You probably missed it. I did. Last Fall, Newsweek reported that 39 per cent of Gen Z-ers polled described themselves as LGBTQ.

Thirty percent of Millennials identify as LGBTQ, according to a soon-to-be released study that is based on scientific polling data. Among Christians the numbers were lower—but only slightly, with just under 30 percent of Millennial Christians identifying as LGBTQ.

The portion of the population that describes itself as gay has varied over the years, from 10 percent, based on research by Alfred Kinsey and widely promoted by the National Gay Task Force in 1977, to less than 6 percent in a recent Gallup poll. The pollster who worked on the new study, George Barna, attributes the unusually high number he found to social and news media coverage that makes it “safe and cool” for young Americans to identify as LGBTQ—whether or not it represents their actual sexual orientation.

“It’s a subset of a larger issue, that this is a generation where three out of four are searching for meaning. This is a group that doesn’t have a reason to get out of bed in the morning,” Barna says. “Therefore, the LGBTQ identity gives them comfort. A lot of this generation claim to be moving in that direction, but there’s a big difference between claiming the identity and living the lifestyle.”

Among Millennials, 30 percent identify as LGBTQ, more than three times that of the rest of the adult population, and when the researchers broke out the youngest of the group, ages 18-24 (which some call Gen Z), they found 39 percent called themselves LGBTQ.

RTWT

Babylon Bee: Dungeons And Dragons Introduces New 100-Sided Die For Determining Your Character’s Gender.

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Donald “Dierdre” McCloskey today.

Last night, I was glancing through the web-sites I follow a bit less frequently than daily and brought up Quillette. The second or third article I opened drew my appalled attention, and kept me thinking about it uneasily all night, in much the manner one is haunted afterwards by the sight of a blood-and-compound-fractures-everywhere motorcycle crash.

The name of the author, “Dierdre” McCloskey, rang a faint bell. When I looked him/her up, that proved to be no surprise, this McCloskey person was actually the rather well-known author of a much positively reviewed book on “The Bourgeois Virtues.”

Professor McCloskey, not surprisingly, of course, for a graduate of Harvard and best-selling author, writes very well in a characteristically restrained, yet Olympian, manner, treating the bizarre topic under discussion, the author’s decision at age 53 to “change gender,” with good humor and detached mild irony.

The fine quality of the writing, however, and the author’s smug, self-congratulatory tone, struck me as outrageously incongruous considering all the issues being so artfully glanced over and avoided.

It’s been a long time now since, at age 53, I became a woman. Actually, I’m an old woman more than twenty years on, who walks sometimes with a nice fold-up cane, and has had two hip-joint replacements, and lives in a loft in downtown Chicago with 8,000 books, delighting in her dogs, her birth family, her friends scattered from Chile to China, her Episcopal church across the street, her eating club near the Art Institute, and above all her teaching and writing as a professor. Or, as the Italians so charmingly say, as una professoressa. …

But of course one can’t “really” change gender, can one? The “really” comes up when an angry conservative man or an angry essentialist feminist writes in a blog or an editorial or a comment page. The angry folk are correct, biologically speaking. That’s why their anger sounds to them like common sense. Every cell in my body shouts XY, XY, XY! I do wish they would shut up. Wretched little chromosomes. In some magical future I suppose we’ll be able to change XYs into XXs. But not now.

And more importantly a gender changer age 53, as I was in 1995, can’t have had the history of a born girl and woman. She cannot have had the good and the bad experiences of girlhood and motherhood and the rest. No science can change her life history. …

I had a normal boy’s life, and the advantage in a macho field like economics of being a man for half of my academic career. The question of what you are is qualitative, not quantitative. What sort? What life? What team? In late 1995, I chose to switch teams. …

It’s a Romantic fallacy to think that people have simple and eternal essences. They change. In a free society, shouldn’t they be allowed to? Tell me.

My wife soon remarried, and lives with her new husband and still enjoys the square dancing she and I loved in the last five years of our happy if sometimes tempestuous thirty years of marriage. Bless ‘em. She’s not spoken to me. In that autumn of first realization in 1995 I left to my wife—stupidly, husband-style—the task of telling my children, my grown son and my college-freshman daughter. Women do emotional work, Donald must have thought, if he thought at all, which I don’t recall he did. I should have gone myself in Donald drag to my children. Not that gender change is a theorem, to be “explained” with the snap shut of a proof. It’s a story, and in October 1995 it was in the middle of Act 1. But my confused and self-absorbed neglect was an awful mistake.

