The controversy over transgenderism arose a few years ago seemingly out of nowhere. But when it did arise, it erupted like a cultural Mount St. Helens.

The transgender cause has not been part of the homosexual communities’ agenda until recently.

When Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen wrote their book, published in 1990, “After the Ball: How America will conquer its fear and hatred of Gays in the 90’s,” I do not recall they made any mention of the transgender issue. At that time, there were transvestites—men that dressed as women who were a recognized part of the community. They were still gay, saw themselves as men, and were still interested in men. And there were “butch” lesbians. Many dressed like men, but still saw themselves as women and were attracted to women. Such variety among homosexuals is not unusual.

While homosexuality was removed from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mental illness in 1973, transgenderism was first categorized as a psychosexual disorder in 1980. In 1994, the classification was changed to gender identity disorder, and in 2013 it was changed to gender dysphoria. Today, gender dysphoria remains categorized as a mental illness.

The modern history of recognizing transgenderism as something different from homosexuality dates to the German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin in 1919. In 1930 he performed the first known sexual reassignment surgery. Before Hirschfeld, not much clearly is known about the issue. The history is murky, to say the least. There isn’t even much known about the Institute for Sexual Research either since the Institute was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 and all the Institute’s books and records were burned. Hirschfeld was forced into exile and he died in France two years later.

The first American to become widely known after having undergone sexual reassignment surgery was Christine Jorgensen, born George William Jorgensen, Jr. Jorgensen served in the U.S. Army in Europe during WWII and while there learned of fledgling practice of sex reassignment surgeries. Throughout his life he had been troubled by his “lack of male development,” but we don’t know what he meant by that. In any case, after returning from the war he began taking estrogen and in 1952 he received permission from doctors in Copenhagen to undergo a series of surgeries there.

A letter he later wrote to his parents announcing that he now was Christine somehow was leaked to the press. The story was widely circulated, and Christine Jorgensen became a household name. Jorgensen remained somewhat of a celebrity for the rest of his life—as an oddity, not as a norm. He died in San Clemente, CA in 1989 at the age of 62.

Until after 2010, there has been very little public awareness about the transgender issue. However, since 2006, a recent survey showed, there has been a 4,000% increase in youths seeking transgender treatment. Additionally, prior the to 2000’s a large majority  of those seeking transgender treatment were males seeking to transition to female. Today that has reversed. Now 70% of those seeking transgender care are female wanting to become male. During the early years the general public was completely unaware of the changes. Now most are aware of many issues involving transgenders’—biological males using female restrooms and locker rooms, biological males on female sports teams, hormone and surgical treatments, etc.—but few have greater than a superficial understanding.

Perhaps the first inkling that the general public got of the sexuality changes going on behind the scenes was in February, 2014, when the Amazon Original show, “Transparent,” (about a parent, Morton, coming out transwoman, Maura) was released to critical acclaim. The show centered on the characters exploring their sexuality and their reactions to others. In no way could the show be considered a real-life attempt to understand what a real-life mental illness is, gender dysphoria. It was an emotionally manipulative series aimed at normalizing transgenderism.

The awakening of the general public began to accelerate when the Obama Administration issued instructions to U.S. Schools that Title IX applied to trans girls, requiring schools to allow biological boys to play on girls’ teams and to use girls’ facilities. While the Trump Administration later rescinded those rules, the schools already were full speed ahead implementing the Obama Administration’s plan. The Biden Administration is accelerating the agenda even faster.

The pandemic and parents becoming more aware of what their children are being taught, the press coverage of the 4000% increase in the number of trans youths, Abigail Shrier’s 2020 bestselling book, “Irreversible Damage,” all have coalesced to make the issue seem like a freight train, thundering down a mountain, after losing its brakes.

To many of us the last five years has seemed out of control, that the world has lost it’s collective mind on this issue. Who could possibly think that when a child as young as four or five, or maybe even younger, says they were born in the wrong body we should accept that as true? That is insane. But we are told its settled science. Moreover, courts and schools and government at all levels have steamrolled any opposition.

Most people must believe this insane idea, right? It turns out, no.

