Of Trans And Trojan Horses

I’d like to introduce a new Substack term, or at least I think it’s new.

The Trojan Horse

A Trojan horse is when someone you follow restacks a note on Substack written by somebody you have already put on mute causing you to click through to that note.

It’s Substack’s version of being Rick rolled. In fact I wish Rick Astley would start a Substack because a Trojan horse pointing to Rick Astley would just be so meta.

Thank you to Demi over at

The Starfire Codes

for Trojan horsing me the other day with this note referencing a post written by someone named Walter Rhein.

In fact this one seems to be popping up on my feed with sentiment featuring various iterations of “look at these idiot leftists”

So I thought what better thing to do on a Sunday than cook up some red meat bloody and rare.

The central premise of Mister Rhein’s article is that conservatives hate the LGBTQ community because they are supporting politicians that harm them. He then goes on to cite a series of harms most of which should be familiar

Opposition to gay marriage

Opposition to neo-pronouns

Opposition to biological men in the women’s bathroom.

He didn’t mention biological men in women’s sports, but I assume it’s implied.

You could certainly construct some kind of judo counter-argument along the lines of voting for democrats means you are a hateful anti-religious bigot.

E.g.

Supporting democrats means you support people who want to erase religious people from public life. They want to force them to violate their religious beliefs by baking gay wedding cakes. They support a party that wanted to forbid them from attending church services during Covid. They fire them for praying in public.

I’m not going there except to say virtually every exercise of government power is harming somebody. Green policies harm oil rig workers. Steel tariffs harm auto workers. Ridiculous professional licensing requirements for braiding hair hurt poor people who want to improve their lives.

Mencken is famed for saying

“every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods”

True, but elections are also the process by which the majority inflicts their preferences on the minority by voting on things that are none of their business. Generally speaking this is acceptable to the left even noble.

Somehow for LGBTQ fare we are expected to make an exception.

There is a reason for this of course. I’m going to start by explaining to the best of my ability here the progressive world view, and I’ll try to get it right.

To progressives there are groups in society that have disadvantages for various reasons from the innately physical, to psychological, to accidents of birth. These differences are inherently unfair, and it is the role of government to make adjustments to society to level the playing field and lift up these groups.

Resisting such efforts is an attack on these groups because they have a right to be lifted up, and the rest of us have a moral obligation to do so.

I don’t see the world through this lens nor do most people which is what leaves the most fervently zealous left in such a perpetual state of rage, and despair. Our oil worker is supposed to vote himself out of work to be an “ally” because LGBTQ is supposed to trump whatever practical concerns he may have about the government harming his family.

I love the term luxury beliefs, but this goes beyond that. It’s luxury priorities. Your “marginalized groups” hobby isn’t a priority for someone being personally harmed by the bundle of invasive, nannyist, centrally run, command and control policies forwarded by the likes of Elizabeth Warren. They just want to keep collecting their freaking paycheck, and otherwise be left alone. They don’t want to firebomb a gay bar, but they don’t want to be fired for not getting on the neo-pronoun train either.

In fact if you look at sentiment on gay marriage this is generally what you get. If you search the topic “gay marriage” in Substack notes you will find result after result from people talking about gay marriage, but it’s overwhelmingly people saying it’s under threat not people threatening it. Likewise you will find next to zero support for reintroducing sodomy laws. Neither of these topics animate much of anybody who doesn’t have both Ukraine flags and pride flags in their bio.

And despite that, yes gay marriage is becoming less popular among republicans. Per Gallup.

Republicans’ backing for same-sex marriage has averaged about 30 percentage points lower than that of Democrats while also showing the same general pattern of increased support over time. Republican support has reached the majority level twice, with 55% readings in 2021 and 2022, but has fallen below 50% in the past two years.

So among Republicans specifically, just like everyone else, there was steadily increasing popular support reaching a meaningful majority in 2021, that cratered by 2023.

Why did that change?

I think it’s blowback for the antics of LGBTQ activists who are kind of in fact assholes.

There are two competing ideas here that relate to out groups. There is tolerance which is the idea that people who go about life differently than you do should be allowed to exist in society. Tolerance generally speaking is a value most people embrace, raging covidians between 2020 and 2022 being an exception.

Tolerance just means I’ll let you go about your life if it doesn’t hurt mine.

The other idea is accommodation. Accommodation goes beyond tolerance, and means everyone else is adjusting for your benefit. When it comes to LGBTQ stuff you will find among almost all political groups, from conservatives to independents to middle of the road democrats, support for the demands of LGBTQ activists drop as we move along the spectrum from tolerance to accommodation.

