Why is the trans cause advanced with such fever and hate?
I n the killing of Charlie Kirk, we may well have experienced our first pro-trans assassination.
Is anyone surprised? The trans cause has been infused with an irrational fervor from the beginning, its ethos deeply illiberal and even threatening. Just ask J.K. Rowling.
Whether it was accurate or not, the implicit message of the gay-rights movement was “Live and let live,” while the implicit pro-trans demand is, “Agree to every claim we make, no matter how implausible.”
The late historian and librarian of Congress James Billington wrote an intellectual history on the European revolutionary tradition, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. What we are talking about here is, Fire in the Minds of Them.
What accounts for the intensity and anger of trans advocates?
First of all, the people who have “transitioned” have poured a massive amount of emotional and financial investment into their choice, and there is no going back. The last thing that they want to hear — from anyone — is that it is all a fraud, that they’ve wasted all that psychic energy and money, that they’ve harmed themselves via hormones or surgery for no reason.
It would be like talking to “anti-racist” advocates who, on top of their poisonous views about American society, have gone to great lengths to make themselves black but harbor doubts that they really are.
The level of delusion involved in the trans cause, meanwhile, requires pushing on all fronts, to get every claim of the trans advocates accepted and to squash all dissent. If there’s one crack in the edifice, it discredits the entire enterprise.
The trans sports issue, for instance, wouldn’t seem like a hill to die on, given the popular opposition that it engenders. But if a so-called trans women can’t play against real women in competitive sports, then that unacceptably calls into question their legitimacy as women.
In a similar vein, it’s not enough to accept the pronouns of trans people — everyone needs to start stipulating their own pronouns on every email and every document
The whole thing is a little like the plot of Shutter Island (plot spoiler), which revolves around the staff of an insane asylum indulging the delusions of a demented man as the best way to treat him.
The notion of suicide hangs over the debate. Trans advocates blame the physiological distress of people suffering from gender dysphoria on those who question trans orthodoxy. And so they think that those who refuse to go along are literally causing trans people to kill themselves. This comes up again and again, and makes the acceptance of trans claims a matter of life and death
As Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health, Rachel Levine, put it in 2022,
Trans youth in particular are being hounded in public and driven to deaths of despair at an alarming rate. Fifty-two percent of all transgender and nonbinary young people in the U.S. seriously contemplated killing themselves in 2020. Think about how many of them thought it was better to die than to put up with any more harassment, scapegoating and intentional abuse.
The refusal to accept the trans ideology is itself considered harassment and abuse.
(Never mind that the narrative around suicide is, as the ACLU’s attorney admitted before the Supreme Court in oral arguments in the Tennessee case of U.S. v. Skrmetti, false.)
On top of this, for the left, it’s always the Edmund Pettis bridge. Whatever the new cause is must be invested with the moral urgency — and the unquestionable righteousness — of the civil rights struggle. In moral terms, the progressives always put themselves in the position of Martin Luther King and Thurgood Marshall, the advocates on “the right side of history,” while their opponents are perpetually standing in the schoolhouse door.
In general, they can’t be blamed for thinking that moral bullying will get them whatever they want, since it’s worked before.
The bookends of the trans debate over the past decade could be considered the transgender journalist Zoey Tur threatening to put Ben Shapiro in a hospital for not accepting his pronouns during a 2015 TV debate and the comedian Graham Linehan’s arrest at Heathrow airport earlier this month for X posts opposing the trans agenda. Both incidents demonstrated a fanaticism and unwillingness to tolerate opposition.
This fervor doesn’t suggest self-confidence. People tend to be most emotional in debate when they are defending a vulnerable position or fear that they are losing. Even when they were making the biggest gains, the advocates of the trans cause seemed to realize the fragility of their own case, a Jenga tower of irrationality that couldn’t bear the slightest examination.
And now, someone who, as his mother put it, had become more “trans-rights oriented” and, in his own words, wanted to stop Charlie Kirk’s hate, assassinated a high-profile dissenter from the trans orthodoxy.
Tyler Robinson’s means was shocking, but the illiberal impulse in behalf of the trans cause was very familiar.