Two inexorable forces are driving the woke movement toward an unavoidable reckoning. The first is the binding force of intersectionality, which holds that all marginalized identities must band together to fight systemic oppression. The second is the energizing force of a permanent revolution that recognizes no limiting principles—the movement always seeks the next cultural convention to challenge, enabling it to recruit new members.
Because human sexuality is so complex, its frontiers guarded by numerous taboos, it is a ripe hunting ground for new victims of oppression. Wokeism has not yet succeeded in fully embracing pedophilia, incest, necrophilia, and zoophilia, but it has staked its life on transgenderism. And that will be its undoing.
It’s one thing to advocate that transvestites and drag queens be allowed to live in peace. One might prefer that they conduct themselves with more decorum, but since standards of public behavior have decayed so dramatically in the age of social media affirmation, what’s one more set of attention-seeking clowns to add to the circus?
[Related: “Abuse as Standard Medical Practice”]
But when they came after the children—with the enthusiastic support of ghoulish surgeons and amoral pharmaceutical companies that, together, turned “gender-affirming surgery” and “hormone replacement therapy” into a multi-million-dollar growth industry—they crossed the Rubicon. The mutilated bodies they leave in their wake will be their thalidomide babies, living reminders of what will one day be widely acknowledged as crimes. Just as the early-twentieth-century progressive movement is forever tarnished by its connection to eugenics and forced sterilizations, so will Wokeism one day have to carry the cross of transgender butchery.
One can already see the binding force of intersectionality starting to fray as the horror of juvenile sex reassignment surgeries is brought out of the shadows and into the public eye. Why should advocates for reparations stand shoulder to shoulder with Mengelian monsters eager to chop the breasts and genitals off disturbed teenagers who desperately need mental health intervention? Why should perfectly normal gay men and lesbian women put up with abuse and cancellation if they refuse to date members of the opposite sex who “identify” with them? Why should women’s sports be colonized by male grifters seeking unearned glory? Why are iconic consumer brands self-destructing as they follow pied pipers of aberrant fantasies?
The medical profession is most at risk, the same group that enthusiastically embraced forced sterilizations of “imbeciles” and “degenerate races” a century ago. It’s bad enough watching woke healthcare leaders fall all over themselves to lower admissions standards and grading regimens in medical schools to fill their identity quotas. But when they insist on making false claims about the alleged scientific consensus regarding the safety and efficacy of “gender-affirming” care, which will surely be refuted in the fullness of time, they will have to pay a heavy price.
[Related: “Why the Trans Issue is Much Bigger than Bathrooms, Sports, and Fragile Feelings”]
A hyperpolarized political battle has already been joined. Red states are rushing to pass legislation banning transgender surgery and the administration of puberty blockers to minors, while deep-blue states are passing transgender “sanctuary” laws that put the “rights” of minors to demand self-mutilation ahead of parents’ attempts to intervene. At some point, saner voices will arise within the Democratic Party who can see the cliff toward which their radical woke fringe is leading them. The sooner they start trying to win back their party, the better their chances of surviving the political wreckage that awaits.
And finally, there are the lawyers. It’s just a matter of time before they smell a huge pot of money going after doctors and hospital systems that destroyed the lives of these mutilated children, who will grow up, come to regret their misguided “choices,” suffer with expensive medical complications, and start seeking restitution. There must be an actuary somewhere in the malpractice insurance industry who is sounding the alarm on the long-term financial liabilities their clients are rapidly accruing.
Academia, of course, will be the last to recognize the price society paid when the ideological gain-of-function research stemming from its critical theory laboratories conjured up the transgender variant of the woke mind virus, which the DEI industrial complex spread far and wide. Future historians are going to have a field day analyzing this. Now is the time to preserve the incriminating documents before they get flushed down the memory hole when the fellow travelers, useful idiots, opportunistic collaborators, careerist grifters, and bandwagon-hoppers begin to desert the sinking ship.
Image: Adobe Stock
Why does everything start in the states and crosses the pond,I say keep your oppressive/depressive opinions to your own country,in fact it looks like it stems from California,yeah great place for all ideologies to start,and why not you have Hollywood film stars with personalities of rattlesnakes to aid your various causes,hooray for Texas at least they have a voice against this nonsense
Yeah, right.
As older people die off, the population becomes more and more liberal. The dinosaur “anti-woke” brigade are having their last gasp before being justifiably tossed into the dustbin of history.
So you agree that kids should get carved up to feed an industry fueled by a religious worldview? That doesn’t seem very liberal of you.
It could be a number of years. Five, then twenty . . But after a generation of two of the experiment of raising toddlers to high schoolers with the notion that they get to discover which gender they are – – but at the same time favoring that they switch genders from the one they were “arbitrarily” assigned at birth – – there will very many de-transitioners who will be battling with the attempts to stop them from de-transitioning. At the same time, parallel to this, there will be more and more publicity regarding the injection of critical race theory – – and that is something that, once experienced in their children, African American parents will just not tolerate. As they move en masse to theonly party that will listen to them (The GOP), the Democrats will suddenly notice that they are looking at a generation or more of minoirty status. Only then will the Democrats see the utter folly of their having endorsed the authoritarian imposition of utterly ridiculous, un-American, anti-democratic, radical, and dangerous ideologies.
The “dustbin of history” sounds as if it will contain many of my dear friends. At least, when I am consigned there, I will be in good company. When I come across this sort of thing – and it seems to me more and more prevalent – I am reminded of that colossus of liberal values, Pol Pot:
“We will burn the old grass and the new will grow.”
