The Murder of a Transgender Child and the Scapegoating of Natural Male Femininity For Political Gain
Rooted in Toxic Masculinity the Authoritarian "Might Makes Right" Ideology Scapegoats Natural Male Femininity For Political Gain
By Priya Lynn
Human psychology evolved over millions of years to allow hunter-gatherer tribes to best survive in a world of occasional violent inter-tribal conflict . Over the course of recorded history dictatorships have existed in civilizations against the wishes of most citizens. The rise of civilization and technology has given highly aggressive individuals tools to exert their control over others far, far beyond what has been possible for 99% of humanity's existence. Natural violent psychological tendencies in a minority of the population served hunter-gatherer societies for hundreds of thousands of years but are counterproductive in our modern technological world where global cooperation is needed to address existential threats. Authoritarianism can spur war, destroying lives and costly infrastructure, creating a very high opportunity cost to allow a few individuals to meritlessly enrich themselves by forcing their will on many. The resources spent on conflict ultimately harm the greater good as they are no longer available to do things that would actually make everyone's lives better.
Each year since Donald Trump's election in 2016 MAGA (right wing authoritarian) Republicans have introduced hundreds of anti-lgbt bills that through flawed and specious arguments foster the same intolerance that lead to the 2008 murder of an American child for harmlessly expressing his femininity. The events and socio-political climate at that time are still crucial to the present and far right Republicans' current stepped up campaign of fear and hate - we choose to overlook it at society's peril.
Around the world totalitarians like Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis seek to maximize their control over society. One seasoned tactic in achieving that is the scapegoating of lgbt people and male femininity in particular. Having an imagined enemy unites and animates the right wing authoritarian 20% of the population having a natural and now destructive psychological tendency to covet and take by force the resources of any group they see as "them". Research shows a world run by right wing authoritarians[7] will make humanity in general worse off by discouraging the cooperation needed to solve global threats like deforestation, drought, flooding and human caused global climate warming.
The American right wing authoritarian 20% of the population has no particular loyalty to the truth and readily accepts absurd conspiracy theories that paint their imagined enemies in as negative a light as possible. A popular ideology amongst them is called accelerationism where they believe society must be destroyed so it can be rebuilt and set on the "correct " (authoritarian) path. They hope to accelerate what they see as the current and inevitable downfall of civilization through random attacks on infrastructure and by provoking violence against government and liberals under the naive belief that they can trigger a civil war causing the destruction of functional society, after which they are sure to be the ones who create and assume control over a new government with which they will rebuild civilization to their authoritarian liking. This delusion is very much reminiscent of Charles Manson's plan to trigger a race war by killing rich white people which he was sure black people would win and then inexplicably install Manson and his white acolytes as their leaders.
The common thread in so many recent mass killings is racists believing in conspiracy theories like "the great (white) replacement" theory and that Jews are controlling the government and everything that happens. Republican politicians pay lip service to mental health but resist doing anything to combat the belief in right wing conspiracy theories intended to trigger civil war.
Toxic Masculinity Destroys the Lives of Two Children
15 year old California public school student Larry King [1] had a school boy crush on his classmate Brandon McInerney (which greatly distressed McInerney) who then shot and killed Larry in what he was sure was befitting reciprocity. In the trial that followed Brandon's defence team argued Larry had caused his own murder by romantically pursuing an uninterested Brandon. Then, as now, there were arguments about restricting lgbt people in society. Despite American acceptance of lgbt people recently being at the highest level ever, a vindictive Republican deluge of far reaching and vaguely worded legislation targets primarily transgender people and aims to win votes by practicing and abetting toxic masculinity.
Many who knew Larry said he was an especially lovable child. He was abused by his adoptive parents then taken away from them and given a home at Casa Pacifica Shelter For Abused and Neglected Children. He stayed there for 4 & 1/2 months prior to his murder. By accounts of staff at Casa Pacifica and his friends at the time, the previously very unhappy child made an amazing turnaround and was thriving. He had a real family at Casa Pacifica, he felt stronger and wanted to change and become a new person which he set about doing. Larry was comfortable with his new surroundings and able to show his true self, so he started coming out as a gay/transgender child and expressing his femininity - a close friend of Larry's said he started dressing up more because he felt better about himself. After his pointless death there was no end of people who blamed Casa Pacifica for setting Larry on the path they allege lead to his death, pointing out that he had become more flamboyant there and belabouring the unjust idea that the real problem that lead to his murder was his being allowed to express his femininity and attraction to boys rather than the unjust and destructive hatred of harmless characteristics.
Two weeks prior to his murder Larry started wearing high heels, makeup and accessorizing his school uniform with feminine touches. The first time the Vice Principal of E.O. Green Junior High School saw Larry with this feminine gender expression she called the district office to ask for advice. They asked her if E.O. Green Junior High School policy said girls couldn't wear makeup. She said "no" so the district office advised her she could not tell Larry he wasn't allowed to do so. SB777 had just passed in California which forbade discrimination in the educational environment on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. The Vice Principal subsequently told Larry if he wanted to accessorize his school uniform in a feminine way he could but "it's going to be very difficult and if you can get through it more power to you.".
At one point Larry asked his teachers to call him Latisha instead of Larry. Reportedly some students were very uncomfortable with this and started bullying him. Despite the abuse, Larry was determined to be who he was and continued with his feminine gender expression, stoically and proudly enduring what the intolerants threw at him.
At Larry's high school children sometimes played what they called "The Valentine’s Game" where "everyone says the first person that comes to their mind that they think is cute and then they have to go up to that person and ask them to be their valentine". Larry thought Brandon McInerney was cute and so went up to him and his friends on the basketball court and asked him to be his valentine. Brandon's friends immediately took delight in shaming him for this, saying he and Larry would "have gay babies", leaving Brandon rattled. According to one participant at Brandon's subsequent trial, Larry said "I love you baby" but Brandon was "offended by his effeminate demeanor", "really disgusted by who Larry was" and became deeply troubled by Larry's open display of infatuation.
In school and at home Brandon McInerney made endless doodles and drawings of Nazi and white power symbolism. He had books on Hitler and both volumes of The 12th SS History of the Hitler Youth. Brandon's then girl friend said what really bothered him was what Larry was wearing, it was "off the wall" to him. She opined "I think Larry was kind of shoving it in everyone's face. For you to come to school dressed like that, you're making a big statement!". One of Larry's teachers described him as being "out of control" and unaware he would go to hell for feminizing his appearance. She said she told school officials they had to stop letting him express himself as a girl or the male students "were going to beat him to death". She dismissed Brandon McInerney's fascination with Nazis and anti-semitism claiming it was common and perfectly normal for school boys to draw Swastikas and give the "Heil Hitler" salute - this was harmless fun. She said she understood how Brandon felt about Larry and while she may not have shot him herself, kicking him "would work too."
Brandon's father had physically abused him as well so he went to live with his grandfather who unfortunately had a ready cache of weapons and ammunition. On three occasions while Brandon was in jail and awaiting trial he attacked other inmates without provocation - jail staff said Brandon was a bully and a thug.
Paradoxically, Brandon's compulsion to present as strong, tough, dominant and dispel any suggestion he might engage in affection with a male was manifested in a decidedly cowardly way. Despite Larry's diminutive stature, Brandon first asked his friends to help him "beat down" Larry. When they refused he decided he needed a gun to ensure he would win a contest of violence against his smaller and weaker classmate.
American gun culture teaches boys that not only is it acceptable, it can be admirable to use maximal force to avenge real or imagined wrongs. Guns are marketed to Americans by suggesting gun ownership will make you an alpha male (or female) or some kind of action figure, who can righteously dominate and control others. Toxic masculinity says it's okay to show emotions like anger, hate, and contempt but not empathy, affection, or conciliation.
Shortly before the murder, Brandon approached another student, a female friend of Larry's, and told her "Say goodbye to your friend Larry because you're not going to see him after tomorrow." Brandon's defence team contended he came to school with a loaded gun but had second thoughts when Larry was unexpectedly called out of class. "He was at that point thinking "Maybe I won't do this."". After the trial, one juror said Brandon then asked "Hey Larry, I hear you're changing your name to Latisha?". According to the juror when Larry said "yes", to Brandon "that was a green light" and he shot him twice. The defence alleged when Brandon heard this it just "obliterated" any reserve or restraint that he had. "That took it to another level, this guy who is doing these things to me is now going to be calling himself by a girl's name?". In court they argued "He shot Larry King because he didn't know what else to do to make it stop.". Any informed reasonable person knows Brandon had no right to "make it stop", he was the one with the problem, not Larry.
Brandon's defence was that somehow Larry King, based on what he did and said, provoked him into a murderous rage - their entire legal strategy was based on disgracefully validating and justifying toxic masculinity. Some of Brandon's apologists insisted he had been bullied by Larry's romantic interest - apparently at one point he told other students he and Brandon were dating but had broken up. After his murder, opponents of gayness propagated the idea that Larry was the incendiary and had "used his sexual orientation like a weapon". One teacher said Larry would sometimes "parade himself in front of Brandon to get his attention.". Brandon's lawyers defamed the victim by claiming what Larry was doing was an extreme form of bullying and sexual harassment. They said to have any guy ask another to be his valentine in front of his peers was bad enough, but to have a guy who's wearing high heels and makeup do that, that was "the ultimate humiliation" and "very disturbing to all the boys". They went on, "It's bad enough to have this kid who wears girl's clothes (Larry was wearing the same school uniform as the other boys except with feminine accessories), you know, breaking all the rules but then guys don't hit on guys - if you want to really insult a guy you call him gay...Brandon was thinking he needed to get rid of Larry and to save everyone from this scourge that had come upon the school.". The reality is Larry didn't initiate the animosity, the abuse was started by those opposed to his freedom to be himself. They were the aggressors, him responding in a less than polite manner to their efforts to push him in a closet was fair and reasonable.
Was Larry really at fault for his own murder? Did he "use his sexual orientation like a weapon"? Certainly not. No student was physically harmed by Larry's refusal to hide his orientation, Larry didn't use his sexual orientation or flamboyance to steal anything or intimidate any classmate into writing, saying, or doing something they didn't want to. Brandon McInerney was the one literally wielding a weapon, not Larry King.
I don't know if Larry ever rebuffed the repetitive mocking and condemnation of his feminine gender expression by telling his male tormentors they were attracted to him or being more flamboyant than he otherwise would have (would that I had the courage to do so when I was in school) but if he did that was a fair and measured response. It's a poisonous caricature from a place of unearned privilege to equate Larry's behaviour to "using his sexual orientation as a weapon" or claim "he was out of control". No reasonable person would ever do what Brandon McInerney did in retaliation for mere flamboyance and infatuation. Brandon was a victim all right, but not of Larry King, a victim of toxic masculinity and American gun culture.
Brandon McInerney was conditioned to respond violently to Larry King's attraction and feminine gender expression by his false belief that males are not and should never be attracted to other males. As his defence team put it "Guys don't hit on guys". Toxic masculinity teaches us that femininity is characterized by weakness and inferiority. Larry's expression of romantic interest in Brandon made Brandon feel ashamed, that his masculinity was being impugned and correcting that required asserting violent dominance over the boy he wrongly blamed for the emotions that troubled him. Brandon's discomfort was likely exacerbated by his, like the majority of males, having experienced occasional same sex attractions[8] that he didn't know how to deal with and wouldn't accept. He needed to be told that having same sex attractions is normal, natural, and doesn't necessarily mean you are solely or primarily attracted to males (but for those who are that's okay too).
Fear of Their Own Secondary Same Sex Attractions Creates Right Wing Authoritarian Hostility to Gays
A society that suppresses variation in sexuality and gender identity is not normal, natural or healthy.[9] Same sex attraction and atypical gender expression and identity are normal and natural for a minority of the population - just like left-handedness. Now I'll be the first to agree that what's normal and natural for humanity isn't automatically a good thing but we best make behavioural boundaries that benefit the most and hurt the fewest. If you consider it from that perspective it should be obvious to you the natural and normal human behaviour we best suppress are attempts to dominate others with force, violence or intimidation rather than relying on reason and democracy.
Speaking from my experience[10] desperately trying to live up to the tough, masculine image I felt was expected of me, reacting to nascent same sex attractions with knee-jerk anger and hostility can enable a young male suppress and hide those attractions from himself (and others). It's like flipping a mental switch to hate ("I hate gays and want to punish/kill them") whenever those desires start to surface to create the appearance to himself and others that obviously he couldn't be gay because he hates gays so virulently - there's a reason why 80% of self-described homophobes get erections while watching gay sex[11].
The documentary "Welcome to Chechnya" chronicles young male right wing authoritarians using gay dating apps to kidnap, torture, rob, out and publicly shame unsuspecting gay men. They justify this with the go to authoritarian slander that all gays are necessarily pedophiles (research[12] shows most child molesters are males who identify as heterosexual [2] and are in a relationship with an adult female). Sometimes the perpetrators of these hate crimes video their assaults and one of those videos reveals the sad irony of many of these crimes; one of the attackers is shown raping the victim all while verbally excoriating him for being gay. The mental shortcut of compartmentalization allows people to believe contradictory ideas, in this case the rapist tells himself he's not gay, he hates gays, he's only raping this man to punish him for being gay - "nothing gay about it". When young right wing authoritarian males are incorrectly taught it's shameful, harmful, or unethical to masturbate or experience same sex attractions it can get pretty stressful as most eventually experience secondary same sex sexual desires. Combine the anger often used to suppress unwanted same sex attractions with a total denial of any kind of sexual pleasure until when and if one marries and you have a recipe for a significant percentage of the young male population being chronically frustrated, unhappy, and on a hair trigger wanting violent retribution on any available scapegoat.
