The recent controversy over a Democrat questioning transgender athletes in women’s sports illustrates one of the most interesting and most interestingly annoying aspects of Trump Era: The sight of supposedly intelligent people whose mind has been reduced to one output for every possible input whenever he is involved.
After last week’s brutal election loss, Democrat Congressman Seth Moulton stated the obvious, telling The New York Times, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Needless to say, the reaction from many of his fellow Democrats was swift and merciless, decrying him as anti-trans, seeking to roll back trans-rights while actively harming trans-people. “If the Congressman’s theory of change is that we need to sell out and scapegoat every marginalized community in order to win, I don’t really know what we’re winning at that point,” explained Kyle Davis, a Salem, MA city councilor who also called on Representative Moulton to resign. “Our community is deeply hurt by these remarks, which reinforce harmful stereotypes and undermine the dignity of transgender athletes,” explained MassEquality, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group’s Executive Director Tanya Neslusan. “We hope that by engaging with the Congressman, we can work toward a more inclusive and informed understanding of transgender issues in sports,” and he was “both harmful and factually inaccurate.” Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley didn’t refer to Representative Moulton directly, but she wrote that the transgender community has been “scapegoated and dehumanized” on social media. “I will always stand with trans people and the entire LGBTQ+ community,” she added. “This Congresswoman sees you and loves you.” In addition to the verbal backlash, The Boston Globe reported that one of Representative Moulton’s top aides resigned, former staffers and interns are demanding an apology, and the venerable Massachusetts institution, Tufts University will offer limited internships for students seeking to join his team, though this appears to be in dispute. As Fox News reported, “A top university is accused of severing ties with Democrat Rep. Seth Moulton’s office over the congressman’s comments expressing concern about transgender female students participating in school sports with biological females. Tufts University, located in Massachusetts, said it would no longer facilitate student internships in Moulton’s office after the Massachusetts Democrat’s interview in The New York Times last week, a source familiar with the matter told Fox News Digital. Moulton himself appeared to confirm the situation on Tuesday morning, but Tufts University has denied limiting internship opportunities with his office.”
To his credit, Representative Moulton isn’t backing down. “I stand firmly in my belief for the need for competitive women’s sports to put limits on the participation of those with the unfair physical advantages that come with being born male,” he told Fox Digital after his initial comments sparked outrage, noting “I am also a strong supporter of the civil rights of all Americans, including transgender rights. I will fight, as I always have, for the rights and safety of all citizens. These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and we can even disagree on them. Yet there are many who, shouting from the extreme left corners of social media, believe I have failed the unspoken Democratic Party purity test. We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue. We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop.” Undoubtedly, some of the hyperbole in the progressive reaction is being driven by Representative Moulton’s perceived agreement with once and future President Donald Trump. As we have seen over and over again, one of the most interesting and most interestingly annoying things about the Trump Era has been the sight of supposedly intelligent people whose mind has been reduced to one output for every possible input whenever he is involved. Unable to assess the situation accurately, it’s as though their brains, which are essentially supercomputers armed with hundreds of billions of neurons, have been replaced by a primitive chatbot from the 1970s powered by a few simple lines of code. Upon encountering a statement, event, or whatever that includes President Trump, any statement, event, or whatever, the miracle of rational thought is completely suppressed, reduced to transposing the topic at hand into Orange Man Bad. Information comes in, some negative, likely exaggerated reference to Trump is appended, and a condemnation comes right back out, repeated on a loop, indefinitely it seems.
