“If you traded one bubble for another, you are not free.” Yes exactly. The Democratic Party lied about so much since 2016 that for many people, it’s become easier to trust the Republicans. The Democratic Party denies reality and punishes people for speaking basic universal truths, such as the fact that men cannot be women. It’s not just gender- it was the Covid lockdowns, DEI, and the Border. They’ve become the party of dystopia. It’s more comfortable to side with Republicans for this reason, but we can’t afford to become complacent and allow the woke right to continue their destructive conquests. We need sane, critically-thinking and dissenting Democrats now more than ever. Really fantastic essay, hits the nail on the head. Thank you! 🙌
Incredible video — a little girl chastising a doctor for observing a baby's sex.
Does it ever strike you as weird that there is, in fact, no movement to change the supposedly evil and wrong "assignment" of sex at birth at the level of medical institutions? Gender has seeped into everything and hospitals, midwives, and medical associations are deep into it, yet the closest they've come to changing that practice is allowing new parents to actively request an X on the birth certificate. But all their rhetoric suggests that doctors should be instructed not to observe the sex at all; that parents should be told their babies can't really be said to have a known sex; that hospitals should refuse to record this harmful and inaccurate information. (I'm not straw-manning; I used to be an activist and my compatriots agreed with this.)
So why is this the one area in which the movement seems to show restraint?
Perhaps they fear that that level of in-your-face surrealism might cause people to break with "Western medicine" before they have a chance to get their hooks in the kid.
But that's rather conspiratorial...do recall that "trans" depends on people having a "gender" that can be "wrong." -- if there were nothing on the birth certificate, then no one would be "in the wrong body," and no one would need "trans medicine."
Individual believers can often be led down the garden path on the subject, because they don't realize the internal contradiction there. The decision-makers are more cunning.
On the contrary, everyone without a designation on their birth certificate would be ripe for siphoning into the trans cult. "Now that you're seven, it's time to pick your gender" --sort of like a First Communion or other religious ritual for chlldren. It's time to make it IMPOSSIBLE to change a birth certificate. Any medical professional (or indeed any parent) can look at a newborn and determine its sex. In fact pre-natal procedures can reveal a child's sex! Sex can even be determined prior to implantation during IVF procedures! It's insane that the generation who gave us "gender reveal" parties are now saying that gender is something children can choose.
I'm very aware that technicalities of logic will not prevent our barbaric "medical industry" from pushing these "services" on whoever they can.
The next thing to watch out for is "cisgender affirmation surgery" -- that will be what they call breast implants and chin prosthetics before long, so that they can make insurance companies & the government pay for them.
Oh, there’s already memes going around with pictures of Elon Musk before and after plastic surgery and making the point that HE got (cis)gender-affirming care so how can the R side object to (trans)gender-affirming care?
I have thought about that — the current orthodox definition of trans involves a mismatch between one's gender identity and one's "sex assigned at birth," not one's sex — so without a sex assigned at birth, technically no one would be trans. People would need to refer to actual bodies to explain transness, and we can't have that (or at least activists bent on sex denial can't have that; clearly there are trans people who are fine with it). So while the "assignment" of sex is nominally harmful and inaccurate, it's actually key to the whole project as currently understood. But still... weird.
It’s not just “weird” — it’s exactly where the whole trans concept falls apart. “Trans” is a meaningful concept only if there is something real (actual sex, easily identified at or even before birth) against which to contrast one’s “sense” of “actually” “being” a different sex (gender). (Sorry for all the scare quotes, it’s just hard to describe any of this in a coherent way — because it isn’t!)
As far as I understand, it *is* happening but behind the scenes, by stealth. Activists are playing the long game, targeting the bodies that set standards for medical software or the companies that sell the software implementing these standards. And the medical admin staff only find out about the changes after a software update, when they see e.g. that "Sex: M/F" has been replaced by "Gender identity" with a multitude of options. https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-gender-harmony/fhirgenderharmony.html
“I have no idea whom to believe” is where I am right now. For the same reasons: mainstream media lies and distorts about gender, how much are they lying about and distorting the Trump administration actions? Trump’s hyperbole is not information but his weapon—so what is actually going on?