Larry King's detractors and Brandon McInerney's defence team said Larry was responsible for his own murder, his flamboyance and infatuation with Brandon left him with no choice but to kill Larry. That is an absurd and evil idea. Can you imagine the outrage from these same conservative men if women started murdering men who harmlessly expressed a romantic interest in them and then their lawyers argued the deceased expressing an attraction to her left her with no other option but to kill him? Conservatives would never countenance that kind of absurdity yet some claim the men who behave this way towards males like Larry King are morally justified.
Larry's flamboyance and infatuation neither picked Brandon's pocket nor broke his leg - there was no justification for responding violently to someone who presented no threat of physical or even financial harm. Was Brandon genuinely offended and disgusted by Larry's girlish attention? That could well be, but most of us from time to time feel that way about random people we encounter in public who aren't doing us any actual harm. We stifle our knee-jerk reaction because we know we don't have the right to banish people or to force them to hide or change their harmless characteristics to spare us trivial temporary psychological discomfort - for example, you don't have a right to ban forest green clothing because that colour reminds you of some bad experience, that's not something there should be a trigger warning for (or that should be banned altogether), that's not like, without warning, showing video of rape to a rape victim.
If seeing some one you find ugly or a male harmlessly wearing makeup triggers discomfort for you, it's not their problem and they are not morally obligated to hide in the shadows lest you encounter them and feel ill. Seeing people whose appearance you find distasteful is part of being a member of society you are morally obligated to put up with - everyone has the right to appear in public. Conservatives mock liberals as "snowflakes" yet they childishly act as though a visibly lgbt person being in public where they might see them is a grievous and unfair imposition. Sometimes I have to stifle the sudden urge to cringe when I see someone with a severe skin problem, disfigured by burns, or who simply seems revolting to me for no readily apparent reason but you sure as hell won't see me demanding laws that forbid them to appear in public.
Schools Need to Teach Pre-teens Basic Socially Acceptable Behaviour
Was Casa Pacifica or E.O. Green Junior High School to blame because they allowed Larry to express his femininity and attraction to boys? No, clearly not. Like everyone else Larry had the right to do what made him happy as long as he wasn't harming others and in no way could him wearing makeup or asking a boy to be his Valentine be considered harm in a consequential or significant way. If Brandon was troubled by this, that's society's fault for teaching him to feel that way, not Larry's. Larry's foster home and school, as they should have, let him express his harmless femininity which greatly improved his happiness and sense of well-being.
Toxic masculinity unjustifiably killed Larry King. Now Republicans are trying to perpetuate and entrench this toxic masculinity with laws that ban any mention of lgbt people in public schools. This tells school children that being lgbt is unspeakably evil and deserves to be punished. It prevents teachers or other school employees from intervening when a child is being bullied for being lgbt as they are not permitted to say lgbt people exist, don't deserve to be punished, and are not "worthy of death" (as the Bible, Koran and some North American religious conservatives tell followers).
If a child tells a less masculine male classmate "Fags like you will burn in a lake of fire forever." the teacher needs to be empowered to say this isn't allowed and administer punishment as appropriate. It best be the same way in schools with a majority Islamic student body, if school children there gang up on a couple of Christian children and repeatedly tell them "Anyone who thinks Jesus is God will burn in a lake of fire forever." there needs to be an authority figure putting an end it. In Orwellian fashion Republicans disingenuously claim to be protecting children with anti-lgbt laws, but what about protecting the myriad of viciously bullied (disproportionately lgbt) children from trauma that lasts a lifetime?
School bullying is a largely unaddressed global tragedy forever mentally scarring[13] an unacceptably large percentage of the population and yet it would seem a simple matter to put an end to it if there was a desire to do so. If there was an authority figure (probably not law enforcement) in every hallway between class changes, during recess, lunch, and the 15 minutes before and after every school day the vast majority of bullying in schools could be prevented. The obvious choice for this extra duty is the teachers who are already there anyway. Give them a 20% pay raise and add preventing bullying to their job descriptions. There was a California law designed to protect feminine boys like Larry King from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity but unchecked bullying against him went on anyway, clearly that law alone was not enough, every school needs to make the explicit commitment to stop bullying and pro-actively implement specific practices to do so.
School children should be free to be themselves without fear of name calling, bullying, or harassment. Our society needs to face the fact that unsupervised school children are unacceptably and disturbingly cruel with frightening regularity, creating life long mental health damage in their victims - children should never be left unsupervised during school hours. A child's prefrontal cortex, which moderates social behaviour, isn't fully developed until early adulthood so we regularly see sociopathic behaviour in children at school.
Research has shown that people with certain psychological propensities can become two very different people depending on how they are treated as children. One impulsive risk taker who's raised with kindness and reason becomes a fire fighter, a similar impulsive risk taker who's physically, sexually, emotionally abused becomes a serial killer. When children have a supportive environment at school it can make up for a lot of what may be going on at home that isn't so good. We'll add to the percentage of good citizens in society by making school a place of acceptance and support where bullying is not tolerated.
Children in public settings need to be protected from each other (they are not that innocent), not from the knowledge that there always have been and always will be people who are partly or solely same sex attracted. It would greatly benefit us all if these future leaders were taught basic social restraint before unchecked toxic masculinity becomes deeply embedded in their psyche.
Children need to be taught to restrain their natural tendency to behave by the law of the jungle, that there is an ethical boundary between words and physical contact, that while it's justifiable to respond with violence in self-defence, it's never okay to respond to speech with violence or to initiate violence no matter how embarrassed or angry you might feel. They need to be taught young that being able to beat down the person you're arguing with doesn't make your opinion or belief correct. A bedrock principle of justice is, as Margaret Thatcher said regarding the Falklands war, when there is a violent conflict the aggressor (Russia invading Ukraine for example) is always in the wrong and must be punished. Children need to be taught it's only ethical to engage in unprovoked violent contests of dominance with consenting opponents where a referee and doctor are present.
It is a tragic and inexplicable failing of our educational system that children are not routinely taught about consent to physical contact and that, in lieu of your romantic interest feeling the same way about you, masturbation is a healthy and risk free alternative you shouldn't feel any shame or guilt about (contrary to the tragically misguided and detrimental advice of celebrity psychologist Jordan Peterson and other sexually repressed right wing authoritarians). Maybe if school children like Brandon McInerney and his classmates were taught critical principles like consent he'd have felt equipped to just tell Larry he wasn't attracted to him and didn't want to date him and the needless loss of one life and severe damage to another wouldn't have occurred.
Recent research shows refraining from masturbating harms your mental and physical health. Many a life long virgin has had a fulfilling sex life with visual aids alone, although most with a strong sex drive will say it's a lot easier to go without sex after you know what it feels like than before - it's tough to be a male virgin mesmerized by thoughts of sex. The blind conservative opposition to pornography is ill-advised now that research shows greater availability of pornography is strongly correlated with a drop in the rate of sexual assaults[14] (at one time you could search key words and find this article amongst the search results. Apparently the powers-that-be didn't want anyone knowing this so good luck finding this article unless you have the actual link to it).
School boys need to be taught they best express their romantic interest to a girl indirectly. Unlike with many of them, it's highly unlikely any girl is going to look at them, think they look sexy, walk up and suggest a sexual encounter (for me that was a once in a lifetime event). Boys shouldn't expect to get any where with a girl in a hurry, they need to accept they are going to be rejected, perhaps frequently, and learn to strike up a non-romantic conversation with a girl anyway who later might develop a liking for who he is and perhaps be open to romance. Teaching children some basic social skills would also likely mean fewer incels[6] (also victims of toxic masculinity) deciding women and society should be punished with a mass killing because they haven't been able to fulfill their intense sexual desires.
When you're going through a period of undesired celibacy but no longer a virgin your masturbation fantasies are more concrete and realistic and so more fulfilling and satisfying - people can be sexually satisfied without an actual sexual partner. When society asks a person to voluntarily be a lifelong virgin it asks a great, great deal, something most people can't willingly do. Society can't make people drastically different than they are in area after area, it needs to pick it's battles - do not make people feel like they're criminals or social rejects for crossing unrealistic boundaries which may then leave them feeling "I'm already an outcast (bad person or going to hell), any other thing I might do that's considered immoral won't make me any more of an outcast so why restrain myself at all?" - when you tell a gay man he's not allowed to ever have monogamous gay sex you're essentially telling him "Whether you have one sex partner or a thousand you're equally bad and we reject you.". Wherever possible society needs to set realistic behavioural boundaries for things that don't cause harm to innocent people (same sex marriage bans are a harmful and unjustifiable restriction) so people can save their finite will power for resisting temptations that may significantly harm the innocent.
Some conservatives want to ban same sex marriage because they erroneously think all gays and lesbians are promiscuous (lesbian couples actually have lower rates of sexually transmitted infections than heterosexual couples) and by some magic, not being able to marry will prevent gay promiscuity - the opposite[15] is true[16][4]. Society best choose which it wants, minimizing gay male promiscuity or banning same sex marriages - it can't have both. Similarly, society can ban regulated sex work or minimize human trafficking and violence from frustrated incels, it can't have both. Radical Islamic societies have proven no matter how big the iron fist and hard you hit with it you can't eliminate recreational drug use or prostitution, you just prevent their less harmful regulation.
What is Toxic Masculinity?
Some of the behaviours or beliefs that constitute toxic masculinity are: might makes right, the worth of a male is measured by his ability to dominate others with intimidation or force, to be female or feminine is to be inferior, and men automatically have the inherent talent, propensity, and moral authority to rule over women. These are the kinds of beliefs that foster sex trafficking, domestic violence and murder, to wit: professional misogynist and accused human trafficker Andrew Tate.
By "virtue" of usually being able to physically dominate women, men do have the propensity to rule over us but that in no way means they are good at it or better leaders than women themselves. It's the law of the jungle - physical strength and intimidation trumps fairness and rational debate. While most civilizations in recorded history have been ruled by men, there have been societies lead by women. Toxic masculinity is common, but it is not destiny. Humanity has the intelligence to resist our natural destructive animalistic impulses, to think of a better way, and arrange global cooperation accordingly.
Our modern culture teaches that men are physically disgusting, or at best utilitarian and the idea of them being physically attractive is akin to a tractor tire being visually alluring. It's drilled into us that being physically attracted to or having sexual contact with a man is defiling, humiliating, demeaning and all the more so if you are male yourself. So when a woman does less covertly express or reveal a physical attraction to, or engage in sexual contact with a man it can come as a big surprise to some males (like incels) who may sporadically react with explosive jealousy and rage.
Charles Darwin noted in his animal studies that females are generally less interested in sex than males. Boys need to know that while females in general are less interested in sex than males, males can still be intensely attractive and deeply desired even if most of us with those attractions usually don't show it. They need to be taught that touching a penis does not automatically taint a female (or male) like a piece of used chewing gum. Learning such simple but important realities will mean fewer virgin males experiencing shock and outrage when females they thought were chaste and devoid of attraction to males atypically reveal a strong attraction to one that is not them. This is basic information about getting along in society that boys need to know before puberty. It creates a potentially violent social dynamic if boys grow up believing women only have sex with men out of a sense of altruism, duty or compassion rather than ever being aroused by and desirous of a man's physical attributes. Without knowing this, men can also hazardously believe that if a woman has sex with a man it necessarily means he's taken advantage of her and he deserves to be punished (perhaps severely).
Instead of toxic masculinity (and yes, some females value and perpetrate toxic masculinity (Marjorie Taylor Greene and Loren Boebert being prominent examples)) children need to be taught before puberty that the similar gender stereotypes of sociable and nurturing females and aggressive risk taking males that have existed in most human societies throughout recorded history didn't come about through entirely random circumstances, there is some truth to these stereotypes and they roughly fit for most people. For example, while most people feel occasional same sex attractions they are also primarily opposite sex attracted. Children need to know that despite there being substantial validity in these gender stereotypes there will always be smaller numbers of boys who are feminine and girls who enjoy engaging in a fist fight, that sometimes just like Mom likes Dad, sometimes boys like boys and girls like girls.
The Nature of Sexuality
Bisexuality is the species norm in the animal kingdom. Strictly heterosexual behaviour is the exception. There are ancient, deep seated evolutionary reasons for this that enhance the survivability of a great many animal species. Bisexuality and gayness are fundamentally and inextricably part of who we, and many (perhaps most), other species are. For example, most of the time male dolphins engage exclusively in same sex sexual activity with a group of close allies. They don't regularly engage in sex with females, only for the time necessary to impregnate them when they are receptive and then they are back to their mostly gay behaviour. Ranchers have long known that cattle and sheep are sometimes only same sex attracted as they have bought bulls and rams for breeding based on good physical appearance only to find that the hundreds or thousands they spent on the purchase were all for naught because the intended breeder is only sexually interested in other males. No doubt this is a significant part of the reason for rural populations’ greater tendency to blind animus regarding lgbt people.
The vast majority of us are at least a little bisexual but that doesn't mean there is no such thing as a man who is only attracted to men. Those men definitely exist and I would make an educated guess they represent 5% of the population (I'd expect a similar percentage of the population to be only opposite sex attracted). There are exceptions to the bisexuality common in nature though. Penguins can form life long same sex bonds and some animals form life long heterosexual bonds.
