The following incorporates passages from a previous post on Priceton, “The Progressive Lexicon Explained” — sooner or later, one begins to repeat oneself, and self-plagiarism is the most efficient way to do so — , but some attempt to explain the inexplicable, i.e., the collective psychosis of transgenderism, seemed called for. Hence the length of this essay…
Rather like having an abortion or “coming out”, being misgendered, and then getting transgendered, is the latest accomplishment for which progressives are entitled to bask in the glow of worldwide adulation, moral righteousness, and political victimization, all at the same time. Do not probe too deeply into why a preference for seeking titillation with a member of the same, rather than the opposite, sex should be an occasion for “pride”, any more than, say, a culinary preference for fish over fowl (and especially considering that, according to the LGBT theorists, homosexuality isn’t really a choice anyway). Be content to know only that all the Orwellian inversions and euphemisms in which the progressive lexicon abounds are designed to make what has always struck sane people as repellent and grotesque seem and sound normal, wholesome, and uplifting, and therefore something of which to be “proud”.
In Canada during Pride Month, the rainbow banner flutters atop every bank, retail store, hospital, government building (federal and provincial), and university, and is now legally required by the Ministry of Education to be flown over public and private schools from K to grade 12 (including Catholic schools). Its ubiquity is such that, as I have written elsewhere, any visitor from another country during Pride Month might plausibly mistake the rainbow banner for Canada’s national flag, and conclude that Canadians are the most jingoistic people on the face of the earth. Indeed, in polite society, homosexual pride is now the only form of patriotism not denounced as a refuge for scoundrels.
But in the progressive victimological hierarchy, being misgendered is but another step higher and closer to the martyr’s crown. Gender dysphoria, once understood as a relatively rare but usually transient, or eminently curable, psychological disorder of adolescence, is now the glass of fashion and the mould of form.
Transgender Pride
At least one representative of the transgender community has by now broken through the multi-colored glass ceiling of every corporate board room and government bureaucracy in the West. Don’t be surprised if quotas for the transgendered are already being secretly implemented in admissions and hiring, and reparations for past misgendering are being focus-grouped. Sooner or later, expect some Democrat politician to put himself (or xemself) forward as at least partly misgendered, and have a rather easier time of it than Elizabeth Warren, since there is no blood test for the self-identified.
Recently, the Greater Derry, New Hampshire beauty contest was won by a grossly corpulent and singularly unattractive “female-identifying” man, whom the official witnesses of these important epochal milestones celebrated as the first transgender beauty queen in history. (My suggestion to the judges to crown him/her the “Greatest Derry Queen”, or “Miss Gendered, New Hampshire”, was peremptorily rejected.) One expects that this will be only the first in a long series of Miss-Gendered titles to be awarded throughout America, save, perhaps, in flyover country.
In practically every discipline in female sport, from weightlifting and swimming to track and field, anatomical males who self-identify as females have been (literally) lapping the field, and being fêted throughout the beau monde for their athletic prowess. If there were a gay Pindar alive today, he would immortalize them in odes.
It’s as if a thief, who never having made it in the more demanding and perilous genres of brigandage (safe-cracking, breaking into houses, robbing banks, etc.) realized that he might become rich and famous all at once by stealing from the begging bowls of the halt, the lame, and the blind. When East German “female” athletes were dominant at every successive Olympic Games from the Sixties through the Eighties, there was much handwringing over Communist pharmacological chicanery. Under the new woke cultural modalities of Marxism, self-identified “female” competitors already possess all of the natural physical advantages of men without the need for pharmacological intervention—testosterone already included—, and cheating in sport has become respectable again, as the means to the high progressive end of abolishing yet another bourgeois atavism (heterosexual marriage having already been abolished) that the Soviet-era revolutionaries were entirely too conservative, or too normal, to tamper with.
Even right-wing extremists must admit that the feminist polemic about the patriarchy historically exploiting women would be entirely justified in the case of underachieving male athletes unashamedly taking advantage of the weaker sex to cheat their way to (un)sporting glory. A male chauvinist might call it unchivalrous. In ancient mythology, pretending to be a girl to escape the hardships or dangers of the quest was considered cowardly and, in the toxically-masculine terminology of the literature of the virtues and the vices, the mark of what was called “moral effeminacy”. When Achilles dressed up as a girl in order to evade conscription into the Troy-bound Greek army, it was to his eternal shame.