My daughter still lives in the Midwest; she is married and has a child. I’ve told in Crossing about how, a year later, when she was still in college, I saw her that one time, very early in my transition, a weeping father in a dress begging for a hug. My friend Patty had advised against the meeting, wisely. Later I occasionally wrote to her, fruitlessly, and a long time afterwards helped her financially. Her lone letter in reply said “Thanks for the money. I still don’t want you in my life. …

My son lives not too far from me. He too won’t speak. None of my marriage-family, out to cousins, is permitted to speak to any of my birth family, out to cousins. Is my son enforcing the embargo with threats? I don’t know. His wife’s father, a professor of law whom I persuaded once to meet me at O’Hare airport, won’t help, because he’s afraid of losing his daughter. To what? Not to love or to tolerance of human change. Hmm.

In 2000 I had moved from sweet Iowa City to a new job at the University of Illinois at Chicago, deciding to live downtown. I learned that a neighbor on the very same hallway was also a well-known libertarian, someone who wrote blazingly on human freedom. True, I noted, he and his wife were strangely distant towards me. Odd. I heard that every month the man hosted a soirée of free-market types. Oh, nice. Natural for me, I thought. But a note I left suggesting I might join got no response. Hmm. Oh, well. I’ve got plenty to do.

Then one day I learned with a jolt from another libertarian economist that my son came to the very same soirée, and knew that I lived thirty feet down the hallway. Good Lord. My Episcopal God was tapping me on the shoulder, hard. In the same hallway. Hope flared. Huzzah!! With the strange neighbor’s help, surely, I thought, I can get back my marriage family, my children, my grandchildren. After all, the neighbor believes in freedom. True, my son had chosen not to knock on the door down the hall. But, well, hope. I left a wrapped copy of Crossing at the neighbor’s door.

Next morning I opened my own door to get the newspaper. The package, unopened, lay on the welcome mat, a message scribbled on it, “We don’t want to have anything to do with you.” My breath stopped. I couldn’t cry. Hope left as shockingly quickly as it had arrived. I thought: So that’s why his wife so awkwardly wouldn’t let her children collect Hallowe’en candy from my door last October. Not even to indulge the sentimental middle-aged lady down the hall. So-called lady. Thus freedom. Maybe my son had claimed to them that I had been an evil father or something. I don’t know. By a decade later they had become at least ordinarily courteous in encounters on the elevator, and I invited them once by note to eat at my club. A note in return:

“No, we are your son’s friends.” And so?

I have not seen my son’s children, now in college or high school, or my daughter’s child, just now in school. The forbidding of children and grandchildren was at first like being stabbed in the chest, the knife twisted in the wound. Early on, I would send Christmas gifts to the grandchildren. But I gave up after a while. Strange, isn’t it, that I care about these offspring I’ve never seen? But there it is. Blood is thicker than water, I suppose.

What worries me most—with the decades, the stab wound hurts less—is the loss to my children and then their children. I would have been a good father, an aunt, whatever you want to say, and anyway a grandparent, nearby and visiting out of state. Youngsters benefit from having more people in their lives, more models of how to live and to love. …

How does a new gender feel after all these years?

Great.

Most decisions leave at least a small regret, a 4:00 a.m. wakefulness. Did you marry the right person? (In my case, yes.) Did you choose the right profession? (In my case, yes.) Should Donald have stayed at his beloved University of Chicago, which in 1980 he left from irritation at the reluctance in the Economics Department, though not in History, to promote him right away to full professor? (A hard one, that; but on the whole, yes.) But becoming Deirdre has evoked not the slightest passing instant of regret. Not once. Nada. …

During the late 1990s shortly after my transition I had called up a male dean at Harvard and asked him if Harvard could change my degree to the women’s college, Radcliffe. “Oh, I don’t think we can do that.” “But the U. S. State Department,” I whined, “had no trouble changing my passport from male to female.” Pause. Then with a smile in his voice, “Yes. But Harvard is older than the U.S. Department of State.” Goodness. Some things never change.

Am I an “angry person?”

