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[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Daniel Greenfield’s masterpiece contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
In 2021, 62% of Americans opposed men in dresses playing on female teams while 34% supported it. In 2023, a sizable 69% majority is opposed and only 26% are in favor.
Within two years, support for ‘transgender female athletes’ fell from a third to a quarter.
While those numbers are important, the real turnaround in the latest Gallup poll has come among Democrats. While majorities of Republicans and Independents were always opposed to men who claim to be ‘transgender’ usurping womens’ sports, Democrats supported them.
But now no more.
In 2021, 55% of Democrats supported men playing on female teams and in female competitions while 41% opposed it. Now 48% of Democrats are opposed and only 47% are in favor.
These are not isolated numbers. They’re part of a pattern that shows how the Democrats are losing the transgender debate not only nationally, but among members of their own party.
Transgender fanaticism led the Democrats to embrace positions too extreme for their party.
A Washington Post – KFF poll from last month found that while Democrats generally supported promoting transgender identity in high school and even for sixth graders, opposition rose sharply to 46% over proposals to groom fourth graders. A solid majority of Democrats opposed exposing kindergarteners and third graders to transgender topics.
This was bad timing since Biden’s campaign video attacked Republicans for ‘banning’ a book featuring a 10-year-old boy performing a sex act. At the Pride Month rollout, the Biden administration announced that the Department of Education would be targeting schools that pull sexual materials from libraries for creating a “hostile environment” for LGBTQ people.
Biden had claimed that banning the sexual mutilation of children is immoral. And the media, having decided that it already won the debate for most ages, is pushing toddler sex changes. An ABC News report profiled a little boy whose parents decided to treat him like a girl when he was only three years old. Nobody has even polled on that question, but the numbers won’t be good.
While Biden and the media may imagine they’re winning the debate, they’re actually losing.
In 2017, a Pew poll showed that only 54% believed that men and women were born as they are, while 44% thought that people could swap sexes. By 2022, 60% knew that men and women are born, only 38% believed they could be made over with a little makeup, an outfit and some drugs.
Washington Post interviews with people who switched positions on transgender issues found that a consistent theme was their concern for children.
“My concern with transgender is mostly with the children,” one woman said.
“Is that going to help these young people get a good job or a good spouse? Why would you introduce that subject to children when it has no life skills?” an older black woman asked about pushing transgender issues in school.
“It’s hard enough to learn as is without other things thrown at you,” a black man suggested.
The Left had previously won sexual morality debates by claiming to advocate for the victims and conservative opponents lost because they could not show meaningfully whom it harmed in a simple and direct way that people could understand. That’s why opposition to abortion, despite all the social changes, has had such staying power among Americans. It’s clear ‘whom it hurts’.
It’s also where the Democrats have stumbled in the transgender debate. Opponents had largely lost the debate until, with the emergence of female athletes like Riley Gaines, feminist victims of cancel culture like J.K. Rowling, and talk of indoctrinating children, the real victims appeared.
The transgender debate now pits two conflicting victimhoods against each other, blunting the usual leftist tactics and making it difficult for them to steamroll the opposition. Are boys being maneuvered into pretending to be girls or teenage girls getting mastectomies suffering because they’re victims of conservatives restricting destructive behaviors or of an LGBTQ movement that has coerced minors into destructive life-altering decisions before they are mature enough?
Are men who want to compete against women the victims, or are the women they displace and injure the true victims?
The Left derives its power from simplistic and often false narratives of victimhood. But these stories are incredibly difficult to counter because they play on empathy with the oppressed.
That’s why any issue, from open borders to crime to terrorism to global warming, is retold in the familiar narratives of the oppressors and the oppressed. Conservatives all too often try to rationally counter these narratives and make their case based on the facts or the larger context. Where the Left always remembers to ground its ideological arguments in personal narratives and human interest, conservatives struggle with talking about people instead of issues.
