By Abe Greenwald
Friday, May 05, 2023
Transgender
activism is failing. Badly. A new Washington Post-Kaiser Family
Foundation poll is definitive. Americans
aren’t buying the trans fairytale about magical, shapeshifting creatures who
can will themselves into anything they want and live happily ever after. “Most
Americans don’t believe it’s even possible to be a gender that differs from
that assigned at birth,” report Laura Meckler and Scott Clement. And if the
poll didn’t use the false and misleading “assigned at birth” formulation, you
can bet that the number of Americans who say that gender is a simple
chromosomal reality would be even greater than the 57 percent majority reported
here.
The Post’s
report on the poll is an exercise in struggling with harsh facts, beginning
with the headline: “Most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP,
poll shows.” It’s not “anti-trans” to recognize that sex is immutable. It’s
pro-reality.
And the
numbers reveal a much saner country than you might infer from observing media
and politicians. Not only do majorities in every age category believe that
one’s sex is locked in at birth, but most Americans are opposed to trans
females competing against biological females at every level of athletics—from
youth sports (62 percent) to the pros (65 percent). Sixty-eight percent of
respondents are against access to puberty blockers for children aged 10 to 14
and 58 percent oppose hormonal treatments for trans teens aged 15 to 17. Large
majorities believe it’s “inappropriate for teachers to discuss trans identity
in elementary schools.” For kindergarten through third grade, 77 percent are
against it; for fourth and fifth grades, 70 percent are against. A slim majority
(52 percent) support such discussion in middle schools and a full 64 support it
in high schools.
How did
this happen? In 2012, the country flipped in favor of same-sex marriage
virtually overnight. This left vast activist networks suddenly without purpose.
Money, contacts, lobbying know-how—all of it rendered useless. Well, that can’t
happen. In the manner of MoveOn—which was founded to defend Bill Clinton from
impeachment and then transformed into an anti-Bush group once Clinton was out
of office—the gay-marriage movement was repurposed. But its new cause has
proved too much for too many. And it has replaced disenchanted former allies
with a new generation of unhinged radicals. These extremists overplayed their
hand, wallpapering the world with anti-scientific, face-value lunacy and
insisting that if you didn’t believe it, you were a monster. The more that
Americans were exposed to this stuff, the more they rejected it. Numbers bear
that out, too. The Post reports: “The Pew Research
Center found
60 percent last year saying one’s gender is determined by the sex assigned at
birth, up from 54 percent in 2017.” This is what happens when you embrace a
self-discrediting cause.
The wave
of progressive coping that’s coming our way will be spectacular. From the Post:
“interviews and other poll findings suggest that many Americans hold
complicated and sometimes contradictory views on the subject.” What’s their
example of such a contradictory view? “While a majority of Americans oppose
access to puberty blockers and hormone treatments for children and teenagers,
for instance, clear majorities also support laws prohibiting
discrimination against trans people, including in K-12 schools.” As
if it’s inconsistent to oppose both the medical disfigurement and social
mistreatment of children.
That’s
only a contradiction in the bubble-mind of identitarian zealots, who genuinely
believe that the average American opposes puberty blockers or hormones for
children because he’s a bigot. Some parts of corporate and political America
have been captured by these types. But as Americans continue to make their
opinions known, as consumers and voters, gender sanity will retake
institutions. If the Washington Post is an indication, it’s
going to be an entertaining process.
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