Progressive insanity is running amok in Massachusetts — again. This time, a local politician who identifies as “nonbinary,” neither male nor female, is melting down and demanding a one-month vacation due to “misgendering.” Yes, seriously.
“The first openly nonbinary lawmaker in Massachusetts history is taking a leave of absence after they allegedly dealt with transphobia from colleagues, including Worcester’s mayor,” NBC Boston reports. “Thu Nguyen, who has served as an at-large councilor since 2022, says their ‘hiatus’ is to prioritize their mental health and emotional safety after they were allegedly subjected to a discriminatory and toxic culture on the Worcester City Council. Nguyen also said this month off will be to forge a path to address this support, asking for support in holding Worcester to a moral and legal standard ‘that feels like the bare minimum.’”
Actually, whatever your “gender identity,” the “bare minimum” is showing up to work and doing your job like an adult. But Nguyen is evidently completely unwilling to do the job she was elected to do.
According to Worcester’s mayor, “Councilor Nguyen has missed half of the Traffic and Parking subcommittee meetings and has not held a meeting for the Public Service and Transportation subcommittee that they chair.”
Now she wants a month off entirely.
This is ridiculous. To be clear, Nguyen is not dealing with some far-right colleagues who aggressively call her by the correct but “offensive” pronoun, she; she’s serving alongside moderate Democrats who made a few mistakes years ago but apologized.
“Early on when the Councilor was elected, I did make an honest error in addressing the Councilor and may have done so a few times, for which I apologized,” one of Nguyen’s colleagues explained. “There has never been any intentional or consistent misgendering.”
That’s right: We’re talking about a few one-off instances years ago. If this kind of mild inconvenience renders you unable or unwilling to do your job, you do not belong in a position of power entrusted with an entire city’s welfare. No, you belong in remedial therapy because you lack the emotional resilience of a functioning adult.
And society, even Democratic enclaves such as Massachusetts, simply must dispense with this “safetyism” nonsense.
We see it infecting progressive-dominated spaces such as college campuses, where certain places are deemed “safe spaces” where students, who are supposed to be learning and opening their minds, are “protected” from ideas that make them “unsafe.” We see it on social media, where left-wing activist organizations have lobbied Big Tech platforms to censor words and speech that might hurt people’s feelings in the name of keeping them “safe.” We even see it in Congress, where left-wing members describe disagreeing with their ideas as a form of “policy violence.”
This dangerous ideology must be rejected.
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Words that hurt your feelings do not make you physically unsafe. Period. Once we accept that fraudulent premise, we head down a slippery slope that ultimately gives anyone a cop-out to avoid doing anything they don’t want to do and potentially even justifies actual physical violence in response to words; it’s just self-defense! Plus, this perverse “logic” is an insult to actual victims of violence, who understand all too well the difference between words and fists.
On one hand, this is just one unhinged local politician in a deep-blue enclave. But it’s an extreme example of a broader cultural phenomenon embraced by much of the Left, and this toxic safetyism threatens to rip our society apart at its seams.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.