2019: The Beginning of the End for the Transgender Movement

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By Tom Gilson, a senior editor, The Stream, January 2, 2019

Tom GilsonThe ground is shaky under the feet of the current homosexual insurgency — especially on the transgender side of the movement. This year I predict we’ll see the start of a turnaround. Trans activism, which roared up out of the true nowhere of biology-denying illusion only three to five years ago, is about to see the beginning of its own end.

Early Signals in the Boy Scouts

The Boy Scouts are harbingers of what’s to come, just as they were early in the gay activist movement. They were attacked early on. Years ago Philadelphia denied them meeting space, for their anti-homosexual standards. The Boy Scouts held out for years. Finally, though, the politics and the pressure were too much to withstand, even for as strong and venerable organization as theirs. They accepted gay scouts.

They even changed their name and their mission simply to The Scouts, for both boys and girls. In response the Mormon Church, which sponsors nearly 20 percent of Scouts, has made it clear they are withdrawing support completely. The Scouts’ parent organization is now considering a bankruptcy filing.

There was a time — not long ago, perhaps three to five years — when gay activism advanced on a premise of equality and fairness. The Scouts experience show us what this “equality and fairness” looks like in action. A movement built on falsehood is hard to sustain. And its fundamental unfairness is showing its face ever more clearly now in the form of transgender bullying.

Parents Will See It First

Parents can see the damage being done. They’ll take a crucial role in unraveling it as they see more events like these unrolling:

Stephens College in Columbia, MO, is the nation’s second-oldest all-women’s college. Beginning this fall, it will accept men who identify as female.

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A friend of mine holds a university student-services leadership position. He tells me the trans issue is complicating on-campus housing decisions. I am quite sure that somewhere, some college freshman woman is being assigned to room with a “transwoman.” And she’s being shamed as “transphobic” if she objects to rooming with a man.

Meanwhile, for the second year in a row, the Texas State girl’s wrestling champion isn’t a girl.

Parents will not put up with this for long. They won’t sit idly by as young girls decide en masse it’s cool to “transition.” Sanity will wake up again and wash its bleary eyes before long, at least in the home.

Public schools may try to stave off parental intervention to hide students’ transitions from their parents. But parents will not let this go on forever, either.

Tyranny Will Lead to Collapse

The trans movement demands compliance without compromise. Persons must actively deny obvious reality, contradicting in their language what their eyes and science plainly see as the truth. The result is tyranny. People are being fined for refusing compliance in New York, and they’re being fired in Virginia. (It’s even worse in Canada.) They’re being banned from major social media sites.

More and more it’s coming clear: the LGBT movement’s equality/fairness premise was always false. Activists were able to make that motto sound plausible for a time, but that plausibility is on the verge of collapse — even in sectors beyond conservatism, where we’ve been saying it all along.

This collapse will not happen primarily through the courts. I have high hopes the judicial system will support sanity with respect to sexuality and gender. But as the Jack Phillips case shows, a legal battle won is hardly a cultural victory.

No, the change will come through a groundswell of realization that the trans movement is built on a lie. There is no science supporting it, no rationality to suggest that gender confusion is a positive condition, nothing in it to say it should be celebrated. We can support those affected without lying to them that the effects are good.

The LGBT Movement’s “Bridge Too Far”

There’s nothing going for trans activism but the bandwagon effect. Gay activism succeeded, and carried trans activism along behind. But trans activism will prove to be gay activism’s “bridge too far.”

What happens next is harder to predict. A collapsing trans movement could rupture the entire LGBT movement, as LGBs realize how foolishly they’ve tied their strategic futures to an unstable and impossible T factor.

What happens next is harder to predict. … Activists won’t vent their hatred and frustration only against each other.

Outside those movements’ leadership, I believe we’re about to see a wider, general cultural backlash begin to build. It will gather power slowly, perhaps even invisibly at first, as cultural elites build dikes against it. We ought not underestimate their power. No anti-trans movement backlash is likely to overwhelm them in just one year.

Behind the scenes, though, in producers’ offices, faculty conferences, and social media boardrooms, the backlash could at least have them worried by the end of 2019. Their worry, I predict, will only grow over years to come.

Good Change is Coming — But Not in Pretty Form

Fear will certainly come into play elsewhere as the LGBT insurgency sees its growth being threatened. That fear will combine with LGBT activist hatred against normal marriage and morality to produce a volatile and potentially explosive mixture.

We could have a challenging year ahead of us.

So we can expect LGB vs. T splintering within the movement, just as feminists and gay rights activists are splintering. But activists won’t vent their hatred and frustration only against each other. It will erupt somehow in the form of anger toward the wider culture. How that will display, I do not know. Such strong emotions have unpredictable effects. But it will not be pretty.

Over the long run — say, 15 to 25 years — the LGBT movement will fade into the cultural background. Children of the mid-21st century will know nothing of today’s constant pro-gay messaging in the media. Although gay marriage may not be overturned — the future is dark to me on that question — no longer will it be considered “hateful” to have questions about it.

Change is coming. Its long-term outcome may well be very good. In the short term, though, be prepared. We could have a challenging year ahead of us.

Tom Gilson is a senior editor with The Stream, author of A Christian Mind: Thoughts on Life and Truth in Jesus Christ and Critical Conversations: A Christian Parents’ Guide to Discussing Homosexuality With TeensHe was chief editor of the anthology True Reason: Christian Responses to the Challenge of Atheism, and he’s the author/host of the Thinking Christian blog.

Tom lives near Dayton, Ohio with Sara, his wife. They’re the proud grandparents of two grand-dogs, a grand-cat and a grand-bunny, by way of their recently married daughter and their very recently married son. He has received a B.Mus. in Music Education with a specialty in performance from Michigan State University and an M.S. in Organizational Psychology from the University of Central Florida. When he’s not writing he loves drinking coffee, canoeing, walking in the woods, and playing his trombones.

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