Mick Hartley

We may think gender nonsense is bad here – and of course it is - but it's a lot worse across the Atlantic. For a start, as Genevieve Gluck points out, it all started out, along with the modern porn industry and other such delights, in California. But also there's a key member of the Biden administration, assistant health secretary Rachel Levine, who's transgender and who openly pushes for the glories of "gender-affirming care" – ie medical mutilation – as a supposedly life-saving intervention in the lives of troubled young kids. 

And where the gender cult goes, suppression of dissension surely follows. Yes, it's all getting a little nasty and totalitarian, as James Kirchick reports:

A hallmark of every dictatorial regime is an inability to withstand scrutiny. From the emperors of antiquity to the tyrants (both tin-pot and tech-savvy) of today, what absolutist rulers throughout human history all have in common is an extremely low tolerance for criticism. No matter the nature of their regime—a Latin American junta, an East Bloc nomenklatura, or an African kleptocracy—among the very first actions that the aspiring authoritarian takes upon seizing power is to silence those who might point out his shortcomings.

“Authoritarian” is the word that first comes to mind upon reading the open letter addressed to the country’s largest social media platforms earlier this summer, calling on them to “Stop the Flow of Anti-Trans Hate & Malicious Disinformation About Trans Healthcare.” Organized by the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD, two of America’s leading LGBTQ rights groups, the letter, which was signed by over 250 celebrities including Jamie Lee Curtis, Elliot Page, and Patrick Stewart, faults Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter for “a massive systemic failure to prohibit hate, harassment, and malicious anti-LGBTQ disinformation on your platforms [that] must be addressed.” …

Examples of such “hate speech” that the signatories want banished from the internet include “targeted misgendering and deadnaming,” the latter being the practice of referring to a transgender person by their birth name rather than their chosen one. In a footnote, the letter links to an article declaring that the “relentless misgendering of Dr. Rachel Levine,” an assistant secretary for health and the first openly transgender Senate-confirmed government official, “is violence.” You know, violence, a category that now includes punching someone, stabbing them, and using the name on their birth certificate….

Whatever one’s views about the transgender issue and its improbable prominence in American life, pediatric gender medicine is an extremely complex subject. It deserves—indeed, requires—further research and debate, not the suppression of contrary perspectives. If the tech platforms acquiesced to the demands of HRC, GLAAD and their cowed celebrity “allies” (at least I hope that’s why Patrick Stewart’s agent agreed to let his client’s name be associated with something so patently foolish as this), reams of vital scientific data would be banned, as would the work of journalists from across the political spectrum and around the world. With HRC and GLAAD having failed in their high-profile effort to bully The New York Times, and HRC doubly humiliated that its declaration of a “national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people” has fallen on deaf ears, these organizations are now flocking to the last refuge of the desperate: censorship. To deal with the “malicious lies and disinformation” about pediatric gender medicine, they demand, social media platforms must implement “specific mitigations … akin to election and COVID-19 mitigations and rules.” From the people who told you that Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation and the lab leak theory was a racist lie, here’s the latest update on “medically necessary healthcare for transgender youth.”

What's happened – as happened here with the rise of Stonewall – is that once the aims of gay liberation were effectively achieved, "gay" became "LGBTQ+", with the emphasis very much on the T. It all looked from the outside, and to well-meaning progressives, as a continuation of the same campaign under a different name – but it wasn't and it isn't. A whole new anti-science ideology grew up to support the trans agenda, marginalising women and portraying gayness as a problem to be cured through medical intervention. Where there was frre speech and open debate we have a new authoritarian cult, which cannot be questioned.