This week, a video has been circulating of a female athletics competition in Washington in which a boy (who identifies as a girl) wins the 400m race. This comes a couple of weeks after another, very similar video in Oregon of a women’s 200m race being won by a man. It’s a very stark illustration of the Orwellian nature of gender ideology, since its logical extension in practice – mingling the sexes, pretending sex differences aren’t real even in sports – is not just bad but absurd, parodic. The tide seems to be turning, though: dozens of US states have passed laws to prevent cross-sex hormone therapy for children, spurred on by the Cass Review. And, unlike the Lia Thomas swimming scandal, in this latest video the girls on the podium don’t cheer for the winner; they pointedly cheer for the girl who came second.
So, what’s the story behind the shift?
The Right Side of History
We have to take a step back to see how we got here in the first place. A powerful motivation behind gender ideology is the desire to be on the “right side of history.” Here in America, now that the surging force of the Gay Rights Movement is petering out, Leftism requires other sources of momentum. For some, that source is climate activism, which claims for itself the most existential justification of all. For others, Trump Derangement Syndrome suffices. But perhaps the most socially detrimental new form of activism is transgender activism, borne of gender ideology. It is particularly detrimental because of its threat to the bodily and mental integrity of children.
Through history, most trans-identifying (previously “transsexual”) people have been adult men. But the rapidly growing numbers of transgender youths are typically the reverse: girls identifying as boys. Gender dysphoria is a well-documented psychological disorder and recently a highly contagious one, rather than hardwired condition. Crucially, the trans lobby has sneakily stopped calling it an illness or even an undesirable condition, despite its reliable accompaniment with other mental illnesses. Instead, transgender identification is being recast as a “gender journey,” with invasive and irreversible forms of medication and surgery no longer called “gender reassignment” but “gender affirming care.” This presents the idealized gender identity, which can – according to the ideology – change daily or even hourly. It is at once fickle yet somehow immutable: a sort of Platonic sprite.
Yet, as this trans-endorsing summary shows, “gender affirming care” ranges from such fundamental alterations as double mastectomies to “speech therapy” geared towards sounding higher or lower-pitched. If your “true” self bears no resemblance to your naturally embodied self, what on earth is true about it? This is clearly not true alignment with the self: This is reassignment in accordance with fantasies arising from self-loathing and insecurity. No population is more vulnerable to insecurity than pubescent children, especially girls. I proceed with this strand of transgenderism in mind.
There are several errors underpinning the delusion that trans activism stands on the “right side of history:”
1) Like all Whig history, it entails the view that temporal progress is philosophical and social betterment. What is good? Why, whatever is next, of course! But any discerning reader of history sees how periods of regression punctuate the march of time. Giving trans-identified male sex offenders access to women in prisons strikes me as the opposite of improvement, to give just one example of the absurd and dangerous political fallout of trans activism.
2) It entails the view that philosophical, political, and social betterment involves the decimation of the powerful and the liberation of the vulnerable. In this case, the vulnerable are trans people (especially of color). Since trans people endure suffering – suffering which strikes any sane person as a result of the confused idea that you are born in the wrong body – that suffering must be imposed by an Oppressor. This Oppressor, they have decided, is the shadowy global Power bloc that is white straight “cis” patriarchy.
3) As such, trans activism is a form of revolution which lacks the precondition of a typical revolution: Top-down Oppression. Instead of dismantling a terrible regime, gender ideology restlessly locates its enemy in perfectly healthy ideas and norms: For instance, the idea that puberty, though difficult, is a natural and transformative period in a child’s life. Also anathema is the more basic idea that the sexes are physically different and that single-sex spaces are necessary (especially for the safety of women). These permanent truths and ubiquitous norms are recast as Oppressive, giving the revolutionary gender ideologue his lifeblood: Permanent and ubiquitous sources of outrage.
4) It champions mental illness simply because mental illness confers victim status. Christ’s beatitudes (“blessed are the meek”) have been perverted by the desire of activists to stand with the blessed meek. For obvious reasons, this harms those who are already mentally ill: Their mental illness is not abetted but encouraged and even, in depraved and damaging ways, rewarded by the cult-like features of the LGBTQIA2S++ Community which rallies around its most Oppressed members and even canonizes them. The myth behind the annual “transgender day of remembrance” – that there is an ongoing genocide against trans people – perfectly demonstrates this.