In this case, Democrats have settled on a specific Trump advertisement widely run in Pennsylvania and other swing states, credited as both one of the keys to his victory and an example of his ongoing effort to demonize just about anyone who is not white and straight. The ad itself focuses primarily on Vice President Kamala Harris’ own statements regarding her support for taxpayer funded transgender surgery even for those currently in federal prison, which I would add is not a popular position for rather obvious reasons not worth mentioning. As she put it herself, “I support policies ensuring that federal prisoners and detainees are able to obtain medically necessary care for gender transition, including surgical care, while incarcerated or detained.” She went on to repeat the same claim in a 2019 interview, replayed in the ad itself, with the National Center for Transgender Equality Fund. In the final few seconds, the ad proceeded to criticize transgender athletes competing in women’s sports, transgender surgeries for children under 18, and ultimately accuses Democrats of prioritizing the welfare of transgender people above others, concluding with the statement, “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” While one can certainly debate the merits of this claim and its relevance to the electorate in general, two things about the Democrat reaction stand out that suggest something different than the regular political back and forth is at work. Rather than defend the Vice President’s position as we might expect under normal circumstances, the ad was immediately interpreted as anti-transgender, that is President Trump was attacking transgender people specifically instead of criticizing his opponent, a strange position considering the bulk of it was devoted to a quote from Vice President Harris herself. After the election, Trump’s political director, James Blair, spoke to CNN’s Dana Bash, who repeated the general criticism, claiming it was widespread. “There are a lot of people who say that your campaign demonized the trans community as a way to present a wedge issue for, perhaps, men of color, suburban, and parents. Why do you think—and I know you believe that those ads worked—Why do you think they worked?” Mr. Blair responded by focusing on the general obtuseness of the criticism in the first place considering the content of the ad before explaining the obvious target given the content. “Well, first of all, we didn’t demonize the transgender community. In fact, [it] just really isn’t even about transgender issues. This ad is really about misplaced priorities, and at the end of the day, it is a small minority of the country that thinks taxpayer dollars should be spent on that sort of thing. When you have a majority of the country who was saying very clearly that they don’t believe the government is working for them, that they’re worse off than they were four years ago, the country is on the wrong track and then to see a presidential candidate who is saying she’s going to move this agenda forward, and that’s how taxpayer dollars should be spent, it just doesn’t comport with them.”
The second part of their reaction is far deeper and more troubling, going well beyond their reflexive desire to immediately conclude the worst possible outcome any time President Trump is involved, suggesting a challenge that will be with us years after he leaves the political stage. Underlying the belief that the taxpayer should fund transgender surgery for convicts, there should be no restrictions on transgender women in biological women’s sports, and no restrictions for surgery or other irreversible procedures on minors, is the completely unsubstantiated, unproven, and altogether illogical idea that a man can become a woman and vice versa simply because they say so. That is, who we think we are magically makes us that person in any and all respects. This is a radical new contention, one that has no basis in fact beyond what we say facts are, nor much of a history beyond the past ten years, akin to either transubstantiation in the Catholic faith or alchemy. It also leads to some rather bizarre conclusions, completely at odds with reality itself. In this framing, a transgender woman, meaning a biological male, who prefers women is a lesbian, despite that the coupling of biological male and a biological woman is heterosexual by definition, based purely on their private parts. The only difference, in this case, is the fact that one of the partners claims to be a woman, but if an alien arrived from another planet to study human sexual behavior, unfamiliar with our current cultural fetishes, what would they conclude? Why would they reason that thinking makes it different in a world where we are blind to everyone’s inner thoughts? Alas, this has not prevented some progressives from insisting that lesbian biological women should be willing to date and have intercourse with transgender biological men, or on the flipside, that men can now bizarrely get pregnant simply because they say they are women. Perhaps even stranger, they also believe that the same person can change back and forth between genders multiple times. We’ve all heard the expression that a man can be trapped in a woman’s body and previously we would’ve acknowledged that a person can feel that way even if it wasn’t the actual truth, but progressives are now asserting that man can jump back and forth between womanhood and manhood, and whatever they choose to be at any moment is absolutely true in all respects, no difference whatsoever between a man or a woman that has been the same their entire lives. In other words, I am my wife if I say so one day and she has nothing to say about it. What exactly is the evidence of this? Can anything in the entire world change its state in all particulars simply by claiming it’s so? Stranger still, many of the people making these claims grew up in a world where this simply wasn’t so and having suddenly changed their own position for no logical reason, expect us all to do the same. For centuries if not millennia considering there were cross-dressers in ancient Rome, it was understood that some people are not comfortable in their own bodies for whatever reason and many (including myself) have argued that they deserve to be respected for their decisions, but that didn’t imply they could magically change what they are, anymore than anything can change itself by thought alone.
Suddenly, however, that is exactly what a vocal, aggressive minority are claiming – to the point where some are concerned that we might misgender pets, as if our bizarre picadilloes extended to dogs and cats – and anyone who disagrees with their radically new thinking on the topic is a transphobe, hurling hateful, inaccurate, non factual accusations. At the risk of sounding harsh, this is a mass delusion, a collective madness, perhaps larger than any in history, but at least part of that is because it’s inextricably linked to the general derangement regarding President Trump. Since he has spoken out against transgender athletes in women’s sports and transgender surgery for minors, it simply has to be bad. Rational thought, namely that we need to balance the rights of trans people with the rights of biological women, not simply assert that they are the same, much less put biological women in an inferior position, or that any irreversible procedure performed on a minor should be subject to the utmost scrutiny and precaution, is no longer a part of the discussion. Everything reduces to Orange Man Bad, and if you dare to say otherwise, you are the one who is deranged.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 