The ideology pushing gender confusion has become a cult. It’s not a cult in the typical sense of a single charismatic leader deceiving followers with promises of deliverance or some such. But there are an awful lot of Americans drinking the proverbial Kool-Aid when it comes to gender issues, and cult members demand not just tolerance but unwavering devotion.

From marketing to legal stuff to grooming, here’s a brief survey of recent events that prove it.

Perhaps the flashiest news in the last week was the decision by the lefty activist who runs marketing for Anheuser-Busch to enlist Dylan Mulvaney, a flamboyant man with a fetish for pretending to be a woman (or a young girl), to promote Bud Light, including with a can bearing his face. Nothing, apparently, says “beer of the average American male” like the sick parody of a man wearing red lipstick and a dress.

This isn’t Mulvaney’s first go around with becoming the disturbed face of a product. He’s picked up corporate sponsorships from makeup to kitchen appliances to sportswear and more.

“No business would advertise using a white guy in blackface,” observes Jordan Boyd. “Yet many major brands are fine with paying a delusional male to sell to real women.”

These companies obviously are calculating that conservatives — despite the ruckus from a few celebrities — don’t tend to organize boycotts very well, and they will be vastly outnumbered by the new customers brought by such publicity.

It helps that the Leftmedia treats the story not as one about the exploitation of a mentally ill TikTok influencer but about the “right-wing backlash.”

Backlash? How about the six people murdered in Nashville by a gender-dysphoric female? How about the other planned attack you didn’t hear about — the one in Colorado intended by a communist young man who goes by a female name? No wonder the media didn’t touch that one.

Why is Mulvaney suddenly everywhere? Our Emmy Griffin will explore the answers to that in the coming days, but for now, suffice it to say young women are the target audience. Individually they empathize and as a group they buy products and vote accordingly.

Which brings us to the latest edict from Joe Biden’s Department of Education. Title IX was once meant to boost women’s athletics, among other attempts at fostering equality. Not anymore. Biden and his radical leftists are increasingly opting to erase women’s sports via Title IX protections.

Let’s face it, this is about women’s sports. There isn’t a wave of females suddenly winning and setting records in men’s sports. These new protections are meant for biological males who were mediocre athletes and would prefer dominating women’s sports.

Specifically, the Biden administration proposes barring schools that receive federal money from “discriminating” on the basis of “gender identity,” all while pretending to give schools the choice to evaluate on a case-by-case basis. Politically, this is targeting Republican-run states that have passed laws following the science by mandating that athletes compete in the sport aligning with their biological sex, or otherwise banning gender experiments on minors.

Biden’s rule decries the “one-size-fits-all policies” of such states. While we’re delighted to see leftist education bureaucrats suddenly discover that individuals don’t always thrive in cookie-cutter public schools, this is not the right way forward. Democrats want to do it anyway because they get to cast Republicans as “bigots” over yet another issue.

Finally, the grooming. After all, without new recruits, this cult would go nowhere.

The White House is leading the charge there too. “LGBTQI+ kids are resilient,” said Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, herself a lesbian diversity hire. “They are fierce. They fight back. They’re not going anywhere. And we have their back. This administration has their back.” She was speaking about a recent report: “According to the Human Rights Campaign, more than 50 percent of transgender youth in the U.S., which is estimated to be more than 150,000 kids, live in states in which transgender youth have lost access to or at risk of losing access to gender-affirming care.”

She added directly to these kids, “You are loved just as you are, just the way you are.” That’s a lie because the whole point of “gender-affirming care” is to hormonally and surgically change patients into something different.

Worse, “gender-affirming care” only goes one way for the Left. Detransitioners who speak out are among the Rainbow Mafia’s most hated people.

KJP blasted what she called “legislative bullying” in Republican states. Yet the real bullying comes from gender clinics, which have grown exponentially in recent years because this whole thing has become extremely lucrative big business.

According to a recent report from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, a majority of parents who end up seeking help for their mentally struggling children say they were pressured to “transition” their kids. Ask the former clinic worker who blew the whistle in February.

We’re not absolving all parents of responsibility here. Many of them are sick themselves, and such parents are straight up abusing their children as a means for attention for themselves. See the mother of Jazz Jennings as an example.

Another aspect of that study is the social contagion for kids. “There was evidence of immersion both in social media and in peer groups with other transgender-identifying youths,” the authors write. “Youths with a history of mental health issues were especially likely to have taken steps to socially and medically transition.” When kids feel pressure to conform to the cult of nonconformity, they pressure their parents.

Without this ground-level recruitment, the gender cult would die out. Because the grooming is working, however, a political party sees a lot of gain to be had, marketing campaigns are raking in big bucks, and the cult grows exponentially.

The alarming truth is that the Rainbow Mafia and members of the gender cult don’t really care about children or other gender-dysphoric individuals. These unfortunate people are just a means to the cultists’ twisted ends.