We Must Go on Offense against Transanity

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, July 13, 2022

 

It’s not often that Senator Josh Hawley gets criticized for not “going hard enough” in a Senate hearing. But this column will be one of those rare times. Here was the remarkable exchange he had with University of California at Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges over transgenderism.

 

There was nothing wrong with how Hawley approached Professor Bridges, and quite a bit right about it. Hawley was widely praised after the exchange by Sohrab Ahmari, Ryan Anderson, and many others for keeping his cool. But ultimately, this exchange demonstrated the seriousness of the challenge gender ideology poses, and the insufficiency of just asking the right questions and waiting for people to laugh this belief system off the stage.

 

The first difficulty for opponents of gender ideology is that it is, in some sense, unfalsifiable. The belief that there is a “gender identity” separate and apart from biological reality cannot be disproved if “identity” is entirely a self-conception, a matter of what a human wills, wishes, or claims to believe about themselves. Lots of the metaphors and expressions used by gender ideologues to describe this phenomenon are falsifiable. Nobody born a man has a “woman’s brain” or “wiring.” But some of these metaphors and expressions are not. How can one dispute, with physical evidence alone, that each person is born in the “right body”? The testimony of inner experience and identity is assumed to be real because identity itself has been cabined off from all other factors but the internal human will — though one buffeted by the unjust social forces around it.

 

Anyone not already convinced that gender ideology is hokum could look at this exchange and say that Bridges won it because, duh, obviously some woman who sincerely believes she is a man, or ought to be treated as one, can get pregnant. That is how Bridges could say, with evident condescension in her body language, that people who don’t affirm what she does are merely “pretending not to know they exist.” Because gender ideologues need only the testimony of trans-identifying people to prove “their existence,” it is trivially easy for those ideologues to convince themselves that everyone else is just stubbornly or wickedly denying the truth.

 

But the bigger challenge is in the rest of the exchange, where the suicidality of people who identify as trans is cast as entirely the fault of a society that has “denialism” in it. This is an astonishing claim given the fact that people who have come to believe that their identity and their body are in some way “mismatched” would, presumably, experience some level of psychic torment no matter how understanding and supportive the rest of society was. When the reality of what is called “gender-affirming care” — the experimental use of hormones or surgeries that create nonfunctional simulations of the opposite gender’s genitalia (often requiring repeated surgeries throughout all of life to maintain) — is added to this turmoil, it sure seems as if it is the gender ideologue who is the denialist, and who is partly responsible for the suicidality of people who suffer from gender dysphoria.

 

It is on this ground that we must fight back. The rote and ritualistic recitation of trans suicide rates, and the scapegoating of nonbelievers and dissenters for these suicides, amounts to a sinister homily. It is Bridges who is encouraging suicide by casting it as an act of quasi-martyrdom. The suicide becomes the testimony to the wickedness of the deniers; that is the public meaning she allows for it. She’s trying to give a pro-social meaning to an act of personal despair and vindictiveness. The more suicides there are, the more condemned stand the deniers.

 

Gender ideology was born out of academic wordplay. And academics such as Professor Bridges have become bodyguards for a buccaneering, barely regulated gender-therapy industry, filled with pill-pushers and demented surgeons who leave their patients miserable and more desirous of ending their lives. We can’t just ask clever questions and hope for these people to embarrass themselves. We have to confront them for what they are: a cult that seduces people and leads them to bodily harm, and, in many cases, self-destruction.