The transgender activist agenda went too far, but that shouldn't be the end

Miami Herald

3 days ago

Last week's Supreme Court decision to uphold Tennessee's right to outlaw gender reassignment surgery for minors, a move made by more than two dozen states, marked the beginning of the end for the most extreme effort to reshape society under the banner of civil rights ever attempted. Parents on the high court voted 6-1 for the decision.
Only a decade ago, the T in LGBTQ took over the debate about how to accommodate those who identify in non-standard ways. The transgender issue was different than what had come before in that some of those who identified that way did not just want to be accepted into society without discrimination, but to fundamentally alter how Americans thought about sex and gender, reshape single sex spaces and activities, and change how the rest of society communicated even when no transgender person was present:
The overreach included:
A flexible definition of gender was to replace the traditional biological sex binary. Society was to accept that gender could change from day to day and go places that seemingly had nothing to do with sex. Women were to accept those who identify as women into locker rooms, bathrooms and women's sports even if the new occupants of the space had a penis and the testosterone that usually comes along with it. We were all supposed to share our pronouns before speeches, presentations, introductions and in emails so that those whose pronouns were not obvious would feel supported in sharing theirs. New words, such as Xe and Xir were introduced to our vocabulary, and others were used in new ways as sex was now 'assigned' at birth instead of observed, and referring to 'biological sex' was considered a slur.
In the wake of the transformation of public opinion after the Obergefell Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, LGBTQ rights groups including GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign approached transgender issues with a confidence that bordered on arrogance.
They used social media to attempt to deplatform and stigmatize anyone who did not bow to the new elite consensus. Gang attacks on public figures who disagreed became common. People lost jobs, friendships and relationships with family members if they objected to any of the new practices or refused to accept people's identities that bordered on the absurd, like people who claimed their gender changed, day to day and even hour to hour.
Athletes like Riley Gaines and public figures like J.K Rowling, the British author of the Harry Potter novels, were branded TERFS – trans exclusive radical feminists – for fighting the changes. Both faced online mobs and lost friendships. Gaines had speaking engagements disrupted over her opinions. Rowling faced calls for her arrest after Scotland passed a broadly-worded hate-crimes law.
School districts in Washington state and elsewhere enacted policies that allow local schools to hide the gender transition of grade school children from parents, including new names, the use of different bathrooms and involvement in sports usually restricted to children of a different sex. In California, such a policy became state law, and local schools were sued by the state's Attorney General when they didn't comply.
In some jurisdictions, courts in a divorce case can weigh disagreement over a child's gender transition against a parent who refuses to recognize a new gender identity of a child of any age. That comes as the number of people identifying as transgender passed 1.5 million and the number of young people who identified as LGBTQ more than doubled, at some colleges passing 20% of students.
Business human resources departments embraced the movement, requiring ordinary workers to be trained on the new social theory. Business executives began to declare themselves 'allies.'
In medical care, the idea that a pubescent teen or even a girl 12 or younger could have her breasts surgically removed went from unheard of and unethical to standard practice taking place hundreds of times in less than a decade. Such 'gender affirming mastectomies' are up '13-fold' according to the National Institutes of Health. Groups of mental and physical health care providers like psychiatrists and pediatricians took the same positions as LGBTQ advocacy groups. Biden administration officials successfully lobbied an influential healthcare group to take all age restrictions out of its medical guidelines involving these procedures. .
It was insane. That fever has finally broken. Now that the extremists have been defeated in the court of public opinion where support for the transgender agenda has plummeted, at ballot boxes where Trump made transgender issues the pitch in his most successful campaign ad, and now at the Supreme Court where the 6-3 partisan divide was on display, we can try something different.
Even some activists, such as the only transgender member of Congress, Sarah McBride of Delaware, admit that the movement went too far.
Trans people shouldn't be punished for this overreach because most of them had little to do with it. I think there is little support for pushing transgender people back into the closet. For those of us who love a transgender person, that is simply unacceptable.
There is plenty of room for a more modest pitch from the transgender community to be free from discrimination in employment, jobs and housing; to be embraced in families and society without fear of harassment; to arrange their romantic lives as they see fit; and for people to treat their requests for verbal acceptance in terms of pronouns and new names as nothing more than being polite. It is not too much trouble to create spaces in sports and bathrooms where sex and gender don't matter.
If the LGBTQ lobby had started here, I doubt there would have been much controversy at all.