The mania of gender ideology

I continue to be amazed that people I know to be smart and discerning and thoughtful support the toxic and utterly made up ideas at the heart of gender ideology. People related to me. People who I used to be friends with. People who should know better. People who think they think for themselves.

How is it that otherwise thoughtful people with notably high IQs believe the nonsense that men can become women? That these people ARE in fact women if they say they are and then put on a dress and a red lip? How do these otherwise smart people look at me and tsk tsk, wondering to themselves “what happened to her?” How do these otherwise smart people consider me the “monster” not the doctors sterilizing children with puberty blockers and wrong-sex hormones and chopping off their breasts and penises?

How do otherwise smart people think a man-made “neo-vagina” constructed from the colon — which will always emanate a distinctly poopy smell — is anything other than mutilation?

How do otherwise smart people think these drugs and surgeries are anything other than inhumane Mengele-style medical experiments on young people? I’m sorry to include these gruesome images but people need to understand what is being done.

I don’t understand it. But the mass formation psychosis at play here was captured quite eloquently in Lionel Shriver’s novel called Mania, which I cannot stop thinking about since I read it a few months ago.

The book is set in a parallel but uncomfortably close to home and familiar near past wherein the Mental Parity movement has taken hold. Seemingly normal Americans now embrace the idea that there is no such thing as variable human intelligence. In this world, everyone is equally smart — just differently so — and discrimination against those with lower IQs is “the last great civil rights fight” of our time.

Not smart? That shouldn’t keep you out of medical school. In fact, tests have been done away with entirely (sound familiar?), because they are bigoted and discriminatory. Dumb as a box of rocks? No problem. You’re smart in a different way and you too can do some doctoring.

Children are punished and expelled from school for using the “s-word” (stupid) and report their parents if they use it at home. Children are taken from the home if parents use the word and fail to affirm kids who don’t do their school work. If parents try to teach their children things they are considered unfit monsters. Children know enough! We’re born knowing all we need to know!

Media people achieve great fame — they are promoted, lauded and financially rewarded — when they spew mental parity mumbo jumbo on TV and the internet — all while mocking it in private.

Failures on the job — which are clearly attributable to poor decision making and yes, stupidity — are ignored. Because bosses calling out these “accidents” risk being criminalized for wrong-think. If you think someone is dumb because they do something clearly attributable to having made a dumb decision, you are evil. You are a bigot.

Families are torn apart, lifelong friendships destroyed. And one woman — Pearson Converse — who refuses to repeat the lie that everyone is smart is punished severely.

Throughout the story, Pearson calls out obvious lies, no matter the cost to her and her family. Pearson claims not to be super smart, rather to simply be stubbornly wedded to the truth. The “not that smart” thing rings a tad false given she is the one writing the words on the page, but the point is made: it’s not brains that allow a person to look a lie right in the eye and refuse to utter it, no matter what it costs her. It’s something else. And I can’t put my finger on it. Shriver doesn’t explain it either, per se, but she does reflect it back to us as a fact: some people just won’t fall in line when obvious lies are demanded of them.

I won’t tell you the ending. Suffice it to say the cultural fever breaks and the outcome is equally abhorrent when the culture swings in the other direction.

I think about this book when I think about those formerly in my circle (and some who still are), who fervently assert their pronouns and use those demanded of them by bullying activists who are sometimes their own children.

I think about this book when people I know to be smart and kind line up to agree with authoritarian laws — such as the Colorado legislation (knows as HB 25-1312) which passed in the Colorado House and is now headed to the Colorado Senate and likely to become law — that criminalize misgendering and would create legal grounds for parents to be stripped of their custody if they refuse to “affirm” a child’s confusion about their sex.

But when I read this Tweet from Kathleen Stock, gender critical British philosopher and writer and TERF, I felt like I could let go of trying to understand and just accept it as something that IS.

If you believe there is such a thing as a gendered soul that is separate from the body, you are not thinking clearly. (I’ll refrain from using Stock’s MORON though she has a point.)

If you believe a penis can be fashioned from arm skin and the vagina just sealed up and that this somehow makes a person their “authentic self,” you are not thinking clearly.

If you believe that very young children have some innate sense of what sex they are outside of what their actual bodies ARE, you are not thinking clearly.

If you believe that sex is not binary and that someone wanting to be called THEY makes them some unknown, unverifiable sex that no biologist has ever identified and that this person is anything other than “gender non-conforming,” you are not thinking clearly.

If you believe that putting minors on wrong-sex hormones isn’t mutilating, you are not thinking clearly.

If you think it’s right to tell girls they need to sit down and accept males in their private spaces and sports, you are not thinking clearly. And you are definitely not progressive or a feminist.

If you think it’s ok to tell boys who play with dolls that they might be girls, you are not thinking clearly. And you are furthering retrograde and extremely homophobic ideas.

If you think “lived experience” is science, well. . . I’ll use it here: YOU ARE A MORON.

As my husband said to me this morning, the real meaning of being “red-pilled” is realizing the team you thought were the good guys are not the good guys. That while the left may position themselves as virtuous defenders of progress and inclusion, it’s a lie and it’s all a façade and means to power. Which isn’t to say that they don’t convince themselves it’s true. They are heroes in their own minds. AOC believes she is a climate justice warrior-hero while flying on private jets to her Fighting Oligarchy rallies.

I continue to believe that these folks — the acolytes — don’t actually believe any of this — not really deep in their hearts. But they suspend their disbelief in order to be perceived as the good virtuous people. They are firm believers that the Left are the good people and anything they think must be “on the right side of history” and any people labeled as “conservative” are the evil people. And they simply are not willing to buck the party line and call bullshit.

They believe that they are being “nice” and positioning themselves against the bad people. They are the resistance. And they simply do not want to be accused of TERF-iness or being a conservative, which is the worst thing in the world, and akin to being an unrepentant bigot.

But these folks will willingly change their position when the fever breaks because these were never firmly held beliefs rather they were expressions of loyalty to their “team.” And yes, it is cult-like behavior from those who think they are not prone to such a thing.

It is unendingly disturbing to me and I’ll never get over it. I don’t think I can forgive it though I will try my best to move on from my extreme disappointment in those who I expected more from. I find myself in a similar situation with those who believed that masking 2-year-olds was both effective and kind rather than child abuse.

As in Mania, this fever too shall break. And as in Mania, almost everyone who spewed this nonsense will pretend they haven’t or that somehow the science has changed and they were being kind and science-y and “progressive” when they advocated for the destruction of basic truth and children’s bodies.