Despite high-profile dissidents like J.K. Rowling wielding their cultural influence in defense of sanity, scarcely a week goes by without some eye-popping headline that should remind everybody that the fundamental premises of the transgender movement have logical, predictable, and indeed predicted consequences.
Consider just a few recent examples.
A 40-year-old Dutch pedophile who, according to Reduxx, “amassed one of the largest child pornography collections in the history of the Netherlands,” decided to “transition” to female after his arrest. Local reports indicate that he “may now be in a women’s prison awaiting trial.” The man in question had hoarded eight million pornographic files on his computer, including many of children being abused and tortured.
A French gynecologist was suspended for practicing medicine for one month and given another five months of probation by the French Medical Council for refusing to treat a 26-year-old man who identifies as a woman; the doctor had insisted, to no avail, that he did not have the expertise to treat the trans-identifying man.
Academics are advising the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) to stop using the term “midwife” because it “subordinates all who give birth,” and suggested instead that the phrase “lead perinatal practitioner” be used instead. The authors of the paper “From Midwife to Lead Perinatal Practitioner” state: “As trans and non-binary people increasingly require access to midwifery services, this paper proposes an alternative professional title that is inclusive.”
A 38-year-old trans-identifying man who allegedly killed a security guard at a refugee shelter in Germany was incarcerated in a pretrial detention center for women in Brandenburg. While there, the man—a refugee from South Africa—“terrorized female inmates and threatened to kill them,” and has demanded that he be referred to as “Cleopatra” in court.
Also in Germany, a trans-identifying male was recently sentenced to a mere 10 months of probation for “repeatedly exposing his genitals in public, soliciting migrant children for sexual abuse, and spraying them with his urine.” According to Reduxx, the public prosecutor insisted that the man’s crimes were a result of his attempt to “affirm her femininity;” the judge agreed. The man, a native of Kazakhstan, has a long history of sexual offences.
Prominent Norwegian politician Mikkel Eskil Mikkelsen, a gay politician and former member of the Sámi Parliament who “led the Norwegian Sametinget’s work on gender identity reform,” committed suicide in February after being arrested and charged with the possession and distribution of child pornography last November. The material included images of children being sexually abused. Mikkelsen subsequently confessed to the crimes.
To be clear: Every single one of those examples is from this year alone, and I could cite dozens of additional cases, incidents, and scandals from just the past several months. Any right-leaning movement riddled with this level of scandal and sexual depravity would produce incessant news coverage that would correctly be viewed as fundamentally discrediting—but because the transgender movement is viewed as an extension of the gay rights movement, there are few journalists willing to connect the dots.
Those manning the barricades in defense of biological reality have racked up several very significant victories. The NHS’s Cass Review resulted in a permanent ban on puberty blockers for minors in the UK, backed by the pro-LGBT Labour Party. Finland has begun to make similar moves, as has Sweden’s top medical institution. The brief and manufactured “consensus” on “gender-affirming care”—the Orwellian phrase used by activists and their allies to describe sex change treatments for children—has begun to show significant cracks, especially as the recipients of this “care,” now referred to as “detransitioners,” tell their tragic stories.
But these victories should not distract us from the scale of the crisis. Transgender ideology has seeped into almost every institution in the West, and, despite setbacks, trans activists are deeply entrenched and more than capable of defending the territory they have taken. For the fever to truly break, we must do more than merely reject the sinister medical quackery of castrations and mastectomies for healthy children; we must reject the upstream premises that led to this horror show in the first place. In short, we must reject the idea that men can become women, and that women can become men.
Plenty of populists are happy to get on board with rejecting sex changes for children, but with notable exceptions, they are following rather than leading. If victories against transgender ideology remain confined to its most extreme manifestations, cases such as those I cited will continue to occur. Transgender ideology still informs judicial decisions, much of academia, and a significant part of the political spectrum. If the premises of trans activists are not challenged, repudiated, and rejected, the victories achieved thus far will be a temporary setback rather than a definitive defeat of a revolutionary movement dismantling Western civilization from the very ground up.