In the United States, MAGA nationalists have gotten sick of hearing the fact that the Statue of Liberty 🗽 delivers a clear invitation to immigrants. These MAGA nationalists are immediately reminded of Emma Lazarus’s poem at the statue’s base where it welcomes the world’s tired and poor huddled masses. These MAGA nationalists recite their stock reply that the poem was only added seventeen years subsequent to the statue’s opening ceremony. They then proclaim that this means that the Statue of Liberty did not originally represent the freedom of immigration.
Donald Trump’s presidential advisor Stephen Miller, who is in charge of ICE’s cruel infractions, is among those who provide this revisionist history about the Statue. In 2017, he sniveled, “...the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of American liberty lighting the world. The poem that you’re referring to was added later [and] is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
That same year, the same opinion came from the late Rush Limbaugh. On the radio, Limbaugh pontificated,
...the Statue of Liberty and the Emma Lazarus poem is a great illustration of how immigration policy and the United States/Statue of Liberty has become bastardized. “Give us your tired, your poor” and so forth literally has nothing to do with the purpose of the United States.
In fact, it’s never been on the Statue. It is inside the pedestal. It was only put there when they put a museum in there. It was not part of the original Statue of Liberty. It was not part of the design. The statue was a gift to the United States from the people of France as a beacon of freedom and liberty. It’s a testament to our Founding and our Founding Fathers, and this Emma Lazarus poem had nothing to do with it. It had nothing whatsoever to do with it!
The poem was put in the pedestal museum because it was used as part of the fundraising for the pedestal. It’s been co-opted by immigration activists and leftists to actually [split infinitive 😣] now represent U.S. immigration policy, which it isn’t.
Actually, the Statue was associated with immigration at least as early as its opening ceremony in 1886 — seventeen years prior to the addition of Emma Lazarus’s poem. At the ceremony, the U.S. President of the time, Grover Cleveland, gave a speech to dedicate it. In the dedication, he alluded to immigration. And the term that the man used is noteworthy.
Anti-immigrationists frequently employ the term open borders as a pejorative. Yet President Cleveland spoke glowingly of how the Statue of Liberty stands before “the open gates of America.”
We know that Cleveland is here consciously alluding to immigration, as it was a topic on which he commented publicly throughout his presidential terms. He had generally wanted to favor immigrants from everywhere, but he was not completely consistent. When gangs of white-supremacists engaged in vigilante actions against Chinese immigrants, Cleveland properly condemned the violence. Yet, sadly, he ultimately capitulated to pressure from the racists and said that ultimately whites and those of East Asian descent could not coexist in the same neighborhoods. He thus relented to calls for restrictions on Chinese immigration.
Cleveland comes across better when it comes to the nativist clamor against other sets of immigrants they hated. At the time, those from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were not considered white. They were darker-skinned and darker-haired and mostly were Catholic or Jewish, castigated as racially distinct from the lighter-skinned Protestant majority. As most of these immigrants were impecunious and not fluent in English, legislation to discriminate against them involved Congressional bills allowing immigration only from those who could write in English. Fortunately, Cleveland successfully vetoed those bills, explaining to Congress and the wider public,
It is said...that the quality of recent immigration is undesirable. The time is quite within recent memory when the same thing was said of immigrants who, with their descendants, are now numbered among our best citizens. . . .
I cannot believe that we would be protected against ...evils by limiting immigration to those who can read and write... In my opinion, it is infinitely more safe to admit a hundred thousand immigrants who, though unable to read and write, seek among us only a home and opportunity to work...
It is Cleveland’s position on this matter that informs his mention of the open gates of America — gates that, naturally, also should have been open to those from East Asia.
I also appreciate how President Cleveland praised Liberty as the USA’s own pagan goddess, a much better object of worship. Thus, in his public speech at the inauguration for the Statue of Liberty, President Cleveland orates,
We are not here to day to bow before the representation of a fierce and war-like god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but we joyously contemplate instead, our own deity keeping watch and ward before the open gates of America, and greater than all that have been celebrated in ancient song. Instead of grasping in her hand thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light which illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.
We will not forget that Liberty has here made her home; nor shall her chosen altar be neglected. Willing votaries will constantly keep alive its fires, and these shall gleam upon the shores of our sister republic in the East [France]. Reflected thence and joined with answering rays, a stream of light shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and man’s oppression, until liberty enlightens the world [boldface added].
Yes, Liberty has always stood for the application of her principles, foremost of which is the liberty to seek new opportunities in new lands. She stood for liberalized immigration at her opening ceremony. May she continue to stand for it today.
Sorry, MAGA Racists: The USA Was Indeed Founded on Active Intellectual Engagement With Philosophic Ideas, Ideas Which in Logic Ultimately Lead to Acceptance of the Rights of Nonwhite Immigrants
Stuart K. Hayashi
This Time magazine special edition commemorating the
founding’s 250th anniversary admits that the American Revolution was and is a “Revolution
of Ideas”
You may ask, ‘How did this tradition get started?’ I’ll tell you. . . . I don’t know. —Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof
Introduction
I notice an internal contradiction in what is said by MAGA white nationalists. MAGA white nationalists shriek that nonwhites, such as engineers from India, are ruining the West by immigrating to it, and therefore they should be barred from entry. In reply, free-enterprisers point out that the MAGA white nationalists are contradicting the Declaration of Independence and the very philosophy upon which the American republic was founded. Bono, the lead singer of the band U2, has turned out to be surprisingly articulate in explaining this position. He began as a conventional leftwinger blaming capitalism for the world’s problems. But, as he says in a speech to Georgetown University, he came to realize that political-economic liberalization is actually the strongest remedy for the Third World’s poverty. And in holding up the liberalizing philosophy of the USA’s founding as his case study, Bono praises the republic as an idea. To quote his own words,
...America is an idea, isn’t it? I mean Ireland’s a great country but it’s not an idea. Great Britain’s a great country but it’s not an idea. That’s how we see you around the world: as one of the greatest ideas in human history, right up there with the Renaissance... right up there with crop rotation... ....that idea, the America idea, it’s an idea, the idea is that you and me are created equal...
The idea that life is not meant to be endured, but enjoyed. The idea that if we have dignity, if we have justice, then leave it to us, we can do the rest. ...
This country was the first to claw its way out of darkness and put that on paper. And God love you for it, because these aren’t just American ideas anymore. ... You’ve brought them into the world. . . . I know Americans say they have a bit of the world in them, and you do. The family tree has a lot of branches. But the thing is… the world has a bit of America in it, too. These truths — your truths — they are self-evident in us.
In 1983, Leonard Peikoff as well made this explicit. The USA, he ascertained, “at root is an ideology. . . . The Founding Fathers explicitly championed a certain philosophy, which they made the basis of America’s distinctive political institutions and national character, and that philosophy to some extent survives among the citizens to this day.” And we free-enterprisers have repeatedly emphasized that this philosophy refutes everything spewed by the MAGA white nationalists.
Hence, the MAGA white nationalists have a rejoinder to us free-enterprisers. MAGA white nationalists stamp their feet and cry out that the USA “is not a collection of ideas.” That’s how failed comedian turned white supremacist Sam Hyde phrases it. In his viral Twitter video with over 21 million views and over 29 thousand retweets, he moans, “There is this disturbing idea...that America is just a collection of ideas.” No, “You have to fight for not...the notion of ‘America as this collection of ideas.’ That’s not what it is.” He dismisses the Declaration and other founding documents as an empty set of words. “You’re not fighting for a paragraph” (emphasis his). J. D. Vance, the vice president under Donald Trump, similarly sneers, “People will not fight for [philosophic] abstractions...”
