Trans-Forming SocietyBy Rod Dreher
April 6, 2022
You see the new Adidas pseudo-men playing in women’s athletics ad? It’s in heavy rotation on ESPN right now:
https://youtu.be/fujboh-W7SkIt’s so brave that men use their biological privilege to dominate and destroy women’s sports — and woke capitalists like Adidas praise it.
This is how it works. As I write in Live Not By Lies:
In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”
These powerful corporations are part of the well-developed network of cultural elites who are pushing hard to make transgenderism normal. Even the Walt Disney Company, once beloved and trusted by American families, has become toxic.
This informal network includes some prominent religious leaders:
Becoming transgender is “a sacred journey of becoming whole”, the former Archbishop of Canterbury has said, as the Government’s U-turn on conversion therapy sparked a boycott of its LGBT conference.
Lord Williams of Oystermouth made the comments in a letter to the Prime Minister, along with a number of other senior bishops urging him to ban trans, as well as gay, conversion therapy, calling it “a wrong-hearted notion of care”.
He said: “Conversion to Christianity is the event or process by which a person responds joyfully to the glorious embrace of the eternally loving and ever-merciful God.
“It has nothing to do with so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – pressure put by one person on another to fit their expectations; the attempt to induce vulnerable and isolated people to deny who they truly are.
“To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole: precious, honoured and loved, by yourself, by others and by God.”
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If the former Archbishop of Canterbury and these other senior Church of England clerics have their way, to try to talk someone out of going on this “sacred journey” to lopping off their breasts or their todgers in an effort to change their sex would be against the law. Think about that.
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Madness. It’s all madness. If you had said to just about anybody in 1965 that in just over fifty years, a former Archbishop of Canterbury would be describing sex change as a “sacred journey,” and lobbying the British government for legislation that would prevent attempts to dissuade people from undertaking this pilgrimage, they would have assumed that by then, British society would have lost its moral minds. But now this is barely noticeable.
It is going to a very, very bad place. The destruction of the gender binary, and of the legitimation of total gender fluidity, entails the total destruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. Back in 2016, Camille Paglia (of all people!) called medical intervention to change a minor’s sex is “child abuse, a crime against humanity”. She goes on to say that from her historical studies, she observes that “the move towards androgyny” occurs in late phases of culture — that is, before “heroic masculinity” comes roaring back, in destructive ways. She says that the emergence of androgyny is a sign that civilization no longer believes in itself. Watch:
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And read this infuriating story about how a mom had to go to war with her emotionally disturbed daughter’s school district in a futile effort to get them to stop encouraging her transition. Excerpt:
The school principal told her that he couldn’t control how the students referred to her daughter. “And he said, ‘Well, there are some teachers who would like to respect your daughter’s wishes.’ And I said, ‘While I appreciate that they want to do that, that’s not my expectation at this point. This is a medical condition. I have control over what sort of medical care my child gets. And she will not be referred to with a different name or gender at school,’” Theresa said.
The principal suggested that Theresa hold her daughter out of school another day. A day later, she said, he called back. School leaders would not abide by Theresa’s expectations. Instead, they would honor her daughter’s wishes to be called Leo and a boy.
Theresa said she was told that if the school district didn’t identify her daughter by the name and pronouns of her choice, they could be accused of discrimination because of new Biden-administration executive orders about gender and sex.
The child went to a different school, and is fine now. Notice, though, that everyone from the government to the school administration — the authorities who ought to be on the side of parents — conspired to ruin the child’s mind and negate parental authority. This is why we should understand the trans-formation of society as an attack on the family, and familism.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/trans-forming-society/
