Deny, Dismiss, Defame, Dominate

From immigration to NSA-Big Tech surveillance of American citizens to critical race theory to transgenderism, today’s major political battles are initiated and won by leftists using the same playbook over and over again.  Like an antibiotic-resistant supervirus, the most effective political operatives of our time have developed certain reflexes to inoculate themselves from host termination. 

It’s important to recognize and understand their tactics, not least to consider what they portend for agendas which have yet to reach fruition. 

The purpose of this essay is, through the lens of the transgender issue, to elaborate on a meme created by Aimee Therese, which encapsulates the classic pattern of liberal political manipulation: deny, dismiss, defame, dominate. The four-step process is a reflex. It is deployed both in a moment all at once and over long periods of time in a more drawn-out manner. These steps often bleed into one another; obfuscation is the point.

Step One: Deny

In 2015, Jordan B. Peterson experienced his first viral moment, when he stood his ground against liberal protestors who had come to attack him for publicly opposing Canadian Bill C-16, which mandated the use of preferred pronouns, forcing anyone and everyone to comply with the delusions of gender-dysphoric people under the threat of loss of employment. Following the landmark Obergefell decision, this was among the first in a series of international legal aggressions purported to advance transgender “rights,” redefined through the American tradition as entitlements. 

When the proposition of an extremely unpopular liberal political position engenders resistance in well-adjusted, even apolitical or “classically liberal” people, leftists first dampen opposition by insistently denying that the issue at hand is even real. At the time, Peterson was branded as a loon, totally detached from reality, for suggesting that, historically speaking, compelled language has a certain communistic quality that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.

What are you even talking about? The trans activists opined. Trans people’s right to be publicly identified by their private sexual proclivity has nothing to do with your rights. This has nothing to do with the USSR. You can’t even draw a straight line from one to the other. You’re making things up to justify your own transphobia. Get real!

Step Two: Dismiss

Denial is implicitly a dismissal of the conservative’s ability to grasp reality. Dismissiveness accelerates especially as time reveals some aspect of the truth. Then, the aggressors make a minor concession leavened by a major distraction. 

The next big step in the global transgender entitlement movement came in 2018, after Republican lawmakers in North Carolina sought to preempt the momentous astroturfing by putting into law that people use the public bathrooms pertaining to their biological sex. At the time, trans activists’ response was to dismiss lawmakers as bigots by suggesting that men identifying as women have always used female bathrooms, and that the legislation, rather than being a preemptive protection of women, was indeed a civil rights abuse of men in dresses.

Without acknowledging the claims of the past, activists implicitly conceded what just a few years earlier they had explicitly denied: that preferred pronoun usage was the objective, nothing further, and that compliance under compelled speech could not possibly lead to anything more serious in the future.

Okay, yes, the rights of transgender men include the right to enter women’s restrooms, but it’s not like that takes anything away from you. They are just like women: submissive, harmless, simply minding their own business. Drag queen bowel hour is a blessing of liberty. In fact, it’s been this way forever. Why can’t you just leave trans people alone?

Step Three: Defame

Denial and dismissiveness are always paired with, if not immediately followed by, the threat of total personal, social, financial, and emotional destruction of political opposition. This was true for Peterson and it was true for the entire state of North Carolina. As for the big picture of the global transgender entitlement movement, precisely at this benchmark is where we stand today.

A few weeks ago, the American Medical Association announced that sex should be removed as a legal designation on birth certificates. This news, combined with the 117th Congress’s decision to cease use of terms “mother” and “father” in session last year, as well as the La Leche League’s normalization of the term “chestfeeding,” instigated some of the most vitriolic personal attacks on trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) since the transgender movement began. 

Time has revealed once again that transgenderism as a political movement is necessarily an attack on women’s civil rights. Because everything that early opposition predicted has come true, transgender activists are particularly eager to destroy opposition, lest the record speak for itself.

Last year, JK Rowling was cancelled by her own disciples. Genevieve Gluck, who runs the podcast and blog Women’s Voices has sustained death threats, rape threats, and cyber attacks to include the ripping off of her voice to use as an overture to hypnotic sissy porn, which resulted in an algorithm that will forever link her name to that kind of pornography. Even I, a far less significant voice in the world of gender-critical writing, as well as many of my friends have sustained attempted cancellation for our positions on transgenderism. Its proponents can no longer deny that legal transgenderism will indeed annihilate political, legal, and civil designations for women, and have resorted to personal annihilation for anyone who points this fact out:

Okay, female-identifying men rape women in prison, but that’s just one news report, and what’s it to you anyway? Why do you hate trans people so much? TERFs are just white supremacists in disguise. Shut up!

Step Four: Dominate

One more move remains to be played for the transgender movement: Step Four, the final revelation of the thing they believed the whole time but told you that you were a bad person for suggesting in the first place:

Yes, some people are going to get hurt by this, but actually, it’s good. 

Sound familiar? Yes, the working class is being exterminated through joblessness and overdose, but actually, it’s good. Yes, the NSA was spying on Tucker Carlson, but actually, it’s good. Yes, we are going to mandate vaccine passports, but actually, it’s good.

This week, animator Chris Chan, who “identifies” as a woman named Christine, was arrested in Virginia for raping his 80-year old mother with dementia. In this case, in which violence against a woman by a man identifying as a woman is the central problem, what happens with Chan’s defense will indicate whether or not the transgender movement, in all its implicit misogyny, has completed its legal domination of women, which was always the goal. The case will hinge on the question of whether Chan’s self-identification of being a female absolves him of charges of incestuous rape, because Virginia law does not recognize incest between mother and daughter as such. Yes, Chris Chan “had sex with her mother,” and actually, incest is good.

The stakes have never been higher. Money can be recovered, migrants can be deported, schoolrooms can be reconquered, and mask mandates can be reversed. Theoretically at least, even the intelligence community could be disbanded. Innocence, on the other hand, can never, ever be restored to victims of sexual abuse. Sexual grooming, indecent exposure, and molestation are forms of theft in which the object of theft is a non-renewable resource—and that’s only the beginning of what makes this so evil. A legal and cultural movement whose explicit purpose is to destroy all sex-based boundaries and categories implicitly intends to defang rape, incest, and pedophilia—despite tiresome yet undeniably effective refrains to the contrary.

Make no mistake about what’s coming down the pike, and do not underestimate the capacity of Big Feminism to justify extreme sexual abuse in the name of progressive politics. Domination is coming for us all unless a serious resistance movement can find a way to fight back while withstanding trademark leftist gaslighting.