There has never been an animal species or human society that has died out because it replaced heterosexual sex with gay sex. This just does not happen and will never happen. Heterosexuality is not going to go out of style just because we stop trying to force everyone to be heterosexual. You can't stop heterosexuality just like you can't stop gayness. It's time to stop fearing the deeply embedded and ancient evolutionary nature of human sexuality and to allow the full natural flourishing of humanity as it was meant to be.
The consensus amongst experts is that human psychology evolved long before civilization appeared, when everyone belonged to a tribe of nomadic hunter-gatherers. To better understand our natural state we can look to the few human hunter-gatherer tribes that have always lived in isolation, were not exposed to modern technology or culture, and still live as people did hundreds of thousands of years ago.
When European explorers arrived in the Great Plains and Canadian Prairies they encountered tribes of indigenous peoples still living as the nomadic hunter- gatherers that they had been for likely all of the perhaps 20,000 years or so since humans first arrived in North America. The similar stereotypes of male and female behaviour and identity seen in most cultures in recorded history didn't arise randomly, there is some truth in them. The Indigenous peoples of the plains of North America prior to European contact had defined traditional roles and styles of dress for males and females just like we see in most societies throughout history. However they didn't attempt to rigidly restrict one's sexual orientation or gender identity based on apparent sex at birth, they let children decide for themselves whether they were male or female and which role they wished to assume.
"Indigenous Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect. Androgynous males were commonly married to a masculine man, or had sex with men, and the masculine females had feminine women as wives." - Walter Williams
The first Spanish explorers to encounter these males living as females called them "Berdache" although in present times many consider that term derogatory. At an assemblage of First Nations peoples the term "two-spirited" was agreed upon as more acceptable and representative of the way indigenous peoples originally referred to their transgender tribal members. Around the world other indigenous peoples isolated from modern technology and culture and still living naturally as hunter-gatherers had more fluid and diverse gender categories that allowed transgender individuals a gender identity and expression that wasn't specifically male or female.
To paraphrase Walter Williams, "Rather than emphasizing the gayness of these persons, many Indigenous Americans focused on their spiritual gifts. American indigenous traditionalists, even today, tend to see a person's basic character as a reflection of their spirit. Since everything that exists is thought to come from the spirit world, androgynous or transgender persons are seen as doubly blessed, having both the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman. Thus, they are honoured for having two spirits, and are seen as more spiritually gifted than the typical masculine male or feminine female."
The Unfortunate Popularity of Right Wing Authoritarian Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson's social philosophy is founded on misogyny. He promulgates the ideology that order is masculine and chaos is feminine, and these qualities are inherent to the sexes. He says culture is "symbolically, archetypally, mythically male," while "chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine". It is hard to believe a person trained in psychology, who has actually counselled people, would make such a sweeping black and white judgement of the entirety of humanity and unjustifiably assign the billions of men and women he's never met to such absolute categories. No doubt as a therapist Jordan has advised patients to avoid making snap black and white pre-judgements about the entirety of a person's character as they are likely to be over simplistic and inaccurate and yet here he is dedicating his life to that himself - this is a man with deep seated issues regarding women, something that is no doubt obvious to the leaders of the Ontario Psychiatric Association who are ethically prohibited from publicly commenting on it despite the damage Peterson is doing to global mental health.
In my opinion the diametrically opposed values Jordan Peterson assigns to women and men shows he devalues women to compensate for his own feelings of inadequacy as a male. Fighting to keep his secondary same sex attractions from his conscious mind and using anger to do so may (at least partially) explain his feelings of shame and blind opposition to masturbation and generalized anger towards women. A male's masculinity tends to be fragile when his concept of manhood precludes experiencing or acknowledging any attraction to men. Men going through this can be extremely sensitive to any perceived slight to their narrow concept of themselves as male; anger and aggression salve their stunted egos and you can certainly see that is a core part of who Jordan Peterson and many right wing authoritarians are.
To believe men represent order and women represent chaos and then expect to give helpful psychological advice to the planet is the equivalent of an architect believing that multiplication is done by adding two numbers together and reversing the resulting digits... and then trying to build sound structures based on that faulty belief. Any person with a modicum of experience in dealing with people knows that any given man can represent order or chaos (or something in between), just as any individual woman may.
If we are going to make sweeping generalizations about the sexes reality shows, if anything, it's generally men who represent chaos and women who represent order. There are roughly 20 times as many men in prison as women and the women in prison are usually there due to their boyfriend or spouse involving them in his criminal activities (like dealing drugs out of their home) - crime is overwhelmingly a male activity. If we're going to examine the inherent tendencies of the sexes it's obvious that males tend to aggression and violence while females tend to nurturing and the creation of harmony(although there are of course exceptions to these stereotypes). Generally speaking, males are the ones starting pointless wars and violence, not women. Jordan Peterson's self-serving philosophy is that the existing societal hierarchy isn't an "oppressive patriarchy" and the "left" "doesn't want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence." - clearly Jordan has put little objective thought into this and is ignoring the mountain of evidence showing men don't rule because they are better at it, they rule because they are generally physically stronger, more aggressive, and more violent and thus are historically able to impose their will on women - competency in a modern knowledge based world never enters into it.
The patriarchy exists because humanity evolved to thrive in a world where the law of the jungle was preeminent. In our modern high tech knowledge based world that is no longer the case and the tradition of ruling by "might makes right" now harms humanity far more than it helps. Human psychology evolved to suit a world that no longer exists, now we need to resist our natural warlike tendencies to have the best world we can. Jordan Peterson is advising young men to deny themselves sexual pleasure outside of an opposite sex marriage and telling them their anger towards women for not giving them sex is justified. Despite his claims to want to lessen the chances angry young men attack the (female) society they perceive as treating them unfairly he's adding fuel to the fire.
Jordan believes the natural tendency of human sexuality is for most females to engage in sex only with a few high status males, leaving the majority of males with no sexual outlet which encourages violence in them - that's a crude, simplistic, and largely inaccurate view of human sexuality; the sexuality of humans is not like wolves, lions or other species where the alpha male is the only male who has sexual access to females. Human females tend towards monogamy much more so than they do to only engaging in sex with the alpha male in their social circle. To be sure, many women do seek an alpha male but many more are happy with and prefer other kinds of males.
Jordan is a hero to the angry sexually frustrated young men known as "incels" mainly because he blames women for their unhappiness and advocates "enforced monogamy" as a supposed solution to the violence incels sometimes direct at a society they blame for their inability to find a sexual partner. Jordan says not to worry though, when he advocates enforced monogamy he's not suggesting the government enforce it, but rather that the broader (patriarchal) society enforce it with social and cultural pressure and disapproval. Of course if that doesn't work to the patriarchy's satisfaction history has shown it will use the government to coerce or force compliance and the subservience of women. Fair minded people justifiably see Jordan Peterson's rules for society as a totalitarian threat.
As I've repeatedly stated, if we want to understand humanity's natural state and tendencies we need to look at tribes of hunter-gatherers who have had little or no contact with modern technological and agricultural civilization, not the societies that appeared after the dawn of agriculture 12,000 years ago (which is a drop in the bucket of the entirety of human existence and not our natural state). If you look at those prehistoric tribes you see most males end up in a “monogamish” relationship with a female, there are traditional male and female roles and some honoured individuals who span those gender roles and greatly complicate the natural interactions and sexual choices of the tribe resulting in a richer environment for creating genes in offspring leading to diverse talents in descendants. It is only after agriculture was adopted and people began living static lives in larger and larger groups that we see uncommon societies where one or a few high status males monopolize sexual access to most females. That is not humanity's natural state, it is an unnatural and harmful dynamic enabled by a social environment we are not psychologically and behaviorally evolved for. Preventing the natural diversity of human sexuality and gender identity further distorts our normal and natural behaviour to the detriment of humanity as a whole.
Reducing the Anger of the "Involuntarily Celibate"
Ignorance and fallacious beliefs about courtship can impede mating success and increase anger and hostility in males for whom it does not come readily. Modern civilization and its video screens have hijacked natural human psychological tendencies resulting in many males isolating themselves and having little social contact and few romantic opportunities with females.
The idea that a woman's efforts to increase her attractiveness is a sexual invitation is a popular and cherished idea amongst sexually repressed religious fundamentalists, incels, and misogynists like Jordan Peterson. If a woman makes an effort to look sexy it may mean she's looking for a romantic encounter but that doesn't necessarily mean its you and give you the right to rape her as the incel community some times advocates. A socially destructive consensus of self-described "incels" is that they have a right to sex with women and that a male controlled society should force women to have sex with them. Jordan Peterson seems to be empathetic to this and barely in control of his anger when he talks about women wearing sexy clothes or makeup on the job to enhance their appearance. He insists any woman who does so should (without exception) be considered to be requesting sexually driven attention and when a man gives that to her she better be open to it because in the minds of misogynists "she's asking for it". To paraphrase Jordan: "If I assume your mere appearance is intended to be sexually appealing you better modest up your appearance or expect, tolerate and be open to my repeated sexual advances." That's the kind of attitude that leads to culturally mandated female genital mutilation, women being forced to wear burkas, and fundamentalist men seeing a minor modesty slip as justifying rape and presenting a fortunate opportunity to do so.
Jordan Peterson and the incels loudly yearn for a step by step rule book on how to approach women they are attracted to in a way that will automatically result in their consent to sex. Jordan, regardless of the extent a woman goes to enhance her appearance, if she is not explicitly consenting to sex with you, you should assume and behave as though she doesn't want to. It should be obvious that in a work environment your starting position best be that romantic advances are inappropriate and to be avoided, especially in a supervisor/subordinate relationship - you are hired and paid solely to do work, finding a romantic partner is not part of that. At most approach a woman you're attracted to in a friendly manner when you have a legitimate work need to interact with her (like you would with a person you're not romantically interested in) and if a genuine give and take friendship develops over time maybe you can ask her to spend some time with you outside of work.
It would be nice if there were a complete set of detailed, rigid and specific rules as to what male attention is appropriate and what is not but the world is a complicated place and that simply doesn't exist and never will. The best we can do are some general guidelines but at some point men have to figure out on their own how to engage in the back and forth dance that may lead to romance. For most of the men who aren't yet successful in love this requires a certain volume of interaction with and rejection from single females. You can't just sit at home on the computer hoping you'll somehow encounter someone who reciprocates your romantic interest, you have to be willing to experience rejection (probably frequently) to find someone - you need to engage a woman in prolonged conversation on a topic other than your desire for a mate if you want to have a chance with her.
In 2018 self-described "incel" Alek Minassian, angry over his inability to find a mate, sought revenge on society by driving a van onto a Toronto sidewalk and committing mass murder. Jordan Peterson seemed to minimize or excuse the murderous rampage by saying "He was mad at God.". Maybe it's not a good idea to tell impressionable children they are an all powerful, all knowing being's favourite (who then bizarrely won't do you any favours or prevent injustice towards you and even rewards people less worthy than you). Common religious dogma can predispose people to anger at a society and a being who commonly rewards and punishes without discernible pattern or rules - we shouldn't be surprised when people are mad at the god they've been taught to believe in. A belief that you're god's favourite can harm your mental health and ability to work and play well with others.
The way of nature is that females generally do the choosing as sex has far greater potential impact on her versus virtually none for the male that might recklessly impregnate her. If a woman gets pregnant she's going to have to devote a lot of resources to the pregnancy and later perhaps to raising the child alone, not to mention the physical risk to her of going through a pregnancy and child birth. So of course nature tailored humans so that women usually do the choosing. Rape is also a natural behaviour in the animal kingdom but if that's your justification for perpetrating it you've rejected the basis of civilization, the social contract (I'll treat you fairly if you treat me fairly), and you have placed yourself as an enemy of society, fairness, and equality.
Religious people often assert humans are a fundamentally different and separate thing from animals: man the tool user, man the thinker, only humans imprison wrongdoers, and so on versus the wild, supposedly unthinking, mechanistic and savage nature of animals. The truth is the general nature and features of living for an animal, a mammal, or a great ape is fundamentally similar that of a human. Humans have a great deal in common with animals (we ARE animals), and we can learn a lot about ourselves from studying them. Of course something being natural doesn't necessarily make it a good thing and we have to decide which parts of our natures we wish to spend our finite will power on continuously suppressing. As people who think we are intellectually superior to animals, surely every rational, fair minded person will agree that the part of human nature that we need to always be aware of and trying to minimize is our tendency to violence, rape, and to "might makes right" social behaviour. I'd like to say to Jordan Peterson: How about rather than teaching young men the harmful belief that masturbation "isn't noble" you teach them that rape isn't noble and neither is believing you have a right to someone else's body?
I'm very confident that if prostitution was legal, available, and would be male customers weren't shamed for it some of those incels who went on a killing spree because they were tormented and angry about being virgins wouldn't have done so. Legalizing prostitution would also negate one of the sex trafficker's most potent tools of intimidation and control - threats that the illegal nature of the prostitution victims are forced to engage in will result in unsympathetic law enforcement imprisoning and punishing the victims if they seek help.
Can You Bestow a Particular Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity on a child?
Some parents are okay with lgbt people in theory, but they don't want their little Johnny to to be gay or transgender. They harbour the false and harmful belief that a child is a blank slate upon which a sexual orientation or gender identity can be written without impediment. You can see that's far from the truth by looking at the tragic case of David Reimer. In 1965 when David was a baby his penis was burnt off during a botched circumcision he and his twin brother underwent to address a problem they had urinating. Woefully misguided sexologist John Money told David's parents babies are born without any inherent sense of gender identity or sexual orientation, that a child's concept of him or herself as a boy or girl was entirely due to the social expectations of the parents, society and how the child is raised. His theory was that if they raised David as a girl he would grow up to identify as female, marry a man, and be happy living within traditional female stereotypes - it didn't at all work out that way.
