Mick Hartley

Yesterday we heard something of the Democrat response to their disastrous embrace of gender ideology. Faced with the timidity of it all –  "I do know that women’s rights are important and transwomen’s rights are important, so we have to find a balance that makes sense" – Meghan Murphy was suitably scathing. JK Rowling was outraged at the rewriting of history that seems to be going on.

Here's another of these milksop efforts: Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic suggesting that Moderation Is Not the Same Thing as Surrender. "Democrats do not, in fact, face a choice between championing trans rights and completely abandoning them."

The problem, as Arty Morty points out, is that Chait refuses to let go of the notion that trans rights is the next liberation step after gay rights: that this is the latest group of oppressed people waiting to be liberated.

But transgender makes much more sense when it’s understood not as an identity-politics or social-justice issue, but as a loose term to describe what began as a small group of adults with a rare psychiatric condition, which subsequently exploded into a fad and a subculture via social media….

Chait says: “The major questions about trans rights are: Do some people have the chance to live a happier and more fulfilling life in a different gender identity than the one to which they were born?…”

But Chait, what is a “gender identity”? If people are already more-or-less free to dress and act as femininely or masculinely as they please regardless of their sex, why do we need to build a whole new cultural concept to suppress all mention of some people’s sex? It seems rather obvious that “gender identity” is a fundamentally regressive way of conceptualizing the relationship between someone’s biological sex and his or her femininity or masculinity….

The American liberal media class needs to learn that trans rights as in workplace and housing protections for people who identify as transgender is one thing. But “trans rights” as in forcing all of society to pretend that the facts of biology are inapplicable to those who state that they don’t believe in them is another thing entirely: as I said in my essay, that’s akin to religious nationalism.

And there’s nothing progressive about that.

Worth a read in full.