This article title comes from Lt Saavik, in Star Trek: The Search for Spock.” David Marcus, Admiral James Kirk’s bastard son is questioned by Lt Saavik, who says that this artificial planet you have created is not what he expected.

• Saavik : It’s time for total truth between us. This planet is not what you intended or hoped for, is it?
• David Marcus : Not exactly.
• Saavik : Why?
• David Marcus : I used protomatter in the Genesis matrix.
• Saavik : Protomatter. An unstable substance which every ethical scientist in the galaxy has denounced as dangerously unpredictable.
• David Marcus : It was the only way to solve certain problems.
• Saavik : So, like your father, you changed the rules.
• David Marcus : If I hadn’t, it might have been years or never.
• Saavik : How many have paid the price for your impatience? How many have died? How much damage have you done? And what is yet to come?

Sometimes, the total truth must be told, even if the truth is unpleasant. I will admit it: I have been called an [insert slang term for the anus here], but sometimes you need an [insert slang term for the anus here] to get around political correctness or misapplied courtesy to just tell the truth.

We all knew it would happen sooner or later: those of us who are smart enough to reject the cockamamie idea that girls can be boys and boys can be girls are being blamed for the death by suicide of “Henry” Berg-Brousseau. From what my, sadly now departed, best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal:

‘Lack of acceptance took a toll.’ KY senator says son, who pushed for trans rights, died

by Tessa Duvall | Tuesday, December 20, 2022 | 4:14 PM EST | Updated: 4:20 PM EST

Kentucky Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville, announced in a statement Tuesday that her son, who was transgender, died by suicide last week.

Henry Berg-Brousseau was 24.

Note that the Herald-Leader uncritically wrote that Senator Berg’s daughter was her son. As is so often the case, the newspaper’s stylebook calls for referring to the ‘transgendered’ by the gender they claim to be, not the sex they actually are, and the use of the preferred ‘pronouns’ and faux name they chose. All of this is subtly designed to be courtesy, but also to normalize ‘transgenderism’ as something real.

Berg said her son spent his life “working to extend grace, compassion and understanding to everyone, but especially to the vulnerable and marginalized.”

“As the mother of a transgender son, I gave my whole heart trying to protect my child from a world where some people and especially some politicians intentionally continued to believe that marginalizing my child was OK simply because of who he was,” Berg wrote. “This lack of acceptance took a toll on Henry. He long struggled with mental illness, not because he was trans but born from his difficulty finding acceptance.”

Yes, Miss Berg-Brousseau “long struggled with mental illness,” but Senator Berg, who is a physician, doesn’t think that her daughter thinking that she was really a boy had anything to do with it. Much further down:

“In one of our last conversations he wondered if he was safe walking down the street,” Berg wrote. “The vitriol against trans people is not happening in a vacuum. It is not just a way of scoring political points by exacerbating the culture wars. It has real-world implications for how transgender people view their place in the world and how they are treated as they just try to live their lives.”

I have included a photo of the Berg-Brousseau family. In it, “Harry” — I have been unable to find her real name — is shown, seemingly shorter than her mother and sister, and certainly shorter than her father, as well as significantly overweight. Were she an actual boy who grew up that way, “he’d” have been the last picked for a team in Phys Ed, and been dateless as high school girls, real girls, would have rejected “him” for more masculine guys. As an adult, she might somehow ‘pass’ as a male, if no one asked any questions, but she’d have been the least impressive of ‘guys’.

Dr Berg claimed that Miss Berg-Brousseau believed that she was at risk, I assume from violence, walking out in public, but, in the end, the person from whom she wasn’t safe was not evil tormenters, but from herself. Had she been an actual boy who grew up to look the way she looked, she’d have had to get used to the kinds of insults that all boys growing up not masculine enough hear. But Dr Berg wants to blame her daughter’s suicide on people who recognize that her “transgender son” was actually her daughter, and refused to lie about it.

This, you see, is what the left want, for sensible people to be guilted into accepting something that they know to be false, to accept the mental illness of gender dysphoria as somehow being not a delusion but normal. More, they want sensible people to lie out loud, to call the ‘transgendered’ by their preferred pronouns and names, when that would be lying to others and to themselves. To me, the proper response is to not get involved in any way with the ‘transgendered,’ to not have to choose between going along with their delusions or angering them in public, but simply to ignore them as much as we can, as long as it has no effect on ourselves and society.

That’s why this site has spent so much bandwidth on Will Thomas, the male swimmer who thought he was a woman, and competed on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swimming team, utterly dominating women in the pool when he had been an average swimmer when competing as a male. That was actual harm, to the women he beat in the pool, and to society as a whole. Miss Berg-Brousseau? Obviously, the female-to-male ‘transition’ does not confer on someone biologically female the physical advantages of height, strength, quickness, and speed that actual males normally have, so there’s no threat to sports performance that Mr Thomas constituted, but it’s also obvious that, while there are short and obese males, the female-to-male ‘transgendered’ simply aren’t males.

Miss Berg-Brousseau? Other than her attempts to persuade the General Assembly not to pass legislation which would protect privacy of people from the opposite sex sharing their bathrooms and locker rooms — legislation which then failed, but failed during the last time in which Democrats controlled the state House of Representatives — she’s done little harm.

Perhaps Miss Berg-Brousseau would have found more acceptance among a smaller group of people, people who would go along with her claim that she was a man, but she tried to make herself an advocate, tried to push others to not only go along with her delusions, tried to get the law and the state to accept them; she put herself out in public, and putting yourself out in public invites those who disagree to state their disagreements, to make their positions clear and known.

This is what Dr Berg, and the Lexington Herald-Leader, as well as many other media sources, are trying to do, to stifle other people’s opinions, to try to blame other people for Miss Berg-Brousseau’s suicide, to try to guilt people into accepting other people’s lies and delusions.

Sorry, but no, just no.

Living out in the country in rural eastern Kentucky, I rarely see such individuals, only twice as a matter of fact: a male pretending to be female as a diner in Lexington’s Corta Lina restaurant, several tables away, and a male waiter pretending to be a waitress in the Applebee’s on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky. He wasn’t our waiter, so we had no interaction with him, but it’s notable that that Applebee’s closed down just a few weeks later.

As far as I am concerned, the ‘transgendered’ can have their own delusions, and I will ignore them when I can. But I will not lie for them. Does that make me an [insert slang term for the anus here]?

You know what? I will proudly accept that appellation, if it means telling the truth. We can have sympathy for Miss Berg-Brousseau, and her family, but sympathy should not extend to lying to other people, and to ourselves. Referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as a male isn’t like answering your wife’s question, “Do these pants make me look fat?” Referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as male is actively harmful to society, in that it goes right along with the normalization of mental illness and transgenderism. And referring to Miss Berg-Brousseau as male falls right along with her mother’s attempt to blame those of us who do tell the truth for her daughter’s death.
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Editor’s note: This article has been significantly expanded, including changing the title, from the original.
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Also posted on American Free News Network. Check out American Free News Network for more well written and well reasoned conservative commentary.

Sometimes the credentialed media send out computer information which tells readers that an article is biased even before you read it. From The Washington Post:

Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined. Here’s why.

The culture war over transgender rights is part of a fight over competing notions of gender and sexuality, including issues like abortion and sex education

Analysis by Kelsy Burke and Emily Kazyak | Tuesday, November 8, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

During the 2022 midterm election campaign, Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars. Last month’s Public Religion Research Institute’s American Values Survey appears to offer confirmation, finding increased polarization on all measures of LGBTQ rights. In particular, Americans’ support for transgender rights has declined.

The article headline isn’t too terribly biased, but if you look at the tab for the page, the article title was, as first saved on the computer, “Why do Republicans attack transgender rights?” And the url for the article is https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/08/ transgender-republican-evangelical-bathrooms/. You can get around the Post’s paywall and read the article for free on the Microsoft network, but the msn.com version does not show the tab change; that can only be seen at the Post’s original.

Clearly, an editor at the Post changed the title the authors submitted electronically from Lincoln, Nebraska.^[1]Article headlines in newspapers are normally written by an editor, so this isn’t anything abnormal.

Then there is the Post’s biography of the article authors, as shown in the screen capture to the right. Let’s face it: when sensible people see that one of the authors is an “associate professor of sociology and women’s and gender studies,” their eyes roll.

