What the debate left unsaid

All about gender ideology

Unless you live under a rock, I’m sure you watched or at least heard about Thursday’s presidential debate on CNN. I won’t get into the details here but suffice it to say, Trump was right when he joked he could openly kill someone and his numbers would go up. 

Yet one highly contentious topic of paramount importance was not discussed: the proliferation of gender cult ideology to the most vulnerable members of society. This is because CNN, as a liberal corporate media outlet, doesn’t see gender ideology as a problem. In this article, I’ll highlight why they’re wrong by outlining Biden’s position, Trump’s position, my own, and finally, how the left could potentially proceed. 

Biden’s position 

It’s no secret that the Biden administration is the most radically pro-LGBT to date. The progressive wing of his party has pushed the Democratic policy agenda ever further to the left, and he’s mostly sat back, mouth agape, and let them. 

From day one in office, Biden made this radical agenda clear. On January 20th, 2021, he issued an executive order implementing the Bostock decision, which extended discrimination protections to include sexual orientation and the fabricated category of gender identity. The move was termed “the most substantive, wide-ranging LGBTQ executive order in U.S. history” by the Human Rights Campaign. 

In March, Biden made her-story by confirming Dr. Richard Levine as the Assistant Secretary of Health at the Department of Health and Human Services, making Levine the first openly crossdressing man to be confirmed by the Senate. 

In October of 2022, Biden invited TikToker and transvestite activist Dylan Mulvaney to the White House for an interview. Mulvaney has made a name for himself pretending to be a little girl, mocking women, and creating increasingly cringey and grating video content. 

In the interview, Mulvaney framed access to wrong-sex hormones as strictly between a patient and doctor, teed up Biden to profess that “no one has a right” to inhibit access to certain “medicines” and “procedures”, and perpetuated the myth that black trans-identified men are killed at a higher rate than the national average. 

Perhaps most egregiously, in April of 2024, President Biden expanded the Title IX definition of sex to include “gender identity.” This change will allow for men to compete in women’s sports on the sole condition of female identification, effectively nullifying the very rights the statute was enacted to protect. It will also permit men to use women’s bathrooms, change in their locker rooms, shower alongside them, sleep in their dorms, and invade any other sex-specific club or activity they wish. 

Honorable mentions: The Biden administration revoked the Trump era ban on diversity training, repealed the ban on trans-identified military service (ensuring countless transvestites have their radical procedures paid for by the state), allowed for the issuance of passports with an X where the F or M should be, and made “trans rights are human rights” an official position. (As opposed to animal rights?) Oh, and he invited a trans-identified man to an event on the White House lawn who flashed his fake breasts on camera and has since been accused of sexual assault by at least five women. 

Rose Montoya. Image credit Reduxx.

Trump’s position 

While historically weak on this issue, Trump has amended his position on transgenderism to reflect that of his party’s. As transgenderism moves away from the fringes of society and into the harsh light of day, politicians and average people alike are swapping their former “live and let live” attitudes for a more hardlined view. When there were an infinitesimally small number of trans-identified people, perhaps it made sense to let them do as they wished, even if they admittedly needed — and deserved — psychological support and counseling to be reconciled with reality. But now that this ideology has taken over everything, it’s clear that it can no longer be given any leeway, and Trump knows this. Give them an inch and they take about 5,000 miles. 

Shortly after Trump announced his run for reelection, he released a statement including bold directives on transgenderism. And while sufficiently far-reaching, this statement was not the draconian, tyrannical mandate it’s been made out to be by activists. Here’s what he said:

“The left-wing gender insanity being pushed on our children is an act of child abuse…very simple. Here’s my plan to stop the chemical, physical, and emotional mutilation of our youth. On day one, I will revoke Joe Biden’s cruel policies on so-called gender affirming care — ridiculous — a process that includes giving kids puberty blockers, mutating their physical appearance, and ultimately performing surgery on minor children — can you believe this? I will sign a new executive order instructing every federal agency to cease all programs that promote the concept of sex and gender transition at any age.”

The way the media has spun it, you’d think Trump intended to ban transition itself at any age. As if he’s somehow going to snatch away adults’ cross-sex hormones in the night, Uno reverse their surgeries, and override the First Amendment to make even cross-dressing and name-changing illegal. But that isn’t what he said. If you read carefully, Trump plans on preventing federal agencies from promoting the concept of transition. This is far from radical. What’s radical is the idea that federal agencies were promoting so-called sex changes in the first place. And while it’s true Trump did include “at any age”, this extends only to the ban he will impose on federal agencies, not to transition itself. Really moderate stuff here, if we’re being honest.

