(2022-06-28) Solana No Homo

Mike Solana: No homo. In June of 2003, the year I graduated high school, homosexuality was still effectively illegal in 14 state

America has come a long way

But for fear of once again landing on the “wrong side of history,” we’ve adopted a culture of accepting almost anything, no matter how illogical

Conservative backlash was inevitable, and congrats, it now extends well beyond its original catalyst

In honor of Pride, Postmates released a PSA on gay sex

It was wild. It was embarrassing. It was “brave,” I guess, is the official verdict. But according to the tech industry’s small class of social activists, this sort of pandering is also not enough.

Disagreement on the topic of sex and gender is dangerous, activists argue, and Amazon’s refusal to deplatform the heretical authors poses a threat of actual trans genocide. It’s a familiar industry story, in which tiny groups of committed ideologues leverage hysterical language to exercise outsize influence over organizations that themselves exercise outsize influence over the country.

The activist gender ideology now beyond reproach, increasingly defacto law online, largely replaces the importance of biological sex with the sacred, if fundamentally abstract concept of gender. Ironically, this essentially erases the concept of gay people.

A few important terms before we break this down.

“Gay” is a word that concerns sex, and sexuality, and is defined by people with an exclusive same-sex attraction.

Despite tremendous cultural change, the number of gay Americans has remained static for decades. Self-defined bisexuals, on the other hand, have exploded across the generational divide,

“Transgender” is a word that concerns the presentation of sex, or how a person looks and feels about the way they look, and until recently denoted someone with a rare condition called “gender dysphoria.”

As recently as 2015, somewhere between .1 and .3% of the population identified as trans. But the age of TikTok has been a truly wild ride.

Today, around 1.4% of the population identifies in some way beyond their “assigned” gender, with close to half that population comprised of people under the age of 24.

This demographic shift punted the entire gay rights conversation from the topic of sex, an immutable biological reality, to the topic of gender, an abstract concept, leading naturally to the prominence of identities like “genderqueer,” or “non-binary,” in which a person feels neither like a man or a woman, and doesn’t necessarily require medical transition.

The critical flaw of contemporary gender ideology is no such “feeling” of gender exists.

In this way, counterintuitively, concepts like “genderqueer,” a stated rejection of the gender binary, rigidly codifies the binary into cultural law. By rejecting the labels of “man” and “woman” rather than the stereotypes associated with the sexes, activists have implicitly reversed feminist and queer positions held throughout the 20th Century, and endorsed the association of “masculine traits” with men, and “feminine traits” with women.

As a kid, I was never clocked as “girly,” or “gay,” or bullied for it. But I did prefer spending time with girls, and had many “girlish” interests. This is something I noticed in myself at a young age, and worried about

At that time, had some well-meaning teacher asked if I felt different I would have said yes. Had she then explained a small number of very special boys are actually girls, and asked if maybe I was that, the truth is I’m not sure how I would have answered. But I do know any medical treatment to “correct” my early sense of difference would have ruined my entire life.

The correct words of encouragement for a young boy who doesn’t feel like other boys is not “maybe you’re a girl.” It’s just “there’s nothing wrong with being different,” and “there is no certain way to be a boy.”

No platform, from social media to entertainment to the world’s largest book store, is qualified to police language on any controversial topic, let alone a topic in so clear a state of flux as gender.

So, a timeless piece of advice: Leave people alone.

If an adult wants to change their body, or their name, or the way they dress, this is not your business

Children are impressionable, protect them. This means, on the ground floor, they should not be challenged in early childhood with incoherent gender theory even most adults don’t understand, and they definitely shouldn’t be attending hyper-sexualized drag shows in gay clubs — because no child should be in any nightclub.