"Where Were All The Trans Kids?" And Other Glaringly Obvious Questions Progressives Didn't Ask
- Grow Some Labia
- Aug 9
- 8 min read
But what if those questions could set them free? What if it led to greater freedom, happiness, more trustworthy friends and--increased status?
I didn’t want to be one of those right-wing bigots, of course.
It was my last days of blogging on Medium in late 2021, slowly becoming aware of the toxic transactivism that had consumed the liberal mind while I challenged wussy feminism. I was arguing with a popular uber-feminist writer, more learned about the history and philosophy of feminism than I.
She said my remarks about transwomen were harmful to a vulnerable, marginalized population when I voiced obvious questions, and I felt guilty; maybe she and the trans-allies were right? She said they needed our compassion, not our judgement. A few times, I acknowledged that transwomen were women, uncomfortably.
I wanted to agree with her, but my knowledge of basic biology precluded it. I said to her:
I'm also disappointed in your frankly bigoted approach to J K Rowling, who has been quite supportive of the trans community if you're not an entitled dude in a dress (I don't know if she sees them that way, but I see some of them that way). Maybe we should just start labeling the indisputable facts? People with XX chromosomes menstruate and carry babies; people with XY chromosomes don't. We can accept transgenders for what and who they are but please, don't gaslight us about who can menstruate and who will never carry a baby in their belly, until transgender surgery/treatment gets a helluva lot more sophisticated.
“Where’s your compassion?” she asked.
“Where’s your common sense?” I countered. How could a highly educated, grown-ass woman assert that transwomen were no different from women? She fancied herself a feminist expert! How could she not see the classic abusive male personalities that simmered beneath transactivist Etsy-sourced frillies?
I asked all the glaringly obvious questions she wouldn’t.
Five days later, my account was suspended. I didn’t petition to get it back. I was already used to the pointlessness of trying to reason with Medium’s woke unreasonables.
I still wonder whether my former feminist foe actually believed her own B.S. Not all Believers are as True as they pretend. They know deep down what they profess is wrong-headed, or maybe even downright harmful to others. But preserving positive self-regard offers less psychic pain than a personal integrity unpopular with the maddened crowd, and so they persist, pursuing their personal poison the way alcoholics and drug addicts obsessively seek that which makes them feel worse rather than better.
This article focuses on the cognitive dissonance that tortures the human spirit arising from beliefs and narratives one professes, but which one knows on a deeper level to be untrue, when one’s actions don’t align with them.
When intelligence and education isn’t enough
For woke progressives and liberals, part of our narrative is that we’re good, empathetic people who don’t want anyone to feel the pain of exclusion, which many of us have felt at one time or another, or perhaps throughout our lives.
When everyone else professes X and agrees that’s the correct belief to be a good person, the crowd is always right, right?
But I’m addicted to reality. I’ve never been very good at not challenging those who deny what I know to be factual. I try to keep an open mind, but not so much my brains fall out.
I knew it was wrong from the get-go to claim that transwomen are the same as women because they claim that’s how they feel. The more I explored trans issues, and encountered transactivists, I realized not only weren’t they ‘the same as biological women,’ but they were about as male and misogynist as the guys I wrote women should avoid on Grow Some Labia.
The reality-denying Medium feminist didn’t understand that compassion and inclusion can quickly turn into complicity and cruelty. Where was her compassion for women who felt uncomfortable sharing private spaces with the be-penised? Or for female athletes who had to compete against hulking men like Will Thomas? Or lesbians accused of ‘genital fetishism’ by transwomen with a penis?
She may not have known about the growing awareness of medical harms potentially visited on ‘trans’ children, or the sudden spike in trans people coinciding with the rise of gender-questioning content on social media, and the creeping influence of queer theory public education.
Maybe she didn’t know about Tumblr’s role as a queer factory for gender-morphing labels, pronouns and ‘microaggressions’ pulled out of thin air to be weaponized against people who didn’t adhere to queer mythology. Maybe she didn’t have friends with teenage kids coming home with weird ideas about whether they were actually the immutable sex they were born with.
She would have, though, if she’d asked those glaringly obvious questions, and Googled.
On some level, she feared what it would mean about her, her values, the hills she’d died on, the public stands she’d taken, and the testament to her intelligence. Who wants to admit they were gaslit, the ‘expert’ who could cite endless highly-regarded sources in support of feminist theory but somehow missed the angry Twitter invitations to ‘suck my ladydick’? Who frequently dissected ‘the Patriarchy’ but missed the ‘cotton ceiling’ whiners, formerly the entitled heterosexual men of our youth accusing women now of being lesbians if they wouldn’t have sex with them?
‘Trans-allies’ are in for several years of high-level, self-inflicted psychic torture, beginning with the death of sex changes for children.
The Trump administration’s HHS has issued a ‘best practices’ report for treating confused ‘trans’ children beginning with therapy first. According to Jay Battarcharya, the National Institutes of Health Director, “We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.”