Rather, MAGA white nationalists such as Hyde and Vance maintain that America consists of two other objects. “America is not just an ‘idea,’” J. D. Vance continues. “It is a group of people with a shared history.” — shared ethnic history. “. . . It is, in short, a nation,” with nation here having a meaning similar to ethnic tribe, such as in how the Huns, Vandals, Angles, Franks, and Biblical Moabites were a “nation.” These are all euphemisms for blood. And Vance would have that although Americans will not fight for “abstractions,...they will fight for their home” — in effect, the soil. Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance would have it that the USA is all about blood and soil. But when they don’t want to admit so explicitly that it’s all about race for them, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists say the USA is not about “ideas” but traditions (translation: only the traditions associated with those of their own skin color) — what J. D. Vance euphemizes as white Americans’ “shared history.”
As a case study in tradition, Hyde pontificates, “Nothing significant that gets built, gets built on an individualistic scale. The greatest things that get built: cathedrals — and, if you disagree with this, you’re just wrong . . . — cathedrals are built over hundreds of years. They’re built not just by the army of stone masons who build them but by the towns who pay for it.” And he continues, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. . . . It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
And in showing a complete lack of understanding of what culture entails, Sam Hyde adds, “This is not learned stuff.”
This denigration of the Founding philosophy — denying America’s status as an idea — is a new low from the political Right, especially its members who claim to be American. Prior to Donald Trump’s initial run for President in late 2015, the USA’s political conservatives frequently gave lip service to the Founding Fathers. These political conservatives were never consistent. They conveniently evaded the fact that their efforts to unite church and State directly contradicted the words and spirit of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Joel Barlow. But these MAGA white nationalists have given up this old pretense of respecting the Founders. And, I suppose, it is best that they do. It exposes MAGA white nationalists in their fundamental anti-Americanism.
Of special interest to me here is the internal contradiction in proclaiming that rather than “ideas,” America is about “culture” and traditions (“culture” and traditions of white people, apparently). The fact is that culture and traditions are, by definition, learned. More to the point: culture and traditions are expressions of ideas, and therefore traditions ultimately come down to ideas. But these “traditions” that the white nationalists uphold are ideas and abstractions to which they want Americans to pledge passively and unthinkingly. When they deride “ideas,” philosophy, and “abstractions,” what Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance really mean is that they reject the active engagement with ideas that was practiced by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and the other Founders.
All Traditions Are Customs, But a Tradition Has a Symbolic Meaning That Goes Beyond the Custom Itself
To understand what is meant, we can do something that Sam Hyde has neglected to do: we can bother to consider what is the definition of tradition. Traditions are customs practiced in particular types of settings and on particular occasions, and these customs have become long-established in their respective societies. So far, Sam Hyde and the other MAGA white nationalists would agree. But there is a second part of the definition that they omit. All traditions are customs, but not all customs are traditions. For a custom to be a tradition, there must be an additional component. What else makes an action a tradition is that is a gesture. Culture consists of actions considered important not only in and of themselves but also as symbolic representations of something else important to that society. And all symbolic gestures exist in the realm of ideas.
Consider a traditional Western wedding ceremony. Absent of any formal marriage ceremony, people can form pair bonds. They can form a unit where people live together, pool their assets, and have sex. These can be considered common-law marriages, and the marriage ceremony is not needed for that. Rather, the nuptials are a formalized ritual to codify the pair bond that already exists. The wedding ceremony, like all traditional ceremonies, is a ritual in which people express their appreciation for a set of actions — the pair-bond and all it entails — and is not the actual set of actions being celebrated. The wedding ceremony is not the pair bond but a symbol expressing appreciation for lifelong commitment to the pair bond in question. To phrase it differently, the wedding ceremony is not the marriage but a supplemental performance of the idea of the marriage.
Within this larger symbol are smaller symbols. The bride wears white as a gesture to represent her relative chastity prior to the marriage. The throwing of the bouquet is a ritual symbolizing the idea that other wedding attendants, too, will soon be able to enjoy what the bride and groom get to have.
Eating particular types of food has practical value, and need not have tradition attached to it. But sometimes eating a particular food on a particular occasions is said to have cultural value and be a tradition. When that happens, that particular dish is no longer valued only for the directly practical values of nourishment, nutrition, and the pleasure of taste. Indeed, the dish becomes a symbol of something — something of value in that society — other than the dish itself. And ideas are involved there as well.
The is seen, and tasted, with the tradition of eating turkey on Thanksgiving. Many Americans could prepare a turkey feast almost any other day of the year. But eating this bird on Thanksgiving is a ritual for family members to represent their gratitude for what everything good in their lives, including each other. Hence, the feast itself is not about the turkey as much as it is about the values the ritual represents — again, specific ideas.
Eating any particular cuisine at least in part due to its ethnic history is about ideas. The Japanese diet originally formed because of geographic isolation. Japan is an archipelago surrounded by sea animals, and therefore seafood figures prominently in the Japanese diet. Historically, it was easier to be a fisherman than to try to be like the Steppes peoples and raise livestock. Originally, then, Japanese people ate seafood only for practical reasons.
But with global trade, a rich person in Japan now can theoretically go for long periods of time eating food not caught from the ocean. Often, people eat traditional Japanese food not only for the taste. Those of Japanese descent want to experience something that their ancestors did, such as eat the same food. When non-Japanese people try Japanese cuisine, it has a lot to do with wanting to experience other cultures — the idea is to be exploratory. Eating food from other cultures is an expression of one’s openness to new experiences and new kinds of people. Accordingly, in the modern world the tradition of eating “ethnic food” has a lot to do with ideas.
(As Murray Rothbard-influenced, patent-hating anarcho-“capitalists” often make common cause with white nationalists, some might interject here. In trying to stigmatize intellectual property rights as some form of protectionism and monopolism, this is the point where I have heard them say in their usual churlishness, But a patent or copyright claims you own an idea. If a tradition is an idea, you want a corporation to patent your ethnic traditions? That is a false conflation on their part. Customs and traditions are generalized ideas, as are entire product categories. By contrast, patents and copyrights recognize your ownership over a very specific configuration of your own origination. I have written of that difference here and here and here and here.)
An apologist from the Intellectual Dark Web might chime in, “Yes, ideas are important. But what we object to, is people talking only about ideas that are pie-in-the-sky and not focusing on the actual actions taken to help the American people.” As Sam Hyde says in his viewed-21-million-times tirade, “...America’s not a collection of ideas; America is a people [a race]: Americans.” But for the Intellectual Dark Web to say that its criticism of America-as-an-idea is not about practicability is for the Intellectual Dark Web to whack at a straw man. No free-enterpriser who stresses the importance of ideas does so at the expense of concrete action. The point of ideas is to implement them. A plan — a complex set of ideas — to buy a home is made for the purpose of buying the home. A schematic explaining an invention is drafted to produce units of that invention.
In turn, the Founders drafted the Declaration not to muse idly in a parlor, but to put such ideas into practice. Hence, they produced a social system freer than what it had existed before. And to the extent that such a social system was successful, it was not due to, but in spite of, political collectivists such as Sam Hyde.
Sam Hyde’s cry that “you’re not fighting for a paragraph,” as is J. D. Vance’s pronouncement that people “will not fight for abstractions,” is belied by the very oath required of those serving in the federal government. The President of the United States and personnel of the armed forces do not take an oath to serve and defend Sam Hyde’s white race — “a people.” Nor is the oath for the white people’s “shared history” of which J. D. Vance speaks. Instead, they take an oath to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution — every “paragraph” of it. More specifically, it is that insofar as the U.S. military is employed wisely against genuine threats, the U.S. military fights to defend the sort of civilian life that the “paragraph” describes.
The Choice Is Not Traditions Versus Ideas, But Respectively of Passive Conformity to Some Ideas Versus Active Intellectual Engagement With Evidence
And, of course, even the MAGA white nationalists’ use of the term tradition is a red herring. They don’t value “traditions” in general. They disparage Islamic traditions. Even MAGA white nationalists who are Catholic are unfriendly toward the Catholic traditions of Latinos. The white nationalists only like “traditions” that they associate with their own skin color. And their skin color is just something unchosen that they just have. That is apparent in Sam Hyde’s conflation of skin color with “culture.” To revisit the quotation from earlier, “We have hardwired group preferences, we have genetic memory, we have culture. This is not learned stuff. It’s so deeply embedded in us that carries on for thousands of years.”