Last month, Summit Ministries of Manitou Springs, CO, released the results of a poll it commissioned. McLaughlin and Associates conducted the poll of 1,000 likely voters from all over the country. It was a stratified random sample that covered all ages, parties, races, voting behavior, sex, ideology, education, population density, and region of the country. One of the questions that was asked was: “What is your reaction to efforts to expose children to the transgender movement using things like drag shows, school curriculum, and social media.” To my surprise, of the 92% that answered the question, 71% of the participants were concerned, while 29% were not upset or concerned. Of the 71%, 41% described themselves as very concerned or angry.

The other question that was asked was “Do you believe that pharmaceutical companies and doctors who promote puberty blockers and cross sex hormones for underage children seeking gender transition should be legally liable for any harmful side effects that arise?” There were 826 of the 1000 participants that answered that question, 83%. Of those, again 71% answered yes, while 29% replied, no.

It is encouraging that at least 71% of us have some common sense. So why are we electing legislators and hiring people for government jobs who don’t? That is a genuine mystery.

When it comes to truth, though, who believes what makes no difference. Just because the whole world believes a lie, that does not make it true. The challenge for us today is to find the closest proximity to truth that we can on this issue. Some experts believe that chemically and surgically mutilating healthy sex organs is the best course of action. Other experts are repelled by the thought, instead favoring talk therapy.

My research points to more experts being repelled than being in favor of the mutilating chemical and surgical interventions. In these circumstances, doesn’t the solution seem clear? Shouldn’t treatment be that which causes the least harm, while allowing the experts to continue researching and debating the issue?

It seems to me that would be the best practice for decision making, as well as the least divisive. Let’s end the eruption and toxic hostility . . . on this issue, at least.

Written by Ignatius Amadeus

No, you’re not crazy. They just want you to feel that way.

There is a special flavor of cognitive dissonance experienced by those confronted with the dawning of a collectivist utopia. It’s found in the twilight between luminescent NuThink and the benighted remainders of objective reality that we plebs cling to so bitterly.

Allow me to illustrate.

Recently, as I perused the social media headlines about the present plague year, I came across a news item whose image featured the governor of Pennsylvania and his secretary of health, Dr. Rachel Levine, who is, in fact, a man. It struck me because the news was not about Dr. Levine’s chimeric redefinition. Rather, it was a serious news piece about a serious issue, and the doctor was peripheral to the point of it. The presentation of such an incongruity–an appointed official whose gender LARP (Live Action Role-Playing) is only slightly more convincing than that of Corporal Maxwell Klinger–without the slightest batting of an eyelash, is the whole game in a nutshell.

You see friend, it requires no acknowledgement, since there is nothing of note here. Only the grotesquely gauche would stumble. We have serious business to do here. Please focus.

The deadpan delivery leaves you feeling gaslit by the reality being proffered. The implicit assertion is not truth, but the situation itself is reality, formed by consensus, and presented without comment.

But, it’s democratic gaslighting.

This collective lack of acknowledgement, cemented by the integration with serious business being done, makes anyone who is tripped up by the disjoint feel that they are on the outside. Anyone hampered by a pedestrian tethering to pre-postmodernism is made to feel the keen edge of their status as other.

It’s akin to walking into a business meeting and finding one of the participants is wearing a bear suit. “What’s with the bear suit?” you ask. You are simply met with cold stares.

This feat of quiet ostracism, this sudden sense that one is an ideological castaway, coalesces all of a sudden. A breeze blows through you, and you realize the season has changed.

You are being gaslit but not by a sociopathic manipulator. The growing psychic pressure is the constricting consensus of an increasingly popular fabricated reality. You are on the business end of a casual conspiracy of complicity. There is a new set of tracks that your train of thought just doesn’t run properly on. You are given two choices: reconfiguration or derailment.

You keep entering business meetings, to be silently greeted by a fellow in a bear suit.

You’re going to keep getting this lesson until you learn it. Capisce?

