The Gay Case for "Don't Say Gay"
The real threat to gay youth: radical gender ideology and wacko teachers
Florida adopted a new law this year; you may have heard of it. Like how the Affordable Care Act became “Obamacare,” Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act has a more common name in the media: “Don’t Say Gay.”
The core provisions of the law are as follows:
“Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”
“A school district may not adopt procedures or student support forms that prohibit school district personnel from notifying a parent about his or her student's mental, emotional, or physical health or well-being, or a change in related services or monitoring, or that encourage or have the effect of encouraging a student to withhold from a parent such information.”
Don’t Say Gay? Not really, no. More like: “don’t tell the kids they’re gay or trans and then withhold it from the parents.” In fact, I see the law as a very pro-gay law. After all, it addresses the number one thing threatening gay youth: wacko teachers trying to trans them. If cutting the gay stuff out of the 3rd grade curriculum — why was it in there anyway? — means we get stop the trans stuff, too, that’s a deal I’ll take.
Follow the Science: The Canadian Trans Study
In March 2021, a landmark study was published in Canada that measured the desistance rates of gender-dysphoric boys. Or in plain English, how many boys that appear to have gender identity issues grow out of it?
The study tracked a group of 150 individuals who were referred to gender clinics as boys between the ages of 3 and 12. Later in life, the study found a desistance rate of 88%, meaning that 88% of the boys who were possibly gender-dysphoric or “trans” as kids resolved their dysphoria and stayed as boys. The study also found that about two thirds, 63-65%, were gay.
The Canadian study was the largest ever of its kind, and the results shocked me. Not because it’s surprising that some gay men have gender issues as a child — that doesn’t seem crazy — but because of just how high the percentages were. Nine in ten weren’t trans? Two thirds were just gay?
This scientific finding is now, of course, forbidden knowledge, and gender ideologues have done their best to distract from and ignore it. I was fascinated enough to read several of the other canonical studies on the topic. Here are my top two conclusions:
In all the longitudinal studies, the majority of boys who were possibly gender-dysphoric were later assessed as androphilic, i.e. they’re gay.
Not a single sound study has ever found more than 20% of possibly-gender-dysphoric boys persisting in their dysphoria. The two most authoritative longitudinal studies put the number at 12% and 2%.
So: very few “trans kids” are trans, but most of them are gay!
The question for us is what to do about this. To the great credit of Florida Republicans, “Don’t Say Gay” is basically the perfect solution. Just let kids be kids, gay or not, and leave them the hell alone!
Story Time
I grew up in a politically center-right but totally secular household. I was once sent to Vacation Bible School at a local church, mostly for the arts and crafts activities. I didn’t last long there after I struggled over a Biblical word search puzzle full of names I had never heard before. Who is Jonah, and what’s this business about a whale?
At 7, I didn’t know those things, and had never been taught. I also didn’t know I was gay — though I expect some adults may have theorized I was. The key detail is that there wasn’t some narcissistic, pronoun pin-wearing, self-proclaimed “ally” teacher or other adult who decided that they knew for me.
I feel very lucky to have grown up exactly when I did, before the lunacy of gender ideology entered elementary school curricula. If I had been born 10-15 years later and gone to kindergarten in 2022, there’s a very good chance that one of my teachers would have tried to trans me. Have you seen some of these people on Libs of TikTok? They’re practically salivating to impose their own “queerness” and social oddities on young children, and they tell themselves they’re just helping the children to embody what their “identities” already are.
Would I trust a “woke” elementary school teacher to make the right judgements about eight-year-old-me? No, I wouldn’t. That’s not to say I would have been thrilled to grow up in an uber-conservative religious environment, either, but I’d still prefer it to a woke one — that’s for sure. For example: what if the teacher were this person, featured by Libs of TikTok?
In 2022, which archetype is more likely to inflict permanent damage on gay children — the homophobic preacher pushing conversion therapy in rural Texas, or a teacher promoting the erasure of gender and surgical interventions? I’d argue it’s the latter, but you won’t get any Hollywood movies about the negative effects of the trans craze on gay youth.
As it happens, the Canadian researchers went so far as to suggest that it was possible that homophobia actually resulted in increased rates of trans persistence. In other words, when kids weren’t allowed to be gay, they became trans.
In the present study, it could be hypothesized that the parents of persisters held less favorable views of androphilia (homosexuality) compared to the desisters and thus predisposed to persistence in order to “normalize” one's sexual orientation.
Makes you think!
The Encroaching Gay Legal Movement
Since the end of the last statutes criminalizing homosexuality, the singular threat to normal life for gays and lesbians in America (and its cultural colonies) is not Christian or conservative homophobia. Those forces are practically irrelevant nowadays — if you ask most conservative Christians, they’d actually complain that religious institutions are far too approving of homosexuality.