Along with the usual white male Christian deplorables, a few old-school feminists have also complained, only to be swarmed and physically beaten by fanatics for their disloyalty to the LGBT cause. From the diminishing vantage point of the remnant of the normal and the sane, it’s gratifying to see factions of the intersectional Left at each other’s throats, not to mention masculine mediocrity being “privileged” (to use a fashionable neologism) at the expense of female excellence for once, rather than the other way around. But it does rather put a new twist on the “affirm” (which we are required to do of the deviant aspirations of the gender-dysphoric) in affirmative action.
The legal obligation to “affirm gender” is another reeking Orwellism, of course. An ordinary person would assume that to “affirm gender” signifies one’s obligation to state clearly and truthfully what a person’s gender is: “Well, officer, I can affirm that, having seen the prodigious evidence in our junior high school locker room, the suspect caught in your security footage is a male.” But it currently means the opposite. It means to support the suspect’s belated fancy to deny what his team-mates have seen in the locker room, and either to have all the prodigious evidence thereof removed at the taxpayer’s expense, or else to retain it whilst still allowing him to compete in the Waukesha Wisconsin Women’s Weight-Lifting Final, or the Miss Greater Derry New Hampshire Beauty Contest—and win (see above). To “affirm gender” means to disaffirm gender.
Affirmative Action for Men
How far, I wonder, will progressives take this? Able-bodied self-identified quadriplegics medaling at the Paralympics? It’s foolhardy to jest about socio-sexual aberrancies that seem so absurd at present as to be unthinkable even in the distant future; for, whatever normal people satirize today, progressives realize tomorrow. Years ago I jocularly predicted the default “self-identified” defense for voyeurism: “Your honor, I was feeling like a girl at the time.” But the unthinkable future has already overtaken us, and rendered that exculpatory legal argument moot.
Under the human rights codes that have been recently expanded (for the umpteenth time) to grant non-discrimination protections for the latest victimological categories of “gender identity or expression”, anatomical males who self-identify as females are expediently demanding transfers to women’s prisons, accommodation in female college dorms, and admission to the girls’ bathrooms and changerooms in elementary and high schools, to all of which they are now entitled by law, and which have proven to be another hugely successful affirmative action program for risk-averse rapists, sexual harassers, and peeping toms, who had hitherto demonstrated only mediocre skills in their chosen professions. In Scotland, a serial rapist’s request to be sent to a women’s prison was duly granted, his discovery that he was a “she” having conveniently occurred in the interval betwixt conviction and sentencing.
In several famous cases, parents who expressed alarm that their school-age daughters were being sexually harassed, molested, or even raped in these new transgender safe zones, have been accused by their school boards of “hate speech”, discriminating against a “vulnerable minority”, and violating the rights of the “marginalized”, for which they have been violently removed, arrested, and charged under their federal, state, or provincial human rights codes. Which merely confirms what everyone already knows, as everyone is intended, for his own safety and protection, to know: that a normal person today is at far greater risk—is more vulnerable and unsafe—for criticizing the sexual aberrancies of the LGBT community than any of its members have ever been for openly practicing or proselytizing them.
Ordinarily, naked biological males invading women’s “safe spaces” would be vexatious to feminists; indeed, in that archaic, pre-progressive era in which sexual modesty was still respected, bathrooms, changerooms, and dorms were the original “safe zones”, unlike their current namesakes in which emotionally-hemophiliac college students are shielded from the triggering micro-aggressions suffered while studying the history of the misogynist Greeks or America’s slave-owning Founding Fathers. But whenever the perps have been, or claimed to have been, “transgendered”, the “Believe-the-Victim” imperative of feminism has been insouciantly set aside. (On the oppression scale, women have suffered a grievous loss of status of late.)