Is Trump’s aggression going to discredit the truth and undermine support for the good things? Or is burning it all down—the good stuff along with the bad stuff—the most effective way forward?
I have talked to my Democratic family about how bad many Democratic policies are (gender, DEI, COVID), but their terror of Trump’s trade war and DOGE stuff seems to outweigh it all. Who cares about gender when we might be heading to world war or economic collapse is their response. I don’t know how to respond to that—I’m not a Trump apologist but I don’t know that such disasters are actually looming.
Well, we do know a lot of bad things that the Trump administration has actually done. I do still trust the reporting that certain things happened (and some of them are visible to our own eyes or easily verifiable in public documents), and I don't need the NYTimes opinion page to judge them for myself. It's bad. It's as bad or worse than people who care about the rule of law and international alliances warned it would be.
The fact that they actually do so many bad things unfortunately undermines the effectiveness of the Executive Orders we support. Call it TDS, but I can understand why people who witness the cruelty and corruption and vindictiveness of this administration have a hard time understanding that their positions on gender are not driven by cruelty and vindictiveness (or maybe they are - Trump doesn't actually care about women or children or scientific truth - but his bad motives don't automatically make the EOs wrong). It takes a truly independent mind to understand that we need to judge things independently of who the messenger is or what his motives are. Independent thinkers are unfortunately pretty rare, as humans are tribal by nature.
Yes, there is a big problem conflating message with messenger. I wonder, though, how much of what Trump is doing is radically different from what others have done in the past. Clinton fired tens of thousands of federal workers (but then they became contractors). Churchill radically restructured trade and currency (but during a global depression).
Is the problem Trump’s manner and tone? Is the problem *how* he does them or is the problem the actions themselves? Is his open vindictiveness wrong or are his efforts to restructure things wrong? Is he truly an enemy of the rule of law or is he an enemy of bad laws? Or both? It amazes me that ten years into the Trump era I’m still unsure.
Those are false equivalencies fed to you by Trump apologists. Clinton didn't fire entire departments, or half of departments, with no notice. He didn't shut down all foreign aid programs and leave their employees stranded in conflict zones with no access to their email. Nobody ever suddenly cut off the AIDS treatment of people in Africa, or ended studies of experimental vaginal inserts so abruptly the women couldn't even get the devices removed.
No president has ever pardoned a whole group of violent offenders who committed those violent offenses in his name. No president has abruptly revoked the security clearances and security details of former officials who had crossed him in the past, leaving them without protections from the violent offenders he just freed and others who may want to take revenge in his name.
No president has publicly humiliated the president of a foreign country that is currently under attack by what used to be a US adversary, or called into question our commitment to Article 5 of NATO (which, if I may remind you, was only ever invoked to help the US defend itself against attack). No vice president has ever given a speech as arrogant, ignorant and obnoxious as Vance did at the Munich Security Conference, leaving the audience "frozen" (but also painfully amused at the absurdity of the spectacle), as one person I know who was there described it to me. No president has ever abruptly cut off intelligence sharing with an ally as Trump did with Ukraine. No president has ever installed someone as DNI who has in the past demonstrated support for genocidal foreign dictators, and could never get a security clearance under a normal administration.
No president has ever revoked the security clearances of major law firms just because their lawyers crossed him in the past, in an effort to destroy their business and undermine their work on public corruption cases.
I could go on. There is so much that is unprecedented, and it's not just a matter of style. Many of his actions are illegal and will be reversed by the courts, including his "own" Supreme Court (which he has now, predictably, taken to maligning as well). It's really not that hard to see, even if one has lost trust in the mainstream media. Don't fall prey to the nihilism MAGA supporters are trying to foster.
People forget, I haven’t. I’m grateful you took the time to remind everyone here. This administration is all about inflicting trauma and Vought who wrote Project 2025 is all about doing that to the world.
The problem is that the people in charge of the cuts are straight-up dumb. Whatever good or bad intentions they may have, they're too dumb to pursue them effectively. They're also too cowardly to mess with the really big stuff, like healthcare, social security or defense. So all they can do is fire some "bureaucrats" and cut various small-potato grants.
