Category: Identity Politics

So why poke the bear? Why travel to Tel Aviv, one of the world’s most left-leaning cities, where hundreds marched against the publication of my book, Irreversible Damage, in Hebrew, blaring horns and pounding bass drums? Why speak out in leftist hotspots like Tel Aviv—so many people asked me—when there are perfectly rational cities like Jerusalem, where I could meet fans and make common cause? The questioners often imply the reaction is my fault—that I am deliberately causing trouble.

A mistake lies at the heart of this question, a false conceit borne of metaphors like tides, and pendulums and fashion fossils like bellbottoms: That if we all stay quiet, the trans extremism will swing back or die down, like feathered bangs and breakdancing.

Gender Ideology is not a pendulum, and it will not swing back with a little help from inertia. Gender Ideology is a fundamentalist religion—intolerant, demanding strict adherence to doctrine, hell-bent on gathering proselytes. I do not here use the term “religion” metaphorically or lightly.

Induction into this religion begins with a baptism: the selection of pronouns and often a new name, greeted with all the celebration (and more) of a conversion. It evangelizes aggressively: through social media influencers, who claim to know a teen’s truest self better than her parents and to love that teen so much more than they ever could. Therapists, teachers, and school counselors play evangelist to numberless kids at American school.

There’s no physical evidence that any of us possesses an ethereal gender identity, of course. It may actually be disprovable; there is a good deal of evidence against it. No matter. The adherents take it on faith. The notion that each of us is born with a gender identity, utterly separable from our physiology, known only to us, imagines gender identity as the secular version of the ‘soul.’