A sincere question for transgender advocates

Things worth asking.

If you are like the vast majority of people, it probably wasn’t that many years ago that the concept of “transgenderism” was completely foreign to you, and very likely bizarre and unbelievable. Up until about a decade ago most everyone still spoke of transgenderism as an oddity, something that afflicted vulnerable and confused people and was more to be sort of tolerated and humored rather than genuinely “affirmed” and treated as merely one other mode of existence.

All of that has changed now. I would hazard a guess than more than 90% of the U.S. populace today will easily and unhesitatingly go along with transgender ideology with little to no resistance at all. Even the people who are still skeptical of it will publicly profess transgenderism’s basic tenets—calling people the pronouns of the opposite sex, letting males have access to locker rooms where women and little girls undress, etc—either because they just want to be polite, or because they’re afraid of making anyone angry, or both. I’ve written before that fear of the social media mob is one of the most powerful motivating factors in present-day society, and this applies particularly to the transgender issue, where any sort of notable or prominent dissent can trigger a cascade of Internet reactions that can lead to lost jobs, lost friends, and other life-upending chaos.

On that note, after several years of the transgender zeitgeist with plenty of indication that it’s going to continue for at least the short term, I think it’s worth posing the following questions to the people who have either actively helped bring about this paradigm shift or who have passively allowed it to happen. Please understand these are legitimate, sincere queries, they’re not “gotcha” questions or “bait,” and they are absolutely worth considering if you find yourself in either one of the following groups.

To the people who don’t really believe in transgenderism but who just go along with it out of “politeness” or a desire not to be harassed: At what point did you decide this was the best course of action to take? What was the calculative process you used to reach this conclusion? For instance, at what point did you decide it was more important to be polite and/or free from harassment than it was to keep unwell men out of little girls’ locker rooms? Is there a limit to your decision—is there some point at which you’ll say, “No way, enough is enough,” and draw a line in the sand?

To the people who used to not believe in transgenderism but who now sincerely believe in it: What changed your mind? What did you read/learn about/encounter that caused you to experience such a transformation in how you view the world? Was it a scientific study of some kind? Some kind of academic/philosophical treatise on the subject? Did you meet enough people who claimed to be “transgender” and they somehow convinced you? If so, how exactly did they do it? Or did you not meet many transgender-identifying people at all, but you just heard that there were a lot of them out there and decided that that was compelling enough to make you believe?

These are not unreasonable questions and are most assuredly worth asking, at least given the things we are demanding of people in service to this zeitgeist—that women and girls accept the presence of males in their changing rooms, for instance, or that female rape victims be forced to accept male medical staff/counselors/etc. Whenever you’re demanding such massive changes on a societal scare, it’s at the very least worth asking how you got there, and why.