This would all be setting up a perfectly-normal swing back to the Democrats in 2/4 years, except for...you know...the commitment to child castration...which is getting to be such an issue that no one even wants to lead this party.
The real "scandal" with Biden wasn't some cover-up -- it was that, whatever the state of his faculties, nobody wanted to run against him in the actual primary. It should've been easy, if he really "wasn't all there." But no one wanted to, because running for the Democratic nomination now means defending the indefensible, or being swarmed. Ms Harris had to try to carry the torch because she was VP -- but in four years, someone will actually have to stand up of their own accord. So far, it's looking like literally no one wants to. Maybe Elissa Slotkin will. I'm hanging my hat on that hope for now.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is when a reader who has identified wrong information in one news story about a topic she knows about then forgets that when reading news stories about other topics. Yes, we need to resist such amnesia and question more news coverage!
Even before all this trans stuff, I had noticed that popular press stories about my area of professional expertise were often inaccurate or simplistic at best, and often presented with a clear ideological slant. I’ve seen this presented as a thought experiment: what are the chances that the media are wrong/biased just in that one area you happen to know a lot about, but accurate/fair on all other topics? A sobering thought.
That "educational" video is insane. It comes across as a desperate attempt to uphold gender ideology while disavowing gender stereotypes. They don't seem to realize that one is impossible without the other, and that the message they are trying to convey in this video defies basic logic and is inherently self-contradictory. If one didn't know better, one could be led to think that gender ideology is just about endorsing gender non-conformity, and not a path to medicalization, which they studiously avoid to mention in this little innocent-seeming piece of propaganda.
Yes! That cartoon is like a twisted echo of the baby skit from “Free to Be - You and Me”: https://youtu.be/VUpLiJfV4_A?feature=shared except that the earlier one lands on the correct conclusion — that you CAN tell a baby’s sex by what’s under the diaper.
I'm interested in "how we got to how we got here" -- that is, why did all these people & institutions knuckle under so quickly to such obvious malarkey?
"Genderism" didn't fall out of the sky one day. The root of it is "psychology" - the notion that the ineffable psyche can be studied scientifically. (One can study observable behavior, but the stuff of thought is not a thing known to science.) When you accept an untruth like this, anything can be made to follow.
I know that this seems like a rather grander claim than is necessary - but we can look at the question practically. The success rate of the "psychologist" in treating a simple thing like overeating is basically zero -- yet they claim to be able to treat far subtler issues like "executive dysfunction" and being "born in the wrong body." It's like if Newton's system had predicted apples fell up and people nevertheless assumed it would explain the motion of planets.
It is a religion founded on magical beliefs. It's very difficult to extricate people from harmful-yet-comforting beliefs -- all the more so when those beliefs call themselves a science. But I think one must at least try to find "how we got to how we got here," or we'll be back here real fast even if we get out of here.
Lisa shares the same concerns I have -- that even though what Trump is doing is horrible, Democrats won't be able to stop it because too many Democratic positions are impossible to defend.
Unlike some of the folks below, I have no trouble seeing that Trump is a unique threat: he's deporting people with green cards because of their speech, and is walking away from NATO at a time when Russia is controlled by a murderous dictator.
But it is crazy for Democrats to push theories like 'you can have a girl brain in a boy's body' to young children. Fundamentally, it is wrong to teach children or really, anyone, that you can change your body from one sex to another, because well, you can't. And of course a child can't really give informed consent to a lifetime of difficult medical interventions. Also, if I hear 'pregnant person' or 'chest feeding' again, I'm going to barf.
I'm also worried that Democrats haven't really moved away from race essentialism, this whole idea that your ethnicity defines your level of oppression and there's nothing you can do about it.
I think for a Democratic candidate to win in purple states, they're going to have to explicitly define a different set of values and positions, and condemn this nonsense. And right now, I don't see anyone doing that. Keeping your head down and hoping for the best is a recipe for another series of electoral defeats.