My position 

While dress and preferred name fall under freedom of expression and so should be allowed, medical mutilation including hormones and surgery do not and should never be allowed. My argument is not that trans-identifying people should not be granted access to these “treatments” — but that no doctor should be permitted to perform them, especially when you consider all candidates for surgery and hormones are either children or mentally ill, vulnerable adults. The very fact that a person wants these things is proof enough that they should not have them. Trans-identifying people are psychologically unstable and in need of counseling, social support, good friends, a community — not irreversible medical procedures. Even if a patient “consented” to being lobotomized, no doctor would be allowed to lobotomize them. My position on transgenderism is essentially the same. 

I would even go so far as to advocate for dressing or representing as the opposite sex to be socially shamed out of existence. While it cannot be made illegal, there are alternate social mechanisms for discouraging sexually sick behavior. Especially if someone does not respond to interventions urging them to seek help, they must be socially ostracized until they see how utterly absurd and farcical their self-proclaimed identity as the opposite sex truly is. Feeding into another’s delusion is never kind. It should go without saying that we should never give in to wrong-sex pronouns or use Orwellian terms like “trans woman” “trans man” or “gender affirming care”. Even using preferred names is questionable.

This doesn’t mean we abandon trans-identifying people altogether. Rather that you agree to speak to your Uncle Frank (now “Francesca”) on the phone or get coffee with him, but not allow him to attend your daughter’s 6th birthday party in fishnets and heels. All the while urging him constantly to return to normalcy, calling him Frank and never Francesca, and reminding him that he is made in God’s image and likeness, not Jessica Rabbit’s. 

Finally, “gender identity” should never be classed as a protected characteristic under the law. For a characteristic to be protected, it must be immutable, and gender identity is anything but. Immutable traits are entrenched, unchangeable, and innate, and gender identity is nothing more than a deluded self-perception that can be changed at will, even from day to day, hour to hour. The fact that so many individuals have “de-transitioned” should be proof alone of it’s mutability — has anyone ever identified as de-black? The truly immutable characteristic that transgenderism threatens to erode is sex, which is entirely binary, fixed, and innate. 

How the left should proceed

While I’m not on the left, I have many friends and subscribers who are. We may differ on quite a lot, but not this. It’s clear that gender ideology poses a threat to the values of both Conservatism and Liberal Democracy alike. Meanwhile, the fact that opposition to transgenderism exists on both the polar left and right is a testament to its absurdity. 

So what should the left do about Transgenderism? They’ve been struck a crippling blow with the forced-teaming of LGB and T, one that’s proven difficult though not impossible to recover from. Organizations like Gays Against Groomers, Get the L Out, and the LGB Alliance have made significant strides in separating the excesses of trans activism from the relative moderatism of assimilated gay life. 

Feminists, though frequently blamed for the rise of transgenderism, were among the first to speak out against it. Feminist writer and advocate Janice Raymond penned The Transsexual Empire in 1979, a groundbreaking work which prophesied today’s sex trait modification industry and the rise of the child sex change. The late Andrea Dworkin wrote favorably on Raymond’s views and expressed similar ones on transgenderism, and even Gloria Steinem espoused her opposition of men claiming the oppression mantle of womanhood, though she later walked such comments back. 

Many of today’s best advocates against transgenderism happen to be on the left or independent politically — Helen Joyce,

Genevieve Gluck

, Kathleen Stock,

Meghan Murphy

, Mya Forstarter, Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull, and of course J.K.Rowling among them. (Their advocacy groups include Sex Matters, Reduxx, Let Women Speak, and Party of Women.) These women have faced considerable harassment and even violent threats for their work, and yet persevere anyway. We could all learn a lot from them. They speak boldly, eloquently, and without fear, couching their arguments not in dogma or jargon but in plain, clear English, using logic, data and statistics to back up their claims. J.K. Rowling has been a particularly admirable figure in leveraging her mass amounts of power and influence to poke fun at transgenderism, and in doing so, deflate it entirely. 

Finally, lines in the sand must be drawn. As fellow writer

Prester John's Revenge

notes, we must move away from useless, abstract ideology and academic theory that turns meaning to mush and focus instead on protecting real, hard-won material rights. Burn your copy of Gender Trouble but stick up for your gay friend. Be kind, but don’t let people walk all over you. 

To wrap up, while we may come at these issues differently, we arrive inevitably at the same place: gender ideology is dangerous. It presents real threats to the rights of women and girls, the perception of every-day LGB people, and the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults. Regardless of where you came from, I’m glad you’re here. Now let’s focus on defeating the transvestite leviathan once and for all. 

Thanks for reading! 

Note: I’m still open to any other left-leaning perspectives if you’d like to contribute your thoughts!