It’s clear that trans activists flourish in conditions of self-conferred victimhood: They often adopt their own markers of uniqueness in the form of “nonbinary” pronouns which exist independently of gender dysphoria. This provides them with a bristling revolutionary spirit without exposing them to any real danger. Since detransitioners who criticize misguided “gender-affirming” therapies are exiled by the community which once embraced them, the grim reality – teenaged girls accessing hormone replacement therapy which makes their bones brittle, their vaginas atrophy, and their hairlines recede – remains comfortably far from the view of the average dutiful march-attending activist.
Despite the errors I’ve just described, gender ideology has been undeniably successful in its self-replication. This is because, for the majority of people, being on the right side of history is indistinguishable from the desire to be seen to be on the right side of history. Recruiting normal people who wish to virtue signal but have no experience in dealing with vulnerable gender-confused children is how gender ideology captures institutions. Workplaces become panopticons: Reader, have you done your quarterly virtue signal by putting your pronouns in your email signature?
Leave Gays Alone
What these well-meaning masses will come to realize – sooner rather than later, I believe – is that gender ideology is in fact regressive. Most obviously, it confuses feminine qualities in men for evidence that they, too, are real women. This leads to the encroachment of men upon women’s spaces. Which societies view womanhood as a cluster of rigid feminine stereotypes (an ultimately male-supremacist worldview)? A certain organized religion comes to mind.
Gay men tend to manifest more feminine characteristics and thus make up a (highly visible) chunk of trans women, which is cheered on by activists in spite of the abject horrors and permanently damaging, even life-shortening, effects of “bottom surgery” which increasing numbers of gay men solicit. Under which regimes are gay men refashioned into “straight women?” The answer is less obvious, so I’ll provide it: Islamic countries like Iran inflict transgender “reassignment” surgeries onto gay men in an effort to erase homosexuality. Encouraging the view that gay men are, or should be, women is a kind of progress: The dystopian kind.
Hope
Sound evidence shows who is actually on the right side of history. To return to trans youth: A recently-published independent report into transgender healthcare in the UK, the Cass Review, shows what several outspoken critics of gender ideology (and most normal people!) already know. It is also the most comprehensive report of its kind, finding that dozens of studies which WPATH (the influential World Professional Association for Transgender Health) used to justify medicalizing children are based on unethical research practices. These studies do not show that medical interventions for trans-identifying youth are safe or that the rate of regret is low, despite WPATH’s claims to the opposite. These small, poorly executed, ideologically driven studies were latched onto by activists who desperately needed to display their enlightened credentials, like the hysterical UK activist Peter Tatchell (formerly a gay ambassador and now an ambassador for the view that seahorses and pheasants can be “trans” and therefore so can people).
This points to another sin of Leftist “right side of historyism:” Studies Show Syndrome. SSS is a digital affliction borne of the exhilarating access we now have to a burgeoning bank of academic and scientific papers at the tap of a button. It rests on the uncritical credentialism which sees any published study as being somehow authoritative. SSS is endemic despite the heroic efforts of James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. to expose the ideological motivations of academic peer review in their grievance studies hoax. This hoax is still relevant: Championing truth requires more scrutiny than WPATH exercised when they rushed to endorse unethical, faulty studies to justify catastrophic healthcare advice.
The Cass Review is a watershed moment. Americans who see the medicalization of trans-identifying children as the scandal it is, irrespective of their other political views, should take a leaf out of the UK’s book. What any investigation into the exploding phenomenon of trans teenagers reveals is that being trans is often a fleeting expression of adolescent distress, self-esteem collapse, and – in even sadder cases – trauma. Heroic women like JK Rowling and non-partisan commentators alike have been pointing out this obvious fact for years in the UK, where the tide is turning: Even several Labour Party MPs have come out as gender critical.
Another British hero of mine and voice of reason Helen Joyce has argued lucidly for gender critical feminists to collaborate with the Right, and vice versa. She convinced her audience of the obvious fact that this is the best way to do what will actually put us on the “right side of history:” Save the children.