Bravo, Lisa! I plan to send this essay to the one and only friend among my group of progressive friends here in NYC who has opened her mind enough to hear another perspective on all things trans. I sent her your interview with the Liberal Patriot and she was very positively disposed to your progressive bona fides and your nuanced analysis.
I think the key is not to identify too closely with any group, party, religion, etc.. I am just me and I try to take each issue as it comes (a la carte, one might say).
I have very clear opinions on some issues. Some issues jump out at me and stab me in the heart. Gender stuff is one such example. I, like so many "ROGD" parents in this, have my honorary PhD in this subject. In my view, this is an issue where it is extremely clear what is right and wrong. Nobody is born in the wrong body, men do not belong in women-only spaces, detransitioners (of which there are many, and the number is growing) need compassion, and vulnerable teens and young adults should never be encouraged to hate their bodies, deny the reality of their bodies, and harm their bodies with chemicals and surgeries. Everyone should be accepted for who they are and atypical gender expressions are absolutely fine.
Some issues really do seem obvious and one-sided (like January 6th - just wrong).
On other issues, I admit to not knowing enough to have a strong opinion, at least not on the overall subject. For instance, Hamas are terrorists and October 7th was a horrible attack and warranted a response by Israel, but I am much less clear on exactly what is going on in Israel aside from that event and the ensuing war. Exactly how much unfairness to Palestinians living in Gaza there has been is a big question for me (perhaps due solely to my own ignorance). Is a two-state solution the answer? I think so, but I could be wrong.
As for Trump, there have been attempts at Unconstitutional things like taking away citizenship from children who were born here to illegal immigrants. Even if someone thinks that's a good idea (I don't), it would have to go through the process of changing the Constitution to re-define "citizens" for future-born babies as not including those born to illegal immigrants on US soil. Taking away citizenship from existing citizens is just wrong! That having been said, like Lisa, I am not certain of some of Trump's actions because I'm not sure who to trust. I feel like I'm not getting the full story, even on Musk (although I have heard about some wrongful firings and other wrong-doing that does seem clear!!). I wish there were a way to know more, but I can't find one.
I won't protest something unless I have a clear idea about it. I will protest harming young vulnerable people and putting men in women's spaces every day of the week. As for Trump, I am unhappy with much of what I'm hearing, but I await further information to draw firm conclusions on some of his actions.
Believe it or not, I find that video encouraging, because it admits the difference between sex and gender. It even confirms that sex is of the body, which is what we gender-critical folks are always trying to say, and which many want to deny.
By the way, the linked article cracked me up by referring to the director of transgender care at Whitman-Walker Health as 'britt walsh." Apparently, you not only get to choose your own pronouns, but you can even force writers to style their work like an E.E. Cummings poem.
Thank you so much for this commentary. You were able to express, what I just couldn’t- I couldn’t understand why this long time leftist protester who had participated in countless non-violent protests and even had little qualms about getting arrested when my sense of justice had been violated has absolutely no currant urge to take to the streets. Thank you for your bravery. I have none.
“…. the windy tundras of the politically homeless”…. How I love that line and image. I will meet you there.
Interesting that US schools are using a Canadian cartoon to teach gender ideology. (I zoomed in to confirm the maple leaves on the bills in the cash register scene, but needn’t have bothered — the credits show it’s a CBC production.)
And it’s painful how close the cartoon gets to what the message *should* be. It’s absolutely true that our genitalia shouldn’t determine what toys we play with! (Well, kids’ toys, anyway…) But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we were already being taught THAT back in the ‘70s with “Free to Be - You and Me.” That also had a bit about babies, and mismatches between gender stereotypes and an individual’s sex. But the bottom line (no pun intended) was that the babies’ sex was indeed evident by what was under their diapers. The activists would want you to believe that we’ve learned something more about sex (gender?) since then — but what on earth might that be?