Notice Sam Hyde’s equivocation of “culture” with “genetic memory” and that which is innate, “hardwired.” Culture and traditions consist of sets of actions that people enact voluntarily. By definition, they are not “hardwired.” But in the warped (mis)interpretation of Sam Hyde and his many white-nationalist fans, such human actions are as innate and involuntary as skin color. Hence Sam Hyde says nonsensically, “This is not learned stuff.”
To test Sam Hyde’s assertion, you can look at differences in traditions among people who are of the same racial heritage but who live in different parts of the globe. Persons of Korean descent in the USA often behave with different customs — different ideas on what is, or is not, socially appropriate — than do people in North Korea. In the USA, rap music is considered “Black culture.” But rap music was not associated with Black people in the 1940s or 1970s, prior to rap music being invented. Rap music is not as popular among Black people in West Africa as it is in the USA. That is because culture is indeed something that is not hardwired. Culture consists of customs. Every custom had to be invented by some individual. Afterward, other people adopted that custom — to wit, they learned it.
Every tradition began as an untraditional innovation and was therefore adopted for reasons other than “It’s a tradition.” As white nationalists frequently invoke the fall of Rome in misleading ways, a particular historic account from ancient Rome is instructive. Yes, MAGA white nationalists say that the Western Roman Empire fell from being to open to outsiders — (white-skinned) Germanic barbarians — and the modern West will destroy itself through similar openness. By contrast, in an actual ancient Roman debate about openness to foreigners, the emperor Claudius made an important observation about traditions which these same MAGA white nationalists prefer to evade. Tacitus quotes the emperor as saying, “Everything, Senators, which we now hold to be of the highest antiquity [tradition], was once new. . . .This [new] practice [with regard to openness to outsiders] too will establish itself, and what we are this day justifying by precedents, will be itself a precedent.”
This, and every other tradition, was something learned. A tradition might have begun as a practice done squarely for practical value. That was the case of Japanese people mostly eating seafood. But the custom might have begun, from the start, as a symbolic gesture. In either case, what is now called a tradition is called such — rather than only a custom or practice — because it is a gesture representing some value other than itself. Traditions are ideas.
But there are two different approaches we can take to traditions and all other ideas that have ingrained themselves into the culture. We can take a passive-and-uncritical approach to them. Conversely, we can engage with traditions and other long-cherished ideas, which means being critical and selective about them, which requires actual thought.
The passive-and-uncritical approach is to accept a tradition unthinkingly. The insinuation is that the tradition was good enough for my family, and so I should practice it, and there is no more to consider. That is the approach taken by those who say, “You should follow a tradition because it’s our tradition, and that’s that.” A variant that is only slightly more thoughtful, and which was popular among twentieth-century European political conservatives who cite Edmund Burke, is one that goes, The fact that the tradition has lasted so long, into our own day, is already proof that the tradition is time-tested and has served us well. So the fact that the custom has earned the status of ‘tradition,’ means the custom is worthy. In that respect, I am justified in saying ‘That a particular custom is a tradition is justification enough to practice it.’
And, of course, that unthinking approach is lazy. For millennia, slavery was traditional. Slavery was a tradition not merely because of its ostensive practical benefits for the slave masters, but because it represented particular ideas that were convenient for the politically-influential in general. It embodied their larger assumption that those in power have every rightful authority to domineer over others by force. In some Mesoamerican Empires, such as that of the Aztecs, ritual human sacrifice was considered an indispensable tradition. The traditional sermons delivered in the very cathedrals that Sam Hyde extols are all about ideas. And, contrary to Sam Hyde, the ideas in such sermons are due for critical reexamining. That a custom is a tradition, is indeed not justification enough. That brings us to the second approach to traditions.
The second and contrasting approach is to recognize that traditions themselves must be subject to judgment and scrutiny other than “It’s a tradition.” It means embracing the realization that some traditions are good and worth preserving, whereas others are inadequate and due for abandonment, replacement, or at least modification. And that is a major role of Enlightenment philosophy. Enlightenment philosophy calls upon us to examine our traditions and select the good from the bad.
Since the founding of the republic, reading Enlightenment philosophy has itself become a tradition. The fact that the free-enterprise philosophy of the Founders and the rest of the Enlightenment has become a tradition in America is frequently cited by pretentious anti-capitalists as proof that such free-enterprise philosophy is conservative, stodgy, and obsolete. These pretentious people then tout their tired old Socialism and Progressivism as the hip new innovation on the cutting edge, omitting how their verbiage is broadly a repackaging of the political-economic collectivism of medieval guilds that Enlightenment liberal free-enterprise philosophy supplanted.
Contrary to those pretentious anti-capitalists, it is the case that Enlightenment philosophy and Founders such as Thomas Jefferson have told us that free-enterprise philosophy becoming a tradition is not a basis good enough to embrace it. Once again, even these — the best of ideas — must be justified by some other, more-objective standard rather than appealing to “tradition.”
Anticipating our century’s nonsense about tradition-for-tradition’s-sake, Thomas Jefferson elucidated, “...institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, ...new truths disclosed, ... institutions must advance also...” Those who uphold tradition unthinkingly “might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.” And in terms of actually yielding equitable results, his free-enterprise philosophy has held up very well. The free-enterprise philosophy of the Enlightenment, enshrined in the USA’s Founding documents — what Sam Hyde denigrates as just a “paragraph” — is indeed a great American tradition. But, contrary to Friedrich August von Hayek, it is not great on account of being a tradition.
Consider a well-publicized contrast. The MAGA white nationalists’ appeal to American traditions not out of any appreciation for what those traditions represent but out of demand that everyone conform to the norms of the white Christian majority. That is why they throw tantrums about American football players kneeling during the National Anthem to protest police brutality but simultaneously deny that the republic was founded upon “ideas” and denigrate the founding documents as just some “paragraph.”
This is self-contradiction comparable to how similar American rightwingers — there is overlap between they and MAGA — prioritize the American flag over free speech. The American flag symbolizes freedom, including freedom of speech. That includes the right to be on the land of a willing landholder as you burn, in protest, a U.S. flag that is your own rightful possession. Those who would outlaw flag-burning are expressing not appreciation for what the flag represents but instead turning it into a fetish — an expression not of reverence for the American flag’s meaning but as an artifact of mindless idolatry. That is fitting, as mindless idolatry is the most consistent manifestation of MAGA. Thomas Jefferson would shake his head in dismay.
That brings to mind the MAGA white nationalists’ self-contradiction and hypocrisy over free speech and the First Amendment themselves. As numerous private parties were peaceably avoiding them, these MAGA people mischaracterized such avoidance as “censorship,” branding themselves “free-speech absolutists.” That these demagogues denigrate the fact of the republic’s founding in abstract philosophy demonstrates they do not understand or care about the freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
The First Amendment exists exactly because of the American republic being founded upon active engagement with philosophic ideas. The Declaration of Independence invoked the liberal republican Enlightenment-philosophy ideas of John Locke and “Levelers” like Richard Overton that throughout the prior century the Crown had tried to squelch. In the name of such ideas and their further development, the Founders established the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech, contrary to Sam Hyde’s cohorts and to Donald Trump, is not about the visceral ejaculation of every prejudice on whim. Rather, freedom of speech is the processing and exchanging of ideas, a facet of the larger freedom of thought, which is what the First Amendment is supremely about. Among the amendments to the Constitution, this one is the first exactly because the freedom of thought is the one of prime importance — freedom of thought, as we have discussed earlier, gives rise to the freedom of action that is freedom in general. In deriding the USA’s founding upon philosophic ideas, the MAGA nationalists minimize the very basis of the First Amendment that they pretend to cherish.
