The Truth About the Transgender Narrative

I have recently sat through a number of local school board meetings and have left fascinated, confused, and depressed.  What was once a really boring and often little attended affair, school board meetings have now become Jerry Springer episodes.  Crowds filled with anger and vitriol and armed with propaganda of their social media echo chamber are storming these meetings with torches and pitchforks, ready to burn it down. 

The issue?  Broadly speaking, LGBTQ.  But much of it revolves around the “T” in that acronym.  And that is where much of my fascination lies.  The transgender movement, to me, has moved at a speed and with a magnitude I have never seen before. I am amazed that so many are willing to untether themselves from reality and believe that a man can become a woman or vice versa.  I am dumbstruck by the fact that people, with a straight face, can claim that cutting off a child’s breast or penis is an option to help one affirm their gender identity  I am blown away that people, especially biological women, think it is perfectly fine for men to compete in women’s sporting events or for a man to serve time in a women’s prison. It’s crazy that the likes of Dylan Mulvaney has ascended beyond a place of normalcy but to a place of reverence.

How have we become so unmoored from reality?  I suspect there are a number of reasons.  Social media obviously has a role in providing nonstop content, acting as a social contagion catalyst.  Pandemic and post-pandemic fall out, certainly added fuel to the fire.  However, I think the most significant reason is that transgenderism is another battleground in the larger political and cultural wars we have been waging for the last fifty years.  More specifically, it is the progressive’s left willingness and desire to deconstruct the foundations of Western Civilization.  Much of that conversation is for another time.  For now, I want to concentrate on why the progressive left is willing to accept outlandish craziness.

To really understand why transgenderism has reached such levels of importance and concern, one must understand the progressive mind.  Progressives have an innate need to feel morally superior.  As such progressives are always in need of an injustice, oppression, or inequality to fight against, whether real or imagined.  When real oppression and injustices are in short supply, they tend to fabricate them.  They use anecdotes, poorly analyzed data sets, and over powering narratives to construct a false moral high ground.  

One of the more clever strategies of the transgender movement was to hitch their wagon to the LGB horse.  This was crucial because the LGB movement had been making significant inroads in American culture and was punctuated with the Obergefell decision legalizing same sex marriage.  With a majority of Americans becoming comfortable, and even embracing homosexuality, many on the activist Left were in need of a new oppression or inequality to fight.  Enter in the transgender movement.  Because many transgender are essentially homosexual in the traditional sense, it seemed like a natural fit.  And, again, it allows Progressives an itch to scratch.

But for transgenderism to really capture the hearts and minds of many on the Left side of the political spectrum, there has to be some compelling story or narrative that describes the oppression and injustice of transgendered folks.  And this is where the story gets interesting, and where most of my fascination lies.

At the center of the transgender argument and narrative is the danger and harm that transgender people face.  They will speak of mistreatment, discrimination, trauma, violence, and suicide.  Certainly at the school board meetings I attended, that was the claim of many of the trans allies that spoke.  In fact, in recent weeks, I have heard many trans activists make claims that people who oppose aspects of the transgender movement are “literally killing” them.  Literally? Here is the deal, this narrative is a critical component to the trans movement and without a narrative of oppression, injustice, and harm, the whole movement collapses on the weight of its own illogical proposition.

These claims seemed dubious to me, if not contrived.  Part of my suspicion regarding these claims comes from a variety of different experiences.  The first is understanding how narratives are formed, why they are formed and how they operate.  I won’t wade into that right now, but here is an explanation.  Put simply, narratives are powerful tools to frame how we perceive and interpret an issue and are often self-fulfilling.  In other words, we tend to understand an issue that confirms what we already believe.  Second, as a high school district administrator who is involved with student affairs and discipline in a fairly conservative community, the claims of harassment, bullying, and violence are not supported by data.  In fact, the sexual assaults we have had in the past year involved LGBTQ students as the perpetrators.  I assume that there are, in fact, incidents in which transgender people are harassed or treated poorly, and many of those incidents may not be reported.  But with the politicization of this issue, if transgender people were being accosted, harmed, or victimized, it would be the lead on every mainstream media outlet.    

However, the opposite is happening.  Trans proponents and trans people are the one’s attacking and committing violence against others.  The Covenant School shooter who killed six people, including 3 children, was transgender.  There was an arrest of a transgender person in Colorado who was planning on shooting a middle school.  An anti-transgender activist known as Billboard Chris, was attacked in Vancouver.  Riley Gaines, a female collegiate swimmer who tied with a transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in the NCAA championship last year, was attacked by a transgender activist in San Francisco for her position on trans-males competing against women. 

