By Jared Bridges

“We are so back.”

That was the rallying cry on countless social media accounts following the 2024 presidential election, a race in which the transgender issue played a prominent role in messaging on both sides. In one video ad funded by the Trump campaign, Vice President Harris was featured talking about supporting the funding of so-called “sex-change” surgeries for illegal aliens and prisoners. The video ended with a voiceover that said, “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” The New York Post called the video, “…the political ad that could win Trump the election.”

Is the Insanity Really Over?

Indeed, following Donald Trump’s victory, many Democrats — along with mainstream media outlets — blamed the party’s obsession with the transgender issue for the staggering loss. Headlines emerged in newsfeeds following the defeat, including ones like, “Dems torn over transgender issue: Centrists worry that party is ‘reading the public wrong’” (Politico), and “Some Democrats blame party’s position on transgender rights in part for Harris’ loss” (NBC News).

In one of its election post-mortems, the Associated Press (AP) gave voice to trans activists themselves, observing how “Transgender-rights advocates say the election of Trump and his allies marks a major setback.” The AP noted its own AP VoteCast poll that showed 55% of voters said, “support for transgender rights in government and society has gone too far.”

Is this the death-knell of the transgender movement? After all, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) even removed the she/her pronouns from her bio on X sometime in the past year. Has the transgender cult which has caused irreparable damage to so many people finally been deprogrammed? Is victory within the grasp of those who embrace biological sanity, not to mention God’s design? Are we really “so back?”

Not so fast.

Same Battle, Different Front

Malcolm Gladwell’s book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point: Overstories, Superspreaders, and the Rise of Social Engineering,” tells the story of how same-sex marriage — having suffered both political and popular defeats in the 1990s and early 2000s — rallied in the 2010s to gain high levels of legal and cultural acceptance. Gladwell follows the narrative that the NBC sitcom “Will & Grace” had much to do with rapidly changing the hearts and minds of Americans with respect to those who identify as gay. Whether or not it had such an outsized effect is no matter, though — the rapid reversal did occur, and Gladwell is correct in that the cultural needle was moved before any political needles followed suit.

Asylum in Mainstream Media

If cultural institutions are captured, then political losses, though they may be a setback, aren’t ultimately devastating to the movement. And one institution that has been fully captured by the transgender cult is mainstream media. Just a month after the election, during coverage of the Supreme Court of the United States hearing of oral arguments in the case of U.S. v. Skrmetti, ABC News provided an example of just how far gone the news giant is in its indoctrination. On the December 5, 2024 edition of ABC’s “Start Here” podcast, the bias was on full display:

Devin Dwyer: “This case is about medical treatments for young adults in this country. More than 300,000 who identify as transgender. That means their gender assigned at birth differs from their sense of identity. One of the things that a lot of those kids struggle with in accepting themselves as transgender is known as gender dysphoria. It’s the distress, the feeling of that disconnect inside between your physical appearance and how you feel. And for years in this country, the medical establishment has supported interventions to treat that.

Distress comes in a number of forms — mental health treatment, therapy, but also, in some cases, the use of medications first to delay puberty, to slow down changes to the body that can make that distress worse, and then hormone therapy to facilitate a body’s development to, you know, the identity that a person is feeling. For more than a decade, major medical associations from the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, the Endocrine Society, and on and on have said that these treatments should be on the table as part of individually tailored interventions to help kids after consultation with their doctors, their parents and, of course, informed consent that on a case by case basis, these treatments can be used.”

This is only a snippet of the reporting in the podcast’s news package on the hearing, and already the biases are almost too many to count. Words like “gender assigned at birth,” “slow down changes that make distress worse,” “individually tailored interventions,” and “treatments” all belie a capitulation to the cult-like thinking that justifies the physical mutilation of children’s bodies.

And it’s not just ABC News and its Disney overlords. The Associated Press Stylebook, the industry standard for news copy, has long discarded proper grammar agreement in favor of preferred pronouns. Even Fox News has been exposed for having policies behind the scenes that encourage transgender behaviors.

It would be easy to say that mainstream media no longer matters, but it does. It has all the infrastructure, all the legions of reporters throughout the world, all the advertising eyes, and even the public airwaves. Sure, alternative media has made significant inroads, and like Elon Musk says, “You are the media now.” But mainstream media isn’t going away.

Victory from Another Source

The Trump administration will hopefully be more welcome to alternative sources, but they’re certainly not going to ban the media that gets them the most eyeballs.

The point is that America needs more than political victories — however long they last — to triumph over the evil of the trans cult. Don’t get me wrong: the political wins are good and needed — but they’re not enough. In the biblical book of Esther, the Jews had made significant inroads in the Xerxes administration. Mordecai had saved the life of the king. And Esther had become queen! Yet Haman, another official, was able to connive a plot to eradicate the Jewish people. More was needed than mere political placement. For the Jews in Esther, it was God’s placement of Esther in the palace “for such a time as this,” and her faith in God to sustain his people that saved them.

For us in America today, we no less need the hand of God to work. We cannot rest on the laurels of a few wins. We need to be ceaseless in prayer for the kids whose lives are being ruined by butchers posing as medical professionals. We need to be ceaseless in prayer for the doctors who are held captive by their medical associations. We need to be ceaseless in prayer for the mainstream media who tell the stories that they themselves see their own captivity.

Unless the hand of God intervenes, the cult won’t be fully deprogrammed. Only the cross of Christ can suffocate the sinful nature that keeps cults like this breathing. The only way we’ll ever really be “so back” is when Christ is back, and when every knee bows to him. Until that day, we should acknowledge the victories as God’s grace as we move from one degree of glory to another, be vigilant that the enemy is still at large, and trust in God that he will save.

Jared Bridges is editor-in-chief of The Washington Stand.