For a long time, I was under the misapprehension that the opposite of bigotry from white nationalists was: the policy of being open to new ideas. But simply keeping oneself open is too passive. It is too passive to wait for new ideas to come along. The true opposite of bigotry is curiosity. This means proactively pursuing one’s own curiosity — like babies and the Biblical Eve —out of one’s own selfish desire to know. That results in exactly what Sam Hyde fears: engagement with ideas, so much so that an entire republic can be founded upon innovative philosophy. Speaking of Sam Hyde’s precious centuries-long construction projects, the play Inherit the Windputs it very well: “An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral.”
Conclusion: The Nation of the Enlightenment
Ayn Rand has observed the exceptionalism here of the USA’s founding. Sam Hyde’s fellow white nationalists wail that white people have no ethno-state of their own. The reality is that almost all white-majority countries are ethno-states founded by a single tribe. It’s called England because it was founded by the tribe after which it was named, the Angles. Yet another well-known nation is called France because it was founded by the Franks. Inasmuch as these tribes founded a country to maintain their traditions, the founding was based on ideas. But as far as it was about “tradition” per se, it was from an uncritical acceptance of those ideas — of accepting them from one’s elders without question.
What makes America exceptional was not only that it was founded by ideas, but by very conscious examination of, and grappling with, such ideas. Upon separation from England, Americans could have set up a new monarchy because that was the tradition of the people from whom they descended. But upon examining that form of government and comparing it against others, the Founders decided to go with institutions previously tried by the ancient Athenians and the Romans but with the aid of the newest philosophic ideas to make these institutions more liberal than what their Mediterranean forebears had conceived. Ayn Rand notes that whereas these other Western societies, including those of the Greeks and Romans, were a result of “historical accident,” the American republic was from “philosophical design.”
Leonard Peikoff, too, observes, “America is the only country in history created not by meaningless warfare” nor some “geographical accident” in which some tribe like the Angles found itself, “but deliberately, on the basis of certain fundamental ideas.”
Thomas Paine understood how the founding of America was more about innovation than incurious adherence to tradition. In Common Sense, the very pamphlet instrumental to inspiring the American Revolution, he reminded readers, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” And that is what the Founders did.
Migo: “But you want to . . . what? Tear down everything our world is built on?”
Meechee: “It’s not just about tearing down old ideas. It’s about finding new ones.” —Smallfoot
Enlightenment philosophy’s celebration of such curiosity is so vital to the USA’s founding that it is enshrined in our Constitution. A major impetus for the founding document’s codification of the rights to copyright and patent is that, as accurately noted in the document itself, these intellectual property rights reward and thereby “promote the progress of science and the useful arts...” The search for new developments is our American tradition but the new developments themselves, of course, begin as something that is definitionally the opposite of tradition.
Bono is right about America. America never could have become a global leader had it been only a set of traditions and, as Sam Hyde also puts it, “a people” (a tribe). As noted in a very American movie,
People need dramatic examples to shake them out of apathy, and I can’t do it as Bruce Wayne. As a man [and as just “a people” —S.H.] I’m flesh and blood. I can be ignored. I can be destroyed. But as a symbol? As a symbol I can be incorruptible. I can be everlasting.
Ah, but Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying their hardest to corrupt it. The fact that America is an idea is the source of what has made it so important and so powerful for over two centuries, prior to MAGA finally being able to threaten it. As a symbol — an idea — America carries an influence that goes beyond the sum total of its human population, those who are white and otherwise. It is as a symbol — an idea — that America inspires people the world over who are yearning for greater freedom, the exact people whom Donald Trump and Sam Hyde are trying to shut out. That is what the historian James Truslow Adams meant when he coined the American dream. The expression the American dream is just another way of iterating that America is a great philosophic idea. And America is a great symbol and great idea because it is not a symbol and idea only, but enacts its own founding philosophic values to the extent that it finally allows for the liberty of all. It is not those of Latin or Middle Eastern descent, but the ugliness of Sam Hyde and Stephen Miller that needs to be deported.
Both approaches to tradition — the incurious approach of Sam Hyde and the other Great-Replacement white nationalists versus the curious approach of the Founders — involve ideas. But note that the latter involves much more thinking and, hence, ideas play a much more active role. As Ayn Rand noted, the USA was founded not only upon ideas, but upon very conscious engagement with them. And that is why this latter approach to tradition is anathema to Sam Hyde and other white nationalists screeching about a “Great Replacement.”
Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists, of course, would have us embrace their racism unthinkingly, going as far as conflating customs and traditions and culture as being as inherent as skin color — “This is not learned stuff.” Bothering to examine the facts about culture, tradition, and the learned-versus-unlearned is what immunizes someone against Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists. In that respect, Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists are correct to hate the fact that America was founded upon “ideas.” The fact that some people still bother to think is a fact that prevents Sam Hyde and other white nationalists from winning over the rest of the population, white-skinned and otherwise. And, on at least some implicit level, Same Hyde and the other white nationalists notice this.
It is not mere random coincide that MAGA denigrates the USA’s founding on philosophic “ideas” and also demands that exclusion of persons of other “races.” The first is in service to the second. To recognize that USA’s founding upon “ideas” would lead to renewed attention on what those specific ideas were and are — that, though far from being applied as consistently as they should have been, both back then and now, they were always about cognizance of the equal rights of all human beings to liberty. And this is the liberty that MAGA is denying to dark-skinned people, such as engineers from India, in denying them entry. To acknowledge (1) the USA’s founding upon the ideas of Enlightenment liberty is ultimately to acknowledge (2) the rights of dark-skinned people. MAGA is trying to kill both.
And note that for most of its history, that acknowledgment of the equal right to liberty for all “races” has not been part of the history of white people or the Judo-Christian religious tradition. It was only subsequent to the rise of Enlightenment liberty philosophy, as promulgated by secularists like Josiah Wedgwood, Adam Smith, and Denis Diderot, that particular Christian sects — mostly the Quakers, Methodists, and Unitarians — took a strong interest in abolishing chattel slavery. When Sam Hyde and the other white nationalists uphold most white-people traditions but conspicuously not the Enlightenment-liberal philosophy one, they are able to uphold most white-people traditions while excluding the one aspect of Western Civilization that was singly most responsible for enfranchising all of the nonwhite denizens of that culture.
That, despite the past codification of racial discrimination into the USA’s laws, the Founding philosophy ultimately requires the abolition of such discrimination, is acknowledged implicitly in Sam Hyde’s diatribe. In the diatribe, he proclaims that if many engineers from India migrated to Japan, you would be wrong to think that this could “turn an Indian person into a Japanese person...”, and this also applies to engineers from India moving to the United States. Hyde is still cowardly to say directly that he conflates “American” with “white,” and that their non-whiteness precludes anyone from India from being American. That cowardice is why Sam Hyde instead makes the insipid analogy about how someone from India can never truly be a Japanese national. But Sam Hyde does say directly that immigrants from India “are being used” — by whom exactly, Sam Hyde does not specify — “to replace white people.”
But American independence from Great Britain was not about the racial anxieties mouthed by Sam Hyde and J. D. Vance. The Declaration of Independence did not say that the American colonists had come to interpret themselves as being a different ethnicity or race from those of English metropole, and that, as a separate ethnicity or “race,” they wanted the new republic as an independent ethnostate. No. The American colonists separated themselves from the British government based not on race — not on them being a separate “people” — but on a difference in governing philosophy, on their having different ideas on how the colonies should be governed. J. D. Vance’s assertion that Americans “will not fight for abstractions” would have been news to those who fought in the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence was chock-full of philosophic abstractions.