In After the Ball, a diabolically masterful turnaround strategy created to take American homosexualism from reviled to revered, authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen laid out a pathway to bring us to this present moment of bear suit ubiquity. It began with desensitization, progressed through leveraging perceived commonalities, and promised powerful acceptance.

When you’re very different, and people hate you for it, this is what you do: first you get your foot in the door, by being as similar as possible; then, and only then – when your one little difference is finally accepted–can you start you start dragging in your other peculiarities, one by one. You hammer in the wedge narrow end first. As the saying goes, Allow the camel’s nose beneath your tent, and the whole body will soon follow.

This was published in 1989.

Once the concept of tolerance was deformed to mean acceptance, and love was refashioned to include things for which it was not designed, it was clear that The Plan was getting far more cultural traction than anyone had dreamed possible. As the sea change continued, the launching of Same Sex Mirage was a fait accompli. Always, you will note, brought to market in the carefully constructed context of simulated normalcy.

The weight of normalcy packaging + the momentum of previous acceptance = the psychic force applied to dissenters who note the incongruities.

This simulacrum of normalcy, coupled with the raised stakes of whatever novel idea is being introduced, creates an uncanny valley of experience. It’s designed to camouflage the situation such that it sufficiently approximates reality for the initiated, but to the sober-minded, the differences create dissonance. That dissonance is designed to cleave off the bitter clingers–to refuse entry to the non-compliant, and convince them that they are the ones failing to grasp this democratically elected reality.

The pressure can feel immense at times–not the Lilliputian arguments for NuThink–but their collective power to layer up, entangle and enervate. Yes, you can see each point where things got ratcheted up, but the cumulative effect–that you feel.

The most recent gut punch happened when I (virtually) encountered “Dr. Glitterbear,” a Rutgers University professor, in his unicorn-jammie-and-white-pumps ensemble. He had apparently led the charge to have a fellow PhD’s published paper about gender anarchy retracted due to its NuThink compliance failure.

“What’s with the unicorn suit?” Cold stares.

Yea, though I walk through the uncanny valley, I will brook no evil.

As has been noted by those who have experienced totalitarian rule, this immense pressure to conform to a synthesized consensus exerts a real toll on the non-compliant. Presented with each new escalation, the mind struggles like an up-ended turtle wriggling to regain its feet.

It can be exhausting and disheartening to keep the turtle righted.

First, know what the truth is and why it is the truth. If you’re reading this, I will assume that you’re likely well-engaged in this process. Understand that we are in an ontological crisis where millions are being swept out to sea. Know how to anchor to the fixed bedrock of actual truth. While this battle is presented as a quibble over small changes, you must understand that it’s actually a conflict over whether reality is already defined or ad-libbed. For anyone adhering to a belief in Logos and Creation, the definitions are fixed and non-negotiable.

Second, don’t lose your equilibrium. When wading through strong opposing forces, it’s easy to overcompensate. Movements become exaggerated, and overreactions can abound. It’s oh-so-easy to become shrill, alienated, or paranoid. It’s simple to get knocked back into reflexive overreaction. Learn to find grace under pressure, and don’t allow yourself to be distorted by your exertion against the onslaught.

Third, encourage and invest in others to strengthen the bulwark against this flood of Dionysian dissolution. Maintaining relationships with other people who are also committed in their fidelity to truth is important. Though one may be overpowered, two can defend, and a cord of three strands is not easily broken.

Finally, do not think it strange, this fiery trial which is upon us. Be encouraged that the Truth Himself was similarly opposed, and so we now share in that same suffering. Having done all, stand. Simply bearing witness to truth in a raging sea of illusion, is a Kingdom act.

“Ignatius Amadeus has been a brand messaging professional for over two decades, and his writing focus is on society, culture, and communication. His desire is to examine, understand, and express what is happening in our nation in order to clarify and see things move in a restorative direction. A typical Gen-Xer, he is most at home in a mashed-up kaleidoscope of the banal and sublime. His interests range from theology to cinema to fine art and music. Oh, and obsolete technology. He thinks that’s fun, too.”

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18-19).

In the wake of the Charlottesville melee, the mainstream press is citing the disreputable Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and its “hate” groups list ad nauseum with nary a peep about the repeated criticism of the SPLC as a bastion of anti-Christian bigotry.

