The U.S. State Department has joined the transgender lobby in gaslighting the country about gender and sex. On Wednesday, the Associated Press reported, “The U.S. State Department has issued the first United States passport with an ‘X’ gender designation. It’s a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female.”
Tempting as it may be to shrug this off as yet another part of the “phony culture wars,” as former President Barack Obama recently said, the State Department’s decision is not a milestone. It is fraught with logistical issues and communicates an entirely flawed philosophy about gender and sex, further obliterating a landmark of Western culture: male and female differences. Marking “X” as a person’s gender might seem benign, but all its inferences are troublesome at best and make for a dismal future at worst.
For starters: What happens when someone marked as “X” flies to a country where only female and male is recognized? Lay aside the logistical problems and consider what this communicates about the U.S. to the world at large: We are not a serious country that takes the mental health of its citizens seriously.
Normalizing a person’s gender as “X” rather than male or female is as dangerous as allowing an anorexic person to continue to starve herself because, after all, she’s merely only living out her true identity by refusing her body nourishment. Willingly participating in identifying a person as genderless is a sign that the U.S. government, thanks to the extreme leftism of the Biden administration, fails to recognize the disastrous signs of what will become of a nation that allows people enduring an obvious mental health crisis to succumb to their whims.
Gender dysphoria is widely recognized as a mental health issue and is just as real and undoubtedly terrifying as any other. But there is little evidence demonstrating that giving in to the dysphoria with a full social and medical transition from male to female (or vice versa) actually helps people with gender dysphoria feel less confusion or anxiety.
Still, the Left, combined with transgender advocates, continue to press transitioning, arguing the transgender issue is about being oneself, embracing one’s true identity, which somehow so happens to be opposite the person’s biological gender at birth. Not only do both groups laud each other for encouraging unhelpful, often dangerous transitions, they do so despite evidence contradicting their success. I can’t think of another area of mental health — anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, or eating disorders — where any mental health professional would advocate that a person struggling merely give in to find the cure.
But in one fell swoop, a small but vocal community of influential people suggest that biology is not real, sex is mutable, and gender is fluid — not because these are facts but because they have allowed their liberal ideology to bend the truth to inform their worldview. It is as if 100 colorblind scientists swear the sky is gray while the rest know it to be blue. The denial of reality, science, biology, and more is terrifying. If scientific fact can be manipulated, what can’t be?
This, too, is the root of the “bathroom wars” in school. Yes, parents fear for their daughters’ safety and their sons’ privacy, but deeper than that fear is the realization that transgender students, their parents, and in many cases an entire school system, are collectively agreeing to dispel what has been an obvious truth for millennia. To treat the undisputed facts that men and women possess different biological traits and cannot change their gender as if the issue is as fluid as taste in music is disorienting. This is why the issue produces such strong responses from parents. No one enjoys being lied to when they can see the lies are brazen.
The government has no business stepping into this arena. It is a sign that the government wants people to ignore certain kinds of mental health issues if they fall under a leftist movement and, in fact, that it will willingly advocate on their behalf with such absurdities. People should not give in to such blatant gaslighting, and they should be firm, yet kind, in their stance against this absurdity.
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