I have heard similar white nationalists pronounce that the observation that the USA is a “nation of immigrants” is not from the Founding period but only gained currency in the year 1959 when Ted Sorensen and Jules Davids ghostwrote for John F. Kennedy, Sr., a Pulitzer Prize-winning book with that title. As these white nationalists uphold white people’s “traditions” as inherently good, their insinuation is that the recognition of the USA is a nation of immigrants is diminished if the recognition turns out to be relatively new and not-so-traditional after all. That goes along with these same white nationalists lamenting that the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, largely championed by John F.’s younger brother Ted Kennedy, created the USA’s “open border.” As I have written before (1, 2, 3), the Hart-Celler Act did not do that, and, though it liberalized immigration in some aspects, the same bill made immigration more difficult in others.
But the truth is that a good idea is good on its own merits regardless of whether it is old or new. The celebration of America’s immigrants would be worthwhile even if the idea came from 1959 rather than the Founding period.
Yet the reality, as usual, is that these white nationalists are incorrect about American history. The observation that the USA is a nation of an increasingly diverse set of immigrants is one that goes back at least as far as John Adams, the USA’s second president and the brains behind American independence. And in the same observation, Adams acknowledged how the founding had been about active engagement with ideas. Writing in the year 1818, and looking back on how, decades earlier, American colonists were initially reluctant to separate from British rule, Adams commented on how it was active engagement with philosophic ideas that eventually united the diversity in the immigrant populations in this cause. As he verbalized it,
This radical change in the principles, opinions sentiments and affection of the people, was the real American Revolution. . . . The Colonies had grown up under...so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners and habits had so little resemblance...that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action was certainly a very difficult enterprize. The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.
Adams said it himself — that rigorous philosophizing by a diversity of peoples was “the real American Revolution.” America, at her best, is an idea. And she will remain a great idea to the extent that we uphold and defend this idea against Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, Sam Hyde, and other racist illiberals like them.
On Saturday, January 17, 2026, I added the point about the First Amendment and the quotations from J. D. Vance. On Sunday, January 18, 2026, I added the quotation from John Adams about the American colonies being a collection of diverse immigrant groups. On Saturday, May 9, 2026, I changed the thumbnail photo of this post to my April 8, 2026 photo of me holding the Time magazine special issue commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Americsan foudning and noting that the U.S. founding was and is a “Revolution of Ideas.”
Over the past several years, the hottest topic of controversy has been the rights of transgender people, especially those among them who are still minors. Among opposition to trans rights, there are two basic kinds — explicit and implicit. The explicit sort is open hostility. It involves the outright proclamation that the idea that anyone can be transgender must always be stigmatized — that people who say that they are of a gender opposite to the one they were assigned at birth must be, at best, delusional. This is the approach of political commentators like Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles.
The implicit opposition to trans rights is more subtle. It is expressed by those who claim sympathy for trans people and claim to understand that legal adults who identify as transgender should be allowed by law to live as such. Yet the implicit position refuses to remove all stigmata from trans people; it would maintain the stigma under the guise of protecting children. This is the commonest position taken by those who claim to support freedom of enterprise. It is also the position expressed by J. K. Rowling when she is at her most discreet, such as in her well-known “TERF Wars” essay online (it is on Twitter where her hostility becomes more explicit and she sounds like Matt Walsh).
For this essay, I will not bother to argue against those who express explicit opposition to trans rights. These people are very much committed to that opposition; it has become part of their identity. An essay such as this one will not sway them.
I do think there may be hope, though, for some people who have the implicit opposition. After all, I was one of them.
“I’m Not Against Trans People; I Just Want Minors Protected”
On the matter of those who have the implicit opposition to trans rights, what they usually cite is what they call the protection of minors. The rhetorical spiel about minors is what I call the TransSkeptic Position. It goes something like this.
I’m not “transphobic.” If you’re an old adult and set upon it, the government should not stop you from getting the surgeries that would help you feel more comfortable in your own body. But children, by definition, are not consenting adults. For that reason, the government is right to prevent children from receiving the body-changing medical procedures that go with what you call “gender-affirming healthcare.”
You know how children are. Sometimes they say impulsively that they want to marry their favorite teacher. And a lot of them are very confident and certain of that feeling when they say it. And it’s common for kids to go through phases. When I was little, I knew a boy who, for three years, was obsessed with dinosaurs and rock-collecting. For those three years, he told everyone he wanted to be a paleontologist. But then he moved on — to telling everyone that he was going to be a professional baseball player. Well, today he’s neither a paleontologist nor a pro baseball player and he’s very happy in his job. You know that you can’t take everything your children say at face value or give in to every demand they feel strongly about. If you did, you would be serving them nothing but ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
And yet we are told that we must take it at face value when our kids, in their normal childish confusion, tell us that they are the sex opposite to the one that they really are. Hell, we’re not just told we have to take this at face value. We are being emotionally blackmailed into it by teachers, the media, and touchy-feely Woke psychologists.
I am going to describe for you what is really going on. Children impulsively say they are the opposite sex. They have no idea what they are in store for. Because parents have been indoctrinated or cowed into being “accepting,” they take the children at their word. They therefore “affirm” and reinforce to the children what they have said about being the opposite sex. Whether the parents intend it or not, this sort of attention acts as a reward to the child. The children are thus signaled what sort of role to fill to get this positive reinforcement. They act accordingly. Both the parents and the children play the parts expected of them. In turn, they reinforce one another’s actions in their respective assigned roles.
This goes on and on. The children are conditioned and pressured further and further into acting according to a preassigned “trans identity.” Hence, the children are pushed into “gender-affirming care.” Their bodies are changed with puberty blockers, hormone treatment, and eventually surgery. Plainly, this all goes too far. And, as adults, many of these former children recognize they were not truly transgender. Yet they have permanently changed their bodies. As adults, they wish they could have children. They cannot, as they have sterilized themselves. They are left with regret. All this happened because the parents were too afraid — cowardly — to put their foot down and say no, on pain of appearing “intolerant” and “invalidating.” And it happened because the children were afraid of disappointing their parents — they felt they were already in too deep.
Is it possible that the child really was transgender? Yes, there is that possibility. But that child is not old enough. Even if that child really is trans, that child does not have the mental capacity to commit to the permanent body changes that go with “gender-affirming care.” To have a minor make such a commitment, absent of contractual capacity, is too great a risk. It is better to be safe than sorry. To err on the side of safety means that only a legal adult can receive “gender-affirming care” and to “transition.”
The government is right to intervene to protect children from abuse by their parents. That includes sexual abuse. As children are not of mental capacity, they cannot consent to sex even if they say they do. On that same basis, even if children say they want “gender-affirming care” and to “transition,” they are in no position to offer consent to it. If the parents authorize gender-affirming care on the child, that is just as nonconsensual as sexual abuse.
If you believe you’re transgender, wait until you’re a legal adult before transitioning or doing anything about it to your body. If you reach eighteen and are still convinced that you are the gender opposite to your sex assigned at birth, then — fine — I will relent. At that point, I can’t do anything about it. I will call you the pronoun you want to be called. But before you reach eighteen, I can and will do something about it. And if that means that the government must do some manhandling on parents trying to push gender-affirming care on minors in their custody, then so be it.
That TransSkeptic Position is already loaded with assumptions. We should clear up some misconceptions. Many people alarmed by the prospect of gender-affirming care for minors are under the misapprehension that it involves surgery on prepubescent children. False accusations by the internet personality “LibsOfTikTok” have people believing that hospitals have been providing surgeries on the genitalia of prepubescent children, or giving them hysterectomies. That is completely false. For many years the guidelines of WPATH — the professional association for trans health care — said clearly that such surgeries could not be performed on those younger than eighteen. In late 2022, WPATH changed its language on the matter. That prompted anti-trans campaigners such as Matt Walsh to shout, falsely, that the professional association was now making it explicit that prepubescent children would be receiving surgeries.
The actual reason for the change in wording was that the professional association opted for health care to be more personalized and on a case-by-case basis. More pertinently, WPATH still specifies that particular medical treatments should not begin until specific points in the child’s physiological development. It specifies, for example, “Hormone therapy is not recommended for children who have not begun endogenous puberty.” As noted by the YouTube vlogger Jessie Earl, “The WPATH may not give specific ages, but it will mention certain particular points in a child’s development where it might be OK to consider certain treatments.”
