Pride Month and Father’s Day

Today is Father’s Day. June is Pride month. Until a few years ago, I’d have found nothing particularly incongruous about that conjunction: there is nothing about the celebration of one’s sexual preference, however odd it may be to call that “pride,” that precludes, obfuscates, or undermines an appreciation of the role fathers play in the lives of their children and their value to society.

But times change, and not always for the better.

Today, the LGB community — those people who are, to varying degrees, attracted sexually to members of their own sex — has chosen to associate itself with a distinctly different group, those who embrace one or another form of gender-identity fantasy or delusion. That’s what the T in LGBT refers to.

I’m sympathetic to homosexuals, as we used to call people who experience strong same-sex attraction. (I think it’s no longer considered appropriate to use the term, but I’m nothing if not no slave to fashion. Parse that at your leisure.) Attraction, whether to members of one’s own sex or the more quotidian kind, is what it is, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that it isn’t something one can change even if one wishes one could. I’m glad that being gay or lesbian is legal, tolerated, and accepted.

I’m sympathetic as well to those who suffer one or another form of gender dysphoria, who imagine or wish themselves to be of a different sex, or who are so confused about the nature of sexuality as to imagine that there’s a meaningful category of human sexual identity that is neither male nor female. People suffer all kinds of emotional and psychological troubles, and their suffering is real.

But the so-called trans movement is nonsense — the self-righteous pouring of gasoline on to the sputtering psychoses of true gender confusion. That it has been elevated to the level of a fad, and given a patina of the same victimhood status to which the homosexual community could once lay legitimate claim, is a sign of the narcissistic unseriousness of our time.

The gender identity movement — the trans movement — is a self-contradictory celebration of inchoate and childish urges, of the desire to make it so by wishing it so. Pursuit of its confused fantasy of sexual mutability, of parallel universes of ever more contrived sexual identity, necessitates the abnegation of the simple truth of sexual reality: that there is male and female, man and woman, and — barring a handful of ambiguously and unfortunately malformed individuals — nothing else.

The world can not gracefully accommodate both physiological reality and gender-identity fantasy — and neither can the culture. Unfortunately, the levers of popular culture are in the hands of deeply unserious people, and so the tide of opinion favors the fantastic over the actual.

Which brings us to Father’s Day. The point of this holiday is the recognition that being a father matters — that men have something unique to offer, that masculinity is distinct from femininity, distinct and valuable. That claim is incompatible with the spiraling nonsense of the trans movement.

My favorite band will play at my favorite bar this week in celebration of Pride month. I’d go, if it were merely an LGB event. But the trans thing is stupid, is on the march, and has to be opposed by people who think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are acknowledgements of something non-trivial.