"Acceptance" doesn't have to include treating gaslighting as activism or delusions as real

Stupid, aggressively false babble should never be graded on a curve

Someone named Lyla Harrod is claiming to have just set the fastest known time (FKT) of the forty-eight 4,000-foot summits in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Harrod’s Instagram bio reads “Sober queer poly trans woman.” I’m guessing that Harrod’s “transition” took place sometime after 2018.

In announcing the FKT attempt, Harrod wrote this:

If Harrod feels better identifying as a woman, whether it’s to set “records” that would otherwise out of reach and hence feel more important in the world or to address some recondite psychological conflict, I have no problem with that. It’s no different from someone who thinks geology is bunk and staunchly believes that the Book of Genesis is a record of historical events. In very few everyday situations do such objectively false beliefs present overt conflicts to others.

But when behaviors driven by these beliefs do transgress reality in ways that adversely affect others, someone needs to establish limits to these societal charades.

A fundamentalist Christian teacher is absolutely free to believe that the universe is less than 10,000 years old and that the first woman was created from a man’s rib (natch). But he or she is not free to teach that idea to public-school science students. In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court dropped its mallet gavel directly onto the head of God (in the minds of some but not all Christians) with its Obergefell vs. Hodges decision. And as much as the U.S. is a religious country by Western standards, it doesn’t rely wholly on trust in Jesus to prevail over its would-be aggressors, given that its annual military budget is fast approaching a trillion dollars (in, mind you, a time of peace for Americans).

Here’s what happens when a male human uses all available surgical and pharmacological techniques to “transition”: He comes out a male who physically resembles a female within the limits of current technology. He might have some parts missing and some new ones attached and implanted, but all 38 trillion or so nucleated cells in his body carry the same contents they did well before he was born. Well before he consisted of even four or eight cells.

Obviously, the same thing happens, or fails to happen, in reverse. Chase Strangio is an annoyingly demented and hostile chick who decided to identify a man in order to better ruin the American Civil Liberties Union from within, and now sports a dead-caterpillar mustache owing, presumably, to the wonders of androgenic hormone therapy.

But the lies and childish nonsense continue unabated. This Harrod character can glibly prate on all day about transphobes and pseudoscience, and in the end will make no more sense than a four-year-old arguing that the moon and the sun are quite clearly the same size, with each object glowing with its own internal light.

Harrod is a man who decided to undergo some previously unusual but increasingly common medical procedures so he could more convincingly scale his identity with the meat he carries around. (These procedures appear to have some hellish drawbacks, which The New York Times will start to cover in about two months as if it never tirelessly championed the transwomen-as-women-athletes idea in the first place.) Any decorative chatter laid atop that reality is just an ongoing attempt from within to close a gap that will always remain.

If this helps Harrod feel better in the world, great. And to continue the above analogy, if a Christian feels he or she needs to reject modern evolutionary biology in favor of biblical creationism to one day gain access to Heaven, fine. But while society has mostly figured out how to deal with conflicts arising from the second kind of problem, it’s plainly unprepared, or unwilling, to properly confront the tide of nonsense from the gender nonconformists. Despite the fact that trans activists as an online horde are some of the shittiest, cancel-happy, dishonest people on the Internet—a place no one forces them to post ad hoc pronouns and flags for the rest of us to memorize—everyone just goes along with it, mainly because these fuckers have gained a lot of leverage in institutions and especially in fitness subculture. (I’m not including Harrod in this category as I knew nothing about this person until this morning.)

I am not the arbiter of who gets credited with FKTs; I don’t know if anyone really is. If there is a national database somewhere, some Wokish person has probably already duly entered Harrod’s name into it as a female list-topper with a satisfied chortle and a flipping of their fuchsia-dyed hair. Maybe no one cares about FKTs, although that notion seems suspect since, I believe, that’s a big Kilian Jornet draw in addition to his many race wins. I know that the operators of Strava—who for solid and ugly business reasons very convincingly pretend in their drooling press releases to embrace every diseased element of Wokism—absolutely love people like Harrod and Latoya Snell, who show that anything is indeed possible provided enough lies and nonsense are taken seriously by people who know better.

Mostly I’m sick of absolute dipshits accusing people who actually know things of harboring psuedoscientific ideas, and of being hateful for insisting on slapping down the infantile jibber-jabber that’s supposed to represent real science. Someone needs to put up some fucking guardrails on the mass-culture highway, because the lanes of travel have now extended well into the woods on either side of it and the bears are getting restive.