Vindication, a Decade in the Making

Back in 2014 I attended college at the University of Redlands. Like many others, my college years did a great deal in shaping the way I thought about life, the universe, and everything. I don’t think my experience was idiosyncratic in many ways; as a youth being exposed to more and more responsibilities, ideas, and the wider world, I very much went through the college activist phase; but in some ways, the experiences were certainly unique. Partway through my time in college Donald Trump became president, and many things could be said to have precipitated and followed from the 2016 election. What may surprise some is that my serious college activist phase began and ended before the inciting incident for many a fellow youth and the wider political world—it lasted from my freshman year up to my sophomore year of college.

To preface a bit more before getting into my self-actualization: my current values and beliefs can be labeled as liberal and moderate. There are many misunderstandings of what that means, so to address some of those: I am not liberal in the sense I adopt the beliefs of fellow leftists and the wider Democratic party by default; likewise, I am not liberal in the sense I reject the beliefs of the right-wing or Conservative party by default; I am not moderate in the sense that I look at two sides of an issue and come to a conclusion that is equidistant from both sides; I do not equally accept two sides of any issue; and I do not throw my hands up in the air while looking at two sides of any issue and say, “Well, both are equally right!” I am moderate in the sense that I tend to hold moderate—that is, not extreme or radical—opinions. This does not disqualify me from holding some extreme views (e.g., I think Green Apple Skittles are awful and people who like them don’t understand the synthesis of flavors Lime Skittles provide). As for being liberal, my values revolve around rights of individuals (e.g., free speech, freedom of religion) and political and judicial equality (i.e., equal treatment). For more clarity on how I form opinions, check out this blog post.

Flashback to Spring 2015: it was my second semester in my freshman year of college. To meet my graduation requirements, I had chosen a women and gender studies class for my general education credits. Overall, the class was simple and interesting, and I got to read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In which was a fun read. I was taught and learned various struggles from the perspective of past and modern women. I grew to share righteous concern and disdain for the hardships women and other minorities faced. Activist phase: achieved. Following a clichéd class project that involved providing a survey for random people about being a feminist, alongside giving a presentation about clichéd talking points about the “gender wage gap” and “pink tax,” I finished the class and the rest of the spring semester and second year’s autumn semester with my pleasantly righteous activist mindset revved up and raring. Then, I happened upon a video in spring 2016: UMass (the University of Massachusetts) held an event about political correctness featuring the speakers Christina Hoff Sommers, an American feminist and former philosophy professor, Milo Yiannopolous, a British journalist and entrepreneur, and Steven Crowder, a Canadian-American actor. These names may rankle, but not knowing anything about them at the time and hearing the information and ideas they shared was what stuck with me. This video was my wakeup call—my red pill, if you will. My cherished beliefs about the hardships women faced were tossed in the gutter (for the most part). In disbelief, I researched to verify the ideas shared in the video, and found they weren’t just credible but factual. How could I have believed women earn less than men for the same job doing the same work and working the same hours—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a thing! How could I have thought women have to pay more for products—they could just go and buy men’s products, for Pete’s sake! How could I have believed 1 in 4 college women were raped—campuses were pioneers of progressivism, that’d mean progressives were serial rapists and academia was complicit! Activist phase: destroyed.

