Twenty-five years ago, the culture wars in America centered around abortion, gays in the military, and public funding for trashy art. Those debates seem quaint and civilized beside the full frontal assault now waged by the Left against man’s core nature. The old liberal pleas for tolerance have been revealed as simply the thin edge of a wedge they now use to destroy not merely traditional morality, but rather the very concept of sexual difference, and with it, the notion of objective reality.
In the space of a single generation, our national dialogue has gone from teaching tolerance towards to homosexuality — a good thing — to celebrating its existence, and to granting same-sex couples the imprimatur of law, yet such victories were apparently insufficient. The Left now seeks to turn anyone who does not approve of homosexuality, whether for religious reasons or otherwise, into an object of socially-encouraged hatred, and to maximize their personal and professional pain. The Left’s call for tolerance was always a lie, used when their position was weak, to be discarded after their ideas had gone mainstream.
In its perpetual search for new victims of unjust country from which only they can save us, the Left pivoted to those identifying themselves as transgender, between one and five in every thousand people. Again the goal is not tolerance, but the institutionalization of the idea that sexual differences do not exist.
As with everything else the Left demands to be regarded as true, transgenderism is now taught to children, and in the case of a Rocklin, California, school this past week, to kindergarteners. State laws previously enacted to give parents some say in the graphic teaching of sexual education in general, and homosexuality in particular, apparently do not apply to transgender teaching, because it covers “diversity” and not sex ed.
Adults are obviously free to present themselves as whatever sex they so choose, and some have surgery to alter the sexual organs they were born with. That is their right, and presumably by the age of eighteen, they will hopefully have a decent notion of what they are doing and why, but to pretend that a girl is a boy, or vice versa, at the age of five risks doing tremendous damage to the child.
Leftist advocates argue that transgender people suffer discrimination, leading to an alarming suicide rate — some forty percent of transgender people have attempted suicide — and that measures are needed to overcome this threat. However, racial minorities do not suffer higher suicide rates, and according to the Left, they are also heavily discriminated against.
Common sense would argue that the extraordinarily high suicide rate of transgender people has far more to do with the cognitive dissonance presented by denying one’s basic genetic make-up, and all the attendant anguish that must produce. For instance, how does one find a mate in what must be a vanishingly small pool of potentials? Would not people’s widespread lack of sexual desire for oneself translate into diminished feelings of self-worth?
Far from encouraging adults — let alone young children — to pursue a transgender identity, should not caring parents, and society in general, make every effort to talk them out of a lifetime of extreme difficulty? There is an age at which acceptance of transgenderism is appropriate, and yes, laudatory, but in kindergarten?
There are masculine girls and effeminate boys, but they are girls and boys, with a very long road ahead to establish their sense of self. To short-circuit this process at the insistence of a five-year-old, or his or her parents, however well-meaning, constitutes an act of borderline child abuse. Furthermore, to force other children to call Sally, who has a penis, a girl, or Tommy, who has a vagina, a boy, is to establish in their young minds the basic denial of objective reality, and that is precisely why the Left is pursuing it.
Objective reality is no friend to the Left. If it were, the Soviet Union would have won the Cold War, Venezuela would be an economic powerhouse, and Obamacare would be wonderful. In order to build a governing majority that will elect them to pursue their job-killing and poverty-inducing fantasies, the Left needs to separate cause and effect by dismantling the basic building blocks of rational thought.
The more intellectual garbage people are taught to regurgitate on command, the more likely they are to accept the whole package of politically correct nonsense, including their own economic slavery via confiscatory taxation. The Left does not mean to govern in the traditional sense, any more than Stalin, Mao, or Hugo Chavez meant to govern, but rather to reign supreme.
The fetishization of transgenderism, and the demand that society celebrate it under pain of odium and ostracism, is simply the Left’s latest assault on normality and reason, both essential anchors by which society operates within the sphere of private life. But privacy and free expression are threats to totalitarianism, which accepts nothing less than wholesale submission to the state. Forced false testimony, such as calling a child of one sex by another, is the coin by which a malignant power tests the loyalty of its subjects and punishes dissent.
As a father of young children, I sympathize deeply with parents trying to raise kids outside the mainstream of behavior or thought, but transgenderism is just a fashion, the same as single parenthood was a fashion in the early nineties, only far more serious and potentially deadly. How many children have to suffer this time around for the Left’s latest social experiment?
P. H. Guthrie is a former Republican campaign operative. His work has appeared in USA Today, Real Clear Politics, The Federalist, and The Daily Caller. He has also appeared on "The Dan Caplis Show" on KNUS 710. He currently resides in the Washington, D.C. area. Follow him on Twitter @PHGuthrie. To read more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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