David had all manner of psychological difficulties caused by being raised as a girl. He didn't want to wear dresses or do girly things but on the advice of John Money his parents persisted and insisted to David he was a girl and treated him as a stereotypical female. An adult David said he was deeply confused by this, he didn't feel at all like a girl and thought that meant there was something wrong with his mind, that he was crazy. As an adult David began identifying and living as a stereotypical male but the damage was done, he was unable to overcome his psychological trauma and chose to exit his life.
Talk of fluidity aside, a person's sexual orientation and gender identity is fixed in the sense that it can't be changed or created by external social pressure to develop romantic attractions for a particular sex or to perceive oneself as either a boy or a girl (which is not to say that there aren't people who can be attracted to both sexes or see themselves as neither gender (or both)). You can't turn a heterosexual child gay or a gay child heterosexual and you can't make a bisexual child grow up to be solely attracted to only one sex. Similarly, you can't make a child with a male gender identity think of himself as female (or vice versa), or a non-binary child stop thinking of themselves as both (or neither) genders.
Through some kind of fallacious reasoning I'm unable to conceive, some people see David Reimer's experience as proving all children are born heterosexual and identifying with the sex they were assigned at birth and any one who is gay, bisexual or transgender has been mislead, tricked, or coerced into being that way. Think about it - if that was at all possible the earnest, thorough and dedicated efforts to make David Reimer identify as a female and be attracted to men wouldn't have utterly and disastrously failed. No lgbt person wants any child to be pressured or directed to a gender identity or sexual orientation they don't inherently feel - we all know how painful and destructive that is.
David was intrinsically heterosexual and being pressured into a stereotypical female role traumatized him. By the same token, some children are intrinsically lgbt and pressuring them to be otherwise is traumatizing to them as well. If, as some religious conservatives insist, no one is inherently lgbt, surely a society would no longer produce lgbt people when it is entirely and viciously intolerant, torturing and throwing innocent gays and lesbians off of rooftops? Yet even in those societies there are always more lgbt people replacing the ones murdered because this is normal, natural, and intrinsic to a minority of every population. No one risks likely torture and death to consistently behave contrary to their natural and predominant inclinations. Lgbt people are as normal and natural as left handed people or those with a far from average IQ. Of course societies can force us to hide and pretend to be something we are not, but as a famous philosopher once said "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should." Hiding that humanity includes lgbt people causes psychological damage and greatly hinders people's pursuit of happiness. No society can make us feel and desire things we don't or stop feeling and desiring the things we do. It makes no sense for society to use resources to only cause harm by trying to coerce people to have a sexual orientation or gender identity they cannot. This doesn't just harm lgbt people, it harms the heterosexual partners and children of gays and lesbians who try to obey by entering into an opposite sex marriage that commonly ends in divorce and a broken family.
If you can't accept your child being lgbt, parenting is really not for you. Just as your child could be born with taxing special needs, your child could be born lgbt and you need to be sure you're up to raising them as they are or you best swear off parenting altogether.
The Myth That Most Transgender Children "Grow Out of It"
A highly misleading claim amongst anti-trans activists is that 80 or 90-something percent of transgender children will grow out of it by the time they are adults and come to identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. This is based on grossly misinterpreting and misrepresenting research done on gender non-conforming children (which is something entirely different from being transgender). Gender non-conforming children are children who have some gender expression or interest that isn't consistent with traditional gender stereotypes - boys who like pink and styling hair, girls who like to play with trucks and get into fist fights, for example. The gender non-conforming children in these studies sent to gender clinics by their parents who didn't go on to be transgender adults never claimed to be trans in the first place, were never diagnosed with gender dysphoria and never expressed a desire to be a gender other than the one assigned at birth, so of course the vast majority didn't go on to be trans adults.
The major mental and physical health organizations in the U.S. all agree that gender affirmation is a best care practice for gender dysphoric children. Politicians shouldn't be putting themselves in the way of doctors and parents who want to help their trans children be as happy as they can be. Contrary to popular anti-trans propaganda, no child is ever encouraged or lead to be transgender, only gender dysphoric children can decide to go down this path and in order to get any kind of gender affirming care the child must be seen by mental health professionals and determined to be insistent, consistent, and persistent in their transgender identity. That means they must be adamant that they are the opposite gender (insistent), consistent in their gender identity (they don't one week say they are a girl and the next a boy and the next a girl again), and persistent - the gender dysphoria and trans identity must be an enduring thing, not something a child has only recently and briefly claimed. Anti-lgbt psychologist Kenneth Zucker has continued to promote the false idea that the overwhelming majority of trans kids will grow out of it by deceptively categorizing children as transgender who are not "insistent", "consistent", and "persistent" per the standards of the DSM-V. Zucker continues to refer to the outdated conventions of the DSM-III and DSM-IV when classifying gender non-conforming children as transgender long after the definition of gender dysphoria and transgender were more narrowly defined in the DSM-V.
Research consistently shows[17] less than 1 percent of children who transition to the other gender ever change their minds and change back again (desist) and for those who do it's almost always because other people wouldn't accept them, not because they were unhappy in their transgender identity and expression.
For those who oppose adults undergoing gender reassignment surgery, consider that if our present unnaturally rigid gender roles allowed full freedom of gender expression perhaps some of the people who now undergo gender reassignment surgery to feel they way they want would find outwardly expressing themselves as the sex they identify with by itself is sufficient and forgo the surgery.
Ivory Tower Navel Gazing And The "Autogynephilia" Farce
Going back to the 1980s and 1990s psychologists opposed to full freedom of gender expression and identity like Ray Blanchard and Kenneth Zucker sought to minimize and discourage this freedom by pathologizing gender identities and expressions that don't fit into more rigid and recent stereotypical ideas. Early on in his career Zucker said “[Gayness] in a basically unaccepting culture simply creates unnecessary social difficulties.”. In other words, better to harm children by coercing them to pretend to be something they are not rather than working to change a homophobic, unnatural and unhealthy culture.
In order to rationalize their desire to restrict, reject, and minimize the number of people who saw themselves as the opposite gender and sought to live in congruence with it, Blanchard and Zucker sought to discredit the idea that some people assigned male at birth had the stereotypical psychology of females ("I have a boy body and a girl brain."). To this end they cooked up this hypothesis that people who were assigned male at birth and identified as female had a psychology that was in no way similar to a non-trans female and called it "autogynephilia", their idea being that these trans females were abnormal or mentally ill and really men psychologically who were sexually aroused by the thought of themselves as women. In their eagerness to pathologize and demean trans women they ran with this idea without doing the basics of research to see if there was any validity to it and are still running with it today despite its having been discredited. While they observed some trans women experienced sexual arousal at the thought of themselves as women they egregiously and inexplicably (or perhaps not) never explored whether people assigned female at birth who identified as female ever had the same feelings. And of course, they do. The people who coined the intentionally stigmatizing phrase "autogynephilia" just baselessly assumed non-trans women didn't have these feelings because the truth was secondary to finding an excuse to restrain the femininity of people they wanted to behave as stereotypical males.
In 2009 Charles Moser surveyed 51 non-trans professional women and 29 completed questionnaires were returned for analysis. By the common definition of ever having erotic arousal to the thought or image of oneself as a woman, 93% of the respondents were classified as "autogynephilic". Using a more rigorous definition of "frequent" arousal to multiple items, 28% would be classified as "autogynephilic"[5]. Now this is a small sample size but the samples used by Blanchard to come up with his unfounded hypothesis in the first place were a great deal smaller than that. A much larger scale study of non-trans women would be relatively easy to do for professionals like this and could put this to rest once and for all, but psychologists like Ken Zucker and Ray Blanchard (who've partly based their careers and reputations on this baseless hypothesis) have no interest in doing so and revealing they jumped to a false conclusion. Blanchard could have easily anticipated that non-trans women might feel the same sorts of sexual arousal as trans women and verified it first but the goal of psychologists like him and Zucker wasn't to understand human psychology, it was to oppose, discredit, stigmatize and minimize non-stereotypical gender expression, identity and gender affirming health care despite the reality of the natural diversity of sexualities inherent to ours and many other species.
The Republican Push to Expand Intolerance In Schools
Supportive teachers and LGBTQ+ inclusive curriculum are associated with less victimization and harassment of LGTBQ+ students by their peers, greater self-esteem, higher GPAs, and fewer missed days of school, according to the Journal of School Violence[18]. Inclusive sex education programs improve feelings of safety at school and reduce adverse mental health outcomes for all students, according to the Journal of Adolescent Health[19].
In an all out assault on reality Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has taken one anti-democratic step after another to broadly assert partisan control over what can be taught in Florida educational institutions. Nationally Republicans are doing everything possible to lower the pay of teachers and professors and make being a teacher ever more precarious and undesirable. It's an attempt to destroy public education controlled by non partisan experts and allow the MAGA Republicans to decide what Americans learn and believe without being restrained by the truth.
Republican endeavours to ban books featuring lgbt people are often justified with the pretext that any mention of same sex attraction is pornographic while paradoxically mentions of opposite sex attraction are not. Under the guise of "preventing the indoctrination of children", Republican politicians catering to a vocal right wing authoritarian minority are implementing their own indoctrination programs that teach school children same sex attractions, romantic relationships, and feminine boys are bad, dare not be spoken of, and the result of a brain that is not functioning correctly rather than the normal, natural, and ultimately harmless expressions that they are, deeply and inextricably embedded in the evolutionary history of humans and other animals. It's clear society can force people to hide and deny their same sex attractions, but it can't force them not to experience them or be harmed by their socially mandated suppression. Contrary to popular right wing talking points, lgbt people have not been scorned by all major societies throughout recorded history - one significant historical study of all known human societies throughout history found that 64% were accepting of and had a respected place for their lgbt citizens[3].
Right wing authoritarians wrongly and detrimentally think they can mandate who children must and must not be, they think they can force every child to be happy in their narrow and rigid prescriptions for sex roles even though that harms the mental health and diminishes the happiness of large numbers of, and perhaps most, children. The American Psychiatric Association states those who accept their gay or bisexual sexual orientation are happier and better adjusted than those who don't. That means almost all of us, as most people who identify as heterosexual have at least occasional secondary same sex attractions.
If you, as a male, engage in fantasies apart from actual sexual encounters with women there's a good chance at some point you're going to experience some sexual arousal at the thought of males as well as females. That's why groups like The Proud Boys have a rule that members must never experience an orgasm outside immediate contact with a woman who is not a prostitute and authoritarian rulers seek to restrict and control the sexuality of young men - the anxiety and frustration this causes predisposes them to engage in unthinking violence which the dictator can channel to seize or consolidate his power by giving these emotionally stunted men a misplaced but deeply desired sense of purpose and belonging through intimidation of the majority of peace loving fair minded people.
Ron DeSantis tries to portray himself as an avenging hero who righteously, decisively, and rigidly imposes obviously beneficial common sense policies cancelling the nebulous threat of "wokeness" (which is code for anything liberals need, want, or like, even if it is something conservatives were in favour of up until that point (like Romney-Care)). Anyone who questions his tactics (like book bans) making white heterosexual conservative Christians superior under the law and harming the lives of people he doesn't approve of is loudly talked over with scorn, derision, contempt, and dismissed out of hand. In DeSantis's mind it just goes without saying that he's 100% right ("There's no racism!") and he'll keep you from saying differently under penalty of law. This is authoritarians' toxically masculine election strategy of might makes right, just demonize and steam-roll anyone who raises valid questions as quickly as possible however you can, ignore facts, reason, and fairness, just push through what right wing authoritarians want - the law of the jungle.
One of the most common ways right wing authoritarians deceive is by repeating cherry-picked anecdotes to create the false impression that an isolated or rare event is actually what is typically or usually happening. For example, they invoke the same handful of rare instances of trans females winning women's sports (or even tying for fifth) to create the false impression that trans females are dominating in women's sports when in reality it almost never happens that a trans female wins a female sporting contest or for that matter, even competes in one. Considering the millions of American women competing in hundreds of thousands of different sporting contests every year, only three or four examples of a trans woman winning shows it almost never happens. Republicans aren't passing laws banning trans females from female sports to address a real concern, they do so to gain support by pretending they're righting a non-existent injustice. In many states that have banned trans females from sports the legislators that passed these laws couldn't name a single example of a trans female competing in their state and surveys showed there were typically only one or two trans females participating in the entire state. The tragedy of this is that the trans female bans in women's sports are a smoke screen covering the real threat to women's sports which is the vastly inferior level of financial support all levels of government put into women's sports compared to men's.
A particularly shameful and glaring example of the "might makes right" political strategy is Lindsay Graham's phony display of rage and indignation near the end of Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings. The witnesses just having testified to Kavanaugh's sexual assaults were very credible, the Republicans present hanging their heads, subdued and contrite over their dishonest attempts to force through the confirmation of a man who is clearly a sexual predator. It was looking dire for Kavanaugh's confirmation, the momentum was against him and it seemed likely Republicans would relent and join with Democrats to reject his nomination. Then Lindsay Graham, seeing the tide was moving against the nomination, launched a toxically masculine exhibition of "righteous" indignation, flowing with scorn, sneers and anger about how Kavanaugh "had done nothing wrong!" had been treated monumentally unfairly, and "has nothing to be ashamed of!" when in fact everyone, including Graham, knew that wasn't remotely true. Graham dismissed the truth out of hand, theatrically lied again and again about what a wonderful person Kavanaugh was, how he had been abominably treated by Democrats and how this "fine man" deserved to be on the Supreme Court and Democrats opposing his nomination should fear supposedly just future Republican vengefulness. This emboldened the dejected Republicans to run with those lies and steam-roll past the myriad valid concerns about Kavanaugh's copious misogynistic assaults and confirm him to the court - the tried and "true" strategy of using bluster and B.S. to shut down good faith argument and bully your way to an outcome that unreasonably favours your tribe, using every opportunity to convey the idea that you are just so obviously right and your opponents so totally evil it's foolish to think otherwise and not a moment should be "wasted" doing so. This is the right wing authoritarians' bread and butter.