And yet the shifting transgender debate shows how effective personal narratives are. And how important it is to convey to the public who is getting hurt by policies that conservatives oppose.
Most Americans were willing to go along with the transgender movement because even though they struggled to understand it and found its premises suspect, they wanted to be nice. And the polls still reflect that desire to empathize and protect a seemingly oppressed group. While most Americans oppose exposing children to transgender materials or forcing women to compete against men, they’re supportive of laws protecting transgenders or using their chosen pronouns.
The easy way to understand this is that most Americans don’t want to hurt anyone.
When asked to choose between hurting transgender feelings or using their pronouns, or passing special laws to protect them, they weigh the question of “whom does it hurt”. Likewise, when asked to choose between female athletes and 280 lb hulking men, or between children and sexual identity activists, they once again ask “whom does it hurt” and protect the vulnerable.
The transgender battle is far from over. Faced with setbacks, the Left goes looking for more victims, employing personal narratives to turn the tide. But there are larger lessons for conservatives looking to fight back. Most people are not ideological. With traditional morality crumbling, people use a combination of gut instincts and anecdotal stories to decide issues.
The Left excels at politicizing the personal and personalizing the political. Its mass media messaging ensures that when people think about the police, they think about George Floyd, when they think about open borders, they think about a little baby clutched in the arms of its mother and when they think about abortion, they think about a ‘headless baby’ in the womb.
These personal stories, false and misleading as they may be, work on the average person.
The transgender debate is being lost because when people think about the issue, they think about Lia Thomas and Riley Gaines, they think about children being asked what gender they are in kindergarten, and they’re able to answer clearly and compellingly, “whom does it hurt?”
Leftists embraced the furthest extreme of the sexual identity politics movement, splitting the Democrats and even dividing feminists and the gay rights movement, but most importantly they exposed themselves as not the advocates of victims, but the ones who are hurting them.
Thank God, many are refusing to get along and are rejecting the transgender push. No one with a brain, or children or any sense of a sane society will want anything that comes with submitting to this madness. There are only two genders, and three sexual orientations. That is more than enough, and any further takes you and society to madness.
Just remember, that only loud mouths make it appear that is a actual mass movement of support for this transgender push by some. True – not enough who know better are not speaking out. Break the back of these loons, and ‘everyone was in the ‘Resistance” will be the story.
Daniel mentioned this:
“ An ABC News report profiled a little boy whose parents decided to treat him like a girl when he was only three years old. ”
Same thing happened here in my small UK town but it wasn’t really the parents it was the mother of the adopted son, the father was terrified of losing his boy so he was forced to go along with the narrative publicly, but they were both influenced by the social workers who were handling the adoption.
I suspect that in the background the father simply treated the child like any father treats his son because the child appears now to be normal.
There does seem something about the female mindset in modern motherhood that loves this. My own mother ‘loves’ this transgender thing with an compassion that is past any understanding. What I have heard coming out of her mouth makes me glad to be adult, have a family that has no young males she could get her hands on for this, and therefore she is past being able to use for this cause. But – it makes no sense why she is so ‘happy’ to be an supporter. She was never supportive of gay men. Or men in general.
My father is dead, but he would have had nothing to do with it. But – he was an man and a Marine…
The sooner this ‘thing’ goes away – the better. It destroys only.
Some women hate men and some men hate women, there’s nothing modern about this, it’s ancient. Some individuals have never discovered the concept of individualism or if they have discovered it, they reject it.
The only antidote for racism, sexism, tribalism, feminism, male chauvinism, socialism, Nazism, communism, or any form of collectivism is individualism.
“Life lessons” not be followed or taken seriously from Objectivism’s self styled comedian and scold.
Not to worry about Objectivism here with me, My only liking of the thought of Ayn Rand is that the film version of The Fountainhead was good. No doubt due to the acting styles of Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal and Raymond Massey. We once had a level of quality in acting that could make almost any film have some value.