Suffice to say, come autumn 2016 my aversion to feminism and transition into skepticism was in full bloom. In a sense, I traded my progressive activism for another brand of activism, though my passion in holding beliefs steadily declined. Beliefs I had even prior to college, opinions of Black Lives Matter and other progressive darlings, underwent a reckoning in my mind (imagine my disenchantment when I learned Trayvon Martin was not shot by a white guy, and “Hands up, don’t shoot” regarding the Michael Brown case was a complete lie). These lies, of course, held fragments of truth, yet their prevalence and their support from misuse of statistics disgusted me. Naturally, I was also disgusted that they had been uncritically taught to me in a college course, but that feeling was more of a deflection from my true ones. What disgusted me more than these lies built on kernels of truth was myself: I had uncritically adopted these lies as the entire truth. In doing so, I had succumbed to a human’s greatest foil: I exaggerated my own ego. I had taken basic assumptions about myself and used them to determine right and wrong, good and bad, valid and invalid—I had doubted nothing about myself, what I learned, and what I believed. I am a good person, I make good decisions, and therefore I am right. But I wasn’t right—so, did I really make good decisions…? And was I really a good person? Well, to have entirely sacrificed these core beliefs would have been debilitating and essentially me making the same mistake, so instead I updated them: I try to be a good person, I try to make good decisions, and I try to be right—that doesn’t mean I always will. Additionally, due to pursuing a degree in psychology (a soft science but a science nonetheless), I integrated a new personal philosophy:

“To have a closed loop as it relates to logic is to have no potential for doubt. That is, when you believe something it can only be evidenced—there is one answer with infinite evidence. This defies a scientific approach that singles out evidence and considers all possible answers. So, consider all answers.”

When Trump 2016 happened, I took it in stride. My thoughts were, “Well, it makes sense. I disfavor him, but such awful lies would naturally have a conservative backlash.” The remainder of my college years, and arguably up to the current moment, I had no horse in the race that was American politics. I criticized generic talking points, ideological tenets, and other forms of half-truths where I saw them, and as my moderate opinions developed so, too, did my (mild) disrepute. I was labeled a “Nazi,” “sexist,” “misogynist,” “racist,” “homophobe,” and just about all the -ists, -isms, and -phobes (and in rare cases I was labeled a “libtard”). Friends online such as on Facebook were lost, some were gained—an amusing and epitomizing example was bonding with others over the Hugh Mungus meme and how unhinged people reacted to the dad joke (the feminist and BLM activist in the infamous video reminded me that many ideological groups have some nasty actors out there—this example among other instances reinforced my thinking to avoid becoming a radical or an adherent of sociopolitical faiths (I’ve been using religious terms to describe sociopolitical ideologies because I think it cannot be understated how much several modern progressive sects resemble Creationism and flat-Earth theory and involve general cultlike and hive-minded behavior)). Altogether, my journey in becoming a moderate transpired over the full course of my college years. Cool.

Cartoon by Colin Wright

Flashforward to January 20, 2025—Trump is inaugurated for his second term as president. Given the title of this blog post, and the throughline that is politics, you may be thinking the vindication has to do with Trump. Well, yes and no. I retain my opinion of him being disfavorable—what politician isn’t? But, like the 2016 election surprise, I experienced déjà vu in my thinking: “Well, it makes sense—awful lies would naturally have a conservative backlash.” There’s a little thing I neglected to address up to this point that is the actual thesis of this blog post. It arose in popularity and awareness in the 2010s, and everyone who isn’t living under a rock today knows what it is. That thing is T. Yes, that T. The T in LGBT+. Transgender. It was such a microscopic population of people that by all means should have been a triviality. Despite my revulsion of feminist and other progressive lies, I retained core liberal values including the right of free speech, expression, and autonomy—live and let live, viva la igualdad. Yet what should have been trivial and benign became the antithesis of each of my liberal values. Transgender activism (i.e., Gender Ideology), the ideological backing behind T, became a pernicious, overwhelming force that ransacked many liberal values. It metastasized until just recently when an authoritative, staunch voice dared to halt this force and speak to my core values by telling this triviality a simple word: “No.”

The executive order, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” Trump signed on the day of his inauguration has been my vindication a decade in the making. It represents a longed-for refutation of persistent, repeated degradations of free speech and sanity. All the lies, starting with the first I was disenchanted from in feminism and repeating up to today, could finally be spoken about logically and honestly. That it was Donald Trump of all people to have made this happen is another matter worthy of expounding on, but, I’ll repeat the thesis, this executive order is my vindication. T has been such a contentious topic for so long; T’s sociopolitical backing habitually interchanged T (i.e., transgender people) with Gender Ideology at its own convenience to avoid criticisms and claim critics were transphobes for being against T rather than said ideology; it contemptibly manipulated people’s empathy to “just be kind” and “just be respectful,” even to the extent of staking transgender people’s lives on the compulsory thoughts and actions of others; it outwardly posed itself as “Live and let live” while in actuality operated as “You’ll do as I say, I’ll do as I want.” Like many ideologies, Gender Ideology pretended to be about equality. It wasn’t, and it isn’t.