Would be despots like Marjorie Taylor Greene go all out with this malicious strategy of slander, nonsensically trumpeting that all lgbt people and anyone in favour of our fair treatment are necessarily pedophiles and any effort to show acceptance or support for lgbt children is "grooming" (an attempt to lure children into sex). The goal of authoritarians like Greene is to create a society with citizens that reflexively assume any violence they may wish to perpetrate on lgbt people they encounter in public is acceptable, desirable and well justified - as is the zeitgeist in Russia, Hungary, Chechnya and other totalitarian states. They demonize us (obviously no punishment is too harsh for a "pedophile") to maximize hatred and intolerance of innocent lgbt people and create the false impression that the authoritarians are noble opponents of evil who obviously should be the absolute and unchallenged rulers of the country and all it's people. The only line they won't cross (yet) is initiating wide spread violence against women, lgbt people, minorities, and liberals, but they're not particularly opposed to that either. When the Proud Boys show up openly carrying guns at a library where a drag queen is reading stories to kids they hope to goad an lgbt person or one of our allies into initiating violent contact or attempting to (a punch thrown that misses, for example) which will then be taken as permission for all the right wing authoritarians present to immediately respond with maximal violence that takes a very heavy toll on the choice side and little or none on the totalitarian side.
Hard core conservatives rarely provide any evidence to support their often far fetched assertions and consider it insulting and elitist if you don't accept their claims without challenge. There were 61 lost court cases claiming the 2020 election was rigged to elect Joe Biden and not a speck of evidence presented to support any of those allegations. The tribal warfare justification is: If we can baselessly imagine something to be true, it's fair to adamantly and repetitively insist it is and anyone who disagrees is too foolish and evil to tolerate listening to (as the guns we're brandishing suggest). That's what this current Republican push to allow the permitless purchase and carry of concealed weapons is about; it's to troll, threaten, and hopefully intimidate liberals into accepting increased right wing authoritarianism - might makes right. The gun lobby and NRA play their part by promoting the toxically masculine idea that owning a gun makes you an alpha male (or female) who the people you dislike better listen to or else.
In one of his culture war laws, Florida governor Ron DeSantis maliciously defines "woke" as "Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees". The real meaning of "woke" is being aware of and having empathy for the situation people unlike yourself are in. What DeSantis is admitting to opposing is empathy, fairness and equality. In court, a less dishonest DeSantis lawyer defined woke as "...a view that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to have policies that address [them]".
DeSantis titled his recent book "The Courage to be Free" but he's referring to the freedom of totalitarians like him to control, suppress, and discriminate against those they dislike and to indoctrinate children into falsely believing every American is and always has been treated fairly by authorities like him. Deception, dishonesty, and bluster to gain undue power and rewards is in no way courageous. If you want a true example of the courage to be free, look at murdered transgender child Larry King. To be his true self he willingly and proudly endured the daily mocking and abuse of classmates DeSantis aims to inculcate in today's American children.
In Orwellian fashion, authoritarian Republicans euphemistically refer to their bans on gender affirming health care as "protecting children", deceitfully blaring that children are undergoing surgeries which alter genitalia. The truth is that gender reassignment surgery is, with extremely rare exceptions, not permitted for anyone under 18. Republicans provoke unjustified anger, hate, and death threats with the lie that it is in order to seize political power.
Gender-affirming healthcare may include puberty blockers for children entering puberty or cross-sex hormones and surgery for adults. To provide a false justification for banning gender affirming care Florida's healthcare agency labelled these treatments "experimental" - even though numerous medical groups have determined they are medically necessary. Puberty blockers have been prescribed to many children for several decades to address health care issues unrelated to gender transition, providing them to children is clearly not experimental.
Florida Republicans deceptively labelled their law restricting free speech in schools the "Parental Rights in Education Act" as though they champion those rights when in reality they only support rights for parents who want to compel gay or trans children to pretend to be otherwise - this law is a license and call for school children (and even teachers) to bully their lgbt classmates, which increasingly happens since it was passed[20]. Parents who want to follow the advice of all the major medical and mental health organizations on best practices and provide gender affirming health care for their gender dysphoric children (such as puberty blockers) have no parental rights in authoritarian Republican states. Only anti-lgbt parents have rights in MAGA America.
Historically, when such “Don’t Say Gay” laws and policies are enacted, many educators are unsure if all in-school speech about LGBTQ people is outlawed and whether intervening in victimization constitutes a prohibited show of support. Twelve years ago, confusion over a policy in Minnesota’s largest school district, Anoka-Hennepin Public Schools, prevented educators from intervening against bullying, contributing to at least seven student suicides[21].
The Republican bans on gender affirming health care purportedly are to prevent a child transitioning to a different gender, regretting their choice and some of the permanent physical changes they underwent, and then detransitioning. Research consistently shows this happens less than 1% of the time and when it does it is usually due to the unwillingness of others to accept the trans person as they wish to be rather than to them deciding their pre-transition state better fit how they see themselves and wish to be. It's an admirable goal to prevent the one gender dysphoric child in a hundred from transitioning who will later regret it, but what about the other 99% of gender dysphoric children who will be harmed by being deprived of gender affirming care[22]? Don't they have a right to care and concern from society too? Surely we should worry about the 99% at least as much as the 1%?
Whenever there is a conflict that sees some people benefiting from a policy and others harmed by it we need to ask ourselves: "Which way helps the most people and harms the fewest?". The answer is irrefutable, far more children are helped by gender affirming health care than are harmed by it. It makes no sense to set policy so that 1 person is not harmed but 99 others are - which is not to say we shouldn't do what we can to prevent that one percent of gender dysphoric children from being harmed by a gender transition that didn't work out for them. Republican bans on gender affirming health care and criminalization of parents and doctors who provide it isn't about protecting children, it's about suppressing and punishing harmless gender non-conforming behaviour and expression, it's about hurting the innocent people they don't approve of, the cruelty is the point, they see happy trans people as an enemy.
Unbalanced Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his sycophants make the superficially specious and totally disingenuous argument that his euphemistically named "Parental Rights In Education" Act is not a "Don't say gay bill" because it doesn't literally include the word "gay". This is at once a contemptuous, childish and machiavellian lie; it's true the text of the bill doesn't actually use the word "gay" , but it singles out gays and lesbians by banning speech in education about "sexual orientation" which in this context means the same thing as "gay" because they certainly aren't going to stop any teacher from talking about heterosexuality or their opposite sex spouse, the only sexual orientation the law actually bans schools from talking about is the same sex one - "Don't talk about sexual orientation" means the same thing as "Don't say gay". Only deceitful, childish and depraved people assert this misnamed "Parental Rights in Education Act" can't be considered a "Don't say gay" bill because it doesn't actually include the word "gay" in the title or text of the law.
Republicans Criminalize Drag Shows as Part of a Broader Assault on LGBT People
Republicans have advanced vaguely worded laws ostensibly targeted at prohibiting drag shows in public where children could see[23]. As written these laws could easily be used by MAGA district attorneys for whims that never occurred (or perhaps did) to the people who created them in the first place. To ban drag queens from being visible to children most of the proposed bills define a drag performer as someone "performing while using dress, makeup and mannerisms associated with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth" - the broad wording potentially criminalizes any feminine expression by one assigned male at birth. A right wing authoritarian district attorney could easily argue that the language of the anti-drag laws determining what counts as a drag performance could be applied to any trans woman or girl in public expressing herself in a stereotypically feminine way. When I express this concern conservatives pooh pooh it, insisting it wouldn't happen but if that's true, how specifically would you distinguish a drag queen (unacceptable) from a transwoman(acceptable) using the text of one of these laws? It's sure not apparent to me. If they wanted to take the law a step further a MAGA Republican could easily argue there isn't a clear distinction and ban any public displays of femininity by those assigned male at birth. In fact, at least one Republican law maker has proposed a total ban on anyone wearing clothing or makeup that isn't consistent with the narrow stereotypical gender expressions commonly associated with the sex they were assigned at birth. There's no clear reason why such laws couldn't be used to imprison a child like Larry King for six years for wearing his makeup and high heels to school. These proposed laws have broad reach and severe penalties vastly out of proportion to the supposed harm they are allegedly intended to prevent.
Even if, in the unlikely event, anti-drag laws were only narrowly applied, as it's claimed they would be, it's ludicrous to assert seeing a drag queen causes a child any injury, certainly nothing that could justify an outrageously disproportionate 6 year prison sentence. It's not like they're cutting off children's fingers, stealing their college funds, or breaking their noses. How about Republicans prosecute actual child abuse by parents who, despite being legally obligated to care for them, beat or throw their children out on the street if they are unwary enough to expect unconditional love and admit being lgbt? Instead of protecting children they are requiring schools to inform parents if their child identifies as lgbt which sends some parents into a violent rage. Given the prevalence of this sort of parental reaction it is wholly unethical to out a child against their will(and likely better judgement). If a child fears his or her parents will react badly to such a revelation there's very likely a good reason for that. If you're not willing to love, accept, and care for an lgbt child as they are you're not fit for parenting.
The real purpose of these bans on drag is to vilify and suppress identifying with or expressing a gender that differs from what was assigned at birth. To this end Republicans claim seeing men in makeup or dresses sexualizes children. Is there any truth to that?
Some of the ways a child can be sexualized are:
1) Inculcating sexual desire before it naturally occurs on it's own
2) Modifying their appearance with precocious clothes, makeup, or accessories that commonly elicit sexual arousal in others
3) Involving them in sexual activity
This is what the MAGA crowd disingenuously and maliciously insist the sight of a drag queen does to a child. Does that actually make sense?
1) How can it be that seeing a woman in makeup does not arouse premature sexual desire in a child but seeing a man wearing makeup does? It doesn’t. Clearly, seeing a female in a dress and makeup does not sexualize a child so neither does seeing a similarly presenting male.
2) Seeing a drag queen doesn't alter a child's appearance to make them more alluring and so is not sexualizing in that way. The massive hypocrisy of Republicans is that they haven't directed similar outrage to the "Little Miss" beauty pageants that do sexualize children by dressing them up in precocious clothes and makeup that can elicit sexual arousal in males. But you've never seen the right wing authoritarian Proud Boys show up armed to one of these child beauty pageants to threaten violence for the actual sexualization of children. The truth is that right wing conservatives aren't actually concerned about sexualization of children but rather only about children knowing a minority of males are feminine and/or only attracted to other males. What they really hate is harmless gayness and freedom of gender identity and expression.
3) Seeing a drag queen does not involve children in sex acts so it does not sexualize them in that way either.
The underlying toxically masculine belief driving such laws is that any expression of femininity is an invitation to sexual contact, and all the more so if you are a male. It's a great leap to say just by being in drag men are inviting male sexual contact; drag is about creating a whimsical or outlandish presentation of femininity and having harmless fun, not about maximizing feminine attractiveness to heterosexual male tastes as is the case with Little Miss beauty pageants.
It's not our job as women to try to keep males from looking at us, it's not our job to make sure they can control their sexual arousal. In patriarchal religious communities like the Amish they teach girls that this is their job, that men can't control their sex drive, men need sex and they must do everything possible to avoid arousing them and if a male does get aroused and rapes them, it's their fault for not being sufficiently modest. And when rape or incest occurs the bitter irony is that the victims are then expected to keep the assault a secret from outsiders and instead appeal for redress to the very patriarchy that is victimizing them, which will typically result in some sort of minor punishment for the perpetrator after an obligatory apology to his victim. When a victim does decide she needs actual justice and reports a rape to law enforcement the entire Amish community will close ranks, scorn and reject her for not keeping it within the community - their doctrine being that outsiders are necessarily evil and so is associating with them in any way. The complainant will be considered the wrongdoer for not accepting the rapist's apology by itself as sufficient as she is considered morally obligated to do.
In some Islamic countries a woman who reports a rape will be accused of adultery and punished rather than the rapist(s). These religious fundamentalists similarly believe that if a woman is raped she was "asking for it" and often men in those countries feel it is their right to rape any woman who doesn't appear sufficiently modest to them and Islamic justice systems will often agree. A co-worker once told me he believes if a woman wears skimpy clothes in public she has no right to object if a man gets sexually aroused and rapes her. It horrifies me anyone could think that way. To me it's very black and white - I don't care if a woman is walking down the street naked, no one has a right to touch her without her permission. If this isn't obvious to you, you need to rethink what civilization best be about.
I frequently see this facet of toxic masculinity in online discussions as I advocate for equal treatment of lgbt people. For example, after posting about a 2019 Harvard study that concluded laws requiring people to use the public bathrooms consistent with their gender assigned at birth result in higher rates of sexual assault against trans and non-binary people, a vocal evangelical Christian repeatedly posted the knee-jerk and disproven reply: "If guys wearing dresses want to prance around in the men's bathroom they are perfectly safe doing so.". The intent of this kind of malicious framing is to belittle and provoke hostility and violence towards feminine males - the subtext being a male with a feminine gender expression has no need of a public bathroom, no business being there and when anti-trans laws restrict them to the male public bathroom, they only go in there to flaunt their femininity and proffer unwanted sexual advances to whatever random men happen to be in there at the time.