‘Gender-affirming care’ is shaping up to be one mother of a medical scandal. Not only will woke progressives increasingly face a hostile mob of ‘normies’ turning accusing fingers, demanding to know how they could let his happen, but also the realization that the Trumpoids were right and they themselves were grievously wrong.
They thought the science was settled. They trusted progressive media outlets that turned out to be deeply incurious. They didn’t question, and explore for themselves. They didn’t wonder how a respected periodical like Scientific American could issue a mind-bogglingly brainless article like Stop Using Phony Science To Justify Transphobia, or wonder about the credentials of the author, a dude named ‘Simón(e) D Sun’?
Scientific American, like other science periodicals, used to believe in evidence. But now, belief is the evidence. Progressive ideologues eliminated inconvenient science, just like their compatriots on t’other side, the fundamentalist Christians.
A social psychologist and the UFO cult
Dr. Leon Festinger was an important figure in social psychology who infiltrated a doomsday cult which believed a UFO was going to pick them up and save them from a forthcoming apocalypse. He developed the theory of cognitive dissonance after infiltrating the cult to study the members’ actions, behaviours, and thoughts once the expected continent-destroying flood failed to materialize. He examined the psychological distress they felt and how they coped when reality didn’t align with their expectations.
Many refused to acknowledge they’d been wrong and rationalized away what went pear-shaped, instead spreading their message and seeking more Believers, each new recruit vindicating them. Their founder helped them rationalize away their pain and disappointment, by relaying the aliens’ convenient new message that their faith had saved the world and therefore, given humanity a second chance. Others, less committed, left the group egg-faced.
To achieve cognitive consistency, the opposite of cognitive dissonance, one must rationalize the contradictions away, or change one’s mind.
In other words, be willing to acknowledge new data has invalidated the old.
Rationalizing is easier than thinking things through. “The experts say that if trans kids aren’t allowed to transition they’ll commit suicide. But why didn’t any do that when I was growing up?”
The Pain of Asking — and the Greater Pain of Not Asking
A far healthier way to achieve cognitive consistency is through learning a very simple but difficult life lesson: Knowing when to acknowledge one is wrong. The sooner the better.
It’s extremely hard on the ego to admit you’ve been misled, or simply haven’t done enough research, but the longer you wait to admit what shames you, the worse your future.
Being ‘wrong’ is often just a matter of believing what you do with the best available evidence, until more comes along that contradicts, disproves or simply changes the story. You weren’t wrong before; now you’re demonstrating intellectual honesty thanks to newer or better data. This is the whole foundation of scientific inquiry.
The Trump years will be sheer hell for ‘trans-friendly’ progressives. They’ve denied the evidence, refused to ask the glaringly obvious questions, kept themselves as insulated as possible, and blithely dismissed facts as ‘right-wing propaganda’. They’ve rationalized their critics were vile TERFs, carefully sealing their ears, eyes and minds.
Many, like Dr. Festinger’s Seekers, will cling to their original beliefs, because it’s awfully late in the game to pretend they didn’t know. The consequences of admitting error are high. Achieving cognitive consistency relieves irritating moral hypocrisy, but introduces the new threat of ostracism by unenlightened friends and family, because if Cousin Martha confesses she thinks she was now wrong about something, by extenuation she damns them all.
What awaits the Questioners on the other side?
The upside for Cousin Martha, if she chooses honest cognitive consistency, is immense psychological relief. Especially if she can avoid talking about it.
One way she can re-reconcile her vision of herself as a Good Person is to work with the group she feel she’s harmed. If her intellectual mistake was to support gender-affirming care, she could help detransitioners facing angry backlash from transactivists for publicly admitting they made the wrong decision and now want out.
Martha’s experience with her former community would be invaluable for smoothing the detransition backtrack. She’d bring compassion to her new community who tragically bought into a pseudo-scientific narrative detrimental to their health, their mental well-being and their ego.
If Martha is brave, she could publicly speak about her personal journey. She could explore why she chose to believe what she did and why she no longer supports it.
If she doesn’t want to do it publicly—with good reason—she can do it anonymously on a Substack or an X account. She’ll receive negative feedback, criticism, and outright flaming, but she’ll be safe from personal or professional ruin.
Learn how to admit your errors and correct your mistakes. Recognize that changing your mind in light of new evidence makes you honest, not a ‘flip-flopper’.
Few actually realize the power—and the optics—in being strong enough to admit and correct mistakes, especially publicly. We all understand that children blame others and everything else rather than accept responsibility. People who act like what we believe adults to be are the obvious adults in the room. And we admire their courage and integrity.
There’s increased status to be found in changing your tribe from the fact-fearing to the Questioners.
Achieving cognitive consistency starts with asking those glaringly obvious questions.
Realigning one’s sense of self with reality may lose some friends and family, but there’s a whole other community of the intellectually and morally responsible waiting for them.
Maybe the solution to losing former friends is finding wiser, truer ones.
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