“If you traded one bubble for another, you are not free.” Yes exactly. The Democratic Party lied about so much since 2016 that for many people, it’s become easier to trust the Republicans. The Democratic Party denies reality and punishes people for speaking basic universal truths, such as the fact that men cannot be women. It’s not just gender- it was the Covid lockdowns, DEI, and the Border. They’ve become the party of dystopia. It’s more comfortable to side with Republicans for this reason, but we can’t afford to become complacent and allow the woke right to continue their destructive conquests. We need sane, critically-thinking and dissenting Democrats now more than ever. Really fantastic essay, hits the nail on the head. Thank you! 🙌
yes, 100%
This captures my feelings exactly, but I didn't have the words to say it so articulately. Thank you.
Incredible video — a little girl chastising a doctor for observing a baby's sex.
Does it ever strike you as weird that there is, in fact, no movement to change the supposedly evil and wrong "assignment" of sex at birth at the level of medical institutions? Gender has seeped into everything and hospitals, midwives, and medical associations are deep into it, yet the closest they've come to changing that practice is allowing new parents to actively request an X on the birth certificate. But all their rhetoric suggests that doctors should be instructed not to observe the sex at all; that parents should be told their babies can't really be said to have a known sex; that hospitals should refuse to record this harmful and inaccurate information. (I'm not straw-manning; I used to be an activist and my compatriots agreed with this.)
So why is this the one area in which the movement seems to show restraint?
Perhaps they fear that that level of in-your-face surrealism might cause people to break with "Western medicine" before they have a chance to get their hooks in the kid.
But that's rather conspiratorial...do recall that "trans" depends on people having a "gender" that can be "wrong." -- if there were nothing on the birth certificate, then no one would be "in the wrong body," and no one would need "trans medicine."
Individual believers can often be led down the garden path on the subject, because they don't realize the internal contradiction there. The decision-makers are more cunning.
On the contrary, everyone without a designation on their birth certificate would be ripe for siphoning into the trans cult. "Now that you're seven, it's time to pick your gender" --sort of like a First Communion or other religious ritual for chlldren. It's time to make it IMPOSSIBLE to change a birth certificate. Any medical professional (or indeed any parent) can look at a newborn and determine its sex. In fact pre-natal procedures can reveal a child's sex! Sex can even be determined prior to implantation during IVF procedures! It's insane that the generation who gave us "gender reveal" parties are now saying that gender is something children can choose.
I'm very aware that technicalities of logic will not prevent our barbaric "medical industry" from pushing these "services" on whoever they can.
The next thing to watch out for is "cisgender affirmation surgery" -- that will be what they call breast implants and chin prosthetics before long, so that they can make insurance companies & the government pay for them.
Oh, there’s already memes going around with pictures of Elon Musk before and after plastic surgery and making the point that HE got (cis)gender-affirming care so how can the R side object to (trans)gender-affirming care?
I have thought about that — the current orthodox definition of trans involves a mismatch between one's gender identity and one's "sex assigned at birth," not one's sex — so without a sex assigned at birth, technically no one would be trans. People would need to refer to actual bodies to explain transness, and we can't have that (or at least activists bent on sex denial can't have that; clearly there are trans people who are fine with it). So while the "assignment" of sex is nominally harmful and inaccurate, it's actually key to the whole project as currently understood. But still... weird.
It’s not just “weird” — it’s exactly where the whole trans concept falls apart. “Trans” is a meaningful concept only if there is something real (actual sex, easily identified at or even before birth) against which to contrast one’s “sense” of “actually” “being” a different sex (gender). (Sorry for all the scare quotes, it’s just hard to describe any of this in a coherent way — because it isn’t!)
As far as I understand, it *is* happening but behind the scenes, by stealth. Activists are playing the long game, targeting the bodies that set standards for medical software or the companies that sell the software implementing these standards. And the medical admin staff only find out about the changes after a software update, when they see e.g. that "Sex: M/F" has been replaced by "Gender identity" with a multitude of options. https://build.fhir.org/ig/HL7/fhir-gender-harmony/fhirgenderharmony.html
Pitch perfect, Lisa. Thank you. I have restacked.
“I have no idea whom to believe” is where I am right now. For the same reasons: mainstream media lies and distorts about gender, how much are they lying about and distorting the Trump administration actions? Trump’s hyperbole is not information but his weapon—so what is actually going on?
Is Trump’s aggression going to discredit the truth and undermine support for the good things? Or is burning it all down—the good stuff along with the bad stuff—the most effective way forward?
