Most people are not partisans in the culture wars and are, in fact, put off by them. For that reason, the loser in most culture wars is whoever looks like the aggressor. And for that reason, the major left-leaning media often go into contortions to pretend conservatives are the aggressors in the culture wars.
The New York Times published a popular piece this week that posits current controversies over transgenderism are because conservatives recently “went searching for an issue that would re-energize supporters and donors.”
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My colleague Zach Faria wrote an excellent response, making the key point that Republicans are ramping up laws about transgender ideology and sex-change procedures on children because the Left is ramping up its imposition of transgender ideology and its promotion of sex-change procedures on children:
“Bills focused on gender ideology in schools have been passed in response to liberals demanding that children be taught to be transgender or ‘nonbinary’ in schools. Bills focused on parents' rights are going through in response to secret social gender transitions that public educators are urging and withholding from children’s parents.”
“Would Republicans be passing bills banning doctors from mutilating their children and pumping them full of chemicals if liberals hadn’t decided that it is evil not to mutilate children and pump them full of chemicals to transition them? They probably never would have even thought of such a thing.”
Zach and I have both written about this maddening media phenomenon in the past. As I put it a year ago, “The Right has grown more combative on culture — just like Ukraine is more combative at war.”
Conservatives are standing on the same ground where they’ve stood for decades, and brand new cultural forces are assailing that ground, forcing conservatives to fight back or make unacceptable surrenders.
“What did Republicans and conservatives believe in 2000? They believed that abortion should be outlawed, that marriage was between a man and a woman, and, while they never would have had occasion to say it, that men were men, even if they identified as women."
“What did Democrats and liberals believe in 2000? They were already pretty dedicated to abortion on demand without apology, sure, but they accepted a compromise of no taxpayer funding. Also, they at least tolerated pro-life Democrats back then. They were split on gay marriage, with the party establishment taking the conservative position. And, again, Democrats weren’t really talking about gender fluidity, deadnaming, cisgender normativity, pronoun violations, or housing male violent criminals in female prisons."
“Today, the Democratic Party drives out any pro-lifers, declares them to be the equivalent of segregationists, persecutes anyone who won't participate in a gay wedding, and tries to teach gender ideology, as a fact of life, in public schools.”
Zach made that point on Democratic attempts to ban standard household equipment and cars and media attempts to paint the conservative resistance as some sort of astroturf culture war offensive. “Democrats try to ban stoves and gasoline — Republicans 'start a culture war' by noticing it,” he wrote.
But I want to make a very specific factual objection to the Left’s account of the transgender wars.
Here’s where the New York Times places the start of the current battles:
“The initial efforts by the conservative movement to deploy transgender issues did not go well. In 2016, North Carolina legislators voted to bar transgender people from using the bathroom of their preference. It created a backlash so harsh — from corporations, sports teams and even Bruce Springsteen — that lawmakers eventually rescinded the bill.”
You would think that conservative North Carolina legislators were the first ones to “deploy transgender issues.” You would think, judging by this account, that the state passed a law about men in women’s bathrooms to score political points.
But there was a very specific trigger to the North Carolina bathroom bill. It was the Charlotte bathroom bill.
Charlotte passed a bill forcing private businesses to let male customers who identified as women use the women’s room or be guilty of discrimination.
The state law was, in effect, a preemption of the bathroom portion of that bill.
So who started that culture war? It wasn’t the people trying to maintain the bathroom status quo.