By now, if you are politically active, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen the memes:
The picture shows a woman in her 20s, wearing a dress, looking feminine and lovely. The caption is usually some brief personal account, like—I was a tomboy when I was a kid. Thank God no one made me cut off my breasts.
We’ve been looking at the trans issue from many different angles, but there may be one we’re missing. First, it is important to recognize that there is a small number of core principles that all iterations of the left have in common:
Their distributive objective (which is also their primary objective and raison d’être) is to engineer a chosen distribution pattern: in simple language, they want to redistribute property from some to others in order to (attempt to) equalize outcomes. In even simpler language—they want to take your stuff.
In order to justify this, they begin with the distributive premise that the collective/state/group/tribe has a claim upon your stuff. Your stuff is forever and fundamentally not completely yours. They can take some of it when they want. They can determine how much of your stuff is subject to confiscation, and they can change that determination at any time. They have developed a lot of philosophical hoo-hah that allows them to pretend that this is moral and good, but normal people know it is just dressed-up theft.
Since normal people don't like having their stuff seized from them by moralizing thugs, the left needs a strong delivery mechanism. That, of course, is a powerful government deploying copious amounts of coercive force.
This in turn produces their power premise—that Power is a desirable good, to achieve the aims of those who wield it.1 This is consistent with their need for the strong delivery mechanism. Oh sure, they pretend that they’re standing up to power, but that is just a tactic to achieve power.
As we’ve seen repeatedly throughout history, they have no limiting principle: once they have power, the only thing that stops them from going all the way to totalitarianism is whatever external resistance they meet. If that resistance tires or is overborne, then the only thing that can stop them is reality itself. (Totalitarianism, you see, cannot work indefinitely, so they are ultimately stopped by its inevitable collapse.)
Finally, we come to their unit of social concern. As you well know, that unit is the collective, not the individual. Groups are what matter to the left. To the communists, it was the working class. To the fascists, it was the nation. To the Nazis, the race. Once the workers proved uninterested in the left’s shtick, the Western left turned to an endless series of proxy groups to take the place of the workers in their oppressed vs. oppressor dichotomy. They need these proxy groups. Their whole system is based on stoking grievance and using groups as a vehicle to gain power. And trans people are the latest such group.
Of course, whenever you have any sort of political premise, its opposite tends to be treated as the enemy. And sure enough, all the ideological and philosophical justifications of the left include denunciations of the individual (the “opposite” of the collective). The individual is “selfish.” The “era of the individual is over.” The individual, you see, is just a mere subunit of the collective.
Okay, so with that background established…
Yesterday, I was thinking about my wife.
When she was a kid, she and her best friend didn’t play with dolls; they created Barbie’s Torture Chamber. (She told that fact to Dennis Prager on his radio show and his shocked reaction ended up being one of their promo bumps for several weeks.) She and her friend loved getting into trouble. You could call her a “tomboy,” but she wasn’t even the typical tomboy. She wasn’t especially athletic, for example. But she was scrappy, and definitely not the typical girlie-girl. In other words, she was herself. Unique.
She still is. Today, she loves beautiful purses. She wears dresses. She enjoys makeup and beauty products. She has luxuriant curly hair that some women might literally kill for. She’s a woman, and she wouldn’t have it any other way.
But even within that, she’s still herself. Her favorite movies aren’t Beaches, Steel Magnolias, and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants; her favorite movies are Fight Club and The Terminator. She doesn’t cry a lot—she has the even keel, and preference for logic over emotion, of the typical guy.
She is an individual human person.
There is no doubt that sex-based correlations are real—there are sets of characteristics that are more likely to apply to each sex, to greater or lesser degrees. But they’re just correlations. They don’t apply uniformly. People are individuals.
But if your entire ideology, for the last 200 years, has effaced the reality of the individual, then the individual is not what you see in this equation. You see the characteristics and correlations. You see the group of which the individual should be a member. And that is part of the explanation for what is going on now.
**Show three or more signs that you're not the typical representative of your sex**
PUMP HER FULL OF TESTOSTERONE!
CHOP OFF HIS GENITALS!
RADICAL MASTECTOMIES FOR TOMBOYS!
In addition to all the other monstrosities at work in this mutilation cult, it’s also an expression of collectivism. The individual can’t just be an individual—one of an infinite number of possible actual women or men. No, the left has to cram him or her into a category.
Genuine protracted lifelong gender dysphoria is incredibly rare. Most gender confusion, on the other hand, clears up by early adulthood. But the left is unwilling to wait. Gender confusion, teenage angst, and individual uniqueness are all excuses to “transition” another child. To shove another individual into a grievance group.
People on the left will object that their approach is the individualist one—that the Dylan Mulvaneys of the world (to cite a current example) are expressing their own individual uniqueness, which we ought to respect. The same is the case, they will argue, in allowing people to identify as neuro-divergent or as one of an infinite number of genders.
At first blush, the argument seems compelling. But do you notice how this too is collectivist? They’re not identifying as themselves (“I am Steve; I am unique.”) They are being convinced to identify as Grievance Group X. Each new pronoun, each time someone claims to be part of an oppressed group, is just another song in the left’s never-ending game of intersectional musical chairs. I know the left too well to fall for this.
I understand full-well that some people have genuine gender dysphoria. Those who know me personally know that I treat those people as the sex to which they have, through surgery and lifestyle changes, transitioned. And to whatever extent that those people suffered from any actual structural discrimination, I would have wanted to see that fixed.
But that’s a tiny fraction of the human population, and the rest of this has gone too far.
It is leftist-collectivist power-politics, narcissism, and social contagion, unleashed with ferocity on an unsuspecting world. The left, you see, are not reproducing. This means they need to “reproduce” ideologically. Yet their ideology is so warped, so demonstrably counter the the basic facts of reality, that even their hegemonic control of nearly every mechanism of information dissemination—media, academia, entertainment, tech, etc.—is not enough. They also have to steal your children more directly.
Transing is one of the ways they do that: Indoctrinate them. Take their individual uniqueness and reduce it to membership in a grievance group. Then mutilate them and make them psychologically dependent, for life, upon the arguments the left makes for why that mutilation was good.
I really don’t care how adult humans think, feel, or live. I think it’s weird and insulting to distill womanhood into a cartoonish caricature (the way Dylan Mulvaney does), but in and of itself, it’s not a big deal. But it’s part of a larger phenomenon—a child-snatching, mind-warping, women’s-sports-ruining, leftist power-play and mutilation cult. And that is a problem.
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Children, you can be whatever you want. But remember, you are an individual. You can still be a boy or a girl even if you’re not the “typical” boy or girl. There are lots of ways to be a woman or a man. The people who are trying to force you to change your bodies with surgery and drugs don’t actually care about you. They care about power for the left and their own vanity.
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If you’re wondering, the opposite (classical-liberal) power premise is roughly this: power is at best a necessary evil, to be used only for protective purposes. In other words, power is only appropriate when it is deployed in the form of protective force to defend individual rights against the initiation of coercive force. There are gradations, disputes within classical-liberalism as to what constitutes coercive force, and questions on the margins, but that is the core premise nonetheless.