I spent the morning volunteering to help wrangle little ones in our church nursery. Besides being adorably hilarious, toddlers are also a fascinating case study on the human condition. They’re raw, honest, and young enough to get away with being supremely selfish little creatures. Toddlers tend to take what they want—even if it happens to be a toy in another child’s hands. And if you don’t give them what they want, they’ll bellow loudly at the injustice of it all until you 1. successfully divert their attention onto something else, 2. grow weary of their noisemaking and give in to their demands, or 3. successfully prove to them that you can outlast their theatrics, in which case they surrender to the reality of their fate and move on to something else.
As a mother, I’m a fan of options 1 and 3. Option 2 feels lazy and counterproductive to me. We all default to it on occasion, but it’s not a recipe for well-adjusted kids. Hopefully by the time kids reach kindergarten, their parents have properly trained them to realize that throwing tantrums is a really ineffective way to get what you want.
Unfortunately, the more I engage with progressives online, the more I realize how many, many people failed to learn this basic kindergarten lesson. This is especially true any time you encounter someone defending gender identity cult ideology. In the absence of a substantive argument, they defer immediately to ad hominem attacks, call you a hateful bigoted person, and smugly declare themselves the victor of the debate. It’s a lazy, manipulative silencing convention, but it’s so gosh darn effective.
It happened to me again this morning on a former co-worker’s page. She had posted some well-intended fluffy kumbaya meme about how we all need to get along and keep our opinions to ourselves and mind our own business about other peoples’ decisions as long as they don’t personally affect us. (See meme below)
Now I want to pause here and address the popular misconception that we should only care about things that personally affect us. It’s a stupid, shortsighted position to hold. I’m not personally affected by the fact that little girls in Afghanistan are sold as child brides to dirty old men, but that hardly means I shouldn’t care about it. I wasn’t personally sold as a slave, so does that mean I forfeit my obligation to care if humans are trafficked? Part of being decent non-narcissistic members of the human race is learning to care about things and people outside our immediate purview.
So of course I commented on the meme. I said that it actually does personally affect me when people codify bad ideas (like gender identity) into law because bad ideas create victims, and the transborg is actively victimizing the masses. No sooner had I commented than my co-worker’s highly educated daughter rode in to save the thread from my regressive opinions, scolding me for forcing my standard of morality onto everyone else and calling me a hateful, ignorant person for failing to champion transgender demands.
“Kaeley, if calling you out on your hatred is mean, I will do it every day of the week,” she postured. “Who do you think you are to force your views on everyone else?” she asked with zero sense of irony.
Notice how the word “hatred” is conveniently substituted for the word “disagreement” without any explanation as to what, precisely, I said that was hateful.
“Agree with me, or else!” “Subscribe to MY standard of morality, or you’re a bad person.” It’s not the Christians doing the proselytizing in these scenarios. It’s almost a formula for progressives at this point: When in doubt, just accuse people who disagree with you of bigotry, and voila! You win.
Well I’m a mom three times over. I have a toddler. I’m immune to tantrums. You’re going to have to do better than that to sway me. After eight years of pretty significant engagement on the fight against gender dogma, having been screamed down by angry men with megaphones, canceled, silenced, and intimidated at every turn, I’m writing this article in hopes of emboldening people to set some boundaries on the power they allow manipulative rhetoric like this to hold in their own lives. I know parents who are actually terrified of disagreeing with their own children on these things. They spend holiday dinners avoiding discussions about anything substantive for fear of disrupting the apple cart and provoking their childrens’ ire. They live as ideological hostages in their own homes, afraid of the tantrums of their own kids.
One therapist I knew used to drive an hour south every week to anonymously meet with like-minded people who, like her, questioned the wisdom of pushing puberty blockers on children. She couldn’t have these types of discussions with anyone in her immediate circles, including her own husband.
