrails and liberate people tend to empower the laptop sect but cause misery at the expense of the rest of society, especially the poor and minorities.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/challenging-the-no-fault-divorce-regime
This historical connection to a core piece of the American mythos is precisely what makes trans much harder to fight than many acknowledge. I honestly don't know how to fix this. How do we put guardrails around liberalism's need to liberate without undoing so much good that liberalism has created? I don't want to go back to Jim Crow, or women as second class citizens. But I've read quite extensively on this issue and I don't have an answer. Liberationist ideologies tend to implode, and absent a constraining religious social order (which ain't coming back), I fear we're headed that way.
This is the core political problem that must be solved in this generation. Because if we don't solve it, our social bonds will continue to fray, the "many" in society will continue to suffer, and eventually they will stop just taking it and use the only means at their disposal: voting or violence.
Trans is also a phenomenon of feminism and gay rights. Blaming it all on post-modernists ignores how these two movements laid the foundations for trans ideology. First, men and women are interchangeable and secondly, words can be redefined top down to mean what we want them to mean whenever we want, regardless of history and use.
> Because if we don't solve it, our social bonds will continue to fray, the "many" in society will continue to suffer, and eventually they will stop just taking it and use the only means at their disposal: voting or violence.
And as we've seen over the past decade voting doesn't accomplish anything.
For ourselves, we must support parallel institutions and discourage cultural imperialism as best we can.
The truly criminal in all of this will likely never face justice. At best, an evil contingent of trial lawyers may wreak havoc. May they prevail.
https://cmppllc.com/
May they prevail, early and often.
Most will carry on with "Progress, Inc." hoping for a cutout or indulgence for themselves. Sometimes, if enough object, there will be a temporary reprieve in deference to a constituency, before "Progress" must resume.
Hoping to save the nation may prove not possible (though I much prefer the company of the patriotic and grateful to that of the social classes in-question, from whom I originated and have rejected). Perhaps saving some children may be all that we can do.
As you intuit, such persons will carry on and have no gratitude - they will in-fact participate in our very persecution, tomorrow.
Can we please stop calling trans ideology ‘progressive’. Kids’ reasons for feeling transgender are often so superficial and reliant on stereotypes- eg they like gaming with a female avatar, playing ‘girls games’ (whatever that means), experimenting with make up and clothes, are seen as ‘too butch’ or (most alarming) they feel attracted to same sex peers and are afraid they’re gay. The affirmative model is the opposite of left- belief without inquiry, or without providing information that would help a child accept and love themselves in their real biological body. And there’s certainly nothing Left about trans ideology, which has far more in common with right-wing totalitarianism, on that no alternative view is allowed. This has all happened mostly because Stonewall - which has become a lobby group for trans rights, against the best interests of gay and lesbian people, gets large amounts of money from governments, which it uses to then lobby these same governments. Even more amazingly, Stonewall itself then gets to assess and grade public organisations on how ‘transphobic’ it deems them to be! This is fact, as exposed brilliantly in BBC ‘Nolan Investigates Stonewall’ documentary (in which Nolan investigates his own organisation- the BBC- and is (er) stonewalled completely. Have a listen and share widely. People need to know their governments and public institutions are no longer objective and are increasingly beholden to a lobby group with fringe ideas rooted in zero evidence base.
Everything you say is true, but the question is: why does all the Left media in all the English-speaking countries support this regressive ideology?
Because the "progressives" never asked themselves the key question of "what are we 'progressing' towards?".
It is progressive, in the sense of being the logical consequence of previous progressive policies.
Great post. I am struggling to understand how it is that so many people do not seem to know that there's an exponential increase in "trans" people who are taking cross-sex hormones and cutting off their secondary sex characteristics in exchange for Franken-pieces.
I have posted the summary of the PITT anthology and a woman I knew in grad school called it "right-wing hysteria." She accused me of not thinking critically about all the evidence I've sifted through. Her thinking critically amounted to asserting that all this evidence isn't "real." For each response to her fallacies with evidence, she called me a name; it ended with "fascist" and "mean."
I ended by asking how it is that she doesn't know any of this. And how was it she could look at all the parents' struggles and say it isn't "real" and "the right wing has lost its mind."
“Team Kindness”: this is a literary strength appellation for a thing I’ve seen with many of my politically progressive friends. They believe in kindness as an identity, and are careful to articulate the opinions and attitudes of the team. Some are genuinely kind; some are not. The best way I’ve found to differentiate the two is to interrogate their views towards hateful minorities like religious believers and traditionalists of any sort. People who are actually kind see these hated groups as sets of individuals. People who simply need to be on Team Kindness recognize the importance of maintaining an a defiant, angry and misanthropic attitude towards everyone not on their own team. For what it’s worth, this latter group often displays “Hate Has No Home Here” signs on their front lawns.
“You voted for this. And you’re going to keep voting for this — whatever happens to you and your child is fully deserved.”
This is an unfair characterization, Wesley. The first half of this statement I agree with completely, the second is totally abhorrent. No one deserves this, not the kids, not the parents.
