The Patriot Post® · Pride Month vs. Trans Madness

Every June is Pride Month, a tradition dating back to the Bill Clinton years and continued this year by Joe Biden’s official proclamation. Purportedly, Pride Month is all about reinforcing respect, dignity, and freedom from prejudice — ensuring a full place in society for those who choose lesbian or gay lifestyles.

But there’s a snag — it’s the “transgender” part, the “T” in LGBTQ.

Like so many complex issues these days, LGBTQI+ support has become politicized and therefore polarized, and transgenderism has emerged as a contentious issue in the endless war between Left and Right.

It’s more than political disagreement. Transgender ideology is fundamentally different from the individual sexual preferences and lifestyle choices covered by the ever-expanding acronym LGBTQI+. And it’s not going down well.

Transgenderism is madness, at every level:

1.) It’s false. The entire transgender premise — the notion that one’s gender is a matter of personal choice and not biology — is fiction. Redefining the term “gender” as a state of mind rather than an unalterable physical characteristic does not alter the reality that our human species is sexually binary; that male is male, and female is female — two very distinct but complementary genders, the foundation of our entire human race.

In very rare cases, humans are born with physical abnormalities in gene configuration or anatomy, or develop psychological disorders related to sexual identity; these must be addressed compassionately, but they do not change the fundamental truth that humans are binary creatures.

2.) It’s peddled, relentlessly. The transgender movement actively pushes that falsehood, even among children. Every reader of this column was once a child and recalls that we were then both clueless and malleable — a dangerously vulnerable combination.

Expecting young children to make sensible decisions regarding their sexual identities is madness. Prepubescent children have no idea whether they were born in the wrong bodies because they’ve not yet met their adult, fully formed bodies.

3.) It’s mandated. The transgender myth is being cemented methodically throughout American culture. It is embedded in public- and private-sector policies and practices, in federal, state, and local rules and regulations, and in elementary and higher education curricula. Misuse of preferred pronouns may seem silly — until it costs you your job.

4.) It’s harmful. Perhaps worst of all, our wholesale cultural adoption of transgender ideology ignores its significant and sometimes harmful consequences, including threats to personal safety, loss of privacy, and unfairness in athletic competition and other pursuits. These consequences affect everyone, not just the LGBTQ adherents.

It’s madness, through and through. And while many aspects of LGBT culture have melded into the American landscape — same-sex marriage is a prime example — Main Street Americans don’t buy the gender fluidity theme and its consequences, and they are beginning to push back hard.

As he often does, the president stoked the political flames. His Pride Month proclamation on May 31 was in large part an angry tirade condemning the surge of anti-LGBTQ legislation in “red states,” particularly those he characterized as “hateful attacks on transgender children.”

Hold on. These “hateful attacks on transgender children” are in fact urgently needed state measures enacted to protect children in reaction to the tidal wave of cultural disruption being forced on those who want no part of it. They include laws that shield young children from inappropriate exposure to sexual material and that prevent teachers and school administrators from encouraging children to question their sexual identity and from hiding those actions from parents.

They set sensible limits on “gender-affirming care” — a bizarre euphemism for medical procedures that can interfere, sometimes permanently, with the natural development of children’s bodies. Physicians’ time-honored Hippocratic oath is a pledge to “do no harm.” Mutilation of healthy human bodies, no matter what it affirms, is not care.

In June and every month, let us celebrate freedom — the freedom of every individual adult to believe what he or she believes and to live whatever lifestyle he or she chooses. But we must not let that freedom cause undue intrusion or imposition on others. And of course, let’s let our children be children.

If we can strike that bargain, we’ll be okay.