Yes and no. Reading Professor McCloskey’s essay did not make me angry, it made me very, very sad. What does make me angry is the patently obvious recognition that Professor McCloskey is, at some level, a very defective and mentally-deranged specimen of humanity afflicted with impulses and desires most of us would consider unbecoming, disgraceful, and bizarre, and the knowledge that a deliberately calculated and conceived political movement using appeals to sentimentality and ressentiment as leverage has successfully persuaded the contemporary elite community of fashion to accept an outrageous Falsehood as Truth and mental illness and sexual perversity as a legitimate societal constituency and a worthy cause.

OK, let us grant that Professor McCloskey really did experience an involuntary, unsolicited in any way, hankering to dress in female clothes and live life as a woman.

We all experience, going through life, involuntary and unsolicited impulses toward thoughts, fantasies, and actions which, acted upon, would really be destructive, disgraceful, illegal, and simply wrong. Who has never experienced homicidal thoughts? Who has not been tempted by an opportunity for theft? Who has never received a sexual proposition for an encounter that was out of bounds?

The political constituency for sexual perversity successfully bamboozled our dim and cowardly elite by the simple tactic of pointing to the involuntary and spontaneous character of homosexual desire and its universal temporal and geographical minority manifestation as evidence the sanction of Nature.

“Ich kann nicht Anders!” (I cannot do otherwise!), Peter Lorre, the child murderer in Fritz Lang’s 1931 “M” protests to the Berlin Underworld gangster jury deciding on his fate. 1931 Berlin gangsters had a lot more sense than the International millennial-era elite. They unsympathetically condemned the murderer Hans Beckert for his crimes.

Consensual homosexuality and female impersonating are, of course, not exactly the same thing as murder. They are basically self-regarding activities that could be omitted from the book of criminal statutes in a libertarian state. But that does not mean they are not disgraceful and wrong. Or even that they do no harm.

Pretending to be something one is not is contemptible and wrong. I expect everyone has one or more unfulfilled personal dreams or fantasies. Lots of people would love to have become rich and famous. Large numbers of people yearn to be movie stars or astronauts. Pretty much everyone has one or more unfulfilled personal ambitions. But living one’s life pretending to be something one is not, ruining one’s marriage, destroying one’s family, breaking one’s vows in order to pretend that the impossible is true? Maybe people like Professor McCloskey should be “allowed” to do all those things, but they certainly should not be encouraged and applauded. Nor should the rest of us participate in their charades. And doctors should certainly should not be allowed to violate the Hippocratic Oath by chemically or surgically mutilating the human body in pursuit of fantasy.

Professor McCloskey writes well, but I fail to understand how anyone can take seriously the academic and scholarly conclusions of someone who thinks it is possible to base his own identity and life on an obvious Lie and an essentially futile fantasy.

RTWT

Newsbusters:

Have you ever eaten Froot Loops and thought, “This cereal isn’t gay enough?” Do you seek a safe space to eat your Rice Krispies? Are you concerned that your Corn Flakes aren’t sufficiently woke? Well, now Kellogg’s has the solution!

On Thursday, the gay site PinkNews reported, “Kellogg’s is launching an LGBT-themed cereal so you can start your day with maximum gay… If you’re a fan of breakfast and being gay, we have grrrrreat news for you – Kellogg’s is launching an LGBT-themed cereal.”

And to think, we’ve been eating straight, cisgender cereal all this time.

Timed to coincide with GLAAD’s Spirit Day on October 17, they teamed up to produce the “All Together” cereal, which Kellogg’s says is the first to offer Corn Flakes, Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Frosted Mini Wheats, Raisin Bran, and Rice Krispies “exclusively together.”

Unlike the mix of cereal the image on the box implies, it’s actually a Limited Edition Variety Pack with 6 individual sized boxes inside, but consumers are free to create any combination they like. Froot Loops and Raisin Brain together? Let your freak flag fly, honey!

Kellogg’s chief diversity officer (why does a cereal company need such a thing??) Priscilla Koranteng said, “At Kellogg, we are firmly committed to equality and inclusion in the workplace, marketplace and in the communities where we work and live.” As part of the Spirit Day partnership, Kellogg’s is donating $50,000 to GLAAD.

RTWT

Consumer corporations that sell out to the radical left can go pound sand.

Erika aka “Devon” Price.