I have talked to my Democratic family about how bad many Democratic policies are (gender, DEI, COVID), but their terror of Trump’s trade war and DOGE stuff seems to outweigh it all. Who cares about gender when we might be heading to world war or economic collapse is their response. I don’t know how to respond to that—I’m not a Trump apologist but I don’t know that such disasters are actually looming.
Well, we do know a lot of bad things that the Trump administration has actually done. I do still trust the reporting that certain things happened (and some of them are visible to our own eyes or easily verifiable in public documents), and I don't need the NYTimes opinion page to judge them for myself. It's bad. It's as bad or worse than people who care about the rule of law and international alliances warned it would be.
The fact that they actually do so many bad things unfortunately undermines the effectiveness of the Executive Orders we support. Call it TDS, but I can understand why people who witness the cruelty and corruption and vindictiveness of this administration have a hard time understanding that their positions on gender are not driven by cruelty and vindictiveness (or maybe they are - Trump doesn't actually care about women or children or scientific truth - but his bad motives don't automatically make the EOs wrong). It takes a truly independent mind to understand that we need to judge things independently of who the messenger is or what his motives are. Independent thinkers are unfortunately pretty rare, as humans are tribal by nature.
Yes, there is a big problem conflating message with messenger. I wonder, though, how much of what Trump is doing is radically different from what others have done in the past. Clinton fired tens of thousands of federal workers (but then they became contractors). Churchill radically restructured trade and currency (but during a global depression).
Is the problem Trump’s manner and tone? Is the problem *how* he does them or is the problem the actions themselves? Is his open vindictiveness wrong or are his efforts to restructure things wrong? Is he truly an enemy of the rule of law or is he an enemy of bad laws? Or both? It amazes me that ten years into the Trump era I’m still unsure.
Those are false equivalencies fed to you by Trump apologists. Clinton didn't fire entire departments, or half of departments, with no notice. He didn't shut down all foreign aid programs and leave their employees stranded in conflict zones with no access to their email. Nobody ever suddenly cut off the AIDS treatment of people in Africa, or ended studies of experimental vaginal inserts so abruptly the women couldn't even get the devices removed.
No president has ever pardoned a whole group of violent offenders who committed those violent offenses in his name. No president has abruptly revoked the security clearances and security details of former officials who had crossed him in the past, leaving them without protections from the violent offenders he just freed and others who may want to take revenge in his name.
No president has publicly humiliated the president of a foreign country that is currently under attack by what used to be a US adversary, or called into question our commitment to Article 5 of NATO (which, if I may remind you, was only ever invoked to help the US defend itself against attack). No vice president has ever given a speech as arrogant, ignorant and obnoxious as Vance did at the Munich Security Conference, leaving the audience "frozen" (but also painfully amused at the absurdity of the spectacle), as one person I know who was there described it to me. No president has ever abruptly cut off intelligence sharing with an ally as Trump did with Ukraine. No president has ever installed someone as DNI who has in the past demonstrated support for genocidal foreign dictators, and could never get a security clearance under a normal administration.
No president has ever revoked the security clearances of major law firms just because their lawyers crossed him in the past, in an effort to destroy their business and undermine their work on public corruption cases.
I could go on. There is so much that is unprecedented, and it's not just a matter of style. Many of his actions are illegal and will be reversed by the courts, including his "own" Supreme Court (which he has now, predictably, taken to maligning as well). It's really not that hard to see, even if one has lost trust in the mainstream media. Don't fall prey to the nihilism MAGA supporters are trying to foster.
You're right. I undersold his horrors. Some of it is easy to see!
People forget, I haven’t. I’m grateful you took the time to remind everyone here. This administration is all about inflicting trauma and Vought who wrote Project 2025 is all about doing that to the world.
Okay, good points! Thanks for the detailed response.
The problem is that the people in charge of the cuts are straight-up dumb. Whatever good or bad intentions they may have, they're too dumb to pursue them effectively. They're also too cowardly to mess with the really big stuff, like healthcare, social security or defense. So all they can do is fire some "bureaucrats" and cut various small-potato grants.