The purpose of anti-lgbt laws advocated by MAGA politicians is to vilify male feminine expressions to unite and energize the 20% or so of voters who are right wing authoritarians, giving them a scapegoat to blame for their often unwarranted dissatisfactions and to enjoy punishing while keeping attention off the grave real threats Republican politicians don't want to address like increasingly severe oscillations between flooding and drought and wild fires, or unregulated artificial intelligence which can create far more efficient and psychologically effective ways to deceive, scam and con increasingly large numbers of people.
When right wing conservatives accuse liberals of the "indoctrination" of children with "woke ideology" they are falsely asserting male children seeing that some males are naturally feminine to one degree or another will then become feminine themselves when they otherwise wouldn't have. The reality is that the same percentage of males are going to feel feminine and a desire to express it whether society forces them to hide or not. Some societies have "successfully" forced the false public presentation of all males as masculine (and all females as feminine) but it comes at a high psychological, social, and physical price. Many (perhaps most) males are feminine to at least a slight degree. When society demands they constantly police their speech, emotions, mannerisms and expressions to ensure a continuous projection of stereotypical masculinity this hyper-vigilance creates long term stress, needlessly hurting the mental and physical health of these males and society as a whole. The society that suppresses and demonizes male femininity is a pointlessly more dangerous and violent society. Males who fear their own secondary same sex attractions are constantly on guard to stifle any unconscious display of femininity and feel an urgent need to maintain a façade of toughness and masculinity and they are primed to respond with violence if anyone or anything breeches that façade.
Ron DeSantis brags about protecting freedom while he goes about restricting it, he's all about the might makes right political strategy - of freedom of gender identity or expression and no books available to the public that right wing conservatives don't approve of. It's all about reshaping government to force hard right wing Christianity and conservatism on the unwilling majority. MAGA politicians believe in the freedom of parents to compel their child to be heterosexual and identify only with the gender they were assigned at birth. Authoritarians can pass laws that say parents have that right, but they never have and never will have the ability to force this on any of the minority of children who will inevitably be lgbt.
The right wing talk of the "indoctrination" of school children does not refer to drilling false beliefs into them, but rather to allowing them to see, hear, or read the truth that some people are lgbt, always have been and always will be. No one has the moral right to "protect" their children by demanding harmless people hide lest their child think it okay to be like them. Just as I don't have the right to force people to hide their heterosexuality they don't have the right to force people to hide their gayness - anti-gay heterosexuals demand special rights lgbt people don't have.
An essential building block of healthy and just societies is that everyone has a right to participate in them freely and equally. Society can coerce harmless but disfavoured people to live on the margins of society, to hide their existence from those who wish they didn't, but this is in no way morally justifiable. Many on the right (and a few on the left) got worked up over polls that show 20% of Generation Z identify as lgbtq and almost 50% do not identify as "completely heterosexual" - they think this shows being lgbt is contagious and heterosexuality could go out of style but it's all much ado about nothing. The percentage of the population with same sex attractions or a non-traditional gender identity is not increasing, what's happening is that as social acceptance has grown more people are feeling safe to openly admit who they always have been. There has always been a significant minority of people who are lgbt, they're just not hiding like they used to - a significant minority of the population (most MAGA Republicans) living in fear of their own secondary same sex attractions want to change that.
Hard right conservatives scaremonger that liberals seek to erase traditional stereotypical gender distinctions, expressions and identities which is not actually possible. Both trans men and trans women have a traditional stereotypical gender presentation in mind when we pattern ourselves after a gender we weren't assigned at birth - that's how we choose our gender presentation. Even people with a non-binary gender identity recognize and acknowledge the existence of stereotypical characteristics of males and females, if they didn't they'd have nothing to compare to when thinking "I don't feel I belong to either gender." or "I feel both male and female". Traditional stereotypical gender differences aren't going to disappear if we let children have freedom of gender expression and identity. For example, when you look at non-binary people who see themselves as both genders(or neither) you see people like Janelle Monae or Demi Lavato who identify as non-binary yet their gender expression is stereotypically feminine: soft spoken, delicate, nurturing, flamboyant, pretty. Or look at Sam Smith who also identifies as non-binary but has a gender expression that usually is not particularly feminine. No one, even if they try, is going to be able to stop a stereotypical traditional gender expression and identity from being adopted by most people, even when you let everyone freely decide for themselves where they fit in. By the same token all the coercion in the world won't stop a minority of children from having a gay sexual orientation or non-traditional gender identity - you can stop children being open about who they are but you can't stop the harm forcing them to hide it will cause them.
Ron DeSantis and other Republican office holders don't accept that they were elected to represent all their constituents, not just the ones they like. Representing everyone means a politician's guiding principle needs to be creating a society that maximizes the happiness for all in an equal and fair way, not passing laws that could mean 6 years imprisonment for a boy like Larry King harmlessly expressing his femininity. American conservatives rage about (supposedly) liberal "identity politics" yet they are the instigators of the very identity politics that deny fairness and equality to women, minorities, lgbt people. Now they aim to indoctrinate children to falsely believe that no group of Americans experiences inequities based on harmless characteristics like the colour of their skin. This is a glaring example of the growing commitment on the far right to "might makes right" politics - what kind of evaluation did MAGA Republicans do of Critical Race Theory before they asserted it was a lie that couldn't be discussed? None that I know of, one day they just baselessly started insisting Critical Race Theory is a lie and ran with it, a right wing authoritarian steamroller that dismisses out of hand any concern over systemic racism. One of the most blatant examples of such systemic racism is the federal American GI bill after WWII which provided massive benefits for white soldiers while explicitly excluding black ones. There has been one American government move after another like this, increasing the chasm in generational wealth whites have over blacks since slavery was ended. The average black family has a net worth of only 10% of what the average white family has but MAGA Republicans absurdly insist the poor treatment of earlier generations cannot have had an effect on the success of later generations of black people.
MAGA Republicans often insist they "don't see colour" but when researchers sent out two resumes with identical qualifications to employers, one with a stereotypically black sounding name and the other with a stereotypically white sounding name the "white" applicant was called in for an interview far more often than the "black" one. When they say they don’t see colour what they really mean is that they ignore mistreatment of black people because they don’t want to acknowledge or take steps to change it; the country is nicely fitted to advantage white people and they don’t want to change that.
Trump, Greene, DeSantis and other MAGA Republicans are telling people who live in largely reasonable circumstances that things are terrible, they should be grossly dissatisfied with their lot in life, angry about it, and blame and seek revenge on liberals for it. History has repeatedly shown a significant minority of people have a natural psychological tendency to warfare and can be manipulated by totalitarians disparaging a scapegoat to create an aggressive, zealous, and infatuated mob that then uses intimidation and violence to coerce the majority into submission to their leader.
The right wing authoritarians geared towards violence are delighted that their would be leaders like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Ron DeSantis use any means available to maximize their power. They lie, cheat, and make death threats to liberals and non-partisan election workers just trying to do their jobs without bias. When Republicans say they oppose "identity politics" what they mean is they oppose acknowledging, studying or attempting to mitigate injustices experienced by the people they make themselves superior to with systemically biased law.
Toxic masculinity says might makes right. Toxic masculinity disparages truth, consideration, fairness and equality. The MAGA Republican voters know their beloved Fox News hosts lied through their teeth about the 2020 election being stolen from Trump and the Dominion voting machines being rigged, and not only do they not care, the dishonesty delights them and they want to see more unbridled efforts like that to accrue conservative power and social dominance - they've got their fingers in their ears shouting "la-la-la" and they are not listening to liberals, reason, logic, or facts any more, they're just taking as much as possible.
The political strategy of bluster and might makes right has been entrenched in human and animal psychology through millions of years of evolution - if you steal resources from a neighbour you get short term benefits. Will conservatives continue to be slaves to our ancestral cave man psychological tendencies that lead a significant minority of us to desire an enemy to attack and take resources from? Civilization is created from a universal social contract - you treat me fairly and I'll treat you fairly. We no longer live in a world where the law of the jungle is the best way to survive, being killed by wild animals is no longer a significant threat to humans and nor should warfare be, as no moral, rational person thinks war is a better way to solve differences than good faith decision making and compromise involving all stakeholders.
In our modern interdependent technological world global cooperation is now the best way for humanity to survive and thrive. Sadly, a minority of the most prominent voices on the right like Donald Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan Peterson and Steve Bannon now express a thinly veiled desire to wage literal war on liberals, to forcefully take control of society by harming, intimidating or killing liberals. Trump goads his right wing authoritarian supporters, "I am your retribution, I am justice", encouraging them to unjustifiably believe they have been victimized by liberals and democracy. Like the dictator he hopes to become, he believes his will alone determines what is just and moral and he will rightfully destroy those who resist his MAGA authoritarianism. Ron DeSantis is following Trump's lead by using the apparatus and power of the state to punish those who fairly and reasonably oppose him. He has engaged in targeted, heavy handed and multi-pronged retaliation against the Walt Disney Company for criticizing his law giving license to bully lgbt students, it's the same creeping fascism normalized and pursued by Donald Trump. Republicans have long demanded business be unfettered and allowed to do whatever it wants in the pursuit of profit so why is Ron DeSantis punishing and suppressing Disney for speaking freely? What happened to free enterprise? The truth is there isn't any sacred Republican value they won't sacrifice in the pursuit of short term incremental gains in power.
Your Religion Should Not Give You Legal Superiority Over Any One Else
Why do religious beliefs deserve preferential treatment by the government? Why should anyone's sincere, long and deeply held religious beliefs be accommodated or unburdened more than my sincere, long and deeply held non-religious beliefs? This can't be the case if we are to have an equal and fair society focused on choosing the most rational and evidence based policies possible. The primary purpose of society should be to maximize the happiness for all in an equal and fair way - there's good reason why that should be the primary mission rather than unconditional obedience to any one of several mutually incompatible religions . You shouldn't have additional rights under the law because your beliefs about morality are characterized as religious rather than non-religious.
Hard core conservatives are commonly religious fundamentalists. The problem with fundamentalist Christian and Islamic ideology is it violates bedrock principles of justice we have all innately understood since we were just children such as:
1)Punishment should be proportional to the crime. Eternal torture for finite crimes couldn't be more disproportionate and that makes a god sending anyone to hell a far, far bigger crime than the precipitating, perhaps trivial, transgression it was supposed to (justly) punish in the first place. With foundational beliefs like that it's no surprise that fundamentalist religious groups sometimes become extremely violent, their religion tells them that massively or maximally disproportionate responses to conflict with others is how to deal with people in a moral way - critical features of true justice like balance and proportionality are readily discarded. A societal standard of eternal punishment for finite crimes is not a good starting place from which to derive a guide on moral behaviour, justice, fairness, and harmony - logically this heinous conception of justice can't come from an all knowing, just and loving God.
2) We own our bodies - no one else, no fetus, no zygote has a right to use them without our permission or tell us what to do with them. And a zygote or fetus is not a person[24]. Some religions decree that you are not owner and governor of your body, their god is and that imagined authority is delegated to males in general who in turn own and rightfully enforce the 'proper' fate on female bodies and children. Psychologist(!)Jordan Peterson alarmingly rages that the doctor who removed Elliot Page's breasts so he could feel more masculine is a criminal, that even adults don't have the right to modify their bodies as they wish - Jordan and his conception of Jesus get to decide what others can do with their bodies. When Elliot Page posted a picture of himself shirtless Peterson posted “Remember when pride was a sin?”. Peterson was never concerned with the “sin” of pride when any other male celebrity posed shirtless, the truth is he only cares about controlling people’s gender identity and expression. His arrogance and colossal sense of entitlement here are unconscionable - he has no right to control anyone's body other than his own. Peterson mocks being called an authoritarian, saying the thought is absurd, but how else can you explain his attitude towards others and society? Who but an authoritarian calls for the arrest of a doctor performing a cosmetic procedure an adult client requests and pays for?
Religious fundamentalists would make the lives of those they don't approve of miserable and then deny us our inherent right to end them straight away - an appalling injustice. I own my body, if I want to modify, damage, or destroy it that's my choice. I don't have to answer to Jordan Peterson's god any more than he has to answer to the Taliban's. A zygote is not a person and forcing a woman to have a baby that is the product of rape or incest is a grotesque injustice - using the morning after pill most certainly isn't. Humanity best not propagate the genes of rapists, we best weed the rapey genes out of our species. Forcing women to have their rapists' babies helps reward and perpetuate rape in mankind's DNA.
The Damage Caused By Enforcing Narrow And Rigid Gender Roles
Despite having devoted a great deal of his life to aggrandizing and spreading his Christian beliefs, in a 2017 interview religious fundamentalist Jordan Peterson waffled when asked about them. He said he is a Christian but contradictorily claimed he doesn't believe in God immediately before expressing fear that Jesus is real ("I am much more afraid of divine retribution") ; obviously no one devotes so much of their professional life to promoting Christianity and spreading the idea that biblical stories provide great insight into the way to live best if they don’t believe in Jesus. Like so many right wing authoritarians, Jordan will take contradictory positions so he can use whatever claim he feels helps him most in the immediate moment - it's a standard dishonest tactic in conservative bad faith argumentation. Jordan's actions show he imagines a grand, perfect civilization where men are men, women are women, and no one masturbates or has sex he objects to and it's all done under the auspices of Jesus(as Jordan conceives him). Jordan is 100% certain his religion is true, his god is real, and everyone is morally obligated to worship his Jesus or go to hell. Under no circumstances will he entertain the idea that his religious beliefs could be even a little bit wrong, he will live and die by them and do what he can to make everyone else do so as well.