Much of the confusion comes over mentions of a prepubescent child starting a “transition” to another gender. Opponents of trans rights have seized on this confusion in order to insinuate that gender-affirming care consists of body-changing treatments. The confusion comes from a conflation between “medical transition” and “social transition,” both of which belong to the broader category of gender-affirming care. Medical transition involves treatments to the body, such as the administering of puberty-blockers and cross-hormones. That is not provided to prepubescent children.
When prepubescent trans children do transition, it consists of a “social transition.” It involves helping children grow accustomed to living as the gender with which they identify themselves. Likewise, it helps acculturate their family and friends in school so that the adjustment is easier for everyone. Most of the healthcare administered at this stage comes from child psychologists and psychotherapists.
Gender-affirming care does begin to have a physiological effect on trans children, however, when they begin to experience puberty. In this respect, gender-affirming care can contribute to the trans child’s body developing differently than it otherwise would. Although there is no surgery on any reproductive organs, it happens that the puberty-blocking medications and cross-hormone therapy can still make people skittish.
The taker of the TransSkeptic Position will then assert that even if no surgery takes place prior to age eighteen, someone receiving hormone replacement therapy at age sixteen does lead that person down that troubling path toward surgery. Such patients, the TransSkeptics continue, are under pressure to finish what they started. For such reasons, conclude the TransSkeptics, there is still a great risk to staring gender-affirming care for someone younger than eighteen. Always the TransSkeptics insist that to err on the side of safety is to forbid gender-affirming care to anyone who is not yet a legal adult.
That TransSkeptic Position was one that I myself held for many years. Much of this essay will explain why I changed my mind on it. The TransSkeptic Position talks up the alleged risks of allowing a minor to undergo gender-affirming care but conspicuously fails at acknowledging the risks of depriving gender-affirming care to a minor who wants it. In the end, gender-affirming care for minors should be allowed legally and be recognized as a worthy option.
The TransSkeptics’ False Assumptions About What Is at Stake
First, we must disabuse some misconceptions. We start with those about puberty-blocking medications, better known as “puberty blockers.” Those wishing to discredit gender-affirming care frequently trump up the alleged dangers of puberty blockers. They propound that puberty blockers destroy a person’s bone density. Worse, they go on, trans-rights activists are so zealous in pushing gender-affirming care on minors that trans-rights activists and doctors unconscionably downplay the dangers of this medication. Rather, continues the narrative, the real beneficiaries of gender-affirming care are the greedy pharmaceutical companies that are paid for puberty blockers, and these companies are Manufacturing the Consent of the trans minors. Such scary rhetoric about these chemicals commonly appears in the Wall Street Journal.
There is irony in the Wall Street Journal peddling this narrative about greedy corporations contaminating people with a toxic chemical. It is that, years ago, the Wall Street Journal published a fact that this same paper now overlooks in its scare stories about puberty blockers. The fact is that when it comes to exposure to any chemical that is not monotonic, the dosage will matter a great deal in determining how much of a danger it poses.
In the early 1990s, environmentalist activists put even more emphasis than they do today on the threat of microscopic residue of alar and pesticides on foods. The Wall Street Journal editorial board interpreted that as an attempt to malign the reputation of big business. The WSJ and free-market think tanks thus found scientists who admonished the public to remember something important. It is that unless the chemical in question is a monotonic toxin, the public has to take the dosage into consideration.
A monotonic toxin is a substance that poses a danger no matter how tiny the dose; examples are cancer cells and HIV. Unless it is a monotonic toxin, it is the dosage that makes the difference between safety and danger. Too much oxygen is a carcinogen; too much water is toxic.
Likewise, the presence of microscopic particles of alar and synthetic chemicals have not been shown to be large enough to pose a major risk. More recently, there is great irony in people who consume alcoholic beverages — a major carcinogen — being scared of the artificial sweetener aspartame, a smaller potential cancer risk. The WSJ and free-marketers frequently quote the Renaissance-era scientist and philosopher Paracelsus: “the dose makes the poison.” You can read that argument advanced in the Wall Street Journalhere, here, here, here, here, and here.
The principle holds consistently, and the Wall Street Journal and free-market think tanks were not wrong for pointing that out. Yet the Wall Street Journal, suspiciously, does not apply this same logic to the dose of puberty-blocking drugs received by minors in gender-affirming care. The WSJ publishes vague alarmism about how puberty-blockers harm bone density, suspiciously without accurate considerations about dosage. You can see examples of that here, here, and here. In reality, minors who receive puberty-blockers cannot receive the treatment for more than two years. By contrast, for puberty-blocking drugs to have a significant impact on bone density, someone would have to be taking them regularly for decades on end. In short, the WSJ disputes the narrative about greedy corporations poisoning their customers with relatively small doses of chemicals . . . except when that narrative proves politically convenient for the WSJ’s socially conservative readers.
The TransSkeptics’ misrepresentations of the risks of puberty-blockers — which they frequently repeat even after being corrected about this — is one among several factors that led me away from the TransSkeptic position concerning gender-affirming care for minors.
Another misconception that must be cleared up has to do with false figures. Fans of the TransSkeptic Position often parrot J. K. Rowling’s proclamation that “through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60–90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.”
That figure comes from a 1995 study by Susan J. Bradley and Ken J. Zucker. And J. K. Rowling misrepresents the nature of that sample. Among the large percentage of gender-nonconforming youths who were referred to the clinic and showed improvement absent of medical intervention, transgender youths suffering from gender dysphoria were a small minority. A larger percentage of the youths referred consisted of gays and those whom the study described as having “transvestic fetishism.” To be clear, “transvestites” are not the same as those who are transgender; transvestites wear the opposite sex’s clothes but, more than half the time, are cisgender; many are heterosexual. Contrary to J. K. Rowling’s misrepresentation, the “60–90 percent” figure does not actually tell us the percentage of prepubescent youths who say they are transgender and then change their minds later.
With that out of the way, I can tell you which seemingly subtle event contributed to my eventual break from the TransSkeptics.
How a Reversible Medication Made Me Reverse Course in This Controversy
For years, even as I thought of myself as respectful of the rights of transgender people, I agreed with the TransSkeptic Position. I had also been casually curious about the commercial success of J. K. Rowling. Ever since I was a little boy, I had wanted to be a writer. I thought that job would make me rich like Ms. Rowling and Stephen King. Haha; how naïve! “Writer” is what economist Steven Levitt identifies as a “tournament job” — only a few people in the profession become truly rich, whereas most do not. Other tournament jobs include those of “actor,” “beauty queen,” “professional athlete,” “musician,” and “drug dealer.”
Even after I learned that only few writers become wealthy, I had wondered if there were aspects of Ms. Rowling’s career that I could emulate. I had also appreciated her standing up for the rights of Syrian refugees, much to the ire of Alt-Right personalities like Ian Miles Cheong who, at the time, disparaged Ms. Rowling as a social justice warrior and woke-scold. It therefore became concerning to me when, in her promotion of her then-new book, The Ickabog, Ms. Rowling had been showing signs that she nursed some sort of grudge against trans women.
Eventually, Ms. Rowling came out with her essay “TERF Wars,” where she gave her reasons for opposing the trans rights movement. I had not previously heard much of the particular issues she raised. Even then, the supposed evidence that Ms. Rowling offered — such as that most trans boys ultimately “grow out of” thinking they are trans — seemed suspicious. All in all, I did not feel confident at the time to come to a conclusion about it. I decided to explore the matter further.
On that topic I came across the well-known YouTube vlogger Jessie Earl, who uploads as “Jessie Gender.” She came out with a video to rebut Ms. Rowling. And in that video Jessie Earl underscored something I had not previously given much consideration. It is that when prepubescent trans children start transition treatment, that transition does not consist of
irreversible transition steps like surgeries or hormones. Instead, most youths are actually given puberty-blocking drugs that stop the irrevocable effects of puberty on their bodies. By taking these puberty-blocking drugs, it allows them longer time to come to terms with their own gender identities and decide later on if they want to transition when they are most able to consent to more definitive actions like surgeries. And, by the way, puberty-blocking drugs are 100-percent reversible, whereas, by the way, the effects of puberty are not.
