The left, both in the United States and abroad, have always been activist, self-righteous, and, at times, a bit loopy. Since about 2015, however, they have traveled to the Mountains of Madness, and nowhere more so than on the “transgender” issue. For the purposes of brevity, I will not go into detail on all the truly bizarre places they have taken their putative advocacy for this putatively oppressed group. You’ve all seen it for yourselves.
The real question is why. Why are they pushing so aggressively, so quickly, and with such hostility? Why are they going after your children? Why are they taking stances that run counter to the facts of reality (facts that no normal person even questions because they’re so basic) and then pretending that those stances are actual “science”? Why are they censoring so aggressively?
I believe I have the answer.
In order to understand, we have to take a look at their history. (I know different people have different levels of tolerance for such explorations, but in this case, it is absolutely necessary, because it explains almost everything. I will try to be as concise as possible.)
It goes a little something like this…
Early Marxists, 19th century
Marx, et al:
The workers are being immiserated by capitalism. They are going to rise up worldwide, in spontaneous revolution, and instantiate the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The “Crisis of Marxism,” late 19th century
Marxists everywhere:
Uh oh—capitalism is not immiserating the workers; it’s making their lives better. They are not rising up. Was Marx wrong?
Late-Marxist bitter-clingers, late 19th–early 20th century
Rosa Luxemburg, et al:
The workers won’t rise up until they’ve been sufficiently immiserated. It’s gonna happen any minute now. You’ll see.
Revolutionary socialists, 1917, etc.
Lenin, Bolsheviks, et al:
We are sick of waiting for the workers to rise up. A revolutionary vanguard of key military officers and university-educated intellectuals will have to do it for them.
National socialists, post-WWI–1920s
Mussolini, Hitler, et al:
The workers will not rise up for class, but they will fight for the nation (or race).
Incrementalist socialists, 19th and 20th centuries
Bernstein, Fabians, et al:
Forget about revolution—we can free the workers through gradual ‘reform.’
Marxist-Leninist/Maoists, 20th century
Lenin, Stalin, et al:
If we’re going to free the workers of the world, we’re going to have to do it country by country, through subversion and proxy wars.
Okay, now here’s where it starts to get interesting. Pay attention as they start to give up on the workers entirely…
Western Marxists, Early 20th century
Gramsci, Lukacs, et al:
The workers have been tricked by the “cultural hegemony” of capitalism—by baseball, apple pie, religion, and high standards of living. Once we have taken over all the institutions (media, academia, entertainment, government, NGOs.), we will be in a position to explain to them how miserable they actually are.
(Note: Here in 2023, their “long march through the institutions” is now essentially complete. They have the informational control they need to make everyone miserable.)
Cultural Marxists, early-middle 20th century
Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, et al:
The workers are never going to rise up. They are not the allies [read: the victims] we expected them to be. We will still pay lip service to the class struggle, but now we must switch to the more general struggle of ‘oppressed vs. oppressor.’
New Left, 1960s–70s
SDS/Weather Underground, Yippies, Alinsky, et al
Keep raising the consciousness of the oppressed. '“Rub raw the sores of discontent.” Use violence. This slow-motion revolution is working. Keep pushing!
Postmodernism, 1970s–80s
Foucault, Derrida, et al
Workers? What workers? Marx? We have nothing to do with that guy. There is no logic, no reason, no meaning—there is only power. Now go out and take it!
Modern progressives, 1990s to present:
We have learned, from all the leftists who have preceded us, that…
We should continue with the class-struggle narrative, and to use it to fuel our primary goal of redistribution, but the workers as a class are not our allies. (Indeed, we must allow capitalism to continue producing so we have something to redistribute.)
Violence, oppression (of speech, freedom, political opponents, etc.), and destruction of all existing culture and social norms are acceptable tactics in pursuit of our goals. Everyone who opposes us is a ‘fascist.’
Blanket denial of the existence of reason and objective facts (while claiming the mantle of ‘science’) is acceptable in our pursuit of power. Each person’s “personal narrative” can be used as a weapon.
There is no tactic that is out of bounds in pursuit of our objectives. We now have supremacy in all institutions and can use these in any way we choose, with relative impunity.
And finally, this all-important component:
The workers have failed to serve our purposes, but we must continue to identify other oppressed groups and use them as proxies in our efforts to seize total control of the state.1
That last item is where the rubber meets the road, so pay very close attention:
Up until now, all of the groups whose cause they have claimed to champion—ethnic minorities, women, and gays—have suffered some measure of actual oppression. You may disagree with the left’s solutions (or their sincerity), but the fact remains, these were legitimately oppressed cohorts, to one degree or another.
Ever since the Cultural Marxists, their system has been relatively simple:
Identify an oppressed group.
