President Donald Trump is goring another yet another sacred cow in the post-Christian cargo cult: transgenderism. Charlie Kirk reports the following excellent news:
BREAKING: The Trump Administration OPM has sent a new guidance to all federal workforce insurance providers instructing them to no longer cover gender transitions.
“For Plan Year 2026, chemical and surgical modification of an individual’s sex traits through medical interventions… pic.twitter.com/ub7TrEOPFJ
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 18, 2025
Expect a massive reaction from the Left, which knows that transgender insanity is a losing political issue, but perversely clings to this fetish with its cold, dead fingers. But why? What explains the fixation with placating every outrageous demand of a tiny minority who turned a rare mental illness into a vast philosophical claim: that the human species, unlike any other mammal (much less primate) has 47 genders. We must be forced by law to acknowledge these imaginary genders, and welcome bearded men in our wives’ and daughters’ changing rooms on pain of persecution.
Screwtape Hates Creation
On the spiritual level, let’s be blunt: This is plainly demonic. Screwtape hates creation as he hates its Creator, and delights in convincing us to mock and mutilate it. We cannot neglect this preternatural aspect of a current policy debate. Doesn’t it seem hard to explain from a this-worldly point of view how quickly and completely a bizarre, fringe position conquered not just the political Left, but most of our institutions as well? It took 100 years to persuade most intellectuals that the earth revolves around the sun, and that claim had the advantage of being true.
Keep in mind that same-sex marriage was illegal in half the country as recently as 2015, when a closely divided U.S. Supreme Court issued a badly argued ruling imposing it on all 50 states. Bruce Jenner did one magazine cover as “Kaitlyn,” and within a few months public opinion cascaded, and suddenly the most basic fact of human life — that there are only two biological sexes — was treated like a medieval myth clung to only by bigots.
Soon professional organizations of psychological professionals and pediatricians were falling all over themselves to endorse radical experimental treatments applied even to children under the age of consent. By 2023, parents who resisted transgender treatments were losing custody of their children, and by 2024 Catholic bishops had become approving of transgender hermits.
This all has the stink of brimstone, and therefore we must take a prayerful approach to it. The prime victims of this unearthly ideology are the patients themselves, especially the children. Detransitioners tell us how crudely and quickly diagnoses and treatments came from psychologists happy to shunt them onto the “transition” assembly line and through the doors of highly profitable clinics in this new industry. By contrast, those who try to claw their way back to normalcy receive little support. Therapists who try to help those with gender dysphoria resolve their symptoms instead of butchering their bodies face legal sanctions in states like California.
We owe our support to detransitioners slike Walt Heyer and to courageous truthtellers like Brendan Showalter, who have weathered enormous hostility to expose the lies and corruption of the transgender industry. And we can learn from organizations like Mass Resistance how to fight the concrete, aggressive efforts of the Big Pharma-funded transgender movement on a state and local level.
The Gadarene Consensus
Don’t focus on people who actually claim to be transgender, who are suffering souls with mental issues subject to psychiatric malpractice. The real issue is “normal” folks who in 2015 never imagined there were 47 genders, that you could shift between them several times a day if you felt like it, or that it was somehow unfair to keep male rapists who “identified as female” out of women’s prisons. How did so many apparently rational people change their mind so radically and so quickly? We can’t forget the spiritual dimension, the icy unearthly voices whispering lies into human ears.
But let’s look to the human level as well — or rather the subhuman level: Most people are sheep, especially if they’re not anchored in solid, supernatural truth as revealed in Scripture. When “leaders” and “influencers” in positions of power adopt a bold new stance, people who crave higher status are tempted to simply ape it. This temptation grows stronger if it’s clear that questioning the new claim can bring social, professional, or even legal punishment. Remember how quickly COVID made cowards of billions of people, successfully getting them to cower in their homes and take experimental, abortion-based gene therapies.
In this morning’s Brew I cited a brilliant essay by Chris Bray, who uses psychology research to show how people quickly change their opinions and become intolerant zealots out of the desperate desire to belong to high-status social groups and avoid getting ostracized. The “correct” position on transgenderism was signaled loud and clear from the most powerful institutions in our culture beginning in 2015, and those who pushed back — such as author J.K. Rowling — quickly suffered the consequences. She only got demonized and driven out of police society, but others suffered worse: a teacher at a Christian school in Ireland, Enoch Burke, was fired, fined, and imprisoned for refusing to use the transgender pronouns that violated his conscience.