While vindicated, the discourse is in shambles. Words and their meanings used to be understood, but now are second-guessed and requiring verification. Gender, priorly being the synonymous and colloquial term for sex, may instead mean gender identity, and gender identity may instead mean sex, and sex (if not deemed bigoted) may instead mean gender—suffice to say, definitions are circuitous if not circular, and, once arriving at an apparent meaning, the meaning may itself be unenlightening, incorrect, or haphazardly labeled “bigoted.” I am still in disbelief at the tacit acceptance of an incoherent vernacular; and, in more egregious cases, I am in disbelief at the explicit acceptance of incoherence. People, authority figures, women even, stated that they could not reliably define what a woman is. I felt like I was going crazy. I mean, we all have mothers, don’t we? How has humanity been able to reproduce? Thankfully, with this EO along with others that are combating Gender Ideology in the U.S. (and the Supreme Court ruling in the U.K.), common sense is returning.

President Trump signing executive order “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports” (February 5th, 2025)

Speaking of incoherence and bigotry, just about everything under the sun is labeled as transphobic, but so little is actually transphobic. Recognizing differences between men and women, males and females, is not transphobic. That such a basic truth became problematic to the point the president of the United States in the year 2025 had to define what a woman was because society could not is astounding. Of course, it started trivially, as all things do. Rewind time.

Flashback to the mid 2010s: pronouns were becoming fashionable—they were what cool kids used and signaled acceptance of everyone. If you didn’t, you were uncool and worse—a homophobic, transphobic bigot. So of course you’d concede on the use of pronouns. Even if you internally thought that calling a man “she” made little sense, you were being nice and respectful. But using the preferred pronouns was only a step—you then had to say some men were women. Cue “Trans women are women,” the new sign of acceptance. All right, you may disagree with the illogical use of pronouns and the illogical phrase of men being women, but both are simply words that can be said without grief and only in select instances, hardly reminiscent of a fictional dystopian society insisting 2+2=5. Small concessions to be cool and accepting. But then you noticed these words and phrases creep into academia, scientific research, work emails, and applications. You began to be asked to introduce yourself with pronouns and attend workplace trainings on gender identity. Well, all right, they still remain only words, albeit cropping up seemingly everywhere, and work always had meetings. Still not a great concession, and you still had space to disagree if you wanted. But then you noticed people’s free speech challenged in courts, people receiving demotions and firings, criminal cases filed against them, deplatforming from revenue streams, and institutionally-ordered reeducation for expressing disagreement. Whoa, that’s a bit scary and mildly reminiscent of Big Brother. Well, maybe disagreement is wrong. After all, no one likes a complainer, right? But then you had to be okay with men going in women’s showers, lockers, prisons, bathrooms, sports teams, and rape shelters. Well, you’ve been calling the men “women” all this time, so why stop accepting them as “women” now? You don’t want to be transphobic, do you? Besides, they’re a minority, they’re not harming women or taking opportunities from them. But then men dominated women’s sports, broke women’s sports records, won women’s scholarships, won Olympic medals in women’s sports, and sexually assaulted women and girls in their previously female-only spaces. Well, that doesn’t sound too good. Maybe there should be some restrictions in place for the men? No, fool! You’d be a transphobe pointing it out! Trans women are women. Wait. All of a sudden, you realize it has gone way too far. You can’t even call a spade a spade. So, you either join everyone in reveling at the emperor’s new clothes, or you bite the bullet and become a transphobe.