Raise their “consciousness” (enhance their sense of victimization).
Use the group as a means to greater power (make promises, secure votes and support, use as activists and shock troops, etc.).2
Lather, rinse, repeat. This has been a very effective strategy—one that has garnered a measure of sympathy from average Americans because of the legitimate grievances of the chosen cohorts. But now, finally, the left has hit a very big wall.
THEY HAVE RUN OUT OF GROUPS.
Actual structural racism in U.S. law ended in the 1960s. Gays have won most of their fight (widespread acceptance, and passage of legislation many consider favorable, are on the rise). Women not only enjoy structural equality, but have actually surpassed men in a variety of metrics. Recently, cracks have begun to form in the nearly monolithic support Democrats long enjoyed from black voters, and both blacks and Hispanics voted for Donald Trump in numbers that were very disturbing to the left. (Ceteris paribus, once a certain percentage of minority voters peels off, the Democrats are finished as a national party.)
They keep cranking up the siren of victimhood and fear, but—just as happened with the workers in the 20th century—these cohorts are slowly becoming less receptive. Many still are, of course, but the writing is on the wall. Left left knows that each frantic performance of their endless morality play will eventually begin drawing smaller and smaller crowds.
Enter the transgenders.
Transgender people were the last cohort for which any claim of oppression—or at least a lack of widespread acceptance/understanding—could plausibly be made. There is reasonable disagreement as to just how serious the situation was, but at least there was something there.
After transgenders, all that remains are pedophiles and fat people.
In a testament to the terrible rot in the ideological heart of the left, they are actually putting in a halfhearted attempt to use pedophiles as another proxy group—even going so far as to try to rename them “minor-attracted persons”—but the American people are having none of it. The left will keep trying at least somewhat, because that is how desperate they are, but this one is a non-starter.
They have also put in some effort to cast overweight people as an oppressed group, but this too is going nowhere. Too many people remain aware that even for people with some predisposition to weight-gain, if you exercise and eat fewer than 1,000 calories a day, you’re going to lose weight. No one is oppressed here.
This is why you see the abject madness on the trans issue. This is why they have gone so far beyond mere advocacy. They are desperate.
It began with exaggeration of the numbers. People with actual gender dysphoria—which starts very young and remains intractable throughout adulthood—are very rare: at most, it is one of of 30,000 people (other estimates place it at 1/100,000). But when this all began to ramp up a few years ago, the left acted as if this was a problem impacting millions.
Then came the proliferation of pronouns. You must understand that this is not mere silliness or narcissism, nor is it without purpose or precedent. The precedent comes from Postmodernism and its insistence that there are an infinite number of interpretations and personal narratives. And if you have been paying close attention, then you have figured out the purpose…
If each person can create his/her own pronouns, then every new pronoun creates a new oppressed micro-group. They are out of actual oppressed cohorts, but they can continue making up oppressed pronouns pretty much indefinitely. Infinite pronouns = infinite grievance.
There are not nearly enough people with actual gender dysphoria to sustain a movement—one out of 30,000 is not nearly enough. So they have to manufacture new ones. That is why they are working so hard to transition our children. More than 90 percent of gender confusion clears up by age 18, but instead of just waiting a couple of years and then letting these kids go on to lead normal lives, they would rather play on that confusion and then surgically and chemically poison children…just to increase their numbers. (There has to be a special layer of hell for this.)
(Moreover, since actual trans activists—meaning those who are both trans and activists—are less likely to have their own children, they ‘reproduce’ by taking yours.)
This then points up the next mechanism by which they create new oppressed groups (since they are out of real ones): inventing grievance where none exists.
Take the phenomenon of “draq-queen story-hour.” Here, the oppressed group is not drag queens, but specifically drag queens who MUST read stories to your children, and if you don’t let them, then they are oppressed.
No one was actually oppressing drag queens. No one cared. So they came after your kids to make you care. Refuse to let your child be paraded about by a man in a bikini wearing a giant strap-on phallus and you are an oppressor.
We also see this in the bake-me-a-cake phenomenon. There are a hundred bakers in town who will bake a cake for gay weddings and transgender reveal parties, so activists intentionally seek out the one baker who won’t. Thus, they manufacture oppression out of nothing.
They are going after women’s sports for the same reason. Don’t want men in your locker rooms? Don’t want to be outcompeted by biological males in athletic contests for which you’ve spent years training? Boom! A new oppressed group, “transgender athletes,” is born, and you’re nothing but a bigoted TERF.
(Note: The ease and rapidity with which the left threw all women under the bus in favor of this shiny new oppressed cohort is an indication that the left, as an aggregate ideological phenomenon, does not care at all about any of the groups it purports to champion. Rank and filers, high on the left’s virtue-crack, can protest this characterization all they want, but it doesn’t make it any less true.)
