The Mainstreaming of the Unhinged
UC Berkeley law professor behaves like the town drunk–and liberals applaud enthusiastically
Never trust anyone who tells you a man can be a woman. Last week we all were treated to something that many of us thought we would never see in our lifetimes. In a Senate hearing about abortion rights, Senator Josh Hawley and UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges engaged in an intense exchange over the term “people with the capacity for pregnancy.” Such a term was once alien to the mainstream public but has been brought into the limelight due to the partisan backlash against the trans movement. Senator Hawley seized the moment to showcase the bizarre claims of gender ideology and asked the professor to clarify if “people with the capacity for pregnancy,” meant women. She answered that not all “cis women” can become pregnant, and added that transmen and nonbinary people can get pregnant.
If this is not a women’s rights issue, Hawley asked, then what is the core of this issue for you? After reiterating her claim that other groups besides women are affected, Bridges used a tactic that many on the left and in feminist circles are used to hearing. Instead of answering honestly that women are the only ones affected by abortion, she accused Hawley of transphobia, claiming that his questions “open up trans people to violence” by “denying their existence.”
From there the situation became even more unhinged. When the senator was skeptical that his questions deny the existence of trans people, Bridges grew angry and demanded to know whether or not Hawley believed that men can get pregnant. Let that sink in. A female law professor demanding a senator say that men can become pregnant. This line of questioning could only be forgivable if Professor Bridges were an alien from Mars interacting with humanity for the first time. Everyone knows the answer to this question–that men cannot get pregnant.
To make the situation even more surreal, woke leftists were quick to write history in their favor, claiming that Hawley was humiliated by Bridges and that she “thoroughly corrected” the transphobic senator.
Transgenderism is not a movement for human rights. It is a manifestation of the postmodernist idea that language creates reality.
How do the genderists get away with this attack on truth? First, activists and academics like Bridges conflate sex and gender to bamboozle their listeners. Gender is a term that has multiple meanings. In mainstream conversations, people use gender as a stand-in for the word sex. But trans activists use the word to refer to how someone identifies, their internal sense of who they are. This disparity makes for a conversation where two people use the same word with two different definitions.
Furthermore, trans activists take advantage of the common usage of gender as synonymous with sex. When they hear, “there are two genders,” they pull you into their trap like this: they say, “you agree with us because you see gender, but you are a bigot for not accepting that there are more than two genders.” Unfortunately, we cannot get out of this trap by ceding to them the word gender and falling back on the more technical word sex, because they claim that sex too is determined by identity.
When trans activists say that there are more than two genders, they actually mean that there are more than two gender roles. They believe gender roles–not sex–define men and women, male and female. They attempt to control the conversation on gender identity through force and deception because their definitions make no sense. They have weaseled their lies so deeply into academia, publishing, and liberal culture at large that even the dictionary has bowed to their madness. Take a look at the definition provided by Merriam-Webster for “gender identity,” which we are supposed to accept is more important and more valid than sex.
This definition is meaningless. It is like defining height as a person’s internal sense of being tall, short, some combination of tall and short, or neither tall nor short. It tells us nothing about how tall the person actually is, or why it even matters how tall they sense themselves to be.
Unfortunately, Merriam-Webster has gone even further, and now includes gender identity as part of the definitions of “male” and “female.” Under the word female, a purely negative and oppositional entry is listed: “having a gender identity that is the opposite of male.” Likewise, the definition of male is “having a gender identity that is the opposite of female.”
Male and female are the words for the two sex categories of humans. These terms are not meant to describe how one feels inside, but to communicate which person has which set of biological parts.
We should be able to go to the dictionary for reality and truth, and yet even here has crept the rot of gender ideology. These dictionary entries are a victory for the gender ideologues, who can now claim that trans women are “adult human females” –the dictionary says so. The betrayal of truth by Merriam-Webster just goes to remind us that we can’t rely on institutions or experts for our understanding of the world.
Back in the senate hearing, Bridges proved the incoherence of this ideology, which uses censorship, force, and appeals to guilt instead of arguments and facts. In her conversation with Hawley, she committed the worst form of conversational foul by becoming hostile and angry in place of making any actual points.
After deferring to the suicide blackmail script (more on that shortly) she accused Hawley of “denying trans people exist.” When Hawley asked incredulously if his mere questions have that power, Bridges practically screamed, “are you? Are you? Are you?” Wrapped up in her moral outrage and indignance, she managed to dodge the original question.
Gender identity activists constantly invoke the trans suicide rate, which they claim is shockingly high, in order to avoid questions and paint their critics as the bad guys. Besides the fact that the suicide statistics they use are misrepresented and inaccurate, this narrative is insidious for two big reasons.
The first reason is that we should not negotiate with terrorists. Anyone threatening suicide if their political aims are denied is acting like a petulant child.. We should not capitulate to this form of emotional blackmail. It gets even worse when they drag children into it. The purported suicide rate of “trans kids” is trotted out to pressure the public into accepting the medical abuse of minors and vulnerable adults.
The suicide threat is abusive and manipulative–both on a grand societal level, and on an individual one, as parents’ worst fears are held over their heads while they are pressured to give their kids over to medical experimentation.
The other issue with crying suicide every time someone asks a simple question is the extreme irresponsibility of pushing such a narrative. Suicide (like gender dysphoria) is a social contagion, and to speak of it as inevitable can contribute to its spread. Kids who identify as trans, or kids with any sort of issue for that matter, don’t need to be told over and over again how likely they are to harm or kill themselves.
And yet professors like Bridges, organizations like the ACLU, and papers like the NY Times are flouting guidelines on suicide reporting in their zealotry for transgenderism. The so-called experts who are supposed to be educating us are in fact indoctrinating us into a cult of self-harm and delusion.
As Hawley points out, imagine being a student in a class with Professor Bridges. If she cannot conduct herself with respect and reason in a formal hearing in our nation’s capital, imagine how she would react to a student who disagreed with her. Her attempt to ostracize and shame a senator is an indication that her behavior with her students might be even more aggressive.
What we saw in the hearing was an academic trying to brand a politician with a mark of shame for going against the prevailing orthodoxies of her class. Students in this climate simply don’t stand a chance; if they are inclined to disagree with the madness, they will soon see how much trouble will be brought upon them for speaking up. This chilling effect can lead to mass delusions taking over society. We are seeing it happen before our eyes.
Transgender activists are attempting to create the illusion that their ideas are the mainstream of society. Their tactic of shaming people is thus no different than when majoritarian groups shame those who go against their cultural norms. Listening to Khiara Bridges is like listening to Christian anti-gay activists in past decades who tried to brand their opponents as pariahs and social outcasts.
Perhaps most glaring is how for years trans activists denied that the talking points used by Bridges even existed. Back in 2019, Dennis Prager was laughed at by liberals on Bill Maher’s show for citing the gender ideology claim that men can menstruate. Fast forward to 2022, and the same liberals who denied this was a part of the trans rights movement are pushing it like their lives depend on it. What will we see next?