The Left Can't Drop "Trans Kids"

Something is happening that has never happened before

The tide is turning against the trans agenda to put children through life-changing drugs and sex change surgeries. Western Europe has slowed down (though not stopped) transgender medical abuse of children. Last week the Biden administration flipped its position and said it now opposes genital mutilation surgery for minors (it still supports puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones).

The Biden admin is right to be worried. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose transgender hormone treatment for minors and surgery for minors is even less popular. Biden already polls poorly with moderates and cannot afford to lose any more ground.

But no matter how electorally poisonous the Trans issue becomes, I don’t think the Left will be able to drop it, because they have already firmly and irreversibly attached transgenderism to the Mainstream Left brand, and if you accept transgenderism in principle, transgenderism-for-kids inevitably follows.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

In the mid 2010s the Regime came out hard in favor of transgenderism. In 2014 we were told that transgenderism was “America’s next civil rights frontier.” Before that, the legal groundwork had been laid to make it a crime to “discriminate” against transsexuals.

Today the message is clear: If you don’t approve of transgenderism, you are outside the mainstream. You are a bigot, just like a “racist” or a “sexist.” If you speak your unapproved thoughts too openly, you can be ostracized by friends or even fired from your job. Transsexuals do not have to keep quiet about their views around you. You have to keep quiet about your views around them. Since no right-thinking person could possibly have any problem with transgenderism, there is of course no problem at all with a child being transgender. And since the child truly is transgender, they should get the medical procedures which transgender people need, up to and including surgery.

The psychology of liberals

From his TV (and school), the liberal has learned The Narrative of Inevitable Leftist Victory. He has been taught that throughout history, there have been many controversies, and the Left has been right about and has won every single one of them. Slavery, Women’s Rights, Economic Interventionism, Segregation, Gay Rights. The liberal has concluded that there is some mysterious force which causes The New Thing to always win in the end, and since he wants to be on the winning side, he always sides with The New Thing. He thinks that conservatives are kind of quaint when they’re protesting The New Thing. They just don’t know as much as he does. Unlike him, they don’t know that The New Thing is destined to win in the end.

Contrary to popular belief, the Left has actually NOT beaten conservatives in every fight. The Left has had a pretty good winning streak - they have a huge systemic advantage since they control the media - but there have been a few issues on which conservatives won out. One example is the Eugenics movement. In the early 20th century Eugenics was The New Thing and it was considered part of the Progressive movement. Its proponents included self-styled Progressives like Theodore Roosevelt and Margaret Sanger. The main opponents of Eugenics were Christian Conservatives. Thanks to a rift between the technocratic wing and anti-civilization wing on the Left, the Right won the fight on the Eugenics issue. Of course, this does not go down in history as a Right-wing victory, because the Left doesn’t include it in history lessons. Part of the reason the Left is perceived as being on a winning streak is a genuine winning streak, but it’s also partly because the Left memory-holes any issue on which they lose.

Another issue is the movement for the legalization of pedophilia. In the 1970s Michel Foucault and other French Leftist thinkers signed an open letter arguing that pedophilia should be legalized. In Britain there was a nonprofit organization called PIE, which stood for Pedophile Information Exchange. They did interviews with major TV channels. Since the Left lost the debate over pedophilia, they stopped talking about it and pretended it never happened.

And up until very recently it was possible for the Left to memory-hole their losses. They control TV, the newspapers and the school history curriculum, so if a topic became unfavorable to them, they could just stop talking about it and pretend it never happened. But now we have the internet, so people can talk to each other without the Regime’s permission, and if the Regime tried to drop the trans issue and sweep it under the rug, lots of people would notice. Even if the Establishment Left wants to drop the Trans issue, they can’t. They’ve already made sure everyone knows that Trans is The New Thing. If they admit that The New Thing can sometimes be wrong, then they’ve undermined one of the fundamental narratives of the Left.

As soon as you admit that Trans might be wrong, then you’ve admitted that The New Thing can sometimes be wrong, and then you have to go back and actually make a case for the old New Things (like Economic Intervention, Desegregation and Gay Rights) - not just assert that they are inevitable, but actually make a case for them on the merits.

Source: AP

And it gets worse (for the Left) because not only has the Left made support for transgenderism central to its message, the Right has made opposition to transgenderism central to its message. The map of state laws on child transgender procedures lines up almost perfectly with the Republican/Democrat divide with Republican states banning the procedures for minors, Democrat states explicitly protecting them, and swing states having no laws on the subject. If the Left tries to drop “Trans Kids” now, they will be admitting not only that they were wrong, but that the dumb yokels they despise were right.