The Hole Where Gay Rights Used to Be

Ironically, gender ideology is so popular on the left BECAUSE it's so easy to debunk.

UPDATE: Read more about this essay, and listen to an audio reading of it (by me), here.

Comparing yesterday’s gay rights movement to today’s trans rights movement is like comparing Jaws to Jaws 2: the first was an unprecedented phenomenon, a masterpiece, and a blockbuster. The second is a cheap knockoff greedily churned out to exploit the market the first one created.

At the time, Spielberg called the studios’ cash-grab sequel “a cheap carny trick.” By now we’re living in a time of such cultural vacuity that the people are habituated to cheap remakes and sequels.

Of course, show business is risky by nature, but over time Hollywood has become overdependent on sequels because familiarity brings at least a modicum of safety and predictability in the ever-shifting, ever-complexifying market of human attention spans.

(This is a circumstance that Spielberg himself had a hand in creating: he went on to direct or executive produce over a dozen sequels in franchises like Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Transformers, Men in Black, Gremlins, and Zorro. I’m not entirely complaining: for one thing, I loved Gremlins 2: The New Batch.)

Not all sequels are bad. I, for one, love Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

Our cultural sequel-itis has gotten out of hand. The “cheap carny trick” has metastasized beyond Hollywood to the point where the self-styled moral guardians of social progress have begun leaning on the crutch of rehashing the cultural hits of their glory days’ past, as it gets harder for them to remain au courant. It’s why Canada’s Liberal Party gave its leadership to the pampered, prettyfaced, partyboy son of our country’s most celebrated former Prime Minister.

Justin Trudeau, the great Pierre Trudeau’s ridiculous son, is Canada’s Jaws 2.

And it’s why orgs like GLAAD, the ACLU, Human Rights Campaign, and Stonewall UK lean so hard on gender identity nonsense: they market it like Gays 2.

The gay rights movement of the ‘70s & ‘80s remains to this day the left’s biggest blockbuster. In the blink of an eye on the timescale of history, gays emerged from the closet to become arguably the most celebrated social cause contemporary politics has ever seen. Progressives succeeded wildly with their message that homosexuality is normal and harmless. They had science and reason behind them: homosexuality is clearly a natural phenomenon, and it’s illogical to punish consenting adults for going about their business when they’re not hurting anyone. Conservatives, embarrassed and ashamed, were forced to do an about-face.

But the 21st Century transgender craze bears only superficial similarity. It’s vaguely to do with sexuality and with gender nonconforming people, yes. But under the hood, the principles are plainly pseudoscientific and the demands range from unreasonable to outrageous.

So why is it so popular with progressives when it’s so obviously bunk? It’s so obviously a cheap knockoff of the gay rights movement.

It’s in part a result of the resounding success of the gay rights movement, and I mean that in two ways: gays won hearts and minds over to the progressive cause, and we united progressives against our enemies: social conservatives. People earned progressive cred not just by showing off how much they liked gay people, but by signalling to each other how much they disliked, and were morally superior to, gay people’s opponents.

Fundamentalist transgender ideology is so crazy that trans activism is certainly not bringing any new converts over to the left — on the contrary, polling shows it’s driving droves of young people rightward. What the activists are doing is uniting those already securely identified with the left against a familiar, shared enemy.

Progressives’ irrational embrace of gender ideology is in part a defensive reaction in response to the increasing sense of threat they feel from the right. Taking a page from the Hollywood playbook, in uncertain times, they’ve turned to the familiar for the modicum of safety and predictability it offers.

The blockbuster boogeyman that most reliably rallies the left against the right is not a mechanical shark, it’s homophobes. Problem is, the right is fresh out of those. Most everywhere in the Western world, conservative party platforms are more-or-less identical to liberal ones on the question of gay rights. But not to worry, in this sequel, the homophobic boogeymen have been revived as transphobes.

Donald Trump is as racist and misogynist as they come, but even he’s not gonna cross the gays.

The appeal of “transgender rights” is not that it’s rational (no one’s even trying to make the case on logical grounds), it’s that it’s just irrational enough to turn large numbers of people against it.

Ironically, the reason gender ideology has such a stubborn hold on the left is BECAUSE it's so easy to debunk. Its obvious bogosity brings it lots and lots of opponents, which the institutional left needs to replenish after conservatives stopped opposing gay rights.

In the world of social issues, the metric for a blockbuster is not quantity, but quality: like a luxury good, it’s not how many people are buying it, but who’s buying it.

The TQ is an artificial, manufactured sequel to LGB, but one whose demands are designed to be as unreasonable as possible, because the general public don’t oppose reasonable accommodations anymore. Letting men self-ID into women’s sports & prisons; labelling children transgender and medically experimenting on them with “sex change” drugs and surgeries… it’s precisely because these things are unpopular with average, everyday people that left wing people are clamoring to pledge allegiance to them — they’re shibboleths that liberals use to link each other into a trust network, a gang they join to help navigate the stormy weather of the cultural upheaval in our midst.

Putting pronouns in your bio is like flashing your Better-Than-Everyone-Else-Club membership card. Like Mensa, but for idiots.

These men are all charlatans, and there are countless more men like them. Clockwise from top left: “Grace” (né Joseph) Lavery, “Andrea” (né Andrew) Long Chu, “Abigail” (né Oliver) Thorn, “Veronica” Ivy (né Rhys McKinnon), “Laurel” (né Gavin) Hubbard, Dylan Mulvaney, “Danielle” (né Daniel) Muscato, “Lia” (né William) Thomas.

Naturally, by virtue of being both nonsensical and beyond criticism, the gender fundamentalist movement has drawn all kinds of troubled and troublesome people to the “transgender umbrella.” Vulnerable youth hide behind transgender identities rather than face their mental demons. Men with sexual desires they’d otherwise be too embarrassed to make public use transgenderism as a cover story to let their kinks run wild out in the open. And charlatans! Oh, so many brazen crooks have gotten in on the transgender gold rush.

Progressives have walked into a trap: they got so addicted to feeling morally superior to conservatives over gay rights, they became easy marks for the cheapest scam in the books: opportunists posing as persecuted victims. Now the progressives are discovering that they were duped, and they’ve been made to look like moral cowards, so they’re panicking and doubling down, and they will keep on doing so, becoming more and more deluded and unhinged, until the entire system collapses.

This crappy sequel is a flop, and the reckoning is going to bite, hard.

UPDATE: Read more about this essay, and listen to an audio reading of it (by me), here.