Two Lost Generations

The Manhattan Institute's Christopher F. Rufo recently reported on a collaboration between gender activists at Chicago's largest hospital and various school administrators to promote "radical gender theory."

Almost simultaneously, the formerly-prestigious-turned-woke Scientific American coughed up a similar hairball, asserting that the binary male-female classification of gender was constructed in the eighteenth century, by the benighted West, in order to oppress women. That, prior to this, women were universally viewed as "inferior men" or some such nonsense.

[T]he ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.

The biological reality of XX and XY chromosomes, and their fundamental and irrefutable roles in shaping the human body throughout its development, is a widely dismissed inconvenience for the trans-activists among us. That small group (and I'm sure it's small - they are noisy and influential and dominate academic circles, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that most of those who go along with the "gender-affirming" narrative" are fearful submissives rather than true believers.

The obligatory caveat here: Today I speak of minors, of children, and of an industry that has chosen to pressure any child that might say one word in that direction that he or she or zhe or ey is indeed transgender and should start the process right away. These are people that are ready, willing, and eager to pump kids full of chemicals and send them to the surgeons so that various parts could be cut off. Adults, do what you want. There are eight billion people on the planet, and wide variation among them, and if after fully developing as a human you conclude that something isn't right in yourself, then pursue your own happiness. Not my place to interfere.

A question comes to mind - and, yes, it is rhetorical: Is Nature good or bad?

For I am certain that there is a large intersection between those who reject biological gender and those who reject GMO and conventional (i.e. not "organic") foods and crops. Who think it's not OK to tweak a corn chromosome to make it more disease resistant, but perfectly acceptable to pump a teenager full of puberty blockers.

I know, I know, bless my heart for seeking rationality or consistency from the agenda-driven. Yes, there is clearly an agenda here - one that elevates the activists' selfish desires over their stated nobility of purpose. That's the conclusion, and the reality, and that’s what makes such a question rhetorical.

It’s not about the science, it’s about the goal: The infestation of primary education by those who not merely want to teach kids about sex and gender spectrums, but to actually introduce them to the full menu of sexual activities (as the Rufo article notes, that includes "kink," "BDSM," and sex toys). Conservative spheres have erupted with accusations of "grooming" in response to all this. While I'm reflexively skeptical of such blanket rebuttals, it's getting harder to ignore what appears to be an obsessive desire to establish the trans agenda as part of primary education, and to make it not just about acceptance of “others,” but about sexual behavior itself, about conflating gender identity with sexual activity, and about getting kids to become active sooner.

It's easy for the Left to dismiss questions, skepticism, and opposition coming from the Right as the products of sexual prudery or antiquated conservative puritanism, but many on that side of the aisle are waking up to the real harm being inflicted on today's youth by the radicals. More and more stories of kids de-transitioning after being aggressively "affirmed" into chemical and surgical changes are emerging, and it's become clear that the industry is more interested in growing the transgender population than in prioritizing the children's well-being.

That's the bottom line of all this: the activists, theorists, and other Best-and-Brightest don't really care about the individuals they claim to be standing up for. They care about effectuating their agenda, about actualizing their radical notion that one's chromosomes are merely an impediment to divining one's "true" gender and sexuality and personhood. They figure that, if they can inflate the numbers (Internet searches report that about 0.5% of Americans identify as transgender, but given cultural pressures, I'm going to raise an eyebrow that it's that many), they can "win out" over the skeptics and deniers, and have their curricula become the baseline in schools.

That kids aren't fully-formed humans doesn't much matter, apparently. That, prior to puberty, kids aren't even wired to 'get' what sex is about doesn't, either. That schools should teach kids the three Rs, and provide a place where they can socialize and develop into functional members of society is antiquated - and therefore bad. Anything old is presumed the product of white colonial patriarchy and therefore de facto wrong, and anything new, if born of the Best-and-Brightest, is de facto better.

The second and third decades of the 21st century are shaping up to be a massive pedagogic experiment. Between the sexualization of primary education, the aggressive advancement of transgenderism, the resurrection of collectivist political ideology and subordination of the Enlightenment’s value of the individual, and the disruptions in education instituted as a response to the pandemic, we witness a great big gamble being taken with two generations of young people. That many are being harmed by all this doesn’t matter, either, because those Best-and-Brightest are perfectly willing to break some eggs to make their rainbow omelette.

The early returns are bad, very bad. These generations are going to carry psychological trouble with them across the next half century, and our society will suffer for it.

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Chapter 1 - A Catastrophic Failure
Chapter 2 - A Brief History

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