In any event, I decided to analyze and evaluate their claims and the evidence they use to construct their narrative. 

First, I wanted to find the data regarding the relationship between trans people and suicide.  Before delving in this topic, it is important to understand that suicide and suicidal behavior is complex and one should not attempt to reduce it to single variables.   More importantly, it is also tragic and concerning and we should not minimize it or make light of it.  Therefore, we should be cautious in how we interpret data regarding suicide behaviors and extrapolate causes versus identifying correlations to other variables. Consequently, crafting policies and practices to prevent suicide can be problematic.  We can’t live in a society in which we are held hostage to the threat of someone killing themselves if they are not getting their way.  When a man threatens to kill himself if his girlfriend leaves, we don’t blame the girl, we rightly understand that the man has deeper, more serious mental health issues.

Not surprisingly, there is no hard data from the CDC or other reputable sources that have suicide rates based on sexual orientation or trans identity.  Instead, the claims rely on data compiled by various researchers (here and here and here)  who solicited responses from online surveys targeting the LGBTQ community.  These surveys do show that LGBTQ people report experiencing more suicide ideation and suicide attempts than their nontrans peers.  And that too, is not surprising.  They make the claim that these suicidal thoughts and attempts are a result of  unacceptance or rejection, victimization and harassment, or lack of “gender affirming care.     

That may all be true, but here is the problem with that data.  For all sorts of reasons, self reported data is not very reliable.  When you get into the details of these studies, they eventually confess as much.  They have huge sampling errors which they try to disguise with fancy sounding statistical jargon, but the reality is people responding to these surveys are not a good representation.  Another problem is that the questions in the survey use terms and phrases that are not clearly defined, allowing for multiple interpretations and require no other evidence.  So, one person may say that being misgendered is an act of violence or harm and another might not.  Also, many in the LGBTQ “community” have been conditioned to believe themselves to be victims and oppressed, and as such they are engaging in a kind of confirmation bias when answering the questions.  There is an incentive for them to claim victim status as it is used to force people to accept the premise of the transgender movement.

So what does this data suggest?  It is certain that LGBTQ have more mental health issues than non LGBTQ people.  I think there is more complexity than just saying that their negative mental health issues are a result of alleged victimization or unacceptance.  However, I do think those things most certainly play a role.  I am not denying that, but maybe transgenderism is a symptom of a larger mental health issue, which I highly suspect it is.  

I am both sympathetic and empathetic to the mental health issues of people, especially young kids.  But sympathy or empathy cannot change reality and for too long we have created a culture of mental health treatment that affirms the mental health struggle instead of teaching perseverance and resilience. Not only do we affirm mental health issues, we have made them a means to become a “protected class” citizen that provides special treatment and rights to which the rest of society must cater.

Just one side note.  The group of people with the second highest suicide rate are white males.  Which is ironic given the progressive trope that white males have the most privilege and power.  Nearly or over twice the rate of black, Hispanic, or Asians.

Another claim often made by activists is that many transgender people are disproportionately victims of violence against them because of their gender identity.  Again, I wanted to find data that showed this to be true.  What I found was that anytime an LGBTQ person is a victim of a crime, it is automatically assumed and reported as an attack on the "LGBTQ community", regardless of any evidence to support the claim.  For example, the infamous and horrific Orlando mass shooting at the gay nightclub, Pulse, was immediately attributed to anti-LGBTQ sentiment.  But that is not certain. There are some credible reports that the shooter was, in fact,  gay. 

There are a myriad of  stories claiming the trans murder rate is skyrocketing.  But again, there is no conclusive evidence that these acts of violence were in response solely to the person's gender identity.  In almost every story, the connection between the violent act and the victim’s gender identity is weak or non-existent.   

Narratives are powerful tools that are used as a means to an end.  Most of the time, narratives are built on anecdotes and half-truths, disguised as reality, and marketed to people who want to hear what they already believe to be true. And the “You're literally killing trans people” is not the truth.  But it does give progressives the moral imperative to recreate society.   Not allowing biological males to compete against biological females does not place trans people at risk, it protects women. Delaying "gender affirming care" which can include long term, irreversible effects, until a person is an adult, is not cruel, it is common sense.  

With all that said, the libertarian in me is fine with people choosing how to present themselves to the world.  But one’s right to pursue their own gender fantasy, does not compel me to partake in their fantasy.  Nor do I condone or support any physical or verbal harassment of people because of their mental health issues or gender identity. However, advocating and promoting the concept of the  biological reality of two fixed and distinct genders, is not hate, just the truth. 

Few more thoughts here...