The old feminist shibboleth according to which “male culture is rape culture” demands that the safety of women be society’s highest priority; and under the puritanical gaze of the sisterhood, merely to look upon a woman to lust after her in one’s heart is to be guilty of sexual harassment. In our post-feminist, transgender age, however, it is apparently just fine for an anatomical male, “identifying” as a female, to expose his membra virilia in the presence of young girls—a matter, I suppose, of “gender expression”.
From Biological Fact to Subjective Feeling at Warp Speed
With all due respect to President Trump, Dr. Fauci, Pfizer, and the FDA, congratulations for Operation Warp Speed ought really to have gone to the Alphabet People for the development of their groundbreaking hypothesis of a pullulant multiplicity of “non-binary”, “self-identified” genders, and the unprecedented celerity with which they have convinced (or coerced) millions of people outside the psychiatric wards to accept it. As the theory goes, gender is a subjective and accordingly elective state of mind, having nothing to do with anatomy, genotypes, or the other cruelly unforgiving facts of biology. As a corollary, transitioning from the state in which one has been misgendered by nature to another of his choosing, by way of surgically amputating the genitalia of otherwise healthy pubescent and prepubescent children, is socially responsible, psychologically therapeutic, and—rather like the experimental mRNA vaccines—completely efficacious and safe. In the light of which, perhaps we should begin working on a vaccine that confers immunity against mass-minded credulity.
Once upon a time in the far distant past (around a decade ago), gender dysphoria was treated as a relatively rare but usually transient, or eminently curable, psychological disorder of adolescence. In the aeons of civilization before then, the gender-confused represented a tiny minority of children (certainly under one percent), almost all of whom outgrew or successfully integrated their contra-sexual fantasies through the natural processes of maturation (in the way that children generally outgrow infantile wishes and obsessions) to live normal, well-adjusted adult lives fully at peace with their native anatomy and biological sex. Currently, with more suicides amongst the transgendered than the gender-dysphoric whose infantile wishes have yet to be hormonally and surgically “affirmed”, and at least a quarter of those who have transitioned already succumbing to buyer’s remorse, the rapidity with which yet another medical experiment whose long-term adverse effects remain completely unknown—while the short-term harms are already evident—is yet further proof that the oleaginous mantra to “follow the science” is a suicidal admonition. The “scientific community”, as I recall, agonized for far longer about the potential dangers of cloning Dolly the sheep or eating genetically-modified cereals. But about GMO humans there has been absolutely no serious ethical or scientific debate.
The Alphabet People were not the inventors of the non-binary theory of human gender, by the way. In Plato’s Symposium, the comic playwright Aristophanes presents an amusing burlesque according to which the original and authentic form of man—personkind, I should say, as Justin Trudeau calls it—was perfectly spherical, with two faces, four arms, four legs, and three sexes (male-male; female-female, and a hybrid female-male.) It required a dull-witted reader indeed to take Aristophanes’ comic confabulation as an earnestly scholarly essay in anthropology, although given the rampant obesity that plagues the developed world, personkind may have restored at least one morphological feature of the playwright’s fictive human prototype; and we have certainly improved upon his myth in terms of the number of human genders (74, according to the last official count) that the “experts” now recognize. Unfit though they are for precreation, one has to give the LGBT crowd credit for obeying the biblical injunction to go forth and multiply, in this sense at least.
74 “self-identified” genders, along with their cognate pronouns, may be hard for us anti-science rubes to keep up with—is there a nursery-rhyme mnemonic, as for the merely 26-letter alphabet?–, but then few of us are experts, and even fewer are biologists. Not that biology has anything to do with gender, in spite of the inadvertent admission of a recent Supreme Court nominee.
When Ketanji Brown Jackson was asked by Marsha Blackburn to define a woman, it should hardly have escaped her auditors that her famous “I’m not a biologist” evasion implied clearly enough the assumption that gender is a question of biology, however abstruse. The fact that the gender-dysphoric demand and undergo the torturous ordeals of sex-reassignment is probably a sign that they themselves don’t believe their own propaganda.