It is heartbreaking to watch so many people live in this kind of paralyzing fear. I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to. Sometimes you just have to be willing to say, “Nope. Not today, Satan. Provide a substantive argument, or prepare to be beaten at your own game.” Because if you want to pull the empathy card on the trans debate, I’m going to beat you every single time with a litany of questions for which no rational rebuttal exists:
How do you think you have any room to berate me for “forcing my standard of morality on you” while simultaneously trying to bully me into playing make believe with men in dresses? That’s YOUR cult standard of morality, and I reject it entirely.
If you’re so empathetic, where in God’s green earth is your empathy for girls forced to share their locker room showers with grown, bepenised adults? Holy rape culture, Batman!
How can you possibly call yourself a feminist who defends women’s rights if you don’t even have the ovaries to accurately define the women you purport to champion?
Transactivists are bullying lesbians who don’t want to date men in dresses. What the heck kind of ally do you really think you are if you’re supporting the group of people who tell lesbians their sexual orientation is “transphobic?” Sexual orientation and gender identity cannot co-exist. You cannot claim fixed, immutable attraction to a sex you refuse to define.
How can you possibly believe you’re on the right side of history if you’re on the team that is sterilizing children? Look at what the butchers have done to poor Jazz Jennings. They pumped him full of estrogen beginning at age 11. They’ve mutilated his previously healthy body to the degree that he will never experience an orgasm. You think this is a kindness? How in the hell can an 11-year-old give meaningful consent to decisions this permanent and irreversible? What is wrong with you?
Where’s your empathy for the female inmates forced to shower with male rapists in women’s prisons?
Where’s your empathy for the battered women kicked out of their shelters for refusing to bunk up with strange men?
Where’s your empathy for the female athletes losing their scholarships and trophies to men in womanface?
How can you honestly call yourself compassionate when you validate vulnerable teen girls’ self-hatred and the rejection of their healthy bodies? Your validation is about as loving as agreeing with an anorexic’s deeply held belief that she is morbidly obese when, in fact, she weighs 65 pounds. In short, it’s not loving at all. It’s wicked. You score zero kindness points for encouraging her self harm.
There are no valid rebuttals for any of these questions, and in the absence of such, the cultists will just call you names and feign moral high ground while they thump their chests and applaud their intellectual and moral superiority. Well I don’t care how high your IQ is; you can be a genius person and a damn fool all at the same time. And in today’s world, in the absence of any gold standard of morality, many progressives will do just that.
But it only works if you let it. And I know I’ve gotten some feedback in the past that my posts are a bit on the angry side, but guys, I promise you anger is the appropriate response to this madness. We should be furious about what’s happening to kids in the name of compassion. It’s a human rights atrocity, and while facts may not care about our feelings, it’s also true that people don’t generally take action on things that matter until they FEEL the urgency.
So now is a great time to stop running scared of progressive tantrums. So they call you a bigot. Whatever. That’s the last weapon in their arsenal. There’s nothing behind it, so keep pushing. Hold their feet to the fire. Ask questions. Require them to either defeat you with logic or go down trying. Outlast them. The truth is resilient, so as long as you don’t give up, they’re not going to win. You don’t have to be a jerk about it, but you don’t have to be a pushover either.
There are way worse things than a mean tweet. Chemically castrating minors is one of them. Call me as many mean names as you want to. I’ll just be here waiting for the cessation of your theatrics so we can get on with the mountain of work in front of us.
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Wow... Great post Kaeley - don't let up.
'Now I want to pause here and address the popular misconception that we should only care about things that personally affect us. It’s a stupid, shortsighted position to hold. I’m not personally affected by the fact that little girls in Afghanistan are sold as child brides to dirty old men, but that hardly means I shouldn’t care about it. I wasn’t personally sold as a slave, so does that mean I forfeit my obligation to care if humans are trafficked? Part of being decent non-narcissistic members of the human race is learning to care about things and people outside our immediate purview.'
I'm totally plagiarizing this. Once again: Well said!