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Order Bruce Bawer’s new book, ‘Trans World: Reflections on a Cult’: HERE.
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously ruled recently that the definition of the word “woman” is based only on biological sex. She is, as a Supreme Court justice here in the U.S. infamously was unable to state, “an adult female human being.” Conversely, then, transgender women are not legally considered women.
Although this decision sent gender radicals into paroxysms of outrage and paranoia, it merely confirms what humankind has known and never questioned for all of history until the most recent sliver of modernity, the last ten or twenty years. Our culture has been so thoroughly captured by a Truth-denying ideology that this court decision affirming basic biological reality is being called a “massive victory” for women’s rights defenders and activists, who had to fight tooth and nail against bullying resistance to get the case heard before the court.
Perhaps this means the cultural momentum is turning, and common sense is making a comeback; it’s too soon to tell, because gender ideology, more than any other aspect of the Left’s agenda, seems to be the hill that the Left intends to die on.
Why is that? Why is the Left literally hell-bent on asserting that male and female are false, oppressive social constructions, that something called gender is on an infinite spectrum, that masculinity and femininity are so fluid as to be meaningless? Because the most crucial front of the neo-Marxist agenda is the abolition of the family, as Karl Marx himself explicitly called for. It is necessary to eradicate the distinction between male and female in order to dissolve the bonds between mother and father, sister and brother, wife and husband, and pave the way for a collectivist utopia ruled by the State.
Toward that end, transgenderism has supplanted feminism as the tip of the cultural Marxist spear, so rapidly and aggressively that the entire West seemingly lost its grip on reality overnight. One of the most trenchant observers of this corrosive movement has been the Freedom Center’s own Shillman Fellow Bruce Bawer – Norway-based culture critic and prolific author of such essential works as While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within and The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Birth of the Woke Ideology. His latest book is Trans World: Reflections on a Cult, a collection of essays – mostly from the Freedom Center’s own FrontPage Mag, but others from American Greatness, City-Journal, and American Spectator – centered on this cultural flashpoint of our time.
The essays, originally published between 2017 and 2025, cover the whole range of the issue from the broad strokes of trans ideology to profiles of individual trans celebrities like swimmer Lia Thomas (pictured above — formerly William Thomas, but to point that out would be to commit the blasphemy of “deadnaming”), actor Elliot (née Ellen) Page, and “relentlessly self-promoting narcissist” (as Bawer correctly puts it) Dylan Mulvaney, as well as activists like gay playwright Tony Kushner and Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary of Health Rachel Levine. The essays are all of easily digestible length and effortlessly readable thanks to the highly literate Bawer’s deceptively conversational style.
Bawer, a gay man who authored the groundbreaking 1996 gay rights book A Place at the Table, stresses throughout the book that accepting being gay and choosing to subscribe to the trans cult are two radically different things. His frustration with the trans hijacking of the gay rights movement is palpable. “A great many of the Americans who are losing their patience with trans world are gay people who have decided it’s long since time to divorce LGB from T,” he writes:
Gay rights was reformist. The trans movement is revolutionary. In fact it’s revolutionary in a way humankind has never experienced before. Because it’s not a revolution against any particular government or political system it’s a revolution against reality itself. And if gay people don’t help bring it down it’s going to take us down with it.
A lot of straight people have responded to the trans movement by saying that they knew gay marriage would only be a stepping stone to something even worse. Well, you are right, folks. But don’t blame gay people. This change was way worse for gay people than for anyone – because we were dragged along for the ride. Nobody ever asked us if we wanted to be described as “LGBT people.”
Being gay, Bawer notes, was never about being cool; it was in fact a stigma. There was a time when coming out took courage. Today, by contrast,
grabbing onto one of the letters in LGBTQIA+ is a style choice for teenagers, and even for younger children. It’s a way for people who are, in reality, nothing more than ordinary heterosexuals to feel exotic and interesting, to get attention and approval from everybody around them, and to instantly gain membership in the coolest of communities.
Deep down, Bawer argues, “none of this stuff really means anything to them. It’s frivolous attention-getting and it’s piggy-backing onto something that was, and is, serious and meaningful.”
He denounces the
armies of callow, narcissistic young people who, mindlessly regurgitating trans-movement talking points after having decided the day before yesterday that they’d been born into the wrong body, aggressively demand, to the cheers of their friends and teachers, that all of society reorder itself around their delusions.
Of the bullying trans mob, Bawer writes,
Their screaming about pronouns or gender is motivated not by a desire to see their identities affirmed so that they can assume their rightful places as equal members of society and be left alone to live their lives, but by a determination to impose an alternate reality on everyone else. It’s not about rights and respect, then, but about power.
“Where will all this gender narcissism lead?” Bawer worries. “Nothing remains cool forever: that’s the nature of cool. The pendulum never stops swinging. Eventually it will swing back. There will be a blowback against all this. And it’ll hit gay people like me, too.”
In the end, Bawer asserts, embracing the hip labels “trans,” “queer,” and “woke” are
all part of the same ideological grab bag, along with the weird new determination to expose kids to drag queens (a tiny subset of gay people who have no more business practicing their craft in front of minors than hookers or morticians.)
And all of it – driven as it is by a radical rejection of objective truth – is a threat to everything we refer to when we speak of civilization.
Correct. As Bawer puts it, the trans movement isn’t about getting a place at the table; it’s about overturning the table. As I’ve noted often before, “queering” the culture – and the trans movement is part of this agenda – is about subverting and inverting the status quo. It’s about deconstructing and destroying every societal norm and erecting in its place a religion of the self.
Trans World is as rare and necessary among cultural critiques as Bruce Bawer is among cultural critics: enlightening but not pedantic, provocative without fear-mongering, courageous without egotism. If you want to understand how the cult of transgenderism rocketed to such a central, privileged position in the culture, and why it is, in Bawer’s words, “a threat to everything,” you can do no better than to pick up this collection of observations about it from a writer of uncommon insight and fearless commitment to truth.
Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior
