Christmas with the Presidents
Jerry Newcombe
The public is wearied by a decade of incessant promotion of all things trans and nonstop virtue signaling. Its heyday has come and gone.
As today marks the beginning of Transgender Awareness Week, the last thing Americans need—or want, for that matter—is more awareness of the unfairness of trans rights to women and girls. Enough is enough. It’s time for the transgender movement to demonstrate some self-awareness instead.
Americans are weary of being told that trans women are women and we shouldn’t deprive them of the right to compete in female sports. What about the rights of women and girls to fair competition? Or the rights of children to grow up without the influence of gender ideology confusing them into thinking they were born in the wrong body?
Up to our eyeballs in pronoun fatigue, we are tired of all the gaslighting. Americans made that clear at the voting booth last week. Behind inflation and open borders, the Democratic Party’s commitment to transgender madness rounded out the top three concerns that drove the majority to elect Donald Trump in a landslide.
In this series we will examine the trajectory of the transgender movement—an arc that moved from awareness to acceptance to the repudiation of the overreach of the trans agenda, especially as it pertains to women’s rights and the medicalization of minors.
The public is wearied by a decade of incessant promotion of all things trans and nonstop virtue signaling. Its heyday has come and gone.
A decade ago Time magazine’s cover story “The Transgender Tipping Point” celebrated the increased visibility of transgender people, calling it America’s next civil rights frontier. The June 2014 magazine cover featured prominent trans actor Laverne Cox from the hit TV show Orange is the New Black as an example of someone who broke barriers in representing transgender people.
In the run up to election day, Trump’s most effective TV commercial that resonated with voters ended with “Kamala’s for they/them; President Trump is for you.” The results of the presidential election indicated the nation has experienced a transition of its own.
In April 2015, Bruce Jenner punctuated the tipping point with much fanfare when the celebrated Olympic gold medalist announced his gender transition during an exclusive interview with Diane Sawyer for ABC’s 20/20. The highly promoted two-hour special episode aired on a Friday night, garnering 20 million viewers, the show’s largest audience in over 15 years. That summer Jenner received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN for his alleged courage in coming out publicly as transgender and graced the cover of Vanity Fair in lingerie, adding legitimacy to a cause that people formerly viewed with doubt or suspicion.
The coup de grâce for Jenner and the trans community happened when the ultimate manly man, who once adorned the cover of Sports Illustrated and the Wheaties cereal box after setting a 1976 world record to win the gold medal in the decathlon—arguably the toughest sport of the Olympics—was dubbed “Woman of the Year” by Glamour magazine.
Jenner starred in I am Cait, his own reality TV show, which chronicled his gender transition to Caitlyn, and his ubiquity in popular culture throughout 2015 did more to make transgender mainstream than anyone previously. But since at 65 he was the age when people are normally announcing their retirement—not their gender transition—he wasn’t necessarily a role model for children.
Jazz Jennings, however, became the poster child for gender dysphoric children as the result of TLC’s popular reality show I am Jazz that followed the teenager’s journey as a male-to-female transitioner. After starting a gender transition at age five and puberty blockers at 11, Jazz underwent sex reassignment surgery at 17. The TV show, which put a young and fun face on medical transition for gender confused children, started in 2015 when Jazz was 15 and has continued for eight seasons so far. With all the notoriety surrounding popular trans influencers like Jazz, Caitlyn, and Laverne, the world was on notice that the transgender revolution was well under way and here to stay.
National Geographic underscored this sentiment with its January 2017 cover story, entitled “Gender Revolution,” featuring a pink-haired 9-year-old boy who identified as a girl on the cover.
Merriam Webster defines a tipping point as “the critical point in a situation, process, or system beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place.” It was certainly a tipping point; in the years since, the trans agenda has tipped all the way over and gone the way of Humpty Dumpty.
This is not to say that transgender rights no longer exist, but for a public who in the last decade was wearied by the incessant promotion of all things trans and nonstop virtue signaling, its heyday has come and gone.
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