When cultural elites insists that everyone swear fealty to ridiculous ideas

by on

Sullivan further writes:
I don’t have children, but I sure worry about gay kids in this context. I remember being taunted by some other kids when I was young — they suggested that because I was mildly gender-nonconforming, I must be a girl. If my teachers and parents and doctors had adopted this new ideology, I might never have found the happiness of being gay and comfort in being male. How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake. And what are gay adults doing to protect them? Nothing. Only a few ornery feminists, God bless them, are querying this.

In some ways, the extremism of the new transgender ideology also risks becoming homophobic. Instead of seeing effeminate men as one kind of masculinity, as legitimate as any other, transgenderism insists that girliness requires being a biological girl. Similarly, a tomboy is not allowed to expand the bandwidth of what being female can mean, but must be put into the category of male. In my view, this is not progressive; it’s deeply regressive. There’s a reason why Iran is a world leader in sex-reassignment surgery, and why the mullahs pay for it. Homosexuality in Iran is so anathema that gay boys must be turned into girls, and lesbian girls into boys, to conform to heterosexual norms. Sound a little too familiar?

7 Comments for “When cultural elites insists that everyone swear fealty to ridiculous ideas”

  1. posted by Mike and David on

    Andrew Sullivan has really lost the plot. Transgender people are not coming after children in order to recruit them. It is a sad day when Sullivan starts to sound like Anita Bryant.

  2. posted by Jason on

    The Mike and David approach: distort what someone has written by turning it on it’s head, then attack the straw man distortion, usually with ad hominem insults.

  3. posted by Mike and David on

    Jason

    I would be more than happy to quote from the article to prove my point.

    • posted by Jason on

      Please do. I’ll start with this quote from Sullivan:
      “Possibly this sudden surge is a sign of pent-up demand, as trans kids emerge from the shadows, which, of course, is a great and overdue thing. The suffering of trans kids can be intense and has been ignored for far too long. But maybe it’s also some gender non-conforming kids falling prey to adult suggestions, or caused by social contagion. Almost certainly it’s both.”

      Yes, he’s a real transphobe!

  4. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    How many gay kids, I wonder, are now being led into permanent physical damage or surgery that may be life-saving for many, but catastrophic for others, who come to realize they made a mistake.

    The number is almost certainly very small, at least in the United States and Canada, where the transition process is lengthy and, in all reputable medical centers, mandate counseling, hormone therapy, a period of living as the gender to which the person is transitioning, and various peer-review checks and balances.

    It seems to me that the most useful thing that Sullivan and the rest of us can do is to do everything we can to ensure that the safeguards are as strong and as effective as possible.

  5. posted by Mike and David on

    Andrew invokes Iran to argue that people supporting transgender people are somehow akin to a fundamentalist regime seeking to eliminate the gays. I call that losing the plot. I am going to repost what Tom said;

    “The number is almost certainly very small, at least in the United States and Canada, where the transition process is lengthy and, in all reputable medical centers, mandate counseling, hormone therapy, a period of living as the gender to which the person is transitioning, and various peer-review checks and balances.”

    “It seems to me that the most useful thing that Sullivan and the rest of us can do is to do everything we can to ensure that the safeguards are as strong and as effective as possible.”

  6. posted by Tom Scharbach on

    The Advocate has an interesting opinion piece that is a counterpoint to Sullivan’s linked article: “Andrew Sullivan Is Coming for Your Children!. The piece is sarcastic, but puts Sullivan into the context of the latest right-wing Bryant-style assault on LGBT folk.

Comments are closed.