American gays face so little real discrimination that they have to create it themselves.
They (I would say we, but I don’t associate with these gays) do this by harassing florists, cake bakers, and other creative professionals — often the same ones, like Jack Phillips — with increasingly specific requests intended to violate 1st Amendment rights. Then, they run screaming to the courts, activists feign shock at the “anti-gay discrimination,” the gay lobby brings in high-powered lawyers to argue the case, and the cycle repeats itself…
No, the real threat is the onslaught of radical gender ideology, predicated on the denial of reality, that is erasing and even replacing homosexuality as a category. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling put it concisely and accurately: “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction.”
I do not consider myself a total reactionary on the transgender issue — yet — and would like to be able to adopt a “live and let live” position. But that’s not where we are; radical trans activists have no intention of letting anyone live in peace. I will gladly accept the moniker of “transphobe” in order to stand up for the rights of gay children to be left alone in their development without abusive surgeries and chemical castration at the hands of a deeply-unwell group of trans activists.
For a small subset of gender-dysphoric adults, medical “transition” might be a prudent path (I tend to doubt it even in those cases, but I won’t let it ruin my day). But we must be very honest that the possible positive effects from “transition” to the person seeking them are mostly cosmetic. The negative effects are not cosmetic; they are permanent and affect a lot more than appearance.
And let’s be honest: none of this should even be discussed in the context of children. The LGBT lobby disagrees, and are unwilling to separate the gay question from trans ideology.
Many of my right-wing comrades say that it has been a slippery slope from legalized gay marriage directly to state-supported transitioning of children. As a gay who stands to benefit directly from the first leg of this supposed slippery slope, I’d like to think it’s not the case, and I’m trying my best to stop the continued slippage. But given how LGBTQ (emphasis on the TQ) activists are behaving nowadays, it’s hard to argue with conservatives who connect the two things. A slippery slope indeed…
The watershed legal victory of Obergefell — which ended the democratic debate around gay marriage in one fell swoop — emboldened LGBT activists to make increasingly brazen and narcissistic demands on society, and to continue to ignore democracy while doing it. Only about 10 states in the U.S. enacted gay marriage through representative democracy; over 30 enacted bans on gay marriage democratically. But the Obergefell decision told us that the issue wasn’t subject to voting anymore. This came as a surprise to tens of millions of Americans who had voted in referenda on marriage throughout the 2000s. That was just pretend voting, I guess…
And yet, Americans, being like they are, accepted it — not just legally, but culturally. Today, 71% of Americans support gay marriage, including a majority of Republicans.
An unnecessary piece of national legislation to “protect” gay marriage (from what, exactly?) even passed with bipartisan support in Congress recently. And as if we needed any further confirmation that the left now explicitly connects gay marriage to imposing transgenderism on children, the Biden administration invited multiple drag queens who have performed for children to the signing ceremony at the White House.
For the LGBT activist movement, the lesson of Obergefell was clear: ignore democracy, control the institutions that matter, and rely on the goodwill of Americans to not fight back too hard as you demand more and more from them. And obviously “equal rights” was never going to be enough; the gay lobby wants power. That the movement has now transitioned, so to speak, into radical transgender advocacy is thus not surprising; they view it as the next arena in which to force the rest of the country into submission.
Look at how they talk — like HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine (formerly Richard):
Radical gender activists, including teachers and people at the highest levels of American government, are trying to promote gender transition to young children and conceal it from their parents. In no world is it appropriate for government teachers to do this, and in Florida, principled legislators and Governor DeSantis decided to put an end to it. All things considered, the Parental Rights in Education law (“Don’t Say Gay”) was a relatively modest pushback, which is why it’s so strange to me that it ignited such a firestorm of hysteria.
Ron DeSantis doesn’t want your third grader to be taught about sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity, and passed a law to that effect — a law which, mind you, puts absolutely no restriction on parents wishing to teach their children about these topics at home. Left-wing LGBT activists, meanwhile, would like to transify your third grader without your approval or knowledge, and if you disagree, they’ll unleash the bureaucracy and legal system against you, and maybe even compare you on MSNBC to a soldier committing rape.
We have a federalist system, and California or New York, for example, may adopt legislation opposite the Florida law, possibly even mandating the teaching of gender ideology, or gender transitions without parental knowledge.
That’s all fine and good for signaling piety and “allyship” to an increasingly zealous activist bloc, but who is really on the side of the kids here? Well, Florida is, and I commend Governor DeSantis for standing by the new law against the mob, against the media, against corporate America, against Washington, and against Hollywood.
Don’t Say Gay. It’s for the kids, including — no, especially — the gay ones.
Max, just came across your blog through the Ozarks piece this morning. Entertaining and well done! Would love to get your take on some of my work at Uncommon Sense.
You have a surprisingly good substack and I am glad I came across it