And as a study by the Massachusetts General Hospital found, 90 percent — again, I say 90 percent — of transgender adults who are denied these puberty blockers faced suicidal ideation in their lifetime because they had to go through puberty: an experience that is honestly really, really horrible for many trans people. Believe me as a trans woman who had to go through male puberty, it gets honestly really hard. It was one of the hardest times in my life. I personally spent much of my puberty wishing I was a girl, and spending a lot of that time crying in the shower to hide my tears from my family.
It is something that I wish I could change but I can’t. It’s my life and I’m happy with how things turned out, but going through [male] puberty — something that I wish I could have stopped by taking puberty-blocking drugs — was hard. By taking the — again, reversible — puberty-blocking drugs, you can greatly increase the chances for trans men and -women to avoid that outcome and enable them to have the choice later on in life if they want to go through a normal puberty or take hormones to transition irreversibly when they are older. [Italics are Jessie’s; boldface is mine.]
That is worth repeating. The effects of puberty-blockers are reversible. The effects of puberty are not.
This is something that had not been addressed by the intellectuals I had been reading online, such as the Intellectual Dark Web circle of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Steven Pinker. I decided to look further into this. What Jessie Earl said checks out — it is well-corroborated in the medical field. As one of the simpler explainers puts it, “The effects of puberty blockers are reversible. If a person stops taking puberty blockers, the effects of puberty will return or resume.” The Public Health Service Authority of Canada likewise says, “There are no known irreversible effects of puberty blockers. If you decide to stop taking them, your body will go through puberty just the way it would have if you had not taken puberty blockers at all.” The Mayo Clinic uses language that is a bit more technical. “GnRH analogues don’t cause permanent physical changes. Instead, they pause puberty. . . . When a person stops taking GnRH analogues, puberty starts again.”
When children repeatedly insist they are a gender opposite to their sex assigned at birth, and their parents and doctors both take this seriously, this is how the process goes. To the extent that they are not stopped by red tape, prepubescent children can receive gender-affirming health care and might be able to start a gender “transition.” But, contrary to smears by the likes of Matt Walsh and LibsOfTikTok, that transition does not entail any type of surgery. For those who have not reached puberty, the transition is merely a social transition.
The children are verbally affirmed by their parents — and, ideally, by their teachers and classmates — in identifying themselves publicly by the gender by which they interpret themselves to be. To the extent that they want, they are allowed to dress and behave in ways consistent with what is normally associated with their gender. That is, if she wants, one who was assigned male at birth (AMAB) can wear dresses. At this stage in the process, the professionals with whom the child has the most contact in gender-affirming care are child psychologists.
When the child begins puberty, the ideal is for the child to be able to access puberty-blocking treatment. Contrary to the scare stories, doctors and the healthcare system are not dispensing puberty-blocking medications willy-nilly. Puberty-blockers remain far less accessible than is claimed, and are, more importantly, far less accessible than they should be. In the year 2020, Jack L. Turban and his associates went over a survey of adults, then aged 18 to 36, who had received gender-affirming care as children. Of those who, at the time of their gender-affirming care, had wanted puberty-blockers as part of the program, no more than 3 percent received that medication.
Let’s look at what happens with those children who actually get to receive the puberty-blocking treatment. It is not to go on longer than two years. Once those two years are up, the child will need to have committed to a decision. At this point, either the child is to discontinue gender-affirming treatments that address physiology, or the child is to proceed with cross-hormone replacement therapy. The effects of hormone-replacement therapy can be compared to undergoing the puberty associated with one’s actual gender, as opposed to the sort of puberty that would be associated with one’s sex assigned at birth. Even in this duration, the patient is not to have surgical alterations to genitalia.
Increasingly, upon hearing people in my circle repeat the TransSkeptic Position, I tentatively brought up the consideration about how puberty-blocking drugs are reversible whereas puberty is not. Consistently, I was met with two different types of reactions. In many cases, the person who expressed the TransSkeptic Position would act as if I said nothing at all, and then just continue the same old spiel.
In the other instances, the person would just repeat the talking point about puberty-blockers being a danger to bone density — as if the denial of gender-affirming care was not itself a great danger — and without concern for how much the dosage level affects the riskiness or safety. When these people bothered to cite some source about bone density, it would always be the same old go-to people for anti-trans talking points, such as Helen Joyce and Abigail Shrier — go-to people whose conclusions are at odds with the wider context of study and conclusions by medical professionals.
Even if people admit that puberty-blockers do not pose a greater physical danger to trans minors than does the denial of puberty-blockers, many people will probably still be horrified by the idea, as such, of minors transitioning in gender. This has much to do with unfamiliarity. It is a cause of culture shock. They fear it because they do not know what it would look like, and often that fear drives them to form preconceptions.
Therefore, I think I should give an example of what it looks like when someone is accepted as transgender very early in life and is allowed gender-affirming care as a minor. That is the case of Rebekah Bruesehoff. Despite being assigned male at birth, before age ten she was already very consistent in informing others that she was a girl, and in behaving in a manner that would be expected of one. Rather than dig in their heels, her deeply religious parents — her father is a Lutheran pastor — accepted the reality of the situation and listened to their doctors. As I said, the process began with a “social transition.” Eventually, Rebekah was allowed to receive puberty-blocking medication.
By the end of those two years, she had already decided on completing the transition. She received the cross-hormone replacement therapy, allowing her to undergo a female puberty rather than the default, the puberty of her sex assigned at birth. As I type this, Rebekah has completed high school and is thriving. I have to admit that if she didn’t say she was transgender, I would not have guessed that she was. [ 1 | 2 ]
We are constantly told that once a trans person gets hormone treatments or surgeries, that trans person is largely stuck with many of the results. Glossed over is the fact of another great risk. Trans minors who qualify for puberty-blocking treatments have an opportunity to avoid a puberty that is not right for them. For you to urge the law to deny them this treatment is therefore, in effect, to force them to undergo a puberty that does not align with the gender that their minds happen to be. And, upon being forced into this wrong puberty, the trans person will largely be stuck with many of those effects. The life of Rebekah Bruesehoff shows us an example of a trans person being able to dodge the default form of puberty that is not right for her and instead undergo hormone treatments that provide a form of puberty more suitable.
And yet, as if these considerations do not exist, the TransSkeptic Position demands that the risks of transitioning are the only risks acknowledged. The TransSkeptic Position therefore falls prey to the same fallacy as Pascal’s Wager.
Conclusion: The Anti-Trans Version of Pascal’s Wager
For those who may not be familiar with Pascal’s Wager, here is a summary. Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and philosopher of the Renaissance. He was also devoutly religious and intent on converting others. In his mind, if you followed his religion, you would go to heaven. But if you did not follow his religion, you would be denied this beautiful afterlife. He therefore offered a challenge to nonbelievers. First he asked you to think over what would happen if you disbelieved his religion, and he turned out to be correct about it. Then you cannot go to heaven. That is a major risk. By contrast, if you do convert to Pascal’s religion, and it turns out his religion is fake and it won’t get you into heaven, you still will have lost nothing. Therefore, regardless of whether Pascal’s religion is right or wrong, the only safe, risk-free bet is to convert to Pascal’s religion.
A major fallacy in Pascal’s Wager is the false presumption that there is no adverse consequence of converting to Pascal’s religion if it turns out that his religion is not the right one. If you follow Pascal’s religion, you must follow its dictates. That involves a lot of self-denial in life — denying temptations that are nonviolent but considered sinful according to Pascal’s creed. If you live according to the self-denying rules of the faith and it turns out there is no heavenly reward for that, then the penalty is that you gave up the opportunity to have lived the happier life you would have chosen otherwise.
