It's safe to say that gender ideology trickled down from academia. It's also safe to say that most people who are buying into these radical changes regarding how we view gender in society didn't go to school for that. The trolling of Gina Carano for not listing her pronouns on Twitter wasn't populated by a hoard of gender studies majors.
As seemingly millions of people have gradually become more radicalized on the subject, and willing to believe more lies, and willing to say things that logically can't be true, and go further down into the dark territories of what this may mean for the socially acceptable treatment of children, we have to start to ask questions.
A basic observation would be that, a few years ago, around the middle of Trump's presidency, the activists took a great joy in chalking up any concern about children getting "gender affirming" surgeries and being sterilized as right-wing conspiracy theories. Now, to an extent, they are right that it's still criminal to perform bottom surgery on a four-year-old.
A lot of right-wingers had their own hysteria on the issue wherein they did buy into some falsehoods. For a while, the gender activists were comfortable.
The thing is, the fact that so many activists were so quick to jump on labeling it all as a right-wing conspiracy theory, in a very clear way, shows that they knew in their gut that, if any of this were happening to children, it would be wrong.
In these early stages, the gender activists got social and personal affirmation in two ways.
One is feeling smart and presenting yourself as smart. Academics love to deconstruct things just as much as engineers love to build things. Academics hate simplicity. Complicating the obvious is the lowest hanging fruit in regard to feeling smart with little effort.
The other was the immediate, perceived distancing from Trump. Never mind that Trump addressed the RNC with a vow to defend the LGBT community to thunderous applause. "He was just lying." the activists will still say. Maybe he was lying; but, was everybody in the room lying? Now who's the conspiracy theorist?
The reality is that, in my adult lifetime, it's never been so socially dangerous for someone on the left to seem to be less mad about Trump than the next person. One step out of line could get you labeled as a Trump supporter, which the left adopted as its greatest possible insult. Doubling and tripling down on policies regarding the trans community was not only useful for these people -- but necessary for maintaining social status.
Don't believe me? The Atlantic published an article titled Separating Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense. We all know that that's a lie, or just plain stupid. Bill Maher, a massive anti-Trumper called the article out, and Bill Maher seemingly lost his liberal card.
Still, eventually truth comes around to bite people in the ass.
The more emboldened activists started saying the quiet part loud.
Blair Peters (aka The Queer Surgeon) was on video describing the difficulties of fashioning a vaginal canal from an undeveloped penis. Ya see, the surgically fashioned vagina can only be as deep as the penis is long. If the biological male didn't go through male puberty, the patient will have a micro-penis, and tissue will have to be extracted from elsewhere. Now, to be fair, this doesn't mean that this surgery is being performed on prepubescent children. What it does mean is that it's being performed on biological males who were drugged from the early stages of puberty, and never developed naturally. What's more, there's been at least one case of an adolescent dying as a result of complications from one of these surgeries.
A mother in New Zealand wrote an article about how her trans-son was going through menopause at the age of fifteen, and how she couldn't be prouder. The original publisher took down the story. Only outlets like The Post Millennial kept the story out there. That allowed the activists to dismiss it (in their own minds) based on the source.
Still, the sterilization issue is real.
You don't need to be a biologist to know that not letting your body do what it needs to do during sexual maturity will result in an adult who isn't sexually mature. A male taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones isn't going to go through female puberty, nor vice-versa. These are kids who will be denied sexual maturity for the rest of their lives.
Then people like Chloe Cole and KC Miller enter the stage. Cole recently testified before congress. When she thought that she was a boy at the beginning of her adolescence, she was pumped full of drugs, and had her healthy breasts removed at the age of fifteen. She also described the menopausal hot flashes. If she's capable of ever having children, she won't be able to breast feed them because of the surgical alteration made to her body.
Major publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, in their feud with Republicans, have labeled any push against these practices in regard to children as "transphobic."
So, now the people who have labeled all of this as right-wing propaganda have to deal with the fact that people on their side are saying, "No, it's real, we're doing it to kids -- and that's good."
What runs beneath that is, "You're gonna join us; or, we're gonna call you a Trump supporter."
Sadly, too many people have been too weak to stand by what all good people know -- that kids can't consent or make life-altering decisions for themselves.
For a while, people were trying arguments as weak as, "Well, if a kid has cancer, they can't consent to medical procedures for that either. "
Seriously I heard that ad nauseum for a while before people finally started to realize how blatantly dumb that comparison is.
What I've seen personally over the last few years is people taking three routes.
The best, and also the smallest group, have just decided to shut up about the issue. They're not willing to turn around and speak out against harming kids for fear of being labeled "Trump supporters." But, they decided to not be fellow travelers.
Another group still chooses to pretend that none of this is actually happening and play stupid.
Way damn too many people have decided to go full NAMBLA and insist that kids can consent. They've gone full Money and Kinsey, the fathers of gender ideology, who were also both sexual deviants and pedophiles.
If a legal minor has the agency to decide to permanently remove reproductive function at the hands of an adult, what can't that minor consent to?
No activist draws a hard line there.
I don't think that the hoards of activists are a bunch of sexual deviants and pedophiles. I don't want to believe that. In general, the easiest way to become a bad person yourself is to think the worst of all of your opponents.
I do think that there are sexual deviants and pedophiles like Joseph J. Fischel, who I've read and most of the activists haven't even heard of, who are driving the ideology. Most of the activists are trying to make sense of the ride without knowing who's driving the car.
The problem is, they figure that, if the ride is taking them further away from Trump, it's necessarily headed in the generally right direction.
It doesn't matter if NAMBLA Town is approaching.