What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye. – JD Salinger
Taylor Swift’s concerts have become cultural phenomenons, religious-like experiences for so many people worldwide, especially little girls. Happy moms post videos of their flushed, excited faces and near-hysteria at the first sight of their idol.
It’s girl world, to be sure. But it’s also become, like so many other things in American culture, LGBTQIA world too, like the upcoming Barbie movie is sure to be. There doesn’t seem to be anywhere left that belongs only to girls. From locker rooms to sports to clothes and makeup, girls are vanishing.
Recently, Taylor Swift “got political,” and was no doubt backed into a corner by activists demanding she take a loud public side against what they believe are “harmful” laws hurting their community. Which laws? They don’t say, and you aren’t allowed to ask. They’re all bad, they insist. You’re with us, or you’re against us.
There is one law growing in prominence not just here but in other countries too, and that’s to put the breaks on “gender-affirming care” for minors. But if you support gay marriage or you want to be a good ally, you have to go along with that too, you have to be part of a movement that is sterilizing children legally, in the United States in 2023.
Most people, including Taylor Swift, have no idea just how bad things have gotten. I too was mostly unaware of what “gender-affirming care” actually means. I also didn’t know how bad things had gotten for women in sports. Denying biological reality seems to be something fundamentalist religions do, not educated liberal societies, yet here we are, insisting trans women are women. They can believe that if they want to but it doesn’t make it true.
The media does such an expert job of pandering to activists, pretending like it’s a small percentage of athletes. But the truth is that there is widespread suppression of dissent and a climate of fear that keeps so many from speaking out about how this is not just a tiny movement anymore. It’s the core identity and belief of the Democratic Party.
They can’t see this as a social contagion because that news never enters their feedback loop. All they hear, over and over again, is “protect trans kids.” Does protecting them include making them infertile? Does it include surgery that creates a false opening that must be dilated several times a day, or it closes up? Does it mean eliminating their sexual function? For life?
Standing up to any of it is hard. We all saw what happened to JK Rowling. The activists are out in force, patrolling reading lists, science labs, school libraries, and all media outlets. Just in writing this, I run the risk of losing everything. But so what?
I’ll take my talking points from exiled scientists – the new heretics of our time, like evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein:
As long as we still have a First Amendment, there is no justifiable reason to stay silent on something so urgent. Controlling speech has been the only reason this madness has gone as far as it has. But thankfully, the voices of dissent are getting louder, and there is strength in numbers.
When Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, struck a deal with the Daily Wire to stream What is a Woman on the first day of Pride, they got spooked enough to pull the deal unless they removed two scenes they labeled “hate speech.”