I've had intermittent periods of deep depression throughout my life. Say what you will about transgenderness, but for me living as a woman has greatly improved my life and happiness - it's been a big success. Prior to my gender reassignment surgery I survived on welfare and experienced a number of psychotic episodes that on some occasions resulted in brief stays in the psychiatric ward of my local hospital. Since then I married a wonderful man, we have deeply enjoyed the past 16 years together, I've never been happier (at times literally jumping for joy) and I haven't had a psychotic episode since. My husband says I've made his house a home and the government is no longer paying to support me. As two can live much more frugally in one dwelling than they can separately our romantic relationship conserves resources and that means it's better for the environment and society. Religious conservatives like Jordan Peterson would decree that society have blindly prevented all this with no regard for how much better it has been for all involved, my husband, me, and the government - that's indefensible, that's crazy talk. Far from being a bad thing, my living as a woman and marrying my husband has been a positive thing for us and society. No one is hurt by me living as a woman and society treating me as such, what's immoral is blindly seeking to prevent this. No one has the moral authority to deny me gender affirming health care and love with this man as I hurt no one.
Anti-lgbt conservatives often go on about "God's design for sex" and allege there is an inherent "complementarity" that exists between males and females that supposedly same sex couples don't have. They don't accept that I'm a woman and assert my husband and I are somehow innately incompatible or romantically unsuited for each other. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Conservative media figures like Jesse Watters insist feminists have been deceived into pursuing a career when if they were honest they would acknowledge they're naturally much happier being a stay at home house wife. Tucker Carlson and Jesse Kelly say women aren’t biologically capable of being employed and happy. My previous love was with a woman I was more sexually attracted to than my husband, but I feel much more emotionally compatible with him than I did with her. This housewife role with him as the bread winner and authority that conservatives claim is most likely to result in a happy opposite sex marriage suits me very well - there is a great deal of complementarity between us, he is the love of my life. This means either there is no inherent advantage in "complementarity" for opposite sex couples, or I really am a woman and that's why our relationship is such a success. Either way core evangelical beliefs must be wrong.
We all know from experience that whatever inherent "complementarity" there may be between any given male and female solely on the basis of gender is woefully insufficient to ensure a happy and successful marriage - there are so many other more important factors in determining how romantically compatible two people are with each other. Most of us know opposite sex couples that are a disaster and same sex couples that work wonderfully together. Society best give people the freedom to pursue happiness as they wish instead of counterproductively trying to compel heterosexuality. No rational person can look at the relationship I have with my husband and honestly say this love shouldn't be welcomed and valued by society.
If You Don't Believe You Are Obligated to Follow Other Religions Why Would You Think Anyone Is Obligated To Follow Yours?
Like so many, Jordan Peterson mistakenly thinks the depth of conviction and immense devotion of people like him to Christianity is compelling evidence that it's true, but millions of fundamentalist Muslims are just as certain theirs is the one true religion, their god is real, and their certainty and dedication to Islam prove that. They are just as committed as Jordan and his followers to creating a world run under the auspices of Allah and haven't the slightest doubt that anyone who calls Jesus God is going to hell.
If you want to make the unjustified assumption that one of the globe's religions must be real (the "one true religion"), the only incontrovertible truth we can take away from this is that millions of people who couldn't be more deeply devoted to and certain their religion is true have to be wrong. Throughout history many, many people have willingly and enthusiastically sacrificed their lives for all manner of religions. So, If not all, certainly most have thrown away their lives for false beliefs. No amount of certainty or devotion is proof one's religion is true, there is no logically compelling reason why Christianity should rule the world rather than Islam, or Hinduism. If we baselessly assume one of them best rule the world, how do we decide which one? There's no rational way to pick one over the other so only pointless violence can determine an unchallenged winner. We are all best off when everyone accepts that the only reasonable overarching principle of society is to maximize the happiness for all in an equal and fair way.
Conservatives laud Jordan Peterson as an intellectual. If that's at all true it should be obvious to Jordan his not accepting that sincere Muslims have the right to force him to live according to Allah means he doesn't have the right to force me or Elliot Page to live according to his Christianity - our bodies our choice. You don't have the moral right to force anyone to follow your religion other than yourself and people who think otherwise are a threat to the well-being of civilization. There is no rational reason to believe any particular religion is right and all others wrong. If you don't accept that a religion other than your own has authority over you, it necessarily follows that there is no valid reason for you to think your religion should have authority over anyone else who doesn't believe in it either.
The claim that a Christian business owner's "sincere" religious belief lgbt people are immoral obligates him or her to refuse to provide us with services they offer to others is shown false every day by Christian business owners providing affirming services for Muslims who the bible says are just as immoral and hell-bound as lgbt people. If your Christianity allows you to bake a cake for a Muslim or atheist wedding it obviously allows you to bake a cake for a gay wedding so please stop pretending otherwise. This allegedly "sincere" religious belief is a convenient and hypocritical excuse for not giving the same break to lgbt people Christians routinely do to people the bible also condemns for following other religions.
According to conservative Islam, Christians and lgbt people are equally immoral, both deserve and will get eternal punishment for being so. So, why do many Muslims put so much more effort into demonizing and punishing lgbt people than they do Christians? Why not treat them equally? If Muslim parents don't feel a need to direct their children to make a public display of trampling on the bible why do they have them do so for the pride flag? The Koran says Christians are no better than lgbt people but, for the most part, large numbers of Muslims are willing to overlook the sin of Christianity but not gayness - why the double standard? It's clearly not about being obedient to a religion.
In some of these countries the government tries to maximize the violence perpetrated on lgbt people to force us not to exist - it doesn't work, they are never finished finding and throwing lgbt people off of buildings, more are born every day.
Christians ask me, what if I'm wrong and their religion is real, do I want to risk eternal torture by not following it? The problem is that Muslims will tell me the same thing. As an objective observer wanting to decide which religion to take up to minimize my chances of being tortured for eternity, what convincing reason do I have to believe Jesus is God and not Allah or Vishnu and Ganesh? Muslims and Christians will both tell me they have uncontestable proof their religion is the one true religion, but neither can give any remotely convincing reason why I should believe theirs over any other (beyond the circular reasoning that it must be true because their religious texts say it is). Francis Collins, who lead the Human Genome Project, said he became convinced of the truth of Christianity while he was out hiking and saw a waterfall frozen into three separate streams. To him that expressed the Christian Trinity and proved his religion is true. For someone clearly possessing great mental processing power he set an unacceptably low bar for proof, something we regularly see in believers of all religions. To encounter three examples of something while you're out hiking is far from a miracle, far from out of the ordinary, and far from being evidence the particular god you favour exists. If a Muslim told Francis Collins that he was out hiking and saw a waterfall frozen into a single stream and this proves there is no god but Allah, he would never accept that as any kind of proof. One of my sisters stopped talking to me because I wouldn't agree to join her religion. Her proof that the Jesus god is real was seeing a bluebird several days after the funeral of her 8 year old daughter who loved bluebirds. I assure you there is no end to Muslims that have similar kinds of proof that there is no god but Allah and all Christians are going to hell.
A pastor who was asked about the likelihood of his religion being true offered the superficially correct sounding type of fallacious logic strategically employed by the far right wing. He said (I'm paraphrasing) "Well either God exists or he doesn't, so that means there is a 50/50 chance I'm correct.". If the error in this logic is not readily apparent to you, consider the same statement from the buyer of a lottery ticket about winning the top prize: "Well, either I win or I don't so I have a 50/50 chance of winning all those millions.". You don't have to know much about lotteries to know your odds of winning the top prize are very far from 50/50. The right wing floods media with this kind of specious logic in order to sell their harmful and unfair agenda to the broader public. Whether they actually believe what they're saying or not, the well worn debate tactic is to talk over opposition with a flood of specious arguments to derail the thoughtful but time consuming analysis that would show it to be wrong. If religious fundamentalists like Jordan Peterson want people like me to acknowledge they're right and peacefully acquiesce to the demands of their religion that I split from my husband and live as a man they need far, far better evidence than what they've offered until now to show their religion is true. And the same goes for Islamic extremists like the Taliban. If they don't see good reason why they should be morally obligated to follow some one else's religion it should be obvious to them there is no rational reason any one is morally obligated to follow theirs either. MAGA authoritarians like Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Jordan Peterson are very much of the same mind as the Taliban in Afghanistan. To think other people are morally obligated to follow your religion is to reject the basis of society, the social contract "I'll treat you fairly if you treat me fairly." - this is anti-civilization.
Despite the fervent wishes of so many, one religion ruling the world and supplanting all others never has and never will happen. Jordan Peterson is never going to convince all Muslims to worship Jesus and they will never convince all Christians Allah is God not Jesus. Religion divides the world into good and holy believers and bad people who don't believe like we do, it creates opposition where there best be cooperation[25]. The only universal values under which the world can conceivably unite to overcome shared global threats is the belief we are all equals and society's main goal is to maximize the happiness for all in an equal and fair way. No matter your religion, if you truly believe your god is love and your religion is peace, that should be easy for you to agree with. There is nothing controversial or divisive about this philosophy unless you think you and your tribe are better than everyone else and entitled to rule us all, which any fair minded and rational person firmly rejects on the face of it.
MAGA Republicans Beat The War Drum
Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene has loudly and theatrically called for a "national divorce". Some liberals agree with her, tediously asserting the solution to polarization is every liberal living in a red state should relocate to a blue state and vice versa. Authoritarians like Marjorie cherish the idea of retribution on their imagined enemies. She is making a declaration of war on everyone outside her tribe, a war just short of initiating physical violence. Her unrealistic, angry demand for a national divorce is an announcement she's no longer open to good faith discussion, the subtext being "I'm no longer willing to adhere to the social contract and treat liberals fairly, I am unconditionally opposed to liberals having any say in how our society works." MAGA Republicans like Marjorie will, without remorse or hesitation, discard truth, logic, equality and the rule of law to achieve political dominance. Her demand for a "national divorce" is childish, destructive, and unworkable, an expression of weighty contempt, hostility, and extreme selfishness.
A prime example of this type of warfare just short of violence, this cold civil war, is Marjorie Taylor Greene blurting out that Dylan Mulvaney, is "one of the biggest pedophiles in America today" because Dylan is a trans woman with a large following. Marjorie knows nothing about her beyond there being no reason to think she's any more likely to be a pedophile than any other random person one might encounter. She seeks to provoke violence against transwomen by goading people with the lie that trans females only go into women's bathrooms to sexually assault those present: "Listen, they want to have sex with you. That’s why they’re in there. That’s real. …These are sexual predators.”. Marjorie is engaging in stochastic terrorism - she isn't directing any specific person to cause a given harm to lgbt individuals, she's using these lies to rile one or more of her anonymous supporters into committing random acts of violence against us allowing her to disingenuously deny she had anything to do with it or wanted it to happen.
Marjorie's not-yet-violent war's rule of engagement is "I will make up whatever B.S. story I can to make you look as bad as possible and my tribe as good as possible and do it every chance I get.". She is encouraging MAGA Republicans to believe any amount of physical violence against liberals would be justified if they decided that's what they want to do. That's what's behind lies like "Democrats want Republicans dead [every accusation is a confession] and they've already started the killing". Then, with a stunning lack of self awareness, she ironically says “We want our own safe space and we deserve it.” - in almost every case it's right wing extremists[26] who are calling for violence, attacking and killing liberals, not vice versa.
Marjorie Taylor Greene crows about being a champion of morality yet she aids a minority of Americans with violent psychological tendencies to continue to accrue power over the peace and freedom loving majority through lies, threats and intimidation because at some level authoritarians like her realize they can't make a logically consistent and compelling argument for the authoritarian policies they advocate to advantage themselves - the hypocrisy is monumental. Supposedly Marjorie Taylor Greene was originally planning on calling the book she wrote "The Case For Christian Nationalism". I can tell her right now that the case for Christian nationalism is just as strong, convincing and desirable as the case for Islamic nationalism and the case for Hinduism nationalism.
Marjorie posts fire-arm cross-hairs on pictures of her opponents, brandishes weapons and retweets calls to shoot Democrats. If she is hoping to scare people, it's working, she is definitely a scary unhinged person. I am scared Republicans like her, Ron DeSantis, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump will turn the United States into Russia, Chechnya or Hungary where the dictator and oligarchs who run the country have almost all the wealth and the bottom 97% have their standard of living and freedom severely curtailed, where lgbt people are outlawed, don't have free speech, and may be tortured and killed by the government or government sanctioned vigilantes - this is where MAGA Republicans are trying to take the United States.
I am scared to see people like Marjorie in leadership or regulatory roles because they use the apparatus of government and power of their positions to maximally bias the system in their favour at every step and won't hesitate to break the law if they can do so without immediate accountability (and of course they're preventing accountability wherever possible too). At this time anything just short of personally initiating violence goes and they sleazily claim plausible deniability to the random acts of terrorism they indirectly inspire with their vilification of innocent people who resist being second class citizens. Hard right wing Americans like Ann Coulter have been talking about invading Canada for a while now, I don't want a Russia on our southern border to make that all the more likely.
