 But what the left has done, I think really over the last, I don't know, 10 years, but it's certainly accelerated over the last five or so years, is they've elevated trans to some kind of high amor status, that they've elevated it to some kind of virtue. And they have tried, and I think to some extent succeeded in making it sexy and making it popular and making it cool and making it something that we should all strive towards. And what's really interesting here for kids in particular is trans is usually, and again, I think the stats read this out, usually something that men, the boys, and then men have an issue with and then convert to women. Sometimes it's women converting to men, but that's rarer historically. But over the last few years, it's become this massive number of girls, women who want to become men. And it's become, again, cool. It's become the thing to do. It's become popular. The cool kids do it, or certain, maybe the geeky kids or whatever. There's a clique in high school that is cool and supportive of trans. And so there's something going on here with the elevation of this into our culture as not only normal, women, it's not normal. It's fringe and it's unusual and it's abnormal and it's, to a large extent, the result of some abnormality that's genetic. And it's become cool. And then the consequence of that is not only is the left pushed that it's become cool, it's pushed. And part of the reason it becomes cool is that girls, a lot of girls, when they grow up, there's many ways in which it's more fun to be a boy. Boys are given more latitude. Boys are more respected in many ways. We still discriminate against girls in certain aspects. A lot of girls want to be tomboy. A lot of girls, it do and do, prefer to be boys. They usually pass us once they get hormonal and once they become women, usually goes away. But it does exist and what you see is girls who feel more tomboy-ish, if you will, latching onto this instead of just viewing the tomboy-ish as a phase, viewing it as something metaphysical and therefore something that needs to be done, something needs to be done about it, hormones, for example. And what's happened over the last 10 years is that there's been this real push among the left to take children who express feelings about what gender they are and cultivate that and play to that and ultimately to provide them with medical solutions anywhere from hormones before enduring puberty to surgery. Now, I think doing that to kids is horrific. I do not believe it should be done. Whether the state should intervene or whether the state should ban it, you could argue it's child abuse. I'm open to that argument. But whether the state should intervene is I think a different issue. I don't think doctors should do it. I don't think parents should do it. I think it's horrific. I think when a child becomes an adult and they get to a certain age, they can make the choices for themselves. But to give children hormones, to go against their biology, unless there's a really, really, really good medical reason to do that, I think that's just horrible and horrific and abusive. But the left doesn't embrace this and celebrates it and has made the transition the number one issue and to the point of rejecting feminism, to the point of rejecting gay and lesbians. I mean, there was just an episode on, God, I forget the conservative's name. The gay conservative who I debated at Clemson University. Anyway, he did a whole thing about trans culture versus queer culture and the idea is one of the things that seems to be happening is that the trans are rejecting the idea of gayness. Gay assumes that you have a particular gender and a lot of this trans movement is involved. And this idea that there is no such thing as gender, that there is no such thing as a woman, there is no such thing as biology, doesn't matter. So it is really interesting about what makes this so important to the left. Why is this the big thing for the Andrew Sullivan? That's right, Scott, thank you for reminding me, Andrew Sullivan. What makes this such a big deal for the left? Why is the left so important? And then I want to get to why the right freaks out about it so much, right? And I think there are a few things when it comes to the left that's particularly the far left that the whole transgender thing really resonates with them. First is the left's, I mean, long-time advocacy for the persecuted. And again, this I think can come from legitimate, positive, pro-human, pro-values orientation, particularly as was reflected in the civil rights, but even in the gay rights movement. They see discrimination and they see oppression. They see people being discriminated against and being oppressed and they respond to that by taking up the cause. And look, they've done, they did a, the left has achieved a lot when it comes to this. And they have been successful. And again, it's not always motivated by the right things, but I think it sometimes is. And particularly historically, I think it has been. That is the civil rights movement that was a just movement in the sense that it stood up against Jim Crow laws and against racism and against discrimination, against discrimination by the state, against just generally the irrationality and the evil of racism and discrimination was a just and right movement. And it was very successful. In some ways, it was too successful in the sense that it laid the seeds for the destruction of its own goal of colorblindness. But it succeeded for a while, right? And