🙂
As for anything else – give me the thought of most of the Founding Fathers – and Edmund Burke. Outside of Burke – I’m generally, somehow, related to many of them.
I was thinking, this might be a case where biology trumps propaganda. Biology doesn’t change much, even when submerged in propaganda.
That’s asking a lot: the feelings over facts paradigm has taken over society. Facts will need to be reinstated first.
Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins we have been warned about their making the children into Sinners with this Pride stuff
Pride actually means they are ashamed of their behaviour, quite rightly when you see some of their perversions on parade.
Gay actually means that they are sad, a fact proven by the high suicide rate among the homosexual community.
Your final sentence tends to confirm something I have noticed in my own encounters (usually brief) with gay persons. For the most part they want to recruit others to their twisted lifestyle. Sort of gay missionaries dedicated to converting those they encounter (hence, the “usually brief” statement). As you said, they are sad, so does misery love company?
They seem to be endlessly trying to tell themselves (and everyone else) that what they do sexually is normal, as if deep down inside they know that they are defective, and aren’t happy about it.
Good point, thanks!
Pride, when defined in a rational manner, is a virtue not a vice. Pride is a virtue you EARN by your moral actions and your moral behavior. What is outside of your choice you can neither be proud of or guilty of.
White pride and black pride are a contradiction of what pride means. If you were born that way it was outside of your choice, you had no say in the matter, it is not a chosen and earned accomplishment.
Pride is not a virtue. It is a virtue signal. Pride goeth before the fall. Your unearned pride will be your downfall.
You’re confusing pride with hubris, arrogance, chauvinism, and showing off. They are very different things.
Genuine, selfish, pride is not about impressing other people, it’s the emotion you feel when you live your life well and successfully for your own benefit. It’s about pursuing and achieving your own personal, selfish, and private happiness, not to impress others, but simply to be serenely and privately happy for your own sake not for the sake of impressing the neighbors.
“Every form of happiness is private. Our greatest moments are personal, self-motivated, not to be touched [by others]… Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” – Ayn Rand
No one but you, or objectivist freaks like you, talk about something that you made up called “Genuine, selfish, pride”. It’s really just your excuse for being a selfish little weasel.
And who are you to tell me I’m confusing anything, considering you are the king of confusion considering all of the worlds you create within that damaged mind of yours.
You are the personification of pride, arrogance, hubris, chauvinism and showing off. And you display these traits on a daily basis because you just have to show the world how “smart” you are.
“‘I know your works: you are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were either cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth. For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.” Revelation 3:15-17
Laodicean (modern) churches are too busy amassing prosperity to care about society’s descent into Hell. Lukewarm churchianity is a haven for idle-worshippers everywhere. The salt has lost its savor and is only fit to be trampled underfoot. But, at least your bank accounts are safe… for a while.
The core of the government’s transgender policy puts the personal mishigas of a child and distraught, dazed and confused parents into the public, political arena. It is political sport – like gladiator games – cold, coerced, calculated, perverted and sadistic, without a trace of compassion.
Support for this policy is especially astounding from the so called medical and teaching professionals. Their active participation is grossly negligent; and prosecuting them for malpractice should result in dismissal, loss of license, disaccreditation and fines.
This government’s policies have no respect for reality, human reality.
They reflect a supremely superficial, demeaning, abusive, misogynistic, misandrist, malevolent, Godless view of life – a tv show in which every personal dilemma and struggle can be resolved in 15 minutes. Skin to skin, as the surgeons say.
A passage in Ethics of the Fathers reflects on pure love that will endure and disputes that endure because they honestly exist for the sake of truth.
These policies, clearly not for the sake of Heaven, will not endure.
The fact that biological males playing against women in sports is seen as unsporting, even by Democrats,is encouraging but it obscures a larger picture.
