Leaving the Left

From the archives II

Kindness is Everything

Envy was once considered to be one of the seven deadly sins before it became one of the most admired virtues under its new name, ‘social justice.’

-Thomas Sowell, 1999

In February, 2022 my daughter pondered taking “just hormones and stuff” in accordance with her most recently declared gender identity—transmasc. Before that she was a lesbian. Before that, pansexual. Before that, she didn’t pay attention. I watched—not understanding at the time—the Marxist framework of “systems of oppression” seep into her consciousness and take over her identity.

It never rang true, what she proclaimed about herself. ‘Pansexual’ sounded contrived, ‘Lesbian’ like wishful thinking and ‘Transmasc’ an urgent affirmation. Let this be true, she seemed to pray between the lines. I was happy to support her—despite my curious doubt—until I wasn’t.

My daughter told me that I needed to “educate” myself—because I am “old” and “don’t understand how it is now.” From her perspective, how it is now is that gender and sex are a spectrum. To think that they are binary is to enact bigotry, small-mindedness and patriarchy. To not affirm someone’s chosen gender and pronouns is transphobic under the larger umbrella of homophobia. She provided a PowerPoint presentation to elaborate these points to her father and me and to instruct us how to use neopronouns for gender fluid people, and what is acceptable or unacceptable to ask an LGBT person.

I started educating myself, but not in the way she’d hoped. I listened to Gender: A Wider Lens. I read Helen Joyce’s book, and Debra Soh’s and Abigail Shrier’s, which Miss Miller told me was “Nazi propaganda.” I watched documentaries like Dysphoric and The Trans Train. I circled back to Jordan Peterson, who I’d discovered back in 2016 when my daughter’s friend came out as a boy. On the phone with Rowan’s* mom the pronouncement had thudded in my brain like a rotten carcass. I witnessed with horror this girl’s mother place her trust in doctors, against even her own intuition. I listened to her express healthy skepticism and then self-correct, chanting her religious hymns: “Trust the science.” “Puberty blockers are a pause button.” “I’m saving my son.” Having witnessed firsthand the alcoholism and schizophrenia in Rowan’s family, it was resoundingly clear that this child wasn’t trans. She wasn’t a boy. She was traumatized and coping in the trendiest, most celebrated and maladaptive way possible.

It seemed as obvious as a trick card that following the affirmative model to its logical end could only result in catastrophe—medicalization for life; infertility; physical pain; increased horror at one’s body for never achieving unflinching passability no matter how many surgical interventions it endures; diminished ability to fit into mainstream society; permanent damage; incessant focus on the self to the detriment of producing anything of value; constant striving for an external solution to internal woe; cultivated paranoia that every interaction with oneself and the world would forever be based on a fundamental lie. All this, and your mother helped you do it. Well, your mother and the state.

As Rowan’s mother shepherded her daughter to and from the neighborhood gender clinic I watched the trans debate morph into a right versus left issue. Many of us ROGD mothers insisted it wasn’t true. We proclaimed our liberalism, our democratic voting record, our support for Obama or Bernie or Hillary Clinton. But the mainstream media didn’t give a platform to Helen Joyce or Abigail Shrier or Debra Soh. Joe Rogan did. MSNBC didn’t interview detransitioners like Helena Kerschner. Tucker Carlson did.

When The New York Times admittedly hinted that “gender affirmative care” might not be the magical solution it was otherwise purported to be, and 60 Minutes aired an episode featuring disillusioned detransitioners, they both got slammed. 60 Minutes produced a supplemental segment addressing the controversy while the Times got with the program. More recently John Stewart raged against the assertion that “gender affirmative care” be prohibited from children. Ditto John Oliver. That is the norm from the left: affirm these poor suicidal children or you’re a heartless Nazi.

But how, utilizing common sense, does one conclude that it is righteous, sane and kind to not only affirm a child’s gender confusion but to also encourage hormone replacement therapy and surgeries? The answer is, one does not. Because it isn’t.

It wasn’t long until I started listening to voices I never would have considered before. With everything I was learning, Ben Shapiro no longer sounded like the far right loon I was taught he was. Now he made sense.

From my newly emerging vantage point, I could see that the mainstream media and academia were actively manipulating the narrative and suppressing free speech. Ben Shapiro, for example, required $600,000 worth of security when he gave a talk at UC Berkeley. If you don’t care for Ben Shapiro, try Peter Vlaming, Paul Rossi or Bret Weinstein who all got fired or resigned from their teaching positions due to their dissenting philosophies on either gender ideology or, to use John McWhorter’s term, woke racism.

Then there was social media. Between JK Rowling and Dylan Mulvaney, it couldn’t have been clearer that the left parted ways with rationality, reason and reality. And that’s to say nothing of the institutions of medicine and mental healthcare which deserve their own lengthy analyses.

It’s not an accident that the issues of gender ID and race culture got muddled a few sentences ago. It didn’t take long to uncover the parallels between Gender ID and CRT. So perhaps naturally I fell into the rabbit warren of systemic racism, which in its calls to “educate yourself”—while simultaneously characterizing any skepticism as bigotry—echo the exact tenor of the trans rights movement. I discovered not only John McWhorter but Glenn Loury, Larry Elder, Chad Jackson and the brilliant thinkers Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell.

Who would have predicted that my daughter’s trans ideation would lead me to one of the greatest minds in the world, and deeply ensconced in learning about, of all things, economics?

It is a wild ride, and despite the anguish, tears and isolation, I am humbled and grateful for the lessons I am learning about my daughter, myself and the world. In that spirit, here are a few Thomas Sowell quotes that seamlessly capture the prevailing culture today, that so many of us ROGD moms struggle against as we wait for our sons and daughters to wake up and return home. They are not pretty or even reassuring, but they ring true from a place of wisdom and common sense. And because I am by no stretch the only one who has awoken to the reality of my ex political party, they give me a newfound sense of peace.

Liberals take positions that make them look good and feel good — and show very little interest in the actual consequences for others, even when liberal policies are leaving havoc in their wake. (2013)

The totalitarian mindset behind the liberal vision shows through in innumerable ways. There are no institutions in America where free speech is more severely restricted than in our politically correct colleges and universities, dominated by liberals. (2001)

On issue after issue, the morally self-anointed visionaries have for centuries argued as if no honest disagreement were possible, as if those who opposed them were not merely in error but in sin. (1999)

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PS, If you haven’t watched the documentaries Uncle Tom and Uncle Tom II I cannot recommend them highly enough.