The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘The Enormity of the Crime’

Posted on | April 23, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘The Enormity of the Crime’

One of the things I’ve always understood about what is now generally called “the LGBTQ movement” (once known more simply as “gay rights”) was that it really wasn’t about fighting oppression, and that the claims of victimhood involved were largely fictitious. And I knew this because I actually knew gay people, none of whom were in the least bit oppressed or victimized, despite the fact that they lived in the heart of the Bible Belt. It is not necessary for me to cite examples, although i could name names of these friends and acquaintances who didn’t parade around proclaiming themselves to be oppressed victims because (a) there was no political advantage to be had by making such claims in the Deep South three or four decades ago, and (b) they weren’t victims in any meaningful sense of the word. It was not until the 1990s, really, that the gay rights movement began to get much traction in popular culture, probably as a result, on the one hand, of the AIDS epidemic creating a crisis atmosphere and, on the other hand, the Democratic Party trying to find political leverage against the “Religious Right.” Prior to the Clinton administration, really, most people had a basic libertarian attitude toward homosexuality — even if they did not approve of such behavior, they didn’t go snooping around trying to “out” people or otherwise make a big scene about it.

Beginning in 1993, after Bill Clinton turned gays-in-the-military into an issue, a new stance of radical gay activism became apparent, which was anathema to the old libertarian live-and-let-live attitude. Suddenly demands were being made, and if you didn’t agree with the policies being advocated, you were accused of ignorance and hatred — “homophobia”!

The suffix “-phobia” amounts to a diagnosis of mental illness, an accusation that one is motivated by irrational fear, and to inject this into public policy debates is evidence of the worst sort of bad faith. Never mind, of course, the fictional nature of the claims of “oppression” made by gay rights activists which, as I say, is my basic disagreement with the movement in general. Because the gay people I knew were not remotely in a situation of oppression comparable to, e.g., black people living under Jim Crow, I was not interested in any lectures about how their “rights” were allegedly being violated. The accusations of “ignorance,” “hate” and “homophobia” were just icing on this gigantic cake of obnoxious activism.

If it is your goal to persuade me, do not begin your argument by insulting me. Bogus accusations of “ignorance” — do I seem ignorant to you? — are habitually hurled by liberals who don’t seem to care whom they are insulting by such claims, or what the consequences may be. Certainly I don’t think I am alone in this attitude. There must be lots of people who never had any malice toward gay people and who, indeed, may be deeply sympathetic to the various problems afflicting gay people, but who simply don’t think that politics is the solution to such problems. Is such a believe “ignorant”? Is it not possible that an honest and intelligent person may evaluate the matter of homosexuality in its entirety, weighing and considering the various aspects of the issues involved, and simply decide that the policies advocated by “gay rights” activists are generally wrong?

Having spent the past couple of decades closely watching how liberals operate, I have long since realized that unless you learn to shrug off accusations of “hate” and “ignorance” from the Left, you’re going to be bullied into submission — or, at the very least, intimidated into silence, which is effectively the same. While I don’t go around starting arguments with people, neither will I be forced to sit in silence while liberals lecture me as if I were a child in need of their tutelage. As folks say down home, I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night, and I am in no need of instruction on this issue. Neither is Jeremy Carl:

Groomers.
It’s the word of the month, which the Right is applying increasingly to our leftist political establishment.
Perhaps the best response to the groomer debate came from Helena Kirschner, a woman who detransitioned (that is, she spent years as “transgender man” before later accepting her birth sex) and has become an influential voice speaking up against transgender ideology:
“There’s a place for precise terminology,” she tweeted. “There’s also a place for memetic terms that convey a difficult to articulate concept in a way many people can intuitively understand. ‘Groomer’ applied to teachers & other adults who manipulate kids into gender confusion accomplishes this.”
And that is exactly right. It’s difficult for us to acknowledge the enormity of the crime that has been committed against our children because it’s hard for us to acknowledge how deeply we have failed. And it’s hard for us to accept that this crime is taking place with the full support of the leadership of one of America’s major political parties and most of the medical establishment. . . .
The mass grooming of our children into pediatric transgenderism and other confused gender identities is a crime of world-historical proportions, a crime which dare not speak its name.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) You see that Helena Kirschner cannot be accused of “ignorance” about transgenderism, having been through the experience herself. One imagines that this experience has provided her with ironclad immunity against such insults masquerading as “arguments.” Recall that I featured Kirschner here last month:

Helena Kerschner is not an unattractive woman. She has a certain pre-Raphaelite beauty — the kind of face you might find in a Rossetti painting — and yet she spent her adolescence feeling ugly:

By the time I was thirteen, I was isolating myself, self-harming, and had developed an eating disorder. In eighth grade, I lost touch with most of my school friends, and was too self-conscious and preoccupied with my eating disorder to put myself out there again. I started skipping school, spending lunch in the bathroom, and in general just keeping my head down, trying to get through the day unnoticed.

She found a “community” in the Internet’s septic tank — Tumblr:

Between sharing photos, drawings, and fanfiction, these girls were posting about their lives and going into deep detail about their struggles. Many were social outcasts like me, also struggling with things like self-harm and eating disorders. Finding a community of such like minded people felt amazing, and I quickly began spending nearly every waking moment on Tumblr or messaging some friend I had met on there.

The self-selecting nature of online communities is insufficiently understood. To be part of such a “community,” after all, you have to spend a lot of time online, whether it’s ranting about politics on Twitter or sharing “fanfiction” on Tumblr. And the people who become obsessed with this — the core of any such online community — tend to be “social outcasts” who lack healthy real-world connections with actual human beings. . . .

The point is that such people are vulnerable, and transgender activists seek to exploit that vulnerability in a predatory way. It should not be necessary to explain what’s wrong with such exploitation, and the fact that the providers of government-imposed “education” now wish to direct these efforts at kindergartners ought to outrage every sensible American. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are not very sensible — Joe Biden got 81 million votes — and thus those of us who haven’t completely lost our minds find ourselves as an embattled minority, arguing against lunatics.

But don’t get me started on David French . . .




 

Category: The Transgender Cult

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