Take one measure: whether laws should require transgender people to use bathrooms that correspond to their sex assigned at birth, not their current gender identity. In 2016, only 35 percent of all Americans favored these “bathroom bills,” the first of which was proposed that year in North Carolina. In 2022, after numerous other states proposed similar laws, the number of Americans supporting them rose to 52 percent.

I always laugh when I see the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” No, sex is determined at conception, by whether the sperm cell which fertilizes the egg is carrying an X or a Y chromosome. This is something we’ve known for 100 years.

People chuckled when they read that His Majesty King Henry VIII blamed his wives for having girls rather than boys, because we now know that it is the father, not the mother, who actually determines the sex of the offspring.

But today? Today the silliness of the left is that sex is somehow “assigned” at birth, rather than recognized at birth. Good heavens, think of all of the troubles good King Henry could have avoided if he’d simply “assigned” Mary and Elizabeth as boys.

While I do wonder whether the Post has a stylebook preference or mandete for “sex assigned at birth” as a phrase, it’s very obvious that the good professors who wrote the article would have used it regardless; it is used several times throughout the article, and the transgender activists prefer it, because it makes it sound as though sex is something other than biologically determined and unchangeable.

The jump was especially pronounced for White evangelicals and Republicans. In 2016, only 41 percent of White evangelicals and 44 percent of Republicans supported the requirement that transgender people use bathrooms that aligned with their sex assigned at birth. By 2022, that number doubled to 86 percent and 87 percent, respectively.

Other groups also increased their opposition to transgender rights, but the rise was less dramatic for Democrats and Americans who are unaffiliated with religion. Only 27 percent of Democrats favored bathroom bills in 2016, compared with 31 percent in 2022. Among nonreligious respondents, support for requiring transgender people to use the bathroom that aligns with their sex assigned at birth increased from 21 percent in 2016 to 34 percent in 2022.

In other words, as people became more educated on the subject, they realized the silliness of transgenderism.

These numbers suggest that transgender issues are increasingly being lived out in polarizing ways among Americans — in other words, that the “culture wars” narrative holds true. As sociologists, we have sought to dig deeper than the quantitative findings to understand why Americans hold such diverging beliefs.

The article continues with their findings based on surveys, and they tell us the obvious: being conservative, Republican and religious makes you more likely not to accept the arguments of transgenderism. I’ll omit that for this article, because I cannot simply copy-and-paste the whole thing; that would be plagiarism, and you can read it yourself. However, while they want to blame people who are “politically conservative” and “White evangelicals”, they somehow never mentioned the most obvious and glaring bit of news about transgender people that people saw: the case of University of Pennsylvania swimmer Will Thomas, a male who claimed to be a woman named “Lia”, and went from being ranked #562 when competing as a male his first three years, to #1 as a female his senior season. Mr Thomas absolutely destroyed the real female competitors at the Zippy Invitational in Akron, Ohio. While some people are surely sympathetic to Mr Thomas psychological plight — it has to be traumatic to actually believe that you should be a different sex — he also awoke people who may not have paid much attention to transgenderism that this was a male, who had been a male athlete and gone through male puberty, and was simply different from real women.

You didn’t have to listen to Republican messages to realize that something was horribly wrong with the Will Thomas story.

Their politically liberal bias — and no, I do not claim to be unbiased myself — is blatantly obvious in their concluding paragraph:

Though these findings obviously relate to transgender people, they implicate cisgender people, too. The culture war over transgender rights is part of a war over competing notions of gender and sexuality, and how those should be regulated in the social world. Thus, in 2022, we have observed simultaneous political attacks on transgender people, reproductive freedoms, and sex education. Americans are divided because we have fundamentally different vantage points over whose identities deserve protection and which experiences are to be prioritized and believed.

Yeah, we get it: this was a biased article, listed as an “analysis” rather than an OpEd piece, and the conclusion, along with the original title, was meant to attack Republicans. But leaving out the huge input of the “Lia” Thomas story pretty much invalidates the authors’ conclusions. If, as the authors began, “Republican public officials targeted transgender rights in what NPR and other news media have called the new front in the culture wars,” such ‘targeting’ bore political fruit because Mr Thomas so thoroughly fertilized the ground.