If anatomy plays no dispositive role in gender, and a man is a woman because he thinks and feels it in the depths of his being, then there ought to be no reason why a self-identifying “woman” should not be content to persevere in the secret gnosis of her femininity. To put it in Pauline terms, if one is circumcised in the spirit, the merely external circumcision of the flesh is rendered superfluous. To suffer surgical amputations followed by surgical implantations in order to obtain the anatomical differentiae of the opposite sex does rather invidiate the notion that gender is merely an inner, subjective state of mind, and betray an acknowledgment, however inchoate, that it is immutably and intractably binary and biological.
Never mind. The LGBT gender theorists have once and for all dispelled that heteronormative myth, and who can doubt that they are the leading experts on the subject? Just look at the number of letters they have after their names.
Beauty contests, women’s sports, and transgender bathrooms aside, there is another reason why feminists might feel betrayed by their LGBT brothers, sisters (and 72 other non-binary siblings) within the intersectional continuum. It was feminists who first overthrew the age-old epistemological principle according to which, as Socrates explained, subjective perception could never rise above the caliginous realm of “opinion”, whereas knowledge and truth could only be discovered in the clear light of universally and independently verified objective realities. As the Believe-the-Women movement insisted, nonetheless, a man was guilty of rape merely because a woman knew it was so in the secret depths of her soul. Transgenderism has built upon feminism’s great epistemological leap forward (i.e., backward), without giving credit where credit is due. Transgenderism is the dwarf standing upon the shoulders of feminist giants.
That a child carrying x and y chromosomes and born with male genitalia must now be recognized as a female because, in his innermost being, he knows that wearing high heels is the expression of his authentic self, puts a whole new spin on the Cartesian syllogism, cogito ergo sum. Had England’s greatest poets lived in our period, we might be quoting Hamlet as having said that “there is nothing either male or female but thinking makes it so”, and Milton’s Satan might have rallied his defeated troops with the consolation that “the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a man of a woman and a woman of a man”. That PhDs in the humanities and social sciences, medical doctors, psychiatrists, legislators, corporate advertisers, and vast swaths of the population now believe that biological fact can be repealed by private caprice—even when it is the symptom of either adolescent immaturity or sexual deviancy—attests either to political expediency or a regression to a stage in the evolution of consciousness when the tribal medicine man professed to be, and was believed by the members of the tribe to be, the totem animal reincarnate. Meanwhile, not to believe in such infantile fantasies, in our “progressive” age, invites the charge of being a denier of science.
The Psychiatric Asylum
It is depressing to ponder the degree to which progressive orthodoxy has completely superannuated the perennial epistemological principle of objectivity (or perhaps I am just suffering from a deficiency of serotonin; see below). So far as I know, the lunatic asylums are still full of patients who “self-identify” as Napoleon, the Empress Anastasia, or chickens, but as a society we remain just sane enough to decline to “affirm” their subjective delusions, and if their caregivers are occasionally forced to go along with them, it is mainly in order not to get pecked.
Psychiatry is a test case in that it currently has its clay feet in both subjective and objective epistemological camps, and is thus severely conflicted (schizophrenic, one might say). Very recently, the psychological disorder du jour was anorexia nervosa, whose urgency was enjoined upon us by feminists who defined it as another symptom of patriarchal oppression—of men forcing upon women their male “stereotype” of ideal female beauty. Anorexia is no longer as modishly contagious (or ideologically triggering) as it once was, but I doubt that, faced with a five-foot-nine inch ninety-pound teenage girl, a psychotherapist would “affirm” her illness, and tell her that she is, indeed, grossly overweight and ought to continue to starve herself and induce post-prandial vomiting.
But psychiatry, terrorized by the inquisitors of progressive orthodoxy, has, like every other discipline of knowledge, made itself a servile instrument of LGBT propaganda. Homosexuality, once identified in the DSM as a psychological disorder, has now been expurgated therefrom by decree of the heresiologists of the Church of Progress, for whom the orthodox doctrine is that homosexuality is an innate and immutable genetic datum: by contrast, that is, to gender, which is but another “social construct”. It scarcely matters to the “science” of psychiatry that men and women manifest defining and empirically verifiable traits, such as distinctive genitalia and chromosomal variations, before and at birth; whereas homosexuality exhibits none of these genetic markers
That psychiatry has been suborned by progressive ideology is hardly surprising to those who have never recognized it as a science in the first place. (Its current depression-is-a-chemical-imbalance-in-the-brain theory seems to many of us to represent a scarcely discernible advance on the ancient and medieval aetiology of disease as an imbalance of the four humors, with an excess of black bile—the cause of melancholy—now updated as a deficiency of serotonin.) But with homosexuals and the transgendered having become society’s most recent and powerful official victim-groups (even as the State sanctifies their same-sex unions and pays for their sex-change operations), any attempt to counsel sufferers of these childhood disorders is construed as discrimination on the basis of “gender identity and expression”, and proscribed as what is now oxymoronically called “conversion therapy”.
