Heather Mac Donald on the Trans Madness

The Left engineers disruption after disruption, then acts as if those changes have existed from time immemorial.

Heather Mac Donald in the latest City Journal:

A Battle for Cultural Survival

In the face of the Left’s hyper-aggressive transgender ideology, conservatives must reassert the legitimacy of bourgeois norms.

The trans revolution has unfolded in a micro percentage of a nanosecond in the context of millions of years of human development. It has introduced ideas that would have been incomprehensible to every previous generation of humanity, whether they found themselves on the African, Asian, American, or European continents. …

But now that academic gender theorists have managed to infiltrate their startling creed into virtually every mainstream American institution, contradicting millennia of human experience and centuries of scientific confirmation of that experience, any dissent from the new default is portrayed as a war against the natural order of things, branding the dissenters as hateful and even homicidal. …

… The trans revolution, the most startling and unforeseeable in human history, is all the more remarkable for its scientific illiteracy and philosophical incoherence. The New York Times may cluck in disbelief that right-wing culture warriors seek to define “sex as binary” depending on whether a “person produces eggs or sperm.” But such a binary division between the sexes is written into every cell of a person’s body, absent a terrible genetic miscarriage. Changing someone’s sex would require switching the male XY chromosomes with the female XX chromosomes in trillions of cells, and vice versa. …

… Only in the U.S. and its Anglophone satellites are teenagers and pre-teenagers, at an astronomical rate of escalation, claiming to be something other than their biological sex and demanding to be recognized as such.

This stampede has built up in barely a decade, making it patently a herd phenomenon, not a biologically driven phase of adolescence. Moreover, announcing a trans identity gives young people the thing that they most crave: the ability to subjugate others to their will, in this case, via their pronouns and all that those pronouns entail. It confers on teenagers instant celebrity and adulatory attention. As a member of the “trans community,” you will be lauded by the president of the United States as one of the “bravest and most inspiring people” he has known, who sets an “example for the nation and, quite frankly, for the world.”

Read the whole thing here.