This would all be setting up a perfectly-normal swing back to the Democrats in 2/4 years, except for...you know...the commitment to child castration...which is getting to be such an issue that no one even wants to lead this party.
The real "scandal" with Biden wasn't some cover-up -- it was that, whatever the state of his faculties, nobody wanted to run against him in the actual primary. It should've been easy, if he really "wasn't all there." But no one wanted to, because running for the Democratic nomination now means defending the indefensible, or being swarmed. Ms Harris had to try to carry the torch because she was VP -- but in four years, someone will actually have to stand up of their own accord. So far, it's looking like literally no one wants to. Maybe Elissa Slotkin will. I'm hanging my hat on that hope for now.
The problem is not Trump's tone, no; the problem is he's illegally impounding federal funds.
The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is when a reader who has identified wrong information in one news story about a topic she knows about then forgets that when reading news stories about other topics. Yes, we need to resist such amnesia and question more news coverage!
I suffer from that! Still read the NYT every day.
Even before all this trans stuff, I had noticed that popular press stories about my area of professional expertise were often inaccurate or simplistic at best, and often presented with a clear ideological slant. I’ve seen this presented as a thought experiment: what are the chances that the media are wrong/biased just in that one area you happen to know a lot about, but accurate/fair on all other topics? A sobering thought.
Gosh, what is wrong with people?
Who the hell cares about economics when half the country is psychotically committed to castrating children?
That "educational" video is insane. It comes across as a desperate attempt to uphold gender ideology while disavowing gender stereotypes. They don't seem to realize that one is impossible without the other, and that the message they are trying to convey in this video defies basic logic and is inherently self-contradictory. If one didn't know better, one could be led to think that gender ideology is just about endorsing gender non-conformity, and not a path to medicalization, which they studiously avoid to mention in this little innocent-seeming piece of propaganda.
Yes! That cartoon is like a twisted echo of the baby skit from “Free to Be - You and Me”: https://youtu.be/VUpLiJfV4_A?feature=shared except that the earlier one lands on the correct conclusion — that you CAN tell a baby’s sex by what’s under the diaper.
I'm interested in "how we got to how we got here" -- that is, why did all these people & institutions knuckle under so quickly to such obvious malarkey?
"Genderism" didn't fall out of the sky one day. The root of it is "psychology" - the notion that the ineffable psyche can be studied scientifically. (One can study observable behavior, but the stuff of thought is not a thing known to science.) When you accept an untruth like this, anything can be made to follow.
I know that this seems like a rather grander claim than is necessary - but we can look at the question practically. The success rate of the "psychologist" in treating a simple thing like overeating is basically zero -- yet they claim to be able to treat far subtler issues like "executive dysfunction" and being "born in the wrong body." It's like if Newton's system had predicted apples fell up and people nevertheless assumed it would explain the motion of planets.
It is a religion founded on magical beliefs. It's very difficult to extricate people from harmful-yet-comforting beliefs -- all the more so when those beliefs call themselves a science. But I think one must at least try to find "how we got to how we got here," or we'll be back here real fast even if we get out of here.
Lisa shares the same concerns I have -- that even though what Trump is doing is horrible, Democrats won't be able to stop it because too many Democratic positions are impossible to defend.
Unlike some of the folks below, I have no trouble seeing that Trump is a unique threat: he's deporting people with green cards because of their speech, and is walking away from NATO at a time when Russia is controlled by a murderous dictator.
But it is crazy for Democrats to push theories like 'you can have a girl brain in a boy's body' to young children. Fundamentally, it is wrong to teach children or really, anyone, that you can change your body from one sex to another, because well, you can't. And of course a child can't really give informed consent to a lifetime of difficult medical interventions. Also, if I hear 'pregnant person' or 'chest feeding' again, I'm going to barf.
I'm also worried that Democrats haven't really moved away from race essentialism, this whole idea that your ethnicity defines your level of oppression and there's nothing you can do about it.
I think for a Democratic candidate to win in purple states, they're going to have to explicitly define a different set of values and positions, and condemn this nonsense. And right now, I don't see anyone doing that. Keeping your head down and hoping for the best is a recipe for another series of electoral defeats.
