Are you confused by the new transgender ideology? Can’t keep track of its competing demands? Puzzled by the claim that biology is imaginary yet feelings are concrete?
If so, then you truly are on the path to wisdom, says Ryan Anderson, the level-headed analyst of transgender theology at the Heritage Foundation, and the author of a new book on transgender politics, titled “When Harry Became Sally.”
He sketches the slippery creativity of the transgender ideology in an article, titled “Transgender Ideology Is Riddled With Contradictions. Here Are the Big Ones.” He writes:
At the core of the ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims. Trans ideologues ignore contrary evidence and competing interests, they disparage alternative practices, and they aim to muffle skeptical voices and shut down any disagreement.
The movement has to keep patching and shoring up its beliefs, policing the faithful, coercing the heretics, and punishing apostates, because as soon as its furious efforts flag for a moment or someone successfully stands up to it, the whole charade is exposed. That’s what happens when your dogmas are so contrary to obvious, basic, everyday truths.
A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.
Read it all here.
There are very few “transgender” people. For example, advocates say from 250 to several thousand people in the military are trying to live like members of the other sex in a military population of 1.3 million full-time soldiers, sailors, marines and air force personnel. Fewer than o.3 percent of Americans wish to live as members of the opposite sex.
Polls show that roughly one-quarter of Americans support the progressive claim that biological sex trumps chosen “gender identity,” despite intense media pressure in favor of the pro-transgender, anti-sexes campaign.
The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their two-sex civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked popular social rules for how Americans handle the many social preferences of equal, different and complementary men and women, boys and girls.
For example, the gender claims have shifted rules or practices about different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.