Transgender surgery is fraudulent. A “transwoman” is in fact a castrated and mutilated male, and a “transman” is an unconvincingly virilized and mutilated female. Moreover, this surgery fails even on its own terms: transsexuals are constantly made aware of the fact that they are parodies of the opposite sex- through inadequate sexual function, the fact that they look like men in drag or that female to males cannot be fitted with a realistic looking, functional penis, their dependence on cross sex hormones, and the fact that male to female transsexual have to dilate their vaginas to keep them from closing up
The other thing is that while the transgender activists are now using Title IX as a cudgel to beat women in sports, feminists have used Title IX to completely enervate male sports in universities (except for remunerative football and basketball). Scores of male swim teams, gymnastic programs, track and field squads, wrestling teams and other programs have been eliminated to comply with Title IX. If he had been born a decade or two later, Greg Louganis might never have won any Olympic medals because his school eliminated its men’s swim program to comply with Title IX. What Lia Thomas is doing is unfair, but since when has unfairness bothered feminists when it rebounds in favor of women and girls? Feminists are being hoist on their own petards.
That’s my snagenfreud with men competing in women’s sports (though it’s too late to save all those men’s sports programs it eliminated), seeing the left destroy title IX itself. But that’s the left. They did what damage they could to men’s sports, and now they’re on to do what damage they can to women’s sports, in their ‘long’ “march through the institutions.”
It’s the cause dejour, and it will change with opportunity. Today, it’s women’s sports being thrown under the leftist bus for trans privilege. At some point they will realize they’ve gone to far, but like mao said, “Push forward with your bayonet. If you feel mush, push forward, if you feel resistance, fall back.” They will push forward as much as they can, always. I’m a pretty tolerant person, as long as it’s consenting adults and not children, but support, much less celebration, is too much.
Next to the Golden Rule, there is, “You’re rights end when another’s begins.” But some people don’t even believe in individual rights, so they’ve no issue trampling on ours.
Not all Trannies get the chop. Lia Thomas, for example. He just wants compete against women because can beat them but not other men.
By playing a rigged game, they’re just stealing a page from the feminists rulebook.
I have no quarrel with the contention that Lia Thomas should no play with women for the simple reason that she is not a biological or anatomical female. Her “identifying as a woman” is between her and the voices in her head. Don’t make me participate in her delusion.
In the early 1970s, feminists in the Women’s Tennis Association got “equal pay” for unequal effort- playing fewer sets in a match than men do. That is not equality, even if you accept the idea that women need a separate space because they’d be overpowered by men (which itself is ironic, given that feminism posits that there are no differences between the sexes except where female superiority can be espoused). Then in 1973 there was the “Battle of the Sexes” between Billie Jean King, 29 years old and the top ranked woman in tennis and Bobby Riggs, a 57 year tennis clown who was old enough to be her father and never close to being the top ranked man in tennis (even with this artificial, unfair advantage, there have been persistent rumors he threw the game). Feminists were jubilant and cited this as “proof” of “inherent” female superiority, All this really showed was their own pathetic insecurity, masked as arrogantly asserted female superiority- this is like “The Battle of the Sexes” that were a feature of television in the 1980s that involved athletic contests between men like Don Rickles and Bob Newhart, and nubile young actress young enough to be their granddaughters. Then a few years later these, “brave, independent women” instituted chromosome testing to keep Renee Richards, a 42 year old ophthalmologist from competing against them, evn though when she won the right to compete she hardly set the tennis world on fire, except as a media circus-Chris Evert and Traci Austin had nothing to worry about.
I never see women competing in men’s Track &Field, or swimming events. OK maybe very rarely but none dominate, so it makes sense to me that something is very wrong. How many Dems are in favor of women playing men’s sports?
OK, bra and panty Football is kinda cute.
“The Left is Losing the Transgender Debate”
I hope so.
If we are winning this debate, what do we do? DOUBLE DOWN. Double down until we’ve crippled every company that supports this cruelty, double down until it’s no longer mentioned in public schools, double down until child transgenderism becomes illegal, double down until the transvestite adults seek the proper mental help they desperately need, double down until people stop pretending. This is not a time for sympathy. We have a country to save.
