What is This Gender About Which You Speak?

Homophobia and misogyny turn us against our whole selves

NASA image of Pioneer 10’s Pioneer plaque features a design engraved into a gold-anodized aluminum plate. (Letting the aliens know who we are, where we live, and the time of launch as a function of some properties of hydrogen, pulsar location and frequency, and the size of the craft itself.)

There is a sea change going on with gender among US youth.

Damon Centola, in a series of experiments, determined that 25% of a population is the tipping point needed to trigger a significant cultural shift — that’s for a dedicated minority seeking to change the view of the majority. We’re approaching that here with America’s youth. If they can hang in there long enough to turn the tide, it’s not looking good for strict heterosexual binary gender as the standard by which all should be judged.

A Gallup Poll in 2021 found that 20.8% of Gen Z identified as LGBT+ vs 2.6% of my generation. This had only intensified by 2023. In results published in March of 2024, the numbers were now 22.3% vs 2.4%. This was noted in passing: it rated a story in the major news outlets — but less so than, say, the release of the iPhone 16.

This just might be bigger than the iPhone 16 :-)

A sense of the importance of this ongoing cultural shift can be seen in the reactions that have gathered against it

The US’s largest protestant denomination is doubling down on “Biblical Manhood” (illuminating example…