The Trans Phenomenon

Let me start by saying something that I don’t think enough people say when approaching this difficult topic. The transgender phenomenon is a trend. The vast majority of the people claiming gender identities other than that into which they were born are an insult to people with genuine gender dysphoria.

My initial thoughts on this subject don’t even resemble how I feel about this topic today.

When the transgender bathroom debate first became a thing, my honest first thought was “Who cares where someone poops?”

Well, it has become pretty apparent that people care. In particular, women care an awful lot, as the very reason a women’s restroom exists is so that they don’t have men in the bathroom. And that brings up the “but trans women are women” argument, and that’s where the story really starts to form. That devolves into sexual predators convicted of rape claiming to be transgender to be placed in a women’s prison. How did we expect that to go?

I don’t care at all what adults do with their bodies, and I think if you want to carve off your nose, tattoo the whites of your eyeballs black, and tattoo snake scales all over your body…then you should do that.

I have transgender loved ones and friends, and their gender identity does not upset me in the slightest. I honestly could not care less what individuals do.

On the other hand, and I’ll admit that this a big thing for me, the aforementioned people likewise don’t care whether you participate in their desire to appear to be the sex that they were not “assigned at birth.” (I have to put that in quotes, because it’s one of the most ridiculous phrases in the modern lexicon…in my opinion.)

I will tell you this ahead of time, and I’m open to a conversation about why you might think I am wrong, but I don’t believe that one can change either their gender or their sex. I think that some people prefer to identify with some of the stereotypical outward appearances of one gender or another, and I think that’s just fine.

Where I have always sort of mentally drawn the line is when someone tries to tell me “Uh, excuse me, but I am a man!” while I am looking at a diminutive, clearly female human being. And the truth of the matter is that I am firmly convinced that no one is looking at this hypothetical person and instantly changing their mind when accosted with kneejerk offense when someone “misgenders” them.

I am a student of human psychology. I don’t have any degrees. I’ve never published a paper. But I have had hundreds of thousands of conversations with people throughout a storied sales career, and it’s a pretty common thing that when you demand that someone suspends their belief in observable reality as a compliance exercise to satiate your personal desire to impose your identity on other people, it generally doesn’t work out very well.

On the occasion that someone has said to me “My pronouns are _____” unprompted, my general reaction is to give them a high five and then disengage permanently. It feels like me introducing myself as Dr. Ericsson, while standing knee deep in cow shit, wearing overalls, and farting uncontrollably with every syllable uttered. It just doesn’t fit, particularly when your offered pronouns are so clearly not in line with your actual ones.

It’s fascinating to me how fast all of this has evolved. We all, over the course of the past few years, have been absolutely bombarded by propaganda indicating that everything we do, up to and including existing is somehow problematic to the “trans community”, a group of people so fickle and unforgiving that people who extricate themselves from it are targeted for life.

I have, on a few occasions, “misgendered” someone, and have been absolutely lit the fuck up for referring to a 6’2″ human being with a beard, a voice like Sam Elliott, and a physique reminiscent of King Kong Bundy as a man. The only outward effort applied to identifying as a woman was a blue dye job in their thinning hair, and two emaciated little pigtails at the back of their head, out of sight.

And that’s the real crux of this argument for me. While I fully support any adult’s desire to do anything that they want to do as long as they are not directly harming another human being, I rightly (in my opinion) truly struggle to suspend observable reality on behalf of someone who is using nothing but imposing their use of language on other people to make themselves feel better.

If I saw Blaire White, Fallon Fox, or even Caitlyn Jenner entering a women’s restroom, I wouldn’t bat an eye. But when I see someone who looks like me who threw on a pink crop top and is now insisting they are a woman walking into a restroom where my daughter just entered, you can bet I am going to pay attention. I am going to say something, with zero fucks given to how many threats this man hurls at me from Tik Tok.

This nonsense would have been unheard of just a decade ago. It wasn’t confusing. Transgender people have been using the bathrooms they mentally associate with forever. They’ve done so quietly and have gone through efforts to at least closely resemble the gender they would prefer to associate with. More effort than growing out their hair, putting on some lipstick, and threatening the lives of anyone who says “Hey, the men’s bathroom is over there.”

