By Chris Powell
As President Biden reminded the country with his ill-timed proclamation, this year Easter Sunday fell on a new and more politically correct holiday, Transgender Day of Visibility. A few days earlier at the state Capitol in Hartford, Connecticut Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz led a celebration of a flag symbolizing transgender rights — more “diversity” stuff.
“By raising this flag,” Bysiewicz told the transgender people, she and Governor Lamont were saying: “We see you, we respect you, and we will keep fighting for you.”
But who these days does not see transgender people?
One needn’t attend a “drag queen story hour” in the children’s library. Transgender people are in the news and on entertainment programs almost every day. It evokes the old saying about homosexuality: What was, in the last century, “the love that dares not speak its name” cannot, in this century, shut up.
Few people these days begrudge the right of people to live their personal lives as they choose. The country, half of it high on marijuana or something else at any particular moment, is mostly libertarian when it comes to such matters now.
Since they are not comfortable in their own skin, transgender people deserve not just basic respect but sympathy as well. They have gender dysphoria, a mental illness that is a burden to them even as most may be able to manage it and live otherwise normal and productive lives if they are not picked on, just as many others with mental illness do.
But mental illness shouldn’t be celebrated. It should be treated insofar as it can be. Celebrating gender dysphoria as the political left does and wants society to do normalizes it and risks great harm to those who suffer from it, especially children, encouraging them and their parents to take potentially life-altering drugs, treatments, and surgeries they may come to regret, as many do.
Indeed, a study by researchers in the Netherlands, published in February, concluded, as other studies have done, that most children with gender dysphoria outgrow it by adulthood. According to the study, “Gender non-contentedness, while being relatively common during early adolescence, in general decreases with age and appears to be associated with a poorer self-concept and mental health throughout development.”
Since school and medical authorities in Connecticut lately have been clamoring about an epidemic of mental illness among young people, what seems like an increase in gender dysphoria is probably part of it.
Besides, the only rights seriously at issue in the transgenderism controversy belong to people who are not transgender at all: the right of gender privacy in public restrooms, the right of girls and women to equal opportunity in sports, and the right of parents to know what schools are doing with the health of their children.
The political left in Connecticut, in control of state government, is striving to take those rights away, and with accusations of “hate” it intimidates people out of objecting. So far only a few Republican state legislators have found the courage to speak up in defense of the rights of the many.
Calls for diversity in Connecticut don’t extend to political opinion. What passes for diversity in Connecticut involves mere appearances, races, and ethnicities. Connecticut-style diversity wants everyone to think the same.
Neither mental illness nor diversity should be celebrated. What should be celebrated is the highest form of personal respect and the best defense against persecution: indifference.
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WILL ELECTRICS CHEAT?: Transportation writer Jim Cameron notes that state government’s clumsy push to force state residents to switch to electric vehicles risks cutting off revenue for highway maintenance and improvement, since gasoline taxes pay for highways and EVs don’t use gas. Worse, Cameron adds, because EVs are much heavier than gas-powered cars, they wear roads down more.
But since EVs use electricity to charge their batteries, they do pay the taxes hidden by state government in electric bills. Will the extra electricity tax revenue from EVs make up for the gas taxes they don’t pay?
Advocates of an EV mandate should investigate.
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years. (CPowell@cox.net)
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Chris Powell column 