That’s why you see general support for gay marriage running in the 70% range. That’s tolerance. Support drops to about 26% when it comes to biological men playing female sports including a plurality of democrats who I’m guessing aren’t 50% homophobe? That’s accommodation. When you ask for tolerance most people will oblige. When you ask for accommodation it’s dicier. When you demand accommodation it makes you look like an asshole. Nobody wants their child harmed in the name of intersectional ideology.

Sorry your daughter has brain damage, but it’s totally worth it because Harold Maude finally got to play 18 volleyball games as the girl she always knew she was inside.

Everyone who hears that line of reasoning thinks asshole. They think fuck you, I don’t care if 1000 Harold’s Maude’s get to play a million games as their true selves. Brain damage is not a reasonable accommodation.

And it’s not as if major accommodations are the norm.

As a left hander I can assure you that the majority is not going to bend over backwards, and adjust to my needs. I spent years writing on right handed desks, cutting with right handed scissors, and just generally dealing with the fact the universe was designed for right handed people. They tolerate me because why wouldn’t they? and I accommodate a world that fits the needs of the vast majority of people because why wouldn’t I?

The belief that the world should be designed around the wants of a tiny minority so they can be elevated is a peculiarly progressive belief system shared by few, and conveniently designed so bullies, can act out their blood lust online while erotically stroking their moral superiority. It’s performant masturbation of their own sociopathic psychological ID. The other word for this is cancel culture or asshole culture if you will, and it turns people against you. It makes you unpopular.

You had me at gay marriage.

You lost me at mandatory dicks on the girls basketball team.

And I’m not alone.

It’s a shame really because there are lots of more or less normal people who have outlier sexual preferences, and would simply like to be able to enjoy the same legal benefits of marriage everyone else has, not have to worry about being fired for those preferences, and not be worried about getting their ass kicked up and down the street by 3 high school dropouts in a rusty pick up truck. That seems reasonable to me.

But it’s not even tolerance or accommodation. The new demand is for fealty, and obedience which isn’t a bridge too far it’s a rocket ship too far. LGBTQ activists over the past 5 years had misread the battlefield, and concluded that their political enemies were routed so they gave chase, and pressed their advantage. We went from toleration to accommodation to get in line or else.

This led to mass efforts to force people out of their careers for any slight to LGBTQ orthodoxy. They thought they were burning Atlanta on Sherman’s march to the sea. There was no need to tolerate so much as a meek objection to anything. Heretics would be destroyed with expediency. They had a juggernaut army of corporations, media outlets, and politicians at their back, all fervent believers in the revolution.

But they weren’t. They were mercenaries in it for the paycheck, happy to vanish into the air, as soon as it seemed like a bad bet which it now does. Now there are about 50 of you surrounded by 2000 angry villagers pissed off that you burned their crops, and secretly transitioned their 8 year old son, and all you have in response is

We aren’t you’re just assholes.

In my mind the defining moment was when they went after Dave Chapelle, and attempted to banish him from the internet as retaliation for his Netflix special that included some trans jokes. Hunting Dave Chapelle was hunting big game, too big, and the effort failed, but it revealed something important.

The movement as a whole had gone from tolerance to accommodation to demands for outright privilege. After all a comedian’s job is to joke about things in society, and the best of them have no boundaries. Demanding that you should be a special class in America that is so important as to be beyond the reach of comedy is a claim of extraordinary privilege, a privilege that nobody else has.

The retort often heard is that comedy “can’t punch down”. This doesn’t work because this notion is once again a progressive value not shared by the wider population. Comedians can and should punch everywhere, and in any case the very fact you can make such arguments with a straight face hardly screams you are being oppressed. Those who can’t be criticized aren’t paupers. They’re kings or in this case thought they were.

The misconceptions were legion which is how we went from LGBTQ activism for gay marriage to the idea that they could force normies to accept the idea that terms like “pregnant woman” are offensive.

There needs to be a lot more reading of the room here because when an all purpose political weathervane in hyper-left California is reading the political tea leaves and comes up with this.

You have to at least consider the possibility you have found yourselves on the wrong side of crazy.

If you want to get married you can get the population behind that. They already are.

If you want more resources to arrest people if they violently attack you, you can get that too.

But if you think you are going to run around getting people fired because they don’t completely agree with you while everyone else walks on eggshells, those days are over.

You’ve lost Gavin Newsom. Your army is spent and exhausted. I think it’s time to sue for peace, and personally I’m more than happy to provide reasonable terms. I propose the rest of us dedicate ourselves to tolerance, and in return your activists stop being assholes demanding special privileges, and accommodations while showing tolerance in return. Deal?