Even the more common-sense types on the liberal left, the ones not totally captured by ideology, will tell you that ‘the trans debate is difficult’. It is not. There are two sexes, men and women. In very rare cases, a person of either sex might have gender dysphoria. If you’re a grown-up, have had an adequate amount of therapy to rule out other possibilities and you want to live as the opposite sex to the one you were born into, fine. But self-identification is a terrible idea for numerous reasons. Two of the biggest are that it, one, allows people who might have psychological problems to identify as trans by mistake (with massive, irreversible medical complications involved), and two, that it allows any man, including some with less than pure intentions, access to women’s spaces. That’s before we get to the fact that offering the option of changing one’s gender to children is an even more terrible idea.

See, not hard. What’s amazing is that the above viewpoint would have been considered the stridently liberal position even 10 years ago. Now, it would get you cancelled from every metropolitan liberal-left dinner party (which doesn’t worry me, I never got invited to them anyhow).

* * * * * * * *

A lot of young men voted for Donald Trump. And while I am not a fan of Trump myself, I get it. I think the whole ‘toxic masculinity’ narrative has been a total disaster for the centre-left, more so than even the trans stuff. Young men are being told constantly that they do not matter, that they should shut up, that they have privilege, that many of the things they like to do for fun are somehow ‘problematic’. This is why people like Andrew Tate have such a seemingly inexplicably large following – who is creating a positive view of masculinity from a liberal-left perspective?

This has created a gaping space for Trump that he has happily driven into and parked the bus. Call me naïve, but when you expend all your political energy pissing off both men and women, what’s left? There really aren’t enough nonbinary folks out there to make up the difference (sorry).

Read the whole thing.