“Conversion therapy” is a swell conceit, by the way. The word “conversion” is deliberately intended to evoke the archaic phenomenology of religion. Not the crazed religious ecstasy of the new parishioners of the Amalekite Church of Progress who sacrifice the sexual members of their children on the bloodstained altar of a woke Demiurge (though it’s too bad that William James did not live long enough to write about that in The Varieties of Religious Experience.) Rather, “conversion”, as in “conversion therapy”, is intended to remind us of the sins of religion as they are endlessly enumerated and lovingly described by such as the New Atheists.
By some strange coincidence, the sins of religion always boil down to the sins of Christianity, and so “conversion therapy” conjures memories of the conversion of Jews and Muslims in the Middle Ages, or of the happy indigenous of the New World, by fanatical Christian missionaries. Needless to say, in the New Atheist History of the World, all conversions to Christianity are by definition forced and, accordingly, insincere; and so too must any attempt by psychotherapists or parents to rescue immature and pre-rational tweens from permanently disfiguring themselves, physically and emotionally, be denounced as the equivalents of a sinister medieval proselytism.
It goes without saying that the word “conversion” in the progressive lexicon is, in any case, another reeking Orwellism. One doesn’t need to be a Latinist to know that the verb vertere, from which the English noun “conversion” is derived, means “to turn”, that is, to face in a new direction, to abandon the old path and embark on a novel one. Conversio is thus the prelude to transitio, and therefore a pretty good description of the decision of the gender-dysphoric to, in St. Paul’s phrase, “put off the old man”, that is, renounce the old biological body in which we were born. (O the ironies of propaganda!)
And so, to denominate as conversion therapy the admonition to the gender-confused to remain content with the status quo of their native anatomy is to call it by a name that, in the non-Orwellian order, applies more or less perfectly to the progressive priesthood’s ubiquitous proselytism of the vita nuova of transmutation into the opposite gender. Conversion therapy is precisely what the progressive State is guilty of. What the LGBT faithful are really worried about is apostasy.
Transgender Totalitarianism
As undisputed masters of the universe, progressives have evangelized and enforced transgender orthodoxy using all of the coercive modalities (censorship of “harmful misinformation”, deplatforming, block-monitor denunciations, heresy hunting, human rights kangaroo courts, State, media, and corporate propaganda, indoctrination in the schools, Maoist struggle sessions, sensitivity training, firings, professional decertification and re-education, swarmings and beatings by political mobs) that were perfected during the COVID despotism and are the habitual instruments of repression in primitive theocracies, banana-republic police states, and modern revolutionary totalitarian utopias. Not long ago, Canada made the U.S. news (for another of those unthinkable progressive novelties for which Canada usually makes the U.S. news) when a student at a Renfrew, Ontario Catholic high school—Catholics can rarely resist the siren-song of LGBT inclusion—was expelled for asserting that there were only two genders and criticizing his schools’ transgender bathroom policy, then later arrested for protesting outside the school’s grounds. American students have suffered similar fates for coming to school wearing tee shirts advertising their belief that there are only two genders or their preference for the pronouns in universal usage until a decade ago (“unsafe” for the “marginalized”; and evidently rather more unsafe for the normal), whereas expressions of pro-LGBT propaganda are permitted, encouraged, and ubiquitous in the very same schools. Teachers who have stumbled across and criticized transgender grooming manuals in the libraries and curricula of elementary schools have been suspended or decertified.
