The USA is Gay
And it's time to shut up and get used to it or finally get deadly serious.
One of the most tedious things about the internet—and Twitter especially—is the seemingly endless capacity for whining and bitching. Some whining and bitching every once in a while is healthy. We are social animals and a ‘world without any complaining’ is much more likely to be tyrannical than a paradise.
But the object of complaining should be to sketch out a problem for an authority (or for ourselves) in sufficient enough detail to go about solving it. Otherwise, complaining is rather pathetic and annoying—one begins to feel the aggrieved party actually accepts their condition and would prefer to bitch and moan about their peeves even louder than remedy them. Maybe they even prefer their injury.
I feel this way about US Conservatives (and more than a few ‘sensible liberal’ sorts) regarding transgenderism and #pride and all of the new and exciting ways in which American culture has gotten more and more saturated in (deviant) sex.
Yesterday Biden flew a gay (+ some other new bullshit) flag at the White House:
America’s conservatives are huffing and puffing “HOW could this ever happen??!”
How? Because the USA is gay, honey. I think it takes willful ignorance and complacency of the sort only conservatives can muster not to see this. They’re a little bit like the parent who doesn’t admit their kid has turned out to be gay. Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. America - but Little Timmy isn’t excited about Project Runway because he thinks it’s a show about airplanes. And this quite tame. Remember the Obama years?
The very texture of American society has been getting steadily gayer, every year. How are conservatives just finding out about this now? Don’t bitch to me about the “new religion”. Forget Will and Grace, Americans have been watching more and more gay (and lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender) television for decades. Back in 2001 (you know, when the 9/11 attacks happened?), Gallup noted American attitudes towards gays were becoming more tolerant.
Gallup has recorded a gradual increase in adherence to the belief that homosexuality is an acceptable alternative lifestyle. Agreement with this proposition has risen from 38% in 1992 to 52% today.
A key part of the shift in American attitudes towards homosexuality is the belief that it is primarily genetic, that homosexual people are “Born this Way”:
One of the more significant changes in American public opinion on gay and lesbian issues has been the increase in the perception that homosexuality is genetic—something a person is born with—as opposed to being due to other factors such as upbringing and environment. For the first time in 24 years, as many people in Gallup's most recent poll say homosexuality is genetic as say it is environmental. This represents a major shift from 1977, when environment was seen as the more prevalent factor by more than a four-to-one ratio.
Interestingly, as genetic science has progressed further in answering questions with authority in the popular culture and political imagination about why people are born this way, regarding sexuality, it clams up entirely on questions of race.
By 2008 (you know, when Obama ran for president?), the push to normalize transgenderism came from taxpayer-funded NPR. I strongly suggest you take the time to read the piece. It’s a time-capsule from a forgotten world in which the phenomenon of transgenderism was clearly new and rare, and had to be spoken about as such, but where the same playbook of “If you love them, you will indulge them” was first being used. Where one physician clearly instructs the parents to stop enabling behavior (which the parents claim was always there, as told through the lens of the mother..) that has sent their boy off into being a girl, another physician enthusiastically encourages everyone in a boy’s life to start addressing them as “she” and playing along with the erroneous identification as a female. The word ‘transition’ is introduced without missing a beat.
Was any of this on your radar in 2008? If it wasn’t, I again encourage you to read the piece. The article even attempts to contextualize both sides by letting the pro-transitioning doctor and anti-transitioning doctor make their case: one says, this is all just like homosexuality, and we used to think that was a mental disorder. After a long campaign by activists, we now no longer do. Isn’t that curious? The science simply ‘updated’, in tandem with the culture. BTW, all of this is admitted.
Conservatives fought next to none of it. And how could they? After all Equality is a fundamentally American value (is it not?) and a cornerstone of our civic sense.
Where does that leave conservative complainers? First, notice that they’re loudly complaining about it now because it’s become obvious now when their enemy is all around them, from their beers to their movies to their military to their politics.
Second, notice that none of them are even willing to think about the status quo ante. Every objection to transgenderism and the fact of surgeries and hormone therapy for children is starting to become couched with the insistence that gays are victims of all of this. Perhaps even the primary victims. Tomboy women who climb trees and sensitive men who love show tunes hardest hit, news at eleven.
That society perhaps fundamentally veered away from a correct understanding of sexual pathology with homosexuality and the fuddy-duddy sorts who objected to that coming into the culture through the 1990s and 2000s were completely correct isn’t even countenanced. That our culture expressly feels it is bigoted and hateful not to accept a child as homosexual—or that no interventions or external environmental factors could prevent (or cause) that—is never wondered about by these conservatives as perhaps related to the new phenomenon of mandatory acceptance of a child who is trans-gender.
Conservatives—as they are on so many other issues—want to be comfortable, they don’t want to win. Winning would require: 1) a positive, unique vision of the good, 2) the will to steadily execute on that vision and bring it into fruition. They are so far away from either of those that it’s hard not to be utterly contemptuous.
I think the most ‘laser-eyed’ Social Darwinist reaction to this reality comes from Anatoly Karlin, who in this testy confrontation (about a related topic) outlines the Strong Case for Woke-ism: “Elite Human Capital prefers this, get used to it.”
I think the jury is still out if elite human capital actually prefers “Woke-ism” (which again, it still bears saying, is just Liberalism itself, but maybe a dynamic and modern verve of it), but the rest of Anatoly’s charges bear weight. There is no coordination or solidarity on ‘the right’ in undoing this, and it is actually found among those economies and societies that are most developed—for now.
What would it look like, what would have to be accomplished fact—socially, culturally, and eventually legally—for the US polity to reject transgenderism? Conservatives should spend less time thinking about the latest outrageous and gross thing sexually deviant freaks have decided requires the rest of us to tell them they are so special and good and vaaaalid, else they committing suicide, and more time thinking about how to answer that question: or get used to it!