Our once great nation is overflowing with poseurs who make believe they’re fighting the good fight against an uneducated army of Philistines, that is, anyone who votes Republican. And so, the myth goes, without the posturing of pawns in entertainment, news media, social media, politics and government, the least fortunate and most misunderstood among us (blacks, Hispanics, gays, transgenderism, etc.) would be crushed under the unfeeling boot heels of puritan era artifacts who long ago outlived their usefulness, if they were ever useful to begin with.
Unpaid big-mouthery is all the rage these days and it always has been; people are frequently lazy but they’re opinionated too. The bifurcated quest for righteous bragging rights and the path of least resistance leads inevitably to the human inclination to proclaim outrage at the supposedly outrageous while doing next to nothing to correct often wholly imagined injustices.
In the United States, our day and age is typified, in large part, by a proclivity for promoting and rationalizing victimization. Being an injured party is empowering. Somebody hurt you, somebody is in the wrong, somebody must pay. Somebody owes you something and you’re going to get what you deserve or so-and-so will have screwed you and you’ll have claim to the moral high ground. And you won’t be shy about telling everyone you meet about it. You’ll have a sympathy card in your hand. You can play the part of the lost puppy and the girls will fall in love with you and fawn all over you and comfort you when you bitch about your self-inflicted wounds on Facebook.
No one promotes victimization as a lifestyle the way the Left does. A hallmark of the so-called “progressive” movement is their sick minded obsession with segregating humanity into groups and subgroups. Each of us are shoved into carefully categorized boxes and our differences are thrust to the front and center. And god help you if your category is better off than another. A conviction in the court of public opinion carries enough weight to condemn wholesale large swaths of folks who may or may not be aware that their cis gendered, patriarchal, white privilege makes them guilty by default of sins they may or may not be aware they committed.
There can’t be a victim if there’s no guilty party.
Labels and categories are helpful and necessary to effective communication, without them no one would know what anyone was talking about. But it can be taken too far. The incessant liberal effort to over-analyze and over-categorize has produced a false appearance of diversity. It is the Left that champions and celebrates the cultural enrichment that theoretically results (it doesn’t) from expanding ethnic and racial diversity. But it’s also the Left that will be the first to preach that we all bleed the same and there’s no real difference between any of us. It’s not surprising that liberal dogma is pervaded by confusion and self-contradictory dictums that attempt to marry together mutually exclusive concepts. In this case, The Left seeks unity while preaching diversity as if segregating us will bring us together.
Manufacturing new categories of victims and painstakingly explaining how they’ve been wronged and by whom and what they are owed, is big business on the Left. It justifies new taxes to flush down the fiscal toilet on programs that don’t work and/or are redundant. It validates the sanctimony of the social justice warriors who go out looking for trouble and the victims they find who don’t know they’re victims and the offenders who don’t know they’re offensive.
Enter stage left, the LGBTQRSTUVWXYZ community – the alphabet soup demographic as Jesse Comeau calls it – the poster child for the “progressive” victimization industry.
It’s not possible to have a discussion about supposed outrages, wholly imagined injustices, and the liberal victim mentality without drawing attention to the issue of transgenderism in particular. This is a textbook example of manufactured umbrage. Dr. Paul R. McHugh of Johns Hopkins, concludes that gender dysphoria – distress at a perceived lack of correspondence between one’s biological sex and gender identity – is a mental disorder. The person suffering this illness has a confused perception of their body much in the same way someone with bulimia has a warped self-image. A major difference in how these disorders are approached is that we treat bulimia medically while the Left seeks to normalize gender dysphoria under the fictional label of “transgenderism.”
It could be asserted that bulimia entails severe physical maladies that make it an urgent health concern and, because of this, it is not comparable to gender dysphoria. I’m no doctor but I don’t have to be to understand that “Rates of suicide are nearly twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery”. One doesn’t need a medical degree to read and understand a recent position statement from the American College of Pediatricians (ACP) that warns of “carcinogenic and otherwise toxic cross-sex hormones” being used to dangerous excess by those impaired by gender dysphoria.
Transgenderism is an aberrant mode of thinking that can and does lead to mentally and physically unhealthy behavior. It is psychosis expressed as self-destruction. But our friends on the Left, ever invigorated by their crusade to find victims and their assailants, have taken up the cross of the mentally troubled. Not to provide treatment for their malady, no, our liberal friends wouldn’t want to hurt the confused feelings of the mentally ill. The cross they’ve taken up is a moral crusade intended to normalize a mental disorder.
The demand of the Left is that drastic alterations be made to our culture, social conventions and mores, traditions, and national policy making to accommodate the distorted thinking of the mentally disturbed. Our nation isn’t meant to be a nation anymore, rather it is to be a psych-ward run by the patients.
Blinded by the light of their fanatical fixation on discovering new victims, the Left has unwittingly revealed a true injured party but not for the reasons they think. People suffering from gender dysphoria, like any other mental disorder, need treatment, not special treatment. They don’t need to be told that their abnormal behavior and inclinations are normal. Nurturing an illness isn’t helpful, it is a destructive disservice to the individual and their suffering.
It’s fitting and typical that the allegedly pro-science “progressive” movement would foist upon our nation the pseudo-scientific concept of transgenderism. The denial of reality is a defining characteristic of liberalism as is taking offense to inconvenient facts, like those elucidated upon by the ACP, such as their observation that, “People who identify as ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ or ‘somewhere in between’ do not comprise a third sex. They remain biological men or biological women.” Gender, they say, “is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one,” and, “A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking.”
Transgenderism doesn’t exist anywhere except in the minds of confused people who are distressed by their confusion. It’s all in their heads. There’s no there there. It isn’t real. Demanding sweeping changes to our country to normalize a fantasy and expand the ranks of the victimized is absurd and perverse. It’s ridiculous that the conversation needs to take place at all.
Now more than ever we need straight talk and simple – though not necessarily easy – reactions to the cacophony of mindless white noise generated by the social justice warriors and cultural Marxists. A good place to start is to not legitimize their fantasies by utilizing their lexicon of made up words and categories.
There’s no such thing as transgenderism and we on the Right need to stop using the term. It doesn’t mean anything. At best it’s a confused fantasy, at worst it’s a deliberate effort by the Left to keep us divided and seek out wrong-doers to punish. One way or the other, this pervasive nonsense needs to stop.
Original artwork by Jesse Comeau
McHugh is the Bernie Madoff of the medical world. He was discredited a decade ago. Johns Hopkins hangs its head in shame that he is associated with them.