Pretending to be gender dysphoric

Yes, I said the part no one is willing to say. The vast majority of supposedly transgender people today are faking it. Why do I feel that way? Well, because I don’t think there was a 4000% increase in trans identified teenagers because it’s more socially acceptable in 2023 than it was in 2013.

I was a teenager once. My life was thrown into utter chaos at thirteen years old when my father died in a single car accident the very summer that I had told my mother only weeks prior that I wanted to stay with him despite the fact that she had full custody. I was thereafter propelled into yet again living with my mother who had decided to reconnect with the very man who had held us all hostage at gunpoint just a year prior. I was, retrospectively speaking, clinically depressed and refused treatment for it, and I walked around for several years with a big chip on my shoulder.

I had no idea what I was doing, who I really was, and who I intended to be as an adult. I was skating through day by day, and I’m not saying a word of this to make you feel sorry for me. Please don’t. I don’t need it. I tell you this because this is a story that plays out for pretty much every teenager who has ever lived. Every teenager I have ever known, myself included, has struggled in some way with their identity.

What most of us didn’t have was an ideologically driven federal government, public school system, and mental health monolith who clearly believes that the root of any mental health difficulty is likely rooted in the fact that some boys are girls and some girls are boys, and a whole lot of people aren’t either one.

I have a stepdaughter who is now 23 years old. She is bipolar, of the diagnosed variety and not the Tik Tok variety. (We’ll get into that clusterfuck of a phenomenon in another post.) I recall walking her into a behavioral health facility during one of her more manic episodes as a teenager, and being greeted by a clearly biological male in a dress, a pony tail, and some flaming red lipstick, whose very first question to my manic teenager was “Do you identify as a boy, as a girl, or as neither?”

I was taken aback. Even my stepdaughter temporarily snapped out of her manic episode for long enough to be genuinely confused at the question. “I’m a…girl?”

Lo and behold, months later, she had been aggressively pandered to by a group of mental health professionals, fellow troubled teens, and to a lesser degree, the social media meat grinder that is progressively churning out propaganda telling teenagers that being transgender is “cool” and something to aspire to.

And then the inevitable happened. She came out as transgender, tears flowing down her face like a fully indoctrinated Pentecostal in the throes of speaking jibberish…I mean “in tongues”. The reverence to her new identity was clearly providing with her some level of manic euphoria.

To make it even more exciting, she and her boyfriend had decided to transition at the same time. She was going to be the boyfriend now, and he was going to be the girlfriend. I recall wondering which one of them had started that conversation first, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was likely my stepdaughter, after being pounced on by the Church of Transgender Ideology, and having a doting and pliable young man who thought he was in love with her so much that he was willing to cut his balls off to be close to her.

What I witnessed over the ensuing months was interesting. She had made another trip to the behavioral health facility after a particularly difficult manic episode, and had come out of that facility with all of the religious fervor of a Southern Baptist minister…except for the trans ideology and not hellfire and brimstone.

“Dad, you just don’t understand. The reason I have been having all of these mental health problems is because I am actually a man, and that’s why I don’t like myself.”

That’s when I completed a 1000 piece puzzle by throwing all the pieces up in the air and it all landing exactly where it fit.

I. Don’t. Like. Myself.

I thought back to how many times in my youth I’d thought exactly the same thing. I thought about how hard being a teenager was for me, and it dawned on me that I have never once known a teenager that didn’t have some kind of existential crisis right around puberty. Not one.

We have an epidemic of modern day children who have had the world so nerfed for them that they literally make up internal bullies to defeat. If a kid calls you a fatass at school, they’re likely to get suspended or even expelled for violating policies against bullies. Kids in the modern era don’t have to earn anything any more, so they’re not feeling any meaningful sense of accomplishment. The end result is a group of kids who have never experienced any form of conflict, and human beings thrive on precisely that, so they have to generate an internal one in order to fulfill their biological imperative to overcome.

Please don’t take this to mean that I think kids should have carte blanche to be pieces of shit and brutalize other kids. That’s not what I mean to say at all. But when you remove any potential conflict, and pair that up with getting the some reward as someone who actually put in an effort, you absolutely disincentivize excellence, and you’re asking for a group of kids who aren’t willing to pursue it.