The TransSkeptic offers a similar wager with a similar implicit assumption. He says,
You and your child believe your child is transgender, and you want to start gender-affirming care before your child reaches puberty. But I wager that your child is probably not trans. This is just a phase that your child can grow out of, as J. K. Rowling has suggested. Consider what would happen if I’m right and you’re wrong. You will let your child “transition.” Upon reaching adulthood, your child will recognize that this never should have been permitted. Irreversible damage has been done. Your child will regret it.
But now consider what would happen if you’re right and I’m wrong. Your child grows into a legal adult and is still talking about being transgender. Well, it’s not as though your child has lost the opportunity to “transition.” Your child can do so now. Therefore, you all can wait until then. It’s better to be safe than sorry.
Always implicit in the “You all can just wait until the child is eighteen” line is a false presumption. The presumption is that forcing the trans minor to wait until eighteen is safe. Allowing the trans child to begin transitioning before the onset of puberty is not perfect but, everything else being equal, it will allow the trans person to avoid a lot of long-term trauma that will beset the trans person if forced to undergo the default form of puberty associated with the sex assigned at birth. Notwithstanding the vociferations of the Abigail Shrier whom the TransSkeptics often cite, it is forcing the trans child to undergo the default — and, in this case, wrong — form of puberty that can result in “irreversible damage.”
Yes, we know that people who insist that the law should not allow trans people to begin transitioning until adulthood — an insistence I once agreed with — claim that the insistence is chiefly out of concern for the well-being of the child involved. But if that truly were the main priority, then the person with that TransSkeptic Position would have to confront and concede the fact of the major risks that come with denying a trans child the opportunity to start the transitioning process prior to puberty. Caring for the well-being of the child means that, rather than write off such concerns, one weighs the risks of both action and inaction.
When TransSkeptics say that they are all about the child’s well-being, only to dismiss those concerns, it makes me wonder if something else is at play. This is what I suspect is really going on. I think that TransSkeptics are still very viscerally uncomfortable with the idea of someone transitioning to a gender that is different from the sex assigned at birth. They are even disturbed to learn of legal adults, such as the actor Elliott Page, transitioning, and they actually would not be sad if this was forbidden by law as well.
But they believe that we have reached the point where it is unlikely that the transitioning of adults will ever be illegal again; they are resigned to this being legal. However, they notice that there is still a chance that the transitioning of minors can be legislated against. Hence, they take that opportunity. But they know they will be looked askance upon if they admit that this mostly has to do with finding trans people, as such, to be icky. Hence, this has to be reframed, sanitized, and rationalized as protecting the trans children from something they will regret. When a woman says of someone else who is not even a family member, “I must caution you against ‘transitioning,’ because I fear that this will be a cause of great discomfort for you in the future,” often what she really means is that this will be a cause of discomfort for her in the future.
In response to that, we must remember an important truth. It is that, whether you are trans or not, your life rightfully belongs to you alone. That even applies if you are a minor. It makes sense if, legally, you cannot yet commit to any and every contractually binding decision without authorization from an adult looking out for you. But, even in that case, you must be the final judge over what is best in the course of your life, and you do have rightful say over a matter as important and pivotal as this. Literally, your life is at stake.
Those who take the TransSkeptic Position, and then refuse to take into account the risks that inhere in forbidding any transitioning to minors, make it all too clear that they do not know what they are talking about. Worse, the refusal demonstrates that they do not want to know. If these people are as rational and live-and-let-live as they claim to be, it is best that they butt out. Leave these matters to the families whose lives actually are directly affected by these decisions, and the doctors whom these families trust according to their own judgment.
Screen shot from the motion picture "Born in East L.A.,"
prod. Peter Macgregor-Scott, dir. Cheech Marin (Universal Pictures, 1987).
The following is adapted from my longer essay, “The War on Illegal Migrants: A Repeat of the War on Illegal Drugs.” The longest version of that essay is here. A shorter version of that essay can be read here.
Former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R–Tx) and his fellow writers of the Ludwig von Mises Institute blabber about the need for the U.S. federal government to get tough with guarding the USA’s southern border. They don’t want undocumented immigrants getting through. And Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also gnash their teeth about the evils of the U.S. federal government sending agents to intervene in foreign countries, including those of Latin America.
Yet such intervention is actually integral to enforcing the USA’s southern border. The leftwing journalist Todd Miller writes of how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has vast operations within Latin America, and their purpose is to do exactly the border enforcement that Ron Paul and the Mises Institute scream that they want. These U.S. agents spy on those they suspect of being smugglers or their clients. Then, when they judge appropriate, these agents apply armed force in order to preempt the smugglers and clients from reaching the border in the first place.
Todd Miller notes that, by blocking undocumented immigration in this manner, the USA is establishing, unofficially but in practice, a border that is even farther south than the official one north of Mexico. The border enforcers are, de facto, lowering the USA’s southern border further southward. As Todd Miller phrases it,
The United States has been purposely pushing out its borders, meaning that the border doesn’t end at the US-Mexico southern border. For example, in Puerto Rico, the Ramey sector of the U.S. Border Patrol can patrol a thousand miles to the south of the U.S. mainland. This allows Border Patrol agents, and effectively the Coast Guard and Department of Homeland Security, to patrol around the Dominican Republic and Haiti. So what happened in the January 2010 earthquake that hit Haiti, one of the first U.S. responses was to send sixteen Coast Guard cutters that were right around the coast line of Haiti; they sent an airplane over Haiti with the voice of the ambassador, who was speaking Creole, but asking people not to leave the island while they were digging themselves out of their homes after they collapsed.
So, all of the sudden, the U.S. border isn’t where you think it is. It expands and goes all the way up to the coast of Haiti. [When some Haitians did try to migrate, there were already] detention facilities at Guantanamo to intercept them. Everything’s in preparation.
Here, fans of Ron Paul and the Mises Institute are wont to say, “No, instead of messing around in other countries, the agents should be focused on the U.S. southern border, and the border only.” According to arguments put forth by the Mises Institute itself about other government agencies, nothing about that demand is realistic. Calling for a beef-up in border enforcement only causes more of the international meddling. It is unrealistic to expect that if a federal agency’s authority is enlarged in just one specific area, it will stick only to that one specific area. That enlargement of authority in that one area allows for administrators to rationalize their expansion into various other affairs that, to taxpayers, seem only tenuously related to what the agency’s original task was.
After all, by expanding their reach and jurisdiction, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and the Homeland Security Department they work under can all further justify their existence and budgets. It helps them look even busier and more important, which places pressure on the Congressmen holding the purse strings to renew their budgets. With renewed or expanded budgets, there is a reduced risk of layoffs within the departments. The agents maintain job security. But one would think that this would already be known by Mises-Institute libertarians so savvy about how the Drug War and other federal programs engage in “mission creep.”
Besides, to the degree that the federal government is serious about stopping illegal entries into the USA — something that those in the Mises Institute orbit demand quite zealously — it makes sense to meddle in the countries of the south. Agents can be more effectual in stopping border-crossings by going on the offensive against the smugglers within their countries of origin.
White nationalists try to conjure up the image of impoverished, nonwhite immigrants being a barbarian horde overwhelming an understaffed and underfunded Border Patrol. The reality is that the fervency of the anti-immigrationists has given the USA’s border-enforcement agencies another excuse to introduce upon foreign soil.
Ron Paul and the Mises Institute go on demanding both a closing of the USA’s southern border and that the USA stops intervening in other countries. But as Todd Miller shows, intensified enforcement of the USA’s southern border always leads to more U.S. intervention south of that border.
Fans of the Ron Paul and the Mises Institute also like to say, “You can have open borders or a welfare state. You can’t have both.” Evidence from academic studies happens to suggest otherwise. Here is a much more realistic binary choice: Either you can have the USA’s southern border closed, or the USA can stop intervening in other countries. You can’t have both.