In Canada, legislation is already pending to create no-protest bubble zones (on the model of those that already exist around abortion clinics) outside of public libraries during their regular drag queen story hours for prepubescent children. A Christian protestor at such an event was recently swarmed, subjected to an incessant barrage of profanities screamed at him through a bullhorn, and physically beaten by a mob of LGBT fanatics; and though he put up no defense other than to stand his ground in silence, he was subsequently arrested by the police for inciting a riot.
Even by the standards of the antifa and BLM mobs, the demented rage provoked by the most innocent statements of the reality of biological gender or the merest deviation from transgender orthodoxy is unnerving. The more obvious the falsity of a proposition, one supposes, the greater the violence is required to defend it. The most feral and rabid of the verbal abuse and physical assaults have generally come from transgender “women”, behaviour which, to borrow a quip from Ben Shapiro, is very unladylike.
Throughout North America and Western Europe, children from as young as five are being systematically targeted by LGBT activist teachers, guidance counsellors, social workers, and other health care functionaries; and under the “protection” of the latter, many of the former have been secretly enrolled in and shepherded through the sex-reassignment mills without their parents’ knowledge. As a recent Babylon Bee spoof pointed out, in most jurisdictions, a minor child requires his parents’ legal consent to get a tattoo. But not for anything as innocuous as genital mutilation, in which the likelihood of future second thought, once maturity is achieved and the long-term harms become apparent, is considerably greater; not to mention that the process of reversal is rather more problematic.
In one of his innumerable recent social media interviews pushing “trans rights”, Joe Biden, Affirmer-in-Chief, demonstrated his infallible talent for seizing upon le mot juste when he lamented the lifelong emotional and psychological “scars” that would be suffered by children condemned to persevere in their birth bodies. But seriously, Joe, have you ever seen the scars that castration and mastectomy leave behind?
Meanwhile, the refusal of parents to “affirm” their gender-dysphoric child’s velleity to undergo a regime of puberty-blocking hormones and genital-mutilating surgeries has been denounced as “cruel”, “harmful”, and “detrimental to the child’s mental health”, all grounds for the invocation of “child welfare” services. If a parent, that is, tries to protect his own offspring from the most gruesome sort of child abuse—the kind that no enterprising videographer would dare to publish on the dark web—the progressive State treats him as a child abuser. Even with progressives’ long and impeccable record of completely inverting the meaning of words, calling the concern of a parent to spare his child the needless and sadistic ordeal of sex-reassignment “child abuse”—when subjecting a child to genital mutilation for the sake of hanging another scalp from the progressive mantel is the plain definition of the term—represents a new Orwellian high.
Progressive Tolerance
In spite of the LGBT victim narrative, adolescent gender confusion has always been treated with compassion, or at least tolerated, though probably not in the progressive sense of the word. For progressives, toleration invariably means normalization and celebration, and what must be normalized and celebrated is invariably the abnormal and repellent. Aside from the fact that “tolerance”, for progressives, really means intolerance towards any criticism of progressive dogma or opinion with which progressives disagree, the etymology of the word itself demonstrates the degree to which its meaning has been corrupted, and rendered morally corrupting.
“To tolerate” derives from the Latin verb tolero, “to bear, suffer, endure”; “tolerance” and “toleration” derive from tolerantia and toleratio, “bearing, suffering, enduring” and “capacity for endurance”. Essential to tolerance is thus the retention of a healthy residue of moral disapprobation. My family used to tolerate my crazy uncle’s repulsive table manners; we suffered them for the sake of domestic tranquility, but never thought they should be extolled as examples to the children in his presence. In its acceptance of the progressive desideratum of tolerance, our society has lost the essential civilizational capacity to feel moral disgust.
Toleration is, in any case, always a one-way street in the progressive autocracies of the West. Recently, LGBT street mobs have been mobilizing and chanting, “We’re queer, we’re here, and we’re coming for your children.” The majority of the heteronormative population (if it remains a majority) has demonstrated that it can live with the “human right” of the LBGT community to practice its “alternative lifestyles”, even including sacrificing its own children to the transgender god; but progressives display no reciprocal tolerance for the right of ordinary parents to bring up their children as heterosexual binary males or females. If fundamentalist Muslim immigrants marched through the streets of Western Europe chanting that they’re coming for the children of their infidel Christian hosts, not even the pieties of multiculturalism would be likely to shield them from nativist outrage. As it happens, it has been Muslims, by contrast to Christians, who have been the least intimidated by and most resistant to (disgusted, in the original sense of “tolerance”) LGBT moral bullying and proselytism, with the exception of “backwards” countries such as Hungary and Russia.
