Charlie Cooke, on continued surveys that show radical trans positions are horribly unpopular with the American public:
I don’t understand why those who commission and respond to these surveys are surprised by this. There was a piece in Axios, speaking of comedy, that implied that the reason that super-majorities of Americans who go to church, including 80% of African-Americans, are skeptical toward these radical agenda claims is that conservatives keep talking about it, the culture war has got to them, the backlash has moved them off their supportive positions.
This is bizarre self-delusion, born of the idea that if a certain group of people in our culture wake up one morning and decide that an idea is worthwhile, that that, rather than the status quo they are pushing back against, becomes the baseline. This has been the mistake from the beginning — the assumption that just because you say something it makes it true, and that everyone else will go along with it and those who say “hold on a moment, I don’t think that’s a very good idea” are the ones who are causing the ruckus, they are the ones responsible for the culture war, they are the ones trying to shift public opinion. Of course they’re not.
The claims that are being made by radical trans activists run counter to what people have believed — especially in Western civilization — for hundreds or thousands more years. Of course the public is sitting there saying “Sorry, what?” What what else did we really expect? Did we really think that a few people in marketing agencies, in Congress, and Hollywood were going to shift our foundational understanding of sex that is born, not out of some contingent cultural moment, but out of our human experience, out of the experience that we witness around us in the animal kingdom and always have?
I think it is a profound failing of modern progressivism that it believes that society is as malleable as it is. That the whole thing is informed and shaped and moved and melded by language. It’s not. So yeah, people are sitting here saying “uh, nope, I don’t think I believe that.”
If you compare the way that our newspapers talk about this issue with the polls, you see how out of touch and narrow those newspapers are. Anyone, anyone who says anything that contradicts ideas arrived at yesterday evening is labeled as anti-trans.
Meanwhile, a majority of Americans doesn’t even believe that transgenderism is a thing. It’s not that they’re anti-it. It’s that they don’t comprehend it. They think that the fundamental claim is bizarre and they operate and proceed from that premise. So I’m not surprised by that. That I would’ve assumed.
I am surprised at how surprised those who have been trying to affect this social change seem to be, that they have not been able to just click their fingers and rewire the world.
UPDATE: Where this silly logic ultimately leads. (I say "ultimately," but who knows?) From today's Daily Telegraph (UK):Gender politics | Downing Street has said that headteachers should intervene to stop children identifying as moons, cats or other “neo genders”. A spokesman for the prime minister said children should not be influenced by the “personal views” of teachers. It comes after The Telegraph revealed that a Year 8 student was described as “despicable” by their teacher for objecting to the idea that a person could identify as a cat.
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