Most Americans have neither the resources nor the ability to leave their home and start a new life in a different state - all the liberals moving to blue states and all the conservatives moving to red states resulting in everyone being happy with their government and society is an impossible and counterproductive dream. Even if you could at once physically separate all conservatives and liberals there would always be new conservatives being born in blue states and new liberals being born in red states. No matter what you do, conservatives and liberals will always exist together, just as we evolved to. It's recklessly naive to assert people can ever create territories solely populated by liberals or solely populated by conservatives where everyone lives happily ever after. No matter how alluring the thought is to some, it is just not possible to have a national divorce and pining for one only increases wasteful conflict and distracts us from what needs to be done to implement policies that benefit and obligate everyone fairly.
War takes resources that could be used to make everyone's lives better and wastes them destroying infrastructure and assets that then take labour and resources better used elsewhere to replace when there was no valid reason to destroy them in the first place. For greedy authoritarians and their key supporters this doesn't matter, it allows them to maximally enrich themselves by lowering the standard of living for everyone else (as has happened in Russia). For some, having an imagined enemy like lgbt people to hate and torment feels exciting, empowering and fun, but it won't make your life any better, you won't gain any resources through cultural or literal war on us, you'll only throw them away while gaining nothing beyond the temporary toxic thrill of hurting people you unjustifiably dislike.
You can't repeatedly give an admirer of dictators like Donald Trump consequence-free rein to do whatever he wants and expect he'll suddenly restrain himself appropriately at some future point before he takes it too far and ends American democracy (as he has regularly expressed the desire to do). Trump has been taught throughout his lifetime he can break the law with impunity. There's no way he's going to suddenly become reasonable and restrained at some point in the future while Republicans continue to prolifically lie to defend his ever more outrageous and totalitarian behaviour.
Now Ron DeSantis is using the Trump playbook and fascistically asserting ever stronger and broader control over Florida government, it's institutions, and it's citizen's lives. He violates the rights of parents and medical professionals to carry out what the scientific method has shown are best health-care practices for gender dysphoric children. It's highly unethical for politicians to substitute their partisan policy goals for the judgement of the experts and the parents of the children who are actually affected. Conservatives have historically railed against this kind of government overreach - they should this time too. Parents who want to accept and support their naturally lgbt children shouldn't have fewer rights than parents who want to futilely and destructively attempt to compel all children to be heterosexual. It's not the government's place to restrict people's sexual orientation or gender expression or tell them what they can do with their bodies. While we all reasonably accept that children have fewer rights to make decisions for themselves than adults, conservatives once universally agreed upon letting parents make those decisions in their stead rather than partisan politicians. Right wing authoritarians like Tucker Carlson, Loren Boebet and their lackeys like Kevin McCarthy will spit on the most sacrosanct conservative principles if doing so at the moment helps them gain power, money, or influence.
A popular idea amongst right wing authoritarians like Steve Bannon, The Proud Boys, The Oathkeepers, and The Three Percenters is that society is best organized as independent monarchies ready to wage war on each other. That surely derives from natural psychological tendencies evolved over millions of years that encourage one tribe (or individual) to benefit in the short run by taking the resources of another by stealth, deception, or force (and then killing the opposing men and forcing fertile females into sexual slavery). One individual or tribe gains short term benefits but it's at the expense of innocents and the whole of humanity in the longer term is less well off than it would have been if everyone worked together fairly instead of wasting resources in conflict. Many believe our vastly superior intelligence sets us entirely apart from the animals. They snicker when I suggest observing the nature of animals to understand our own ("You see yourself as a lowly animal - ha ha!") and yet here are so many people who think humans are intellectually superior advocating we organize society around the destructive animalistic idea that might makes right - the antithesis of civilization.
The pace of change in our modern knowledge based technological world is thousands of times faster than when we were all hunter gatherers 12,000 years ago. Our inherent psychology and the natural balance of conservatives and liberals was then ideally suited to our pre-civilization tribal survival needs but it is no longer. Homeostasis over hundreds of thousands of years human hunter-gatherer culture with its intermittent tribal warfare in a relatively static external natural environment worked by rigidly holding to the knowledge and ways that have always worked in the past. Now our natural cave-man psychology inhibits us from reacting quickly enough to a rapidly changing new world to continue to survive and thrive. In a modern world facing global existential threats our natural hunter-gatherer psychological tendencies cost us far more than we gain, perhaps humanity's very survival.
Intermittent tribal warfare has been present in many animal societies for millions of years as well. Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors tells us in some detail the social interactions and life of a tribe of Chimpanzees that in some ways reflects human society - individuals organized in tribes and intermittent fights for dominance punctuating longer periods of détente.
Chimpanzees and Bonobos are mankind's closest genetic relatives sharing 98-99% of our DNA. But unlike Chimpanzees, Bonobos are generally a peaceful species, there are no inter-tribal fights and little of the daily violence that is typical in Chimpanzee society. Amongst Bonobos conflict is normally settled through make-up sex and individuals tend to share what they have rather than fight over it as Chimpanzees frequently do. I often wonder which of our closest relatives we are naturally most similar to in social structures and culture, the highly sexual, peaceful and loving Bonobos, or the Chimpanzee society that prominently relies on violence and intimidation to settle disputes. I'm confident our long established human nature is some where in between the cultures of the two species most closely related to us, significantly different than religious fundamentalists claim and how some recent(on an evolutionary scale) societies have counterproductively forced the population to behave.
Now that knowledge and intelligence are paramount to humanity's survival our deeply embedded evolutionary psychology of "might makes right" and the law of the jungle causes a lot of needless harm and destruction. Society needs a continuous effort and commitment to counteract our natural tendency to separate into tribes and engage in violent, wasteful contests for control which, given a no longer nomadic lifestyle, allows dictators to assert unnatural and unreasonable amounts of power and control over huge numbers of people to the detriment of the vast majority of us.
The happiest, healthiest, and most efficient societies are built on democracy, equality, and fairness. If you're a compassionate conservative, do not let the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers, the MAGA Republicans (this significant minority of the population with a natural tendency to violence) scapegoat male femininity to push you into hate, destruction, and a lower standard of living. Do not vote for politicians who cravenly do the bidding of these extremists in return for their political backing. If you see yourself as intellectually and morally superior to animals it behooves you to make a sincere effort to be honest, debate in good faith and resist living by might makes right. Hard right wing Republicans have abandoned honesty and fairness while fraudulently claiming to be paragons of virtue - if your tribe insists on unconditional superiority at every turn, as right wing authoritarians do, it necessarily relies on promiscuous dishonesty to create false justifications for a majority of the population that reasonably wants fair treatment.
Even the restless 20% or so of humanity who are authoritarians at heart can be happy living in harmony and cooperation but the majority of us will find our happiness greatly curtailed with them in charge as is the case in Russia. If the authoritarians try to intimidate you with violence or threats of violence remind yourself that the large majority of the population is on your side - the right wing authoritarians don't speak for most people or have the moral authority to force you to live according to their hostile, selfish, knee-jerk reactions to a reality they insist on very inaccurately perceiving. In order to make the best decisions on how to run society we need an accurate understanding of reality which Republicans commonly seek to prevent (note laws against researching gun violence or government agencies mentioning "global warming"). While stereotypical gender expressions and heterosexuality are consistent with who most people are, the idea that all people are innately and completely heterosexual or that children are a blank slate upon which any gender identity or sexual orientation can be written is grievously wrong. The ideology that all males are, or should be, masculine and all females feminine is an inaccurate perception of reality and decisions based on this false understanding will not be the best we can make.
I like to discuss morality with deeply religious people and I always tell them the essence of morality is "Do whatever you want, but harm no one." Often they scoff and dismissively blurt out "That's just utilitarian ethics!" as though that characterization by itself discredits this idea - it certainly does not. If that's how you see it, what have you got that works anywhere near as well as "utilitarian ethics"? I'd very much like to have that conversation with anyone who thinks they have a superior form of ethics to make everyone's lives the happiest they can be in an equal and fair way.
Often when I define morality the knee-jerk response of conservatives is to subsequently pettily misquote me and falsely claim I believe "Morality is do whatever you want." They can't refute what I actually said but this clearly dishonest misquote pops easily to mind and they can't resist the childish dodge - it's that "might makes right" debate strategy some conservatives depend on: "If I can make up some specious b.s. on the spur of the moment to make you look bad (or me look good) it's my moral right to do so and you're the asshole if you object.". A typical example of this kind of glib dishonesty is Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeting "New York has the worst air quality in history due to wild fires from Climate Cult Canada.". If you willfully take the mental shortcut she offers the nonsensical suggestion that people who oppose global warming are responsible for fires caused by global warming can sound superficially correct and that's good enough for MAGA Republicans, that's "fair" to them in pursuit of tribal advantage - "we deserve more than everyone else so lying is justified".
Another sad and hateful example of this sort of relexive childish dishonesty is Nikki Haley's comment when told about a recent study showing depression is a serious and growing problem amongst teen girls. Nikki fatuously proposed their depression was due to not being able to win any sporting contests because trans girls win them all when in reality trans girls competing in school sports (let alone winning) is extremely rare. Save Women’s Sports, an organization that advocates banning transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, has identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports grades K through 12 in the entire USA. That’s essentially no one - clearly, clearly the wide spread depression of teen girls has nothing to do with trans girls playing girls' sports but Nikki couldn't resist the knee-jerk "I just heard of a bad situation, let me baselessly blame it on people I hate."
When I call right wing conservatives on this common kind of dishonesty they defensively howl "Liberals are just as bad!" but you just don't see liberals lying with such wild abandon, frequency and total disdain for the truth. Surveys of politicians' fact checked statements have proven this. No liberal politician has told remotely close to the 30,000+ lies in a four year period that Donald Trump has. Right wing authoritarians are well aware of how much Trump lies and are openly thrilled by it, they see this as "owning the libs" and showing he will unconditionally seek to advantage their tribe over all others - fairness and equality only matter within the tribe. If only they could see Trump, like Putin and other dictators, is merely pretending to champion them in order to benefit himself and his key supporters. Whenever an authoritarian like Trump needs to choose between what's good for his supporters and what's good for him he will never choose them.
Let's Make Our World The Best It Can Be
I don't seek to harm Steve Bannon, Jordan Peterson or Marjorie Taylor Greene, but they seek to harm people like me in their pursuit of dominance. Liberals just want equality of societal consideration and honest good faith debate. MAGA Republicans claim to want a meritocracy, but in a meritocracy you don't lie, mislead, and intimidate your way to power and for MAGA Republicans this is now standard operating procedure. As Chris Kelly said "To these "Real Americans," a transgender celebrity's image on a can of Bud Light or a "tuck-friendly" swimsuit at Target is a greater threat to the Republic than an ex-president whose every utterance is a lie and who instigated a failed coup to overturn an election he lost." or to quote Joe Kennedy "They routinely warp the power dynamics of some of society’s most crushing injustices, attempting to convince voters that victims of discrimination, oppression and hate are in fact perpetrators of some larger wrong against everyone else."
Like the innate desire of a significant minority of humans to have an enemy to violently exploit, the drive to cooperate and share is also deeply embedded in the psychological tendencies our species has evolved. A recent article by a MAGA Republican alleged Ayn Rand perfectly predicted the future we're in now and quoting her saying "Capitalism and altruism are incompatible … They cannot co-exist in the same man or in the same society," showing she wasn't a particularly insightful person and couldn't see beyond her inner tumult. The desire to be altruistic and the desire to be selfish DO co-exist in most people and most societies and we naturally aim to balance the two competing desires which generally leads to everyone being better off.
The natural tendency of people to cooperate with each other is the foundation of every society and best be the basis of our globally connected and interdependent civilization, not warring monarchies right wing "Q" conspiracists fetishize. Humanity has learned much since we were all hunter-gatherers, in our modern technological world we now need intelligence to succeed far more so than violence but our innate psychology has yet to catch up. It goes against human nature, but we're best off seeing all of humanity as our tribe, as people we want to cooperate with and make better lives with, rather than as dangerous outsiders who should be subjugated, converted, or expelled. If we are going to minimize, suppress, or restrain any part of our natural psychology and behaviour let it be unjust anger, aggression, and violence, not harmless same sex relationships or male expressions of femininity.
Whether you're conservative or liberal, if you want the best for everyone you must have an accurate picture of reality which requires a level of honesty far above what we see today in MAGA Republicans like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Tucker Carlson. and Marjorie Taylor Greene. They seek to maximally tilt power and the perception of reality in favour of MAGA conservatives and against the rest of us; its a strategy of war just short of violence which it can readily devolve into. The main tactic in this cold civil war strategy is the unqualified refusal to acknowledge any reality that contradicts the ideology that MAGA conservatives deserve superiority over all. As civil rights lawyer Elena Komsky warned "Using division, hate, and instituting anti-democratic reforms slowly is a well-known path to political power."
It is this natural psychological tendency towards violence in pursuit of unaccountable and socially corrosive dominance over others that civilization best constantly resist and discourage, not freedom of gender identity and expression. Children need to be taught a few foundational social values every reasonable person can agree with: cherishing good-faith debate, pride in readily admitting when you're wrong, a sincere commitment to honesty and accurately understanding and portraying reality so we can make the most effective, rational, and beneficial socio-political choices possible. Reject the law of the jungle, toxic masculinity, the amoral pursuit of tribal superiority and short term wealth; embrace civilization, honesty, and fairness. All we ask for from political opponents is be honest and debate in good faith about how society best be arranged. If you truly see yourself as morally superior and intellectually distinct from animals show it and place truth before the law of the jungle. All of humanity is our tribe. We're all in this together.
END
** Special thanks to the producers of the TV show "Valentine Road: The Murder of Lawrence King" for the background information I used in this essay.
Footnotes and links referenced in this email are in the attached files
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