Reality Bites Back
The scanty evidence transgenderist advocates offer falls apart on examination. Britain’s high court ruled this year that sex is a biological fact, not a mental construct. (Of course, a transgender activist judge is now appealing that decision to the European Court of Human Rights.) That country’s national health service stopped giving puberty blockers and disfiguring surgeries to children after a government report found that almost no children actually benefit from these dangerous, sterilizing treatments.
Voters don’t seem all that keen on transgenderism as a political cause. Pew Research reported in 2022:
Roughly six-in-ten adults (58%) favor proposals that would require transgender athletes to compete on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth (17% oppose this, 24% neither favor nor oppose). And 46% favor making it illegal for health care professionals to provide someone younger than 18 with medical care for a gender transition (31% oppose). The public is more evenly split when it comes to making it illegal for public school districts to teach about gender identity in elementary schools (41% favor and 38% oppose) and investigating parents for child abuse if they help someone younger than 18 get medical care for a gender transition (37% favor and 36% oppose).
Don’t Expect Repentance
But our elites and the Democratic Party — and far too many in our churches — have gone all in for transgender ideology, and they seem unlikely to repent anytime soon, regardless of the political cost their positions impose. You might well wonder why. For the answer, let’s look to the writings of a British ex-Communist.
After decades of organizing and recruiting for Communist organizations, Douglas Hyde converted to Catholicism. He spent the rest of his life 
exposing the techniques political extremists (and also religious cults) use. One of the key insights in his book Dedication and Leadership concerns human motivation. I think we can learn from him why this movement won’t go away anytime soon.
Hyde writes, based on his experience as a Marxist zealot, that most people don’t value an organization, idea, or relationship by how much they get out of it, but by how much they’ve put into it. If you can convince people to plunge headlong into a venture and sacrifice themselves on its behalf, they will be very reluctant to leave it. They’ll overlook corruption, blind themselves to evidence, even justify obvious crimes. They’ll do almost anything rather than admit that they’ve squandered their time, talent, and treasure on a wretched fraud. Think of how long it took the GOP to admit the truth about the Iraq War or the Deep State to concede the futility of its bloody crusade in Ukraine.
This “sunk cost” fallacy partly explains why it’s so hard to get people to quit cults. It’s why hundreds of people took poison in Jonestown, Guyana, when the Rev. Jim Jones ordered them to. And it’s why the transgender cult is such a powerful instrument of fanaticism, producing not just foot soldiers for the Left but multiple mass shooters. Because accepting transgenderist claims isn’t like deciding that higher immigration from the Third World is a good idea, then realizing based on repeated experience that it isn’t. That’s the kind of mistake an honest person could make and recover from.
1+1=47
No, accepting 47 genders is like deciding that 2+2=5, and really convincing yourself to believe it. I wrote a piece about this parallel with George Orwell’s 1984 back in 2019, with the pertinent title “Freedom Is the Freedom to Say ‘Bruce Jenner.’ If That is Granted, All Else Follows.” Just a few years into the transgender jihad I realized:
The left has taken up transgender ideology not just despite the fact that it’s absurd and contrary to nature. They’ve chosen it because of that. Saying and meaning phrases like “female penis” and “pregnant men” is the absolute equivalent of asserting that two plus two make five — or whatever other number The Atlantic, the Harvard faculty, and the EEOC have most recently said that it makes. They don’t just want you to repeat that, of course. Like O’Brien, they need you to believe it.
Those who decide to believe it make a genuine sacrifice. They give up their rationality, their freedom to see the truth of human life as it stands before them. They commit themselves to a wild, ungrounded faith in something unseen (45 invented genders). They make an almost religious commitment to an imaginary reality.
That’s the kind of price Douglas Hyde used to demand of his Marxist recruits. And as he discovered, the very cost it imposed on people made them reluctant to admit it was all for nothing — that they’d sold their souls for 30 pieces of silver.
John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or coauthor of 14 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. His newest book is No Second Amendment, No First.