Bravo, Lisa! I plan to send this essay to the one and only friend among my group of progressive friends here in NYC who has opened her mind enough to hear another perspective on all things trans. I sent her your interview with the Liberal Patriot and she was very positively disposed to your progressive bona fides and your nuanced analysis.
I think the key is not to identify too closely with any group, party, religion, etc.. I am just me and I try to take each issue as it comes (a la carte, one might say).
I have very clear opinions on some issues. Some issues jump out at me and stab me in the heart. Gender stuff is one such example. I, like so many "ROGD" parents in this, have my honorary PhD in this subject. In my view, this is an issue where it is extremely clear what is right and wrong. Nobody is born in the wrong body, men do not belong in women-only spaces, detransitioners (of which there are many, and the number is growing) need compassion, and vulnerable teens and young adults should never be encouraged to hate their bodies, deny the reality of their bodies, and harm their bodies with chemicals and surgeries. Everyone should be accepted for who they are and atypical gender expressions are absolutely fine.
Some issues really do seem obvious and one-sided (like January 6th - just wrong).
On other issues, I admit to not knowing enough to have a strong opinion, at least not on the overall subject. For instance, Hamas are terrorists and October 7th was a horrible attack and warranted a response by Israel, but I am much less clear on exactly what is going on in Israel aside from that event and the ensuing war. Exactly how much unfairness to Palestinians living in Gaza there has been is a big question for me (perhaps due solely to my own ignorance). Is a two-state solution the answer? I think so, but I could be wrong.
As for Trump, there have been attempts at Unconstitutional things like taking away citizenship from children who were born here to illegal immigrants. Even if someone thinks that's a good idea (I don't), it would have to go through the process of changing the Constitution to re-define "citizens" for future-born babies as not including those born to illegal immigrants on US soil. Taking away citizenship from existing citizens is just wrong! That having been said, like Lisa, I am not certain of some of Trump's actions because I'm not sure who to trust. I feel like I'm not getting the full story, even on Musk (although I have heard about some wrongful firings and other wrong-doing that does seem clear!!). I wish there were a way to know more, but I can't find one.
I won't protest something unless I have a clear idea about it. I will protest harming young vulnerable people and putting men in women's spaces every day of the week. As for Trump, I am unhappy with much of what I'm hearing, but I await further information to draw firm conclusions on some of his actions.
Excellent post.
Believe it or not, I find that video encouraging, because it admits the difference between sex and gender. It even confirms that sex is of the body, which is what we gender-critical folks are always trying to say, and which many want to deny.
By the way, the linked article cracked me up by referring to the director of transgender care at Whitman-Walker Health as 'britt walsh." Apparently, you not only get to choose your own pronouns, but you can even force writers to style their work like an E.E. Cummings poem.
Looking forward to reading your new book, Lisa!
Excellent post, Lisa.
I will share with my friends who haven't unfriended me.
Thank you so much for this commentary. You were able to express, what I just couldn’t- I couldn’t understand why this long time leftist protester who had participated in countless non-violent protests and even had little qualms about getting arrested when my sense of justice had been violated has absolutely no currant urge to take to the streets. Thank you for your bravery. I have none.
“…. the windy tundras of the politically homeless”…. How I love that line and image. I will meet you there.
Interesting that US schools are using a Canadian cartoon to teach gender ideology. (I zoomed in to confirm the maple leaves on the bills in the cash register scene, but needn’t have bothered — the credits show it’s a CBC production.)
And it’s painful how close the cartoon gets to what the message *should* be. It’s absolutely true that our genitalia shouldn’t determine what toys we play with! (Well, kids’ toys, anyway…) But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, we were already being taught THAT back in the ‘70s with “Free to Be - You and Me.” That also had a bit about babies, and mismatches between gender stereotypes and an individual’s sex. But the bottom line (no pun intended) was that the babies’ sex was indeed evident by what was under their diapers. The activists would want you to believe that we’ve learned something more about sex (gender?) since then — but what on earth might that be?