Trans Ideology Is Now Laughable. Time To Make It Unthinkable

When the transgender fever fully subsides, it won’t be because of how celebrities like Kiera Knightley respond to idiotic questions about it. But it’s telling when celebrity windsocks no longer feel obligated to pay ritual fealties to social contagions, because social contagions rely on ritual fealties to survive.

In a Decider interview published last week, Knightley — who voices a character in a forthcoming audiobook recording of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series — was asked if she was “aware” of the fury directed at Rowling and, by extension, the Potter franchise for Rowling’s “ongoing campaign against trans people.” (By this, the interviewer meant Rowling’s insistence that men cannot become women and should not be enabled to invade private women’s spaces.)

“I was not aware of that, no. I’m very sorry,” Knightley said with a glint of sarcasm and a laugh.

I highly doubt Knightley, who has included herself in what she describes as a “progressive” and “left-wing artistic” group of people, intended to become the new patron saint of conservative women’s magazines with that laugh. The actress’s previous deference to progressive sexual politics (“of course” she’s raising her daughters to be feminists, she told Vanity Fair) suggests she became the conservative icon du jour by total accident, though if she withstands the pressure to apologize for her momentary moral clarity, she deserves some respect for that. (If she really wants us to praise her bravery, she should speak up for women with the decisive conviction that Rowling has.) But at the very least, that Knightley felt free to react so candidly to the absurd demands of trans radicals suggests some kind of Overton window shift.

So does a study, published the same day Knightley’s interview was posted, indicating a “Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans.” Canadian professor Eric Kaufmann found the share of students at “elite” universities who professed to have irregular gender identities had dropped drastically in the past two years. Even more interesting, he concluded the trend reversal was happening independently of political or religious beliefs, which did not follow the same trendlines.

Kaufmann’s research, paired with other studies that have found evidence of transgenderism being brought on by social pressures, strongly indicates the modern explosion of transgender ideology is a metastatic fad. His research also indicates — as does a celebrity’s belief that she no longer must pay homage to the transgender gods — that the fad has an expiration date.

Transgender doctrine was always held together by the corporate assumption that it could not be questioned. It cannot survive being dismissed, or worse, laughed at. While any reports of its death are greatly exaggerated, it is certainly weakened.

But that does not mean it will slink away quietly. When it subsides, it will leave its victims maimed and in need of both compassion and practical rescue. Before that, we can expect its perpetrators to act with all the desperation of those whose life’s work is suddenly under threat, not just of being extinguished, but of being exposed as on the wrong side of history. If transgenderism is an expression of sadomasochism — doing violence to physical bodies that won’t submit to ideology — we can expect a similar reaction from the transgender cult directed at an unsubmissive society.

That’s why Knightley’s kumbaya solution is insufficient. After laughing, she told her interviewer, “You know, I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure out how to live together, aren’t we? And we’ve all got very different opinions. I hope that we can all find respect.”

It’s as good an answer as you could expect from a celeb, but it’s not a great plan. Injecting children with sterilizing hormones, chopping off their healthy body parts, and forcing them to share bathrooms with perverts is not a “different opinion” that deserves respect; it’s behavior that a sane society would deem criminal. You wouldn’t just ask people to “figure out how to live together” with murderous criminals (unless, of course, you were a Democrat district attorney). I don’t want to be forced to “live together” with pedophiles who lurk in the women’s bathroom — I want those guys locked up away from me and my future daughters.

Laughing in the face of transgenderism’s propagandists is a fine start. It would be great to live in a society where full-grown men cosplaying as toddler girls are treated with deserved mockery instead of accommodation. Exposing (pardon the poor word choice!) the movement’s absurdity can help deter would-be victims from falling for it. Studies have shown that many young people, particularly young girls, face massive social incentives to adopt LGBT identities. Reversing those incentives would surely slow the mania.

But we have a lot more work to do. Young people who have fallen prey to transgenderism’s false promises need physical and mental healing. Some will drop the fad as easily as they adopted it, but others suffer from legitimate and often preexisting struggles that deserve the kind of compassionate counseling the state of Colorado is currently fighting to outlaw. Parents will need community support in protecting their children from self-destructive delusions. Lawmakers and prosecutors will need the courage to sue and, yes, imprison the so-called doctors and therapists who pump vulnerable young people into the lifelong gender patient pipeline and coerce them into medical self-harm.

Celebrity comments won’t do all that — but there’s no better example than Rowling to show that their courage can embolden others to stop entertaining harmful fictions. Hopefully Knightley pays attention to her example.

Elle Purnell is the assignment editor at The Federalist. She has appeared on Fox Business and Newsmax, and her work has been featured by RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.