A few days ago, I finally got around to reading the gigantic New York Times Magazine story on the rise and fall of the transgender legal movement’s big bet to take their ideology to the Supreme Court.

(I don’t particularly recommend reading this 10,000 word essay — unless, that is, you’ve got an hour of spare time to go spelunking through this dystopian and very strange world.)

In a way, the essay is almost quaint: It describes a movement that has culturally — and, now, legally, since the High Court ruled in United States v. Skrmetti — suffered defeat at the hands of sanity and common sense.

It was not that long ago, of course, when the transgender movement was riding high. On Facebook, you could choose between 37 genders. Right-thinking people everywhere considered it both the right-kind-of-revolutionary and unremarkable to display “she/her” or “they/them” on public-facing profiles. Bien-pensants used terms such as “two spirit,” “demiboy,” and “ambigender” in complete seriousness and with straight faces, and would report you to the thought police if you happened to confuse “pangender” with “demigender.”

It was not that long ago that the leading lights of American society insisted that there was nothing wrong with males dominating in girls sports, nothing wrong with transgender officer candidates at Quantico, and nothing wrong with a legal regime that allowed doctors to chemically and surgically change the course of children’s lives before they could reach the medical age of consent.

At National Review, however, we always told the truth. We always argued for common sense and the timeless virtues and facts before radical ideology.

We told the truth when it wasn’t popular. We told the truth when it looked like we might be on the losing side. We told the truth when New York City’s “human rights law” and its so-called “gender identity” protections threatened NR’s ability to do what we do without the threat of government interference.

Through it all, we do it because we think America is terrific, as Charlie Cooke writes, and we want to keep it that way. We do it because we’re outraged by progressive stupidity, as Jeff Blehar writes.

And we do it for you, our readers and subscribers. What we do here is not free. It costs money to run our operation, print the magazine, pay our writers, and keep the website going. And it’s no exaggeration at all to say that we couldn’t do it without you.

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