The reason the "I'm a good progressive with reservations about trans" person is so annoying is it pretends our current trans-moment is disconnected from 100 years of liberal/ progressive history, as if trans sprang up last year completely spontaneously. It may feel sudden, but it wasn't. The train was put on this track 100+ years ago by John Stuart Mill's harm principle -- the notion that society has no role limiting ANY behavior unless it is directly harmful to others ("my rights only stop at your nose"). This is quintessential liberalism: a desire to liberate people from unchosen constraints. The ideology which liberated black women from the shackles of slavery now liberates their black great-grand-daughters from the shackles of biology.
Gender ideology is the logical outcome of the very Millian liberalism that Mrs. Ackerman likely prides herself on believing in. That's what makes articles like this so frustrating. It isn't that I think she "deserves" the pain her family is suffering; I have great sympathy for her. But that sympathy doesn't change the role her own ideology and voting patterns played in creating this. And a failure to acknowledge that role is like asking for forgiveness without repentance.
I said that some would say that — not everyone.
Once you climb aboard the Deconstruction steamroller and aim it towards a Chesterton fence, you never know what will be flattened--might end up being your own home with your own family inside.
In that case, open the Overton window and jump to the ground. Unless you land on an Event horizon. In which case, run toward the light as fast as you can.
Hello Brian. Good to "see" you.
Your comment is well-put. Eugeine says something similar.
Eugine. (typo)
You are my hero, Mr. Yang. And thank you Ms. Ackerman. These pieces together are brutal. They break the heart.
This was cathartic reading for me.
I completely share your sentiment. I was a huge fan of Chris Hayes’, to an embarrassing degree, since his days of Up! I thought he was one of the smartest people on TV. Up until a year ago, I rarely missed his nightly show.
When I learnt the truth about pediatric gender transition, i was shocked and disappointed. I felt duped by the media. But I thought, surely, Chris just doesn’t know. If only he took a little bit of time to look into it.
For a while I regularly commented on his tweets, stuff like “there is zero long term research on efficacy and safety of childhood transition” and “systematic reviews of evidence in some European countries...”
He has to know. He found the way to convince himself it’s fine.
I appreciate you Kassandra!
> I thought he was one of the smartest people on TV.
The first step is to admit you made a mistake.
What a horrible situation for this mother to find herself in, getting sucked into the radical wing of a once-liberal party that once cared about people more than ideology. And to have a child sucked in in the bargain—unimaginable. But at least she knows what all us mods have known from day one about Hayes. That hack.
I have just retired from the teaching profession, one in which I could provide little help to my indoctrinated students—all girls, all in various stages of transition—that is unless I wanted to help for one day before getting canned. I’m fairly certain that by sheer virtue of my not employing pronouns in emails, and projecting a skeptical attitude in faculty meetings and “trainings”, my retirement was assured whether I wanted it or not.
My lasting memory of my last year will be the time I went to the department head to report the exciting news that a brilliant but troubled girl (very troubled, and socially trans-ing, not clear which came first) had at least temporarily righted the ship and aced a test. In my excitement I mistakenly referred to the student by her biological pronouns. The dry response to the news she might pass the course after all: “They”
Wow. That says it all.
Cult. It’s a cult.
Great post! Here’s an interesting (I hope! ) perspective: what if the trans contagion is just one of several social contagions being spread in our children by this approach - what if the depression crisis is similar? What if we’re encouraging kids to be mentally ill the same way we’re encouraging them to be transgender?
More on this, and how to counter it, here:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/how-we-make-children-miserable-and
Just food for thought for this engaged audience!
"American gender clinics aren’t even required to report their data to any public health body: the CDC and NIH are not interested, apparently"
Really??? Wow!
How can the CDC and NIH be made to be interested?
We would have to have ICD10 codes for Detransition and all the associated medical problems that comes with it. From what I’ve read there are none specific to this category. No way to keep track or chart and charge to insurance. Even Texas legislators rejected an attempt to require insurance companies to compensate for Detrans care.
I sincerely hope you don’t believe that reply was clever.
Trans is the highest form of identity-politics (with due homage to Lenin). In some very important circles (in the English-speaking world) Trans isn't just the most important issue, it is the only issue. You would think a left-wing party would object to sending a male rapist to a women's prison. You would think and you would be wrong.
Wow. What a piece. Thank you, Jenny and Wesley.
Thank you Ms. Ackerman for such a full report
I have learned that if you privately approaching someone who has publicly established themselves as supporting child transition, and they respond to your good faith efforts with things like, “I hear you. It’s really complicated. It’s thorny,” that is their polite, non-confrontational way of brushing you off and letting you know they have no intention of listening or reconsidering anything.
It's not hard. Either you are in favor of the sterilization of children, or you are opposed to it. People who pretend it's "thorny and complicated" are either lying to themselves or you or both.
The phrase "thorny and complicated" recalls to mind people's desire to adjudicate the abortion of children on a case-by-case basis, ultimately leaving it up to the mother to decide and calling it "good" to let her decide.