The radical left, of course, only pushes this to destroy our country. The rest of those on the left go along for the same reason they go along with everything the Marxists do: they’re ignorant, probably the biggest crime of all.
The “pride” movement is guaranteed to come down, crash and burn, just like the sarcophagus administration.
“With traditional morality crumbling, people use a combination of gut instincts and anecdotal stories to decide issues.
Most people, including conservatives don’t think clearly with objective precision, they don’t follow a premise to its logical conclusion. That’s why they readily accept contradictions, useless imprecise terms, and mind crippling “anti-concepts” like “anti-racism” and “extremism”.
That’s why they come to wrongly believe that altruism really means kindness, conservatism precisely means freedom, liberty, and capitalism, traditional morality really means rational morality and rational values.
Slavery, misogyny, absolute monarchy, racism, tribalism, theocracy, are all ancient and traditional, were considered moral and proper, they still exist today, does that make them rational values by a rational moral standard?
“People are arguing about “extremism” as if they knew what the word meant, yet no two statements use it in the same sense and no two speakers seem to be talking about the same subject….
In fact, most people do not know the meaning of the word “extremism” [or altruism]; they merely sense it.” – Ayn Rand
Then by the time they find out what the words, terms, anti-concepts, imprecisions, obfuscations, and contradictions really mean, where they really lead to, it’s too late, they find themselves enslaved and crushed by a tyranny put over on them by “nice” sounding words.
What would we do without our daily dose of anti-altruism and the word salad that always accompanies it?
Basically your Objectivism For Dummies course consists of the following:
Altruism…bad.
Jesus…..bad
Christianity…………bad
Judaism…….bad
Judeo-Christianity is Leftism……bad
Judaism and Christianity are oriental…..bad
Christianity prepared the ground for modern totalitarianism….bad
Medieval Christianity was a totalitarian system…..bad
God and magical thinking…….bad
Atheism….good
Greeks……good
Christian Dark Age….bad
Renaissance and enlightenment …..good
Greek philosophers……good
Christian philosophers…….bad
selfishness “properly defined”, rational selfishness….good
Altruism…bad.
Repeat ad inifinitum
And there we have the simplistic world according to our rezidentura fraud…..THX
They LOVE Ayn Rand. They remind me of ……. religious fanatics.
What would I do if not for your incessant obsession with attacking my comments? You’re my best advertisement, you attract others to read my comments.
The worst thing that could happen to my comments is having them met indifference and having them ignored. Thanks to your tireless effort that will never happen, thank you.
Yes they do, they are truly fanatics
Wow, give yourself an “I Am Special” award.
As always you are delusional. My “incessant obsession” is way better than your obsession with altruism and Rand. Because it’s based in reality.
Thanks to my “tireless efforts” I may be attracting others to read your gibberish, and you are generally met with a blizzard of downvotes, negative responses or no response at all.
I am the one garnering upvotes and some positive responses. That is because I am normal and sane. You are not.
In other words you are wasting your time and your life. But hey, enjoy feeding that bloated ego of yours.
LGB allying itself the with T and racial civil rights groups for decades was understandable as most of them presented themselves as decent, rational, and reasonable.
Their mistake was staying silent as the sick and radical T nutjobs started gaining notability.
It was the same case for the feminists from the sexual revolution era, who allied with similar groups and presented themselves as decent, rational, and reasonable. And then they stayed silent as the degenerates – the Trans activists, hijacked the movement.
And that Q at the end. Dead giveaway that this movement is sick and depraved.
that any percentage of the population supports the debauched lunacy of the trans agenda is beyond belief .
They are losing because millions of parents will not subject their children to pediphilia, or mutilations of their bodies. We are observing a dark twisted culture of child abuse and evil intentions, and everyone knows its not the norm.