Of course, there remains the possibility that your comment is just a little provocation.
“Yes, America is burning. But that’s how forests grow,” — Maura Healey
https://commonwealthmagazine.org/criminal-justice/healey-america-is-burning-but-thats-how-forests-grow/
It took 20 years and 60k surgeries, globally, before we realized the harm lobotomies caused. How many will be permanently handicapped by the removal of their functioning sexual organs before the harm it’s caused is fully realized by all?
Excellent point.
Your comment about older people being relegated to the dustbin bespeaks a very illiberal and noxious view. And whereby do you come up with the outrageous statement that societies become more liberal? You do make a case for them becoming more stupid and nasty.
Dianne, do you know what “mutually exclusive” means? Or what happens when matter and antimatter (which does exist) collide?
The L & T will not tolerate each other — they can’t — and as it is explained in another article above, the G & T can’t tolerate each other, either. It’s going to be like the final days of the French Revolution when the radicals started destroying each other. The whole higher ed calliope is going to come crashing to the ground.
You are also using the wrong word — a “liberal” is one who holds the values of the Western Christian Liberal Enlightenment, notably those of “life, liberty, and property.” You are actually talking about leftist values which inevitably disappear from sane folk as their hair starts to grey, and it’s been that way for centuries.
That’s a flawed thinking. The next generations to come will raise up against wokeism, like the we fought the Nazis back in WWII
Can’t wait till you get older, when the reality of your dystopian world will -hopefully – make you wiser, and the young people of your day will wish you justifiably dead just like you wish for others.
Can’t wait.
This is not true. As younger people, who skew more liberal, grow older they tend to become more conservative.
I’ve been hearing this pipe dream for decades now and it just isn’t going happen like a watershed moment.
That used to be the case. However, Millennials and Gen Z now exhibit illiberal views compared to earlier generations – e.g. pro-censorship, pro-authoritarianism, difficulty in coping with, and accepting people who hold different views and perspectives, etc.
FANTASTIC!!! … We need MORE voices. Thank you!!
I doubt it will all collapse. Those in power will adapt, pivot, adopt new slogans — whatever it takes to preserve their positions for as long as they can. And if they are indeed replaced by some other group, soon enough it too too will act primarily to consolidate and maintain their positions.
Where has it ever been different?
Well, lobotomies aren’t practiced anymore. This is about as close a situation to that as we’ve ever seen
I have LONG said that higher ed will be like the railroad, auto & steel industries — all of which outright imploded for a lot of the same reasons. The PennCentral Railroad, the merger of the nation’s two most powerful, became the biggest bankruptcy to date in 1971. And who ever thought that GM stock would become worthless, as it did in 2009?
It didn’t matter how much they rearranged the deck chairs on the Titanic, she sank.
The whole calliope is going to come crashing to the ground
” Just as the early-twentieth-century progressive movement is forever tarnished by its connection to eugenics and forced sterilizations…”
No, let’s get real here — it was the Progressives and their concept of eugenics that led to the Holocaust. The US Holocaust Museum openly states that “[t]heories of eugenics, or “racial hygiene” in the German context, shaped many of Nazi Germany’s persecutory policies.” See: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/eugenics
We need to remember just how badly the Progressives screwed up a century ago as I don’t think anyone in 1923 could possibly have imagined just how bad things would become by 1943. Germany was, after all, a civilized country with centuries of art and science — their universities were so advanced that they were the model that we copied and which our universities reflect today.
Progressive ideas are dangerous, the butchery of our children is not only insane but a decade ago (under the DSM IV-IR) would have been legally defined as such. What’s next, helping the anorexic to starve themselves to death?
Thirty years ago, when this insanity was just starting, I used to joke that I was a “male lesbian” — a “woman trapped in a man’s body, a woman who happens to be a lesbian.” And as one thus doubly oppressed, I was thus entitled to a double heaping of affirmative action — while said in jest, it truly infuriated the feminists who really had no reply because I could point out that I wore jeans, rode a motorcycle and was attracted to women, the textbook definition of a lesbian (at the time).
Thirty years later, I don’t joke about this anymore lest people think I am serious.
A mere decade ago, I went to a conservative conference and told of the then-new Massachusetts K-12 policies on students changing sex and I had to email copies of the Mitchell Chester memo because people thought I was making it up. And now I am told that there is something wrong with me if I don’t want to date a guy in drag…
Oh brave new world….
Reality is that there are two mutually exclusive groups on an inherent collision course — women who hate men and men who think they are women are increasingly going to be demanding access to the same resources and it ain’t gonna end well. There are lesbian “separatists” who have gone so far as to try to exclude men from a public park in Northamption (MA) and there are trannies who (amongst other things, need a shave) believing they can prance around naked in front of said separatists with impunity.
Throw in the fact that (a) Massachusetts passed a state ERA back in the 1970s and (b) it was used as the basis for the gay marriage decision — that in Massachusetts, “sex” is a protected category like “race” — and things will get quite interesting until the whole calliope comes crashing to the ground.
And I think it will take higher education — as we know it — with it.
The only question I have is how much damage it will do to our society in the process…
“Progressive ideas are dangerous…”
A useful distinction might be made between ‘progressive ideas’ and ‘ideas propagated by persons identifying themselves as Progressives.’
Almost everything worth having and preserving arose from a progressive idea – and many more are needed.
Of course, one may be of the opinion that, generally speaking, we inhabit a ideal reality, but the evidence for that is, I suggest, scant.