As in previous totalitarian epochs, most refuseniks have prudently chosen to keep their heads down and their mouths shut in order to preserve their jobs, feed their families, and stay out of jail. But that hardly explains the fact that a near majority, or at least a significant plurality, of the population seems to credit the lies and superstitions of transgenderism, and thus support State-sponsored measures to suppress and criminalize dissent. The most fanatical of these adherents are often parents with young children.
Sacrificing to the Transgender God
How do you sell parents on the joys of child genital mutilation? Don’t tell me that the ancient priests of Baal-Peor and Moloch had an easy time of it, especially when the sacred victims were the children of their own adult congregants. And yet to the woke parishioners of the New Amalekite Church of Progress, bringing their own children to the altar is an act of piety. Indeed, their child’s “transitioning” makes them proud, as Christian parents are proud whenever a new-born is baptismally transitioned unto new life. In the Church of Progress, transgenderism and abortion are the two highest sacraments, the rough analogues of baptism and the eucharist in Christianity.
It hardly matters to progressives that the wrath of the god of transgenderism is impossible to propitiate no matter how munificent the blood sacrifices one offers (which can be taken as a warning to conservatives as well progressives). At least when the priests of the Great Mother, Cybele, unmanned themselves every winter and cast their severed members against the image of the goddess, it was for a reason: to remind her of her reproductive duties and thus ensure the rebirth of nature in the spring, of which, by the way, there was recurrent and reliable empirical evidence. But the equally barbarous amputation of the healthy genitalia of gender-dysphoric children followed by the implantation of contra-sexual organs can never transform men into women or women into men, in spite of the fairy tales that a transgendered “man” can inseminate a woman, or that a transgendered “woman” can menstruate and conceive.
As long as we are on the subject of mythology, ancient and modern, it occurs to me that the only character in Greek myth who was transgendered was the blind seer Teiresias, and only as a punishment from Hera. Having been sentenced to live for consecutive seven-year periods in the body of a man and then a woman, Teiresias was later asked to settle a domestic argument between Hera and Zeus as to which sex enjoyed the greater pleasure during coitus. Currently a transgendered man wouldn’t have a clue as to how to answer that question, since medical experts have yet to figure out how to make a prosthetic membrum virile that reacts (as it is supposed to) to sexual stimulation. Be assured that they are spending vast sums of taxpayers’ money on research to solve this urgent medical problem, and when they do, perhaps they might return to searching for a cure for cancer.
The Revolutionary-Utopian Imagination and Transgender Make-Believe
How did we get here? Your guess is as good as mine. No one doubts that there has always been a small minority of children who sincerely felt that they had been “misgendered”. Today, practically every other little Johnny comes home from school demanding that he be surgically transmuted into a little Jennie. Once again, one can only admire the patient persistence and effectiveness of LGBT indoctrination in persuading children that “exploring” their authentic contra-sexual selves and reifying them in the flesh is cool and fun. The exponential explosion of the number of children whose spirits are suddenly at enmity with their flesh is proof enough that it is a function of propaganda and the nonconformist chique that has always been a symptom of ideological conformity. The transgender craze, that is, has little do with being “misgendered” by nature at birth, unless you believe that Dame Nature has been assigning genders more or less accurately for aeons but suddenly, about ten years ago, suffered a complete nervous breakdown and became as erratic as Lucy Ricardo at the candy factory conveyor belt.
The general infantilization of the culture has been a feature of the progressive phase of liberalism since the Aquarian Sixties, when we saw the wholesale abrogation of adult authority and its projection upon children, under the auspices of a neo-Romantic cult of youth and the concomitant assumption that anyone over the age of thirty was not to be trusted. The willingness of today’s parents to accede to their children’s immature avidities for gender reassignment suggests a resurgence of that flower-childish sentimental illusion.