And that’s when the school, the counselor, and the behavioral health system captures these kids. You’ve got kids feeling lost, abandoned, confused, and the nicest person they know is a blue haired non-binary school counselor with pronoun pins, rainbow glasses, and pride flags ringing their office, paired with the emotional energy of a 1950’s sitcom grandmother who will happily tell you that your parents can’t possibly understand what you’re going through and therefore you don’t have to tell them…but they’re probably trans. And if they are, that’s GREAT because they have a pamphlet to give you for the Church of Transgender Ideology that they can read, but they can’t take home.

And if they don’t capture your kid at that point, this fucking guy will:

That’s Jeffrey Marsh, and if you’re a parent and don’t know who that is, you should look him up. Or them. Or whatever.

That’s quite a wall of text. I know. I’m not sorry.

Because this is what parents are up against. A group of people so hellbent on proselytizing their philosophy that they have infiltrated school systems, federal institutions, and apparently the entirety of the mental health profession sufficient that a whole generation of kids is coming up believing that sterilizing or castrating oneself is a stunning and brave act of discovering one’s true identity.

Worst yet, there are a great many teachers that will help you hide your dysphoria (in other words, not liking yourself) from the very people that are most likely to want to help you through it.

I think this is some high handed attempt at helping a minority of children who have ballistic parents avoid “danger”. The kids that are in “danger” for having an identity crisis in their formative years is the minority. And in an effort to protect one unfortunate kid, we can’t leave 99 other kids’ parents out of the conversation. The solution to the minority of shitty parents is absolutely not to completely ignore the role of parents on the whole in a child’s life.

As for my stepdaughter, I learned a powerful lesson the day that she started pushing the hormone conversation. When she proclaimed in no uncertain terms that she wanted us to schedule her for “top surgery” and get her on testosterone, my immediate response was “Absolutely not.”

Up until that point, I was content to let the ideology drift out of her like every other fad she had attached herself to. Having dealt with her bipolar disorder for several years at that point, I knew how quickly she changed her mind. More importantly, I was intensely aware that anything I put my foot down about was going to generate a month of chaos the likes of which no one who doesn’t have a bipolar child will ever know.

But in that moment…I had had enough of the game.

“What? You’re not going to help me?”

She looked at me with a sense of awestruck indignation that I knew was going to lead to a much deeper conversation. I saw the indoctrination in her eyes, and the quick thinking “What did that pamphlet tell me to say?” memory access that was happening.

“Actually, I am going to help you. I am going to help you wait and think about the decision that you think you want to make right now. I’m going to support you and love you, and have your back against anyone who has anything mean to say to you. I’m going to help you by giving you the time to come to an adult decision when you are an adult. And between now and then, you can wear what you want to wear. You can tell other people your new name. But here at home, your name is your name. And when you are an adult in a few years, if you still want to do this thing, I will drive you there myself and sit in recovery with you and stomp the shit out of anyone who gives you a hard time about it. But for now, there won’t be any surgeries or hormones. Period.”

What I expected was a tirade of consternation and fury. What I got was, unbelievably, “Yeah, that makes sense…and that’s fair.”

I felt like I had spontaneously figured out the Konami cheat code. My bipolar child who used to lose her shit any time I told her that the song on the radio when she was in the middle of a bipolar episode was not actually about her had just responded with logic and reason. My skepticism was high, to be certain, but less than a month later, she proclaimed that she was so glad that she had waited to do anything, because she loves being a girl, and she can’t believe she ever felt that way.

Support your kids. Love your kids. Protect your kids. And pay fucking attention to what they are being fed both at school and online. And if your kid is currently going through any kind of mental health treatment, vet the living shit out of the people that are providing care. It’s your job as a parent.

The Pronoun Game

It’s 2023 at the time of this writing. In the past few months, I have received a hundred emails with pronouns in the signature or even in the god damn subject line. When I get an email from Stephanie Williams, I am pretty sure I know what your pronouns are. Same for Michael Smith. Declaring your pronouns just seems absolutely ridiculous.

Well, very much like the bathroom conversation, we have engaged in a slippery slope of stupid at this point, and we are ripping down that slope like Olympic bobsledders.

Most people of reason, at least for a while, would say “Okay, you want me to use male pronouns to describe you? Cool.”

I did. One of my favorite phrases for a while was “I’ll call you whatever you want me to call you because I’m not an asshole.”

