[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
After losing a presidential election and a Supreme Court case, Democrats are looking to detransition from the transgender movement, but they can’t seem to manage to do it.
‘United States v. Skrmett’, the transgender movement’s biggest legal loss, bet everything on the Supreme Court getting comfortable with medically and chemically mutilating children based on dubious claims that it was the best way to reduce suicide rates. In ‘How the Transgender Rights Movement Bet on the Supreme Court and Lost’, a New York Times Magazine article blames the loss on growing extremism within the transgender movement.
In one of the most striking moments in the article, a Biden aide says of Dr. Rick ‘Rachel’ Levine, the man in a wig appointed as a top health official, going rogue, “everyone was like, holy cow — did Rachel Levine really go out and lobby for 9-year-olds to get surgery?”
The Biden administration couldn’t control Dr. Rick and the movement couldn’t police itself. Those inside it and the ‘allies’ around it were shocked at the extremism, but couldn’t stop it because ideological capture had left the party and the administration a shell of itself.
In an appearance on Ezra Klein’s New York Times podcast, Rep. Tim ‘Sarah’ McBride insisted that “we’re not in this position because of the movement or the community”, but a “well-funded effort to demonize trans people.” He conceded that there were “requests that people perceived as a cultural aggression”, like mandatory pronouns, but the only mistake was going “to Trans 201, Trans 301, when people were still at a very much Trans 101 stage” and that “some of the cultural mores and norms that started to develop around inclusion of trans people were probably premature for a lot of people.” The solution is two steps backward and then ten steps forward.
Once people are sold on the idea that men in dresses just want to live their lives and be left alone, mandatory pronouns and child mutilation can make a comeback with Trans 301. And it’s best not to ask for any details about Trans 401, the advanced grad courses and final exams.
But even two steps backward may be impossible.
The transgender movement, like BLM, the Hamas campus riots or the more recently illegal alien riots, was mostly about “cultural aggression”. That is why exposing children to drag queens, getting men to play against women and medically mutilating children were not unfortunate excesses that tainted a movement, but the larger purpose of the movement’s ‘allies’.
An inoffensive transgender movement that did not mandate pronouns or abuse children would be of minimal interest to the millions of non-transgender leftists who embraced it because it offered a revolutionary deconstruction of sex and human relationships. They did not fly blue, white and pink flags so that a tiny group of people could live out their sexual fantasies, but for the promise of breaking down and reinventing society within the larger cultural revolution.
The other unpopular movements currently consuming the Left are based on similar deconstructions, of nationhood like the ICE and Gaza riots, of public safety and private property, like BLM, of the industrial revolution, like environmentalism, and the resulting ‘cultural aggression’ and backlash are due to the fundamental transformations they’re unleashing.
Deconstructions take a fundamental building block of society, invert it as oppressive and then give people a taste of what life would be like without it, and cancel those who resist. This is not, as some Democrats have taken to claiming of the transgender debate, a distraction, it’s the entire purpose of the Left which seeks to deconstruct, invert and then reinvent all of life.
When Democrats talk about taking a step back, they’re being either naive or disingenuous about the radically aggressive movement that had captured their party. The transgender movement only really gained wide acceptance on the Left when it did not seek ‘acceptance’ but set out to challenge and transform how people saw the sexes. Forcing pronouns on everyone in the name of acceptance was really a vehicle for reeducating and transforming the public view.
This “cultural aggression” was meant to offend, upset and mobilize what the Left considered ‘reactionary forces’ and radicalize ‘progressive forces’ for a showdown in the ideological equivalent of a race riot. The Left lost an election, but it’s much less interested in winning elections than in breaking up the existing consensus on everything and imposing its own.
Democrats have been committed to a revolution, to a cycle of perpetual cultural aggression, always positioned as “fighting oppression” in the name of the “right side of history” and then they pretend that those issues are divisive only because Republicans make them so. This perpetual game of punching their victims in the back of the head, then running away and crying if their victims fight back has escalated into a collection of 80/20 issues and a narrow coalition.
Leftists adopt 80/20 issues to open the Overton Window. Occasionally more traditional leftists argue that they should be focusing everything on class warfare instead of identity politics, but postmodern leftists don’t just want an American Soviet Union, bread lines and crude outfits, they want to redefine everything, not just property, in an endless war against sanity and reality.
The man in a dress who wants to play against girls half his size is not the real problem. It’s not even his movement that’s the real problem, but the movement behind the movement.
Democrats may want to detransition from the transgender movement, but as long as the Left sets their intellectual, moral and policy priorities, they’re just going to adopt an equally horrible movement. And they’ve already managed to adopt not just one, but four of them. And counting.
They can’t step back from extremism because they’re in the grip of an extremist movement. Until they come to terms with that and stop blaming everyone objecting to the latest horrible idea out of academia that’s now suddenly the subject of bestselling books, John Oliver episodes and riots in the streets, and actually deal with where their party’s brain is, things will get worse.
As long as Democrats remain mired in the same old debate between pragmatic politics and the moral imperatives of leftist agitators, the dysfunctional cycle will keep on repeating itself. To break it, Democrats have to figure out what their principles are and what they stand for, as distinct from whatever leftist agitprop and cultural programming tells them to stand for.
The Democrats used to know who they were fighting for because they knew what they believed. And then they outsourced their beliefs and their fights to the Ford Foundation, Soros and Harvard, they adopted positions they were silently uncomfortable with and kept quiet about it.
The latter is how they ended up getting on the side of mutilating kids and forcing teen girls to play volleyball against a 250 lb man who calls himself ‘Lisa’. That ought to be a wake-up call.
But it won’t be.
Mutilated children will have more luck detransitioning than a mutilated movement.