It is a question many are asking as we watch the madness of gender ideology sweep over our children and our culture across the globe: Will the tide finally turn back toward sanity and objective reality? Some assume it is already doing so, evidenced by things such as economically effective boycotts against major corporations like Anheuser-Busch and Target stores.
But a leading voice, one of the first to carefully document the brutal attack of gender ideology and transgenderism upon our daughters, is not so sure. Actually, she is certain it won’t.
Abigail Shrier, author of the important blockbuster Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing our Daughters, explains in a new essay over at Substack that it is incorrect to believe “that if we all stay quiet, the trans extremism will swing back or die down, like feathered bangs and breakdancing.”
Shrier adds, “A mistake lies at the heart of this question, a false conceit borne of metaphors like tides, and pendulums.” This mistake has to do with underestimating the nature of the beast we are facing here. She correctly explains,
Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly.
She is right to call gender ideology a fundamentalist religion.
Shrier holds that “induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion.” (emphasis in original). And the faithful are required to get this secular religion’s liturgy exactly right at all times or the gender clergy will pounce with fierceness and shame you into obedience.
This gender religion also “evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could.” Shrier continues, “Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school.” She is not wrong.
There is an obliged orthodoxy that is forced, not just upon the adherents of this religion, but upon all of us. Shrier is right in telling us that “Gender Ideology is policed by blasphemy laws – like those passed in California and New York, which assign criminal and civil penalties to healthcare workers who intentionally misgender patients and landlords who intentionally misgender tenants.” Of course, it doesn’t stop there.
Outside of statutory law, most social media services will quickly exile you if you’re caught blaspheming (i.e. misgendering, deadnaming et al.). College campuses enforce these blasphemy laws with such smug severity, they are rarely violated. Much as the instances of public blasphemy in Mecca round down to zero.
The largest LGBT organization in the world has incredulously declared a national state of emergency because citizens are resisting their orthodoxy.
Apostates to the faith – known as detransitioners who deeply regret their decision to mutilate their body in obedience to this religion – are brutally exiled and denounced by the faithful. “The level of ostracism and hatred detransitioners face in America today would be familiar to anyone who has tried to leave a close-knit orthodox faith community,” Shier explains.
This religion also has its high holidays. Of course, no one can escape that we are now in the midst of its highest of holy days: Pride Month. Shrier notes, “All major institutions are expected – or is it compelled? – to celebrate Pride by changing their logos to incorporate the look of the Pride flag.” She astutely notes the exceptionalism at work here: “They don’t do that for any other holiday – not even Christmas.”
And unlike the Christian religion, all of this is rooted in absolute make-believe with no rootedness in observable reality.
There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course. It may actually be disprovable; there is a good deal of evidence against it. No matter. The adherents take it on faith. The notion that each of us is born with a gender identity, utterly separable from our physiology, known only to us, imagines gender identity as the secular version of the “soul.”
People do not tend to give up their deeply held and utterly false religious ideals easily. They are rooted in a deeply deceptive worldview and they are shamed into obedience. We are seeing this demonstrated nearly every day with this new and growing gender religion. Shrier concludes, “We are not likely to see … reversals.” She fears we will continue to see more “furor of hundreds of zealots” and “the world they aim to create, where truth finds no foothold and fairness, no purchase.”
Abigail Shrier is likely right.
We are mistaken if we think this madness will all just exhaust itself and politely go away if we wait long enough. This false religion demands our consistent and deliberate resistance and denunciation because it stands directly against all reason including that which is fundamental to the family and human well-being.