But…of course it evolved. It’s no longer “Hey, nice person, I would prefer it very much if you would refer to me with these pronouns.” It has morphed into “YOU WILL CALL ME MAYONAISSELIDSELF AND STAND WITH MY PROCLAMATION OF MY IDENTITY OR YOU ARE A BIGOT THAT DOES NOT DESERVE TO BE ALIVE.”

Well, if you don’t look like a mayonnaise lid, I’m going to have a hard time calling you that.

I know that sounds hyperbolic, but that’s the reality of where we reside today.

And look, there are plenty of transgender people out there that very much look the part of their new chosen identity.

But for any of you rage reading this right now, let me tell you why you get so much pushback from the community at large at this point: you pushed too hard.

Consider the Elliot/Ellen Page saga. I’ve watched several of Ellen’s movies before that person became Elliott.

If you scroll Elliot’s IMDB, it has been scrubbed of any mention of the name “Ellen”. We are literally revising history and digitally scrubbing actual human beings out of existence. We are cutting off body parts, and manipulating the very hormonal makeup of otherwise healthy people in an effort to prove that biology has no idea what it is doing.

And now you want me to look at Elliot Page and not only say “he” but also believe it, lest I be labeled a bigot? That bridge is held up with toothpicks and gun scraped off of the bottom of a Cracker Barrel table.

Elliot made an adult decision, and I support it, just like I support face tattoos and other forms of body modification, as even if I think most of it is stupid, I firmly believe that adults should be able to make decisions about what they want to do with their body.

If someone I know were to have a unicorn horn implanted in their forehead and told me that they now identify as a unicorn, without the irony with which so much of today’s youth does the same with gender, I would respond with something along the lines of “Cool, do what makes you happy. Awesome. Have fun.”

But if that person were to ask me if I believe that they are a unicorn, I’m going to have to tell them no. Not because I don’t care about them, or I want to make them unhappy, but because I actually don’t believe that they are a unicorn. Even if they actually believe themselves to be a unicorn, I am doing them no favors at all by playing along.

I can identify as a 110 pound prima ballerina, and demand that other people refer to me that way. They’re going to take a quick look at 290 pounds of me with a beard and the fine motor skills of a newborn deer and disagree. They might say that they believe me, but if they’re being truly intellectually honest, they can’t actually agree with me.

And that is precisely what we are being asked to do with this modern day pronoun frenzy. Suspend observable reality and pretend to believe it or you are a horrible person. Some people are. Most people aren’t. Most people just say “Yeah…whatever” and move on with their day like sane people. No one wants the conflict.

Then that unfortunate person feels ostracized because people are hesitant to engage with them. They go on to create prolific Tik Tok profiles crying in fast food restaurant bathrooms that no one sees them for who they “actually are.”

Unfortunately, it’s my opinion that people actually do see you for what you actually are, and so many people are making their entire lives about what they externally look like or internally feel like that they are forgetting that most people simply don’t give a shit. Dunbar’s Number is a real thing. And if I get to choose 150 people or so to form a connection with, I’m not picking people whose entire life is centered around making me believe things that are contrary to observable reality. This is also why I can’t stand politics or politicians in general.

Most people aren’t ignoring your pronoun choice. They are just seeing what they see. And what other people think about you is none of your business, and you have no right to expect a person to see you as you desire to be seen. That so many in the modern day trans community expect precisely that is a testament to how far we have devolved into make-believe land.

Most men would prefer to be seen as Chris Hemsworth…but most men aren’t Chris Hemsworth.

Most women would prefer to be seen as Margot Robbie…but most women aren’t Margot Robbie.

And apparently some people now believe themselves to be either things or multiple people, and prefer to be seen as “they” or “them”. I can’t do it. I won’t do it. It’s not out of disrespect. It’s because I refuse to see a human being as an amorphous thing.

Wrapping Up

I know this reads as regressive to a great many people who have bought into the trans ideology.

I will never question the humanity or the importance of any human being, especially not based purely on their stated gender identity. The truth is, like most other people, I truly don’t care at all how someone identifies in any regard, provided they are not an asshole.

Therein lies my problem with the industry that the Church of Gender Ideology has decided to foist upon the masses. People don’t want to live and let live. They demand acceptance so loudly that they have forgotten that courtesy goes both ways, and to make things worse, they expect what no reasonable person would ever expect from the world at large: to be seen how they wish to be seen regardless of visual evidence to the contrary.

I’m ready for the heat on this one. Bring it.