A lot of people on Facebook yesterday were marveling at, and laughing about, this leftie idiot‘s ideological derangement and her absolutely appalling Mount-Everest-sized shrill sense of self-entitlement. Her much-enduring and despite-all-her-bullshit loving family has evidently, for years and years, through what must have been a truly dreadful adolescence well into what-ought-to-be adulthood tolerated her vicious politics and humored her sexually perverse nonsense, but those terrible people failed to climb on board the radical LGBTQ&c.&c. train with her and she, they, zir, or ze is finally fed up.

Every Sunday for the last 12 years, I have called my conservative Republican mom and talked to her for upwards of an hour. I tell her about my work, and try to keep her entertained with cheery, funny anecdotes. I share good news and paper over bad. I keep the conversation flowing and effervescent. In each call, I work hard to come across as someone happy, with lots of friends and lots to do, and nothing to complain or cry about.

I have upheld this ritual through breakups, bereavements, depressive episodes, periods of trauma, and years of acute political turmoil. I’ve only wavered and broken kayfabe a few times — when my dad died, for example, or when Trump was elected. That time, I curled up on a bench and sobbed, begging my conservative mom to understand what her vote had done to me. I shook and sputtered borderline incomprehensible things about how much it hurt for her to vote the way she did, how betrayed I felt as a sexual assault survivor, a trans person, a scientist, or a person who needs birth control.

She believed we could agree to disagree, so long as we never discussed or even thought about our disagreements.

She reacted with the same equanimity she always projects when unwanted emotions rear their needy heads. She wasn’t concerned that her actions had hurt or betrayed me, no, she was worried I was stressing myself out by thinking about it too much. She believed we could agree to disagree, so long as we never discussed or even thought about our disagreements. By refusing to stop glaring at our differences, I was the one hurting myself.

That’s how it’s always been in my family. I am the renegade, the unstable queer one, with big emotions and strange desires that alienate me from my family’s politics. I am responsible for minimizing the conflict that my existence creates. I’m not supposed to express emotion, start fights, or remind anyone of the chasm that separates my life from their traditional, “family-oriented” values.

I’m done carrying that responsibility. It’s been slowly poisoning me for years. …

My mom wouldn’t say she’s socially conservative. Neither would most of my Republican relatives. They like to think of themselves as family-oriented, patriotic, no-nonsense lovers of fiscal restraint, and it doesn’t matter if the reality of the political choices lines up with those ideals. They don’t like to talk about the basis for their ideology, or evidence in support of their views — and they absolutely will not acknowledge the social consequences of their actions. They have always voted Republican, and it seems they always will, no matter the candidate they are given or the abhorrent policies that candidate advances. And for the most part, they don’t want to talk about their beliefs or the reasons for their choices — aside, perhaps, from a few idle rants about the evils of the Clintons. In such a vacuum of reflection and vulnerability, it’s paralyzingly difficult for me to even start a conversation about the harm they’ve done.

In my family, control and invalidation are wielded subtly, and perhaps without conscious intent. Norms are enforced through a gentle blend of selective praise, light mockery, quiet dismissal, and mild admonition. If I take a step toward prescribed, traditional roles, I am celebrated and recognized. If I take a different path, or express a competing desire, I am ignored or ridiculed in a way I can’t quite point to. If I complain about that ridicule, I am dismissed as overly sensitive or told I’m making things up, misremembering them.

I have dozens of memories of family members chiding a teenage me for expressing disinterest in giving birth or having a family. Whenever I expressed a passion for the sciences or a desire to go to grad school, I was treated as though my interests were cute, but fleeting. When I began throwing my adolescent, closeted self into politics — mostly activism for LGBT rights — my mother would tell me, in hushed tones, that it was “okay” that I was doing so, but that we wouldn’t be letting my grandparents know about what I’d been up to.

I wasn’t beaten for being who I was. Usually, I wasn’t even directly berated. The problem wasn’t a specific act of mistreatment or abuse, but rather the emotional and political climate that surrounded me. My family consistently listened to conservative voices that branded me, and people like me, as perverse, immature, deluded, and mockable. My family voted, without relent, for politicians who wanted to curtail abortion rights, LGBT rights, educational access, and intellectual freedom. They unilaterally advanced and rewarded a life path that was traditional, deeply gendered, and rooted in devotion to the family unit, often to the detriment of connections with the outside world. They couldn’t see how these actions wore me down and slowly, quietly, left me feeling broken, incapable of appropriate adulthood, and totally alone.

RTWT

Her family sounds very nice. It’s a shame that parents like that had one child that obviously long ago landed the wrong way on its head.