Setting aside the narcissism (the need to appear virtuous) that runs like an underground river beneath most of what the left does, this a major explanation for what is going on.3 For 170 years, the left have moved like a plague of rats from room to room, until finally they entered a room labeled “TRANSGENDER.” But there’s no way out of this one, so they just keep swarming in, piling up, and scrambling about—desperately trying to make the room bigger somehow.
It’s an ugly sight to behold.
Wikimedia/Vivek2285/CC BY-SA 4.0
If you balk at the phrase “total control,” then you have not been paying sufficient attention to the totality of the phenomenon of leftism, worldwide and throughout history. There is a) no fundamental difference in core objectives and principles from one iteration of the left to the next and b) they have no internal limiting principle that tells them where to stop on their journey to total control. Thus, if allowed, they will always go all the way. This is a subject to which we will return.
Two points here. First, this phenomenon does not need to be centrally guided from a smoky backroom or underground bunker. This is a collective phenomenon of people following the same ideological program, reading the same ideological and activist instruction manuals, etc. Second, if you balk at the term “shock troops,” then you have not been paying attention. The left bombs, assassinates, assaults, seizes buildings, kidnaps, robs banks, and on and on, all for political purposes. This was most frequent in the U.S. in the 1960s, but it happened before and has continued since (notwithstanding the media’s serial efforts to downplay it).
Update: It is not the explanation for every aspect of leftism or everything that leftists or trans activists do. I am referring specifically to the land of insanity to which the left have traveled on this particular issue. (I have edited the original sentence slightly to reflect.)
People who might accept the framework you propose, as I do, balk when we get to what’s “back of behind” all this: the transhuman movement, run by billionaires with all the políticos in their pockets and pharma in their portfolios, with the urban land, the corporate rental ownership, the farms and heritage seeds, the laws and policies, the gold and money and aaaall the real power. Even with my reading and experience with all facets of the scenarios you detail, I still wonder, “Can this really be true?” when I delve into that movement and connect the dots.
This is made even more difficult because so many who are being used to promote the furthest left’s agenda have no idea, and no connection, to this much more hidden (for now) influencing factor. Now as in the past, the useful idiots are just tools, and do not know it. Any discussion of this over-arching campaign will get you pegged a conspiracy theorist, a madman, worse.
I can’t say as I’d blame anybody for coming to that conclusion, because it seems mad to me and I already kind of believe it!
Did you stop short of this final piece in the puzzle because you’re not convinced of it, or because you wanted to argue the most observable, demonstrable level before going on to the far greater challenge (to me, anyway, as the rest makes perfect sense) of what’s behind it all? Or perhaps you reject the notion of a really weird and spooky-as-f**k transhuman Valhalla somewhere, hard at work on this? (If so I hope you’re right.)
I’d love your thoughts on this, and if you agree there are some wicked minds at work on plans to change the course of our species (which makes me feel insane to even articulate) I hope you’ll pen an essay with the same great clarity and purpose as you did here. If you don’t agree, I’m eager to know why: I’d like to be talked out of it myself.
Because if what I read is true, even if we can defeat what is most evidently wrong and redirect our country back to sanity and revitalize the American project, we have the battle for our existence still ahead.
Unpopular opinion:
Intellectually-minded people (All of you lovely Substackers, for example, Of Course) love to construct grand theories to rationalize base human behavior - their own and others'.
Soviets/CCPs motivated by Russian/Chinese nationalism and greed always justify(ied) their actions with Communism, Americans with Manifest Destiny and Exceptionalism.
Socialists rationalize their envy with altruism.
Capitalists rationalize their abuses of power with Darwinism.
Spoiled, over-privileged rich kids created Critical Theory and Queer Theory to rationalize "I get to do whatever I want, with whoever I want and no one gets to hold me accountable, set boundaries or tell me 'No.'"
EVERYONE, on all sides, convinces themselves that their opponents' various individual self-interested actions are part of a massive secret nefarious conspiracy. If there is a dot somewhere, they will connect it to something, be assured. THEIR theory is genius of course, but everyone else's is insane. Of course.
Everyone attributes to conspiracy what is adequately explained by typical human selfishness, mistakes, incompetence and ass-covering, to paraphrase the old saying.
The reality is a lot more mundane, a lot more boring: people really are the same wherever you go. They act selfishly, predictably, in their own little sphere of influence, in parallel with or in opposite parallel or at converging or conflicting angles with other people acting selfishly and predictably in their own little spheres of influence. It is useful to point out the patterns in their actions, but a pattern isn't a conspiracy. It's evidence of our shared human nature.