Infantile exigencies are everywhere “affirmed” today in modern education, whose pedagogical telos is the inculcation of “self-esteem” (pride, that is, which in the original sense of the word was a cardinal vice), and in the narcissism that is the condition and raison d’être of social media. The reification by the State of a gender-confused youth’s infantile wish-fulfillment also happens to coincide with an era in history in which an unprecedented number of thirty-year-old pueri aeterni are still living in their parents’ basements playing video games.
Apparently, the revolutionary project of the hippie generation to volatilize the “imperfect” and “corrupt” moral norms, institutions, and social arrangements of the past in the solvents of postmodernist theory has now progressed to the last and most intractable of those atavisms in the form of birth. To progressives (as to the Gnostics, once again), birth is tragic, insofar as it is the sum and culmination of the historical process, and its malignant circumstances (poverty, race, family dysfunction, etc.) have always been blamed by liberals for society’s ills. It may be an irony that, though being born a woman has always been bemoaned as an insuperable disadvantage by progressives, traffic on the transgender highway is heaviest in the male to female lane. In any case, as a bequest from the human past, biological gender in general is an affront to the revolutionary-utopian imagination for which the history of the West is a miasmal swamp of oppression and prejudice and the future is an imaginary locus amoenus of infinite possibilities. In the words of John the Prophet, if you can “imagine” a world without war or religion, you can “imagine” a world without biological gender; and if you can imagine a world of perfect justice, equality, and peace, why can’t a man imagine himself as a woman?
Amongst the LGBT utopian imaginers, transvestitism–the LGBT form of infantile make-believe par excellence–has always been regarded as an intermediary step. The final step, self-identified gender, takes make-believe to the ultimate limits of its own logic. Transgenderism is transvestitism, well, on steroids: another miracle by which modern science fulfills our every fantasy, only it is outrageously expensive (and lucrative for its professional service providers), and its gruesome effects can never be déshabillé after an evening of wholesome drag-queen story-telling at the local library.
The Transgendered Civilizational Crash Site
However one tries to rationalize it, future chroniclers of historical episodes of collective psychosis and mass suggestibility will be, nonetheless, hard-pressed to explain how, in the 21st century, virtually all of the cynosures of power and influence in Western society—government, the judiciary, the human rights industry, the media, the academy, Big Tech, Big Business, Big League Sports, the military, the entertainment community, physicians and health care administrators, the writers and editors of respected scientific journals–could have been induced to believe and promote such obvious and pernicious nonsense. As I have said already, even parents have joined the New Progressive Church of Moloch, happily deferring to (“affirming”) the velleities of their gender-dysphoric pre-teenagers, the vast majority of whom would have overcome their delusions (or sexual deviancies) through the ordinary processes of adolescent maturation or psychological counseling—were it not currently against the law—and enrolling them instead in regimes of puberty blocking drugs and surgical disfigurements that are irreversible, and the long term physical and psychological effects of which remain completely unknown.
It’s all worked out so well for the quadruple-vaxxed twenty-something athletes at the peak of fitness who are developing heart disease in record numbers and dropping like flies on the athletic fields; so what could possibly go wrong with massive infusions of synthetic hormones and double mastectomies? I’ve heard the transgender experiment compared to flying the plane while building it; a better analogy might be flying the plane while taking it apart. With more and more transgendered adults regretting their adolescent fancies, one wonders how the pieces of the de-transitioning can ever be reassembled at the crash site.
Recently, Vladimir Putin has publicly derided the self-inflicted decline of the West into moral degeneracy, epistemological superstition, intellectual dishonesty, and psychological derangement, and promised to tolerate them in his own fashion—that is, not to get in the way of the West’s determination to destroy itself. When so basic and obvious a fact as biological gender is denied and sacrificed on the altar of ideology, it does seem rather as if Truth itself cannot stand. And when children are sacrificed alongside it, there is good reason to believe that the madness of the progressive State has reached a point beyond which no therapy, political resistance, or moral or religious reawakening could be sufficient to restore it to sanity.