The Illinois Family Institute (IFI) is included on the “hate” groups list alongside white supremacist and white separatist groups for no reason other than our biblical view of marriage as a sexually differentiated union and our biblical views of sexual morality—views that are shared by the Roman Catholic Church, many Protestant denominations, many non-denominational churches, Orthodox Judaism, 2,000 years of church history, and the Bible.

It’s not just IFI that finds the SPLC and its leaders unethical. The avaricious founder of the SPLC, Morris Dees, and the dishonest editor-in-chief of the “Intelligence Report” which is responsible for the corrupt “hate” groups list, Mark Potok, have come under sustained criticism from many people for many years. (Click here, here, and here  to read more.)

Several months ago, one such critic, Real Clear Politics writer Carl Cannon, wrote an exposé of the SPLC, to whom Cannon attributes blame for the anti-free-speech assault on political scientist Charles Murray at radical Middlebury College in Vermont.

Civil rights attorney Dees co-founded the lucrative non-profit SPLC in 1971, ostensibly to combat the racism endemic to the South, and on the way, he’s made a boatload of money that has enabled him to live the luxurious lifestyle to which he and his five serial wives had become accustomed. His clients? Well, they didn’t fare quite as well financially.

Cannon explains that when the Ku Klux Klan’s power waned and racism diminished, the SPLC had to find new ways “to frighten people into still donating.” He says that “Scaring the bejesus out of people requires new bogeymen, and lots of them.” Further, Cannon claims that “mainstream conservative groups” are among the bogeymen.

Cannon reports that the “most scathing assessments of Dees and his group have always come from the left” like “Stephen B. Bright, a Yale law professor and president of the Atlanta-based Southern Center for Human Rights,” who describes Dees as a “con man” and a “fraud.”

Even the far-Left magazine The Nation indicts Dees as “the archsalesman of hatemongering,” accusing him of stuffing “mailbags…with his fundraising letters, scaring dollars out of the pockets of trembling liberals aghast at his lurid depictions of a hate-sodden America in dire need of legal confrontation by the SPLC…. Dees and his hate-seekers scour the landscape for hate…it’s their staple.”

While useful idiots in the mainstream press disseminate the SPLC’s propaganda, thus smearing Christian organizations and lining the pockets of Dees, the FBI has stopped using the SPLC as a resource.

The SPLC has perfected the tactics espoused by homosexuals Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen who in 1989 wrote what they deemed a “gay manifesto for the 1990’s” titled After the Ball, in which they urged “progressives” to utilize the mainstream media in a campaign to eradicate conservative moral beliefs—what they call “homohatred”—or “silence” the expression of such beliefs in public:

[L]ink homohating bigotry with all sorts of attributes the bigot would be ashamed to possess and with social consequences he would find unpleasant and scary…. Gays must launch a large-scale campaign…to reach straights through mainstream media. We’re talking about propaganda…. Gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection…. Make victimizers look bad…. The public should be shown images of ranting homohaters whose associated traits and attitudes appall and anger Middle America. The images might include: Klansmen… Hysterical backwoods preachers… Menacing punks, thugs, and convicts who speak coolly about the “fags” they… would like to bash… [or] A tour of Nazi concentration camps where homosexuals were tortured and gassed.

The SPLC employs all of these propagandistic tactics to stigmatize and marginalize Christian organizations like the Family Research Council, the American Family Association, Liberty Counsel, and the Illinois Family Institute for our beliefs about sexuality and marriage that derive from Scripture and for our willingness to express them publicly.

These are a few of the organizations that have not fallen prey to ravenous wolves or been taken “captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).

For their faithfulness, Christ-followers will be hated, but enduring such trials brings blessings:

“Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matthew 5:11-12).

The cost of discipleship has been minimal in America for over two hundred years, but the cost is rising due to the unholy efforts of “LGBTQQAP” activists.

While Jesus says, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me,” many Christians—entire denominations—are choosing instead friendship with the world, ignoring the words of James:

“Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.” (James 4:4).

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