I think the same thing is true with gays. The gays were discriminated against. They were treated horrifically. They were not granted equal rights before the law. And I think that the movement, particularly over the last 10 years, was five, six years ago, 10 years back, 20 years back, was very successful, very successful in changing Americans' attitudes. Most importantly, it changed people's attitudes towards gays. It's no big deal today. Nobody really cares that much about it, except people like Ben Shapiro and the religious nuts and Walsh and people like that. People generally don't care about people being gay. Gay marriage was approved. And there's a sudden, there's a sudden real legitimate issue that the left rallies around in terms of oppressed groups. And suddenly, trans have been oppressed. Certainly, they're marginalized and they have been. If gays were marginalized, certainly, trans have been marginalized even more. So they rally around that. But the problem with that is that much of that is not actually motivated by positive values, at least for a certain fringe element within the left. And I think that fringe element today is dominating the intellectual debate. For a large number of leftists around these causes, what is really driving this is some sense of, you know, in a sense, a worship of the oppressed groups. It's what we've talked about, this transactional attitude, this seeking out the most oppressed, but not just in terms of improving their lot, but in terms of elevating them and turning them into the very fact that they're oppressed, turning that into a virtue, turning that into the epitome of virtue, turning that into the epitome of morality. That is what we should all be sacrificing too. And the motivation is not so much to help the oppressed group. The motivation, much more than that, is to drag down people who are not like the oppressed group. Not even the oppressors, just people who are not like the oppressed group. I mean, this is, I think, much of the agenda of the modern intersectionality movement. So you get Black Lives Matter, which is, you know, there's a real issue there of Blacks being discriminated against, is there racism? All legitimate questions, is there police brutality against Blacks? Legitimate question, right? We can look at the data and look at facts and figure it out. But that's not what really is driving many of these people. Which driving them is to elevate this one group that is oppressed to a kind of moral status where everybody must sacrifice to that group, not for the sake of improving that group's lot because they don't really care about that. But in the sacrifice that everybody else has to commit. So the whole point about BLM and white guilt and all that, white fragility and all that, was not to help Blacks, people that happen to have Black skin. The whole point of that movement was to inflict guilt on people who don't have white skin. The whole point of that movement was to knock down the people who have so-called privileged. The whole point of that was to hurt the non-oppressed group, to knock them down, to put them in their place. And that, I think, is true of every single group that they, in monotimes, in the last, I'd say, 10, 15 years, any group that the left rallies around, it's not anymore enough to try to elevate that group, to try to improve their lot. The main energy is in knocking down everybody else, is in using the oppressed group to create guilt and sacrifice and contrition among the non-oppressed group. And that's the whole, I think, the whole point at the end of intersectionality. And it clearly was part of the agenda of BLM and of white fragility and all that. It's to knock everybody else down. And it's all driven by a kind of a egalitarian ideology that realizes that you can't raise people up. So the only way to reach this imagined, utopian, impossible equality is by knocking everybody down. And not knocking everybody down economically. It's not about economics, it's about culture, it's about who you are, your soul. And this is why there's a sudden eagerness among these people. To get kids who are not trans, to be trans, to knock them off their privilege, to make them be part of this suffering group, to make them part of the oppressed group, to make them feel what it's like, and even if they don't go through the whole conversion therapy, to inflict the guilt on them that they're not that. There's something special about being trans, there's something really good about being trans, and they can't be that. They should feel bad about it, particularly given that this other group is oppressed, and by the way, that oppression is what makes them good and moral and interesting and virtuous and worthy of our affection, worthy of our interest. So the left is driven by, I think that the better left is driven by, we need to help the oppressed, we really want equal rights, we want equality, what drove them to get equality for gays or what drove them to try to get equality for blacks. But then there's a much more insidious, extreme fall-left group that is all about, all about, knocking anybody who's quote, normal down. Being normal is a privilege, which you should feel ashamed of, and you should feel guilty of. And that's what they live for. That's what drives them. It's that nihilism. So I think that's one obviously driving force for the left. Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching, show your appreciation. 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