As I said earlier, this has been a contentious topic for a long time. J. K. Rowling has been considered a pariah for talking about T. Other brave souls similarly faced asperity and calumny for sticking their necks out. More recently, California’s governor Gavin Newsom has seemingly changed stances and vocalized opposition to males in girls’ and women’s sports, which is interesting—namely because Democrats nigh-unanimously support males in girls’ and women’s sports (and they have already begun chastising him for his new stance). It’s likely to continue being contentious. But, with this vindication, I feel more free to say what I actually think. In case what has already been said wasn’t clear, here’s what I think: men and women are different, and a woman is an adult human female.

PS:

Some may disagree with the simplistic and exclusionary nature of my given definition of “woman.” Language is exclusive by design—that is, words are designed to have a unique meaning. Without an exclusive meaning, a word may include everything and subsequently the word will mean nothing. “Duck” could mean “boat,” “car” could mean “train,” and, as the ever-quotable 1984 said: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” That is why my given definition of “woman” is what it is (and was what its understood meaning has been since Old English was invented or around the 5th century of the Common Era (and, of course, was what was naturally understood before documented language arose as humans always had concepts of man and woman—as I rhetorically evoked earlier, sexual reproduction has been a constant fact of life for humanity and predates it long before animals evolved)). As for qualms with my definition’s simplicity, I’ve often seen it argued that there are variances of what women can be (i.e., “sex is a spectrum” (an idea based on a misinterpretation of what sex is and what the sexual system of humans is)). I’ve also seen it argued that my given definition is “reducing” women to their sexual organs and function. These are erroneous arguments, as it would then follow that “defining” is the same as “reducing” which is untrue; being a woman does not preclude one from being an athlete or loafer, being blonde or bald, nor even being fertile or infertile. Such arguments can be recognized as either a continuum fallacy or a cognitive distortion known as labeling. If you’re looking for rigorous descriptions for all phenomena and potential states of being related to women, you’re misunderstanding the function of definitions—a dissertation or scholarly article is what you’re really looking for.

PPS:

Some may be curious about some citations I used in describing the progression of Gender Ideology; one particularly of note is the story of Imane Khelif and the 2024 Olympics. He—and I use such male-specific words descriptively, as aforementioned, without malice—is an odd one given he is not transgender. That did not stop T from rallying behind him and claiming him as “one of us” (and often mistakenly attributing this idea to those who questioned Khelif’s sex and participation in a female event). But yes, he isn’t transgender, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) said. That very statement, a correction to a former statement by the IOC, also confirmed an integral detail about Imane Khelif implicitly: he is a DSD (differences in sexual development) case. What kind of DSD case? Well, the world may never truly know for sure. The best evidence, which is admittedly substantial, includes: Imane Khelif being disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA) for the 2023 IBA Women’s Boxing Championships; Khelif initially appealing the disqualification before later withdrawing the appeal thereby making his ineligibility legal and binding; leaked sex test results from a 2023 report drafted in collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris, France and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, Algeria stating that Khelif had 5-alpha reductase deficiency (a male DSD); statements from Khelif’s own coach (Georges Cazorla) that admitted Khelif had a male karyotype and high testosterone, and the Spanish national coach (Rafa Lozano) that admitted Khelif was “too dangerous” to pair with women; more leaked sex test results from a Dr. Lal PathLabs in New Delhi, a lab accredited by Illinois-based College of American Pathologists and credentialed by Swiss-based International Organization for Standardization, that stated “Chromosome analysis reveals Male karyotype” (note that both leaks are from sources independent from the IBA which the IOC and many have written off as untrustworthy, though both confirm the validity of the IBA’s decision to disqualify Khelif); World Boxing instating sex tests and naming Imane Khelif as conditionally barred from participating in the female category at the 2025 Eindhoven Box Cup until he conducted a genetic sex screening; and most recently Khelif choosing to “skip” participating in World Boxing’s 2025 Eindhoven Box Cup, an event he was set to participate in and was a featured face for. Did I say the world may never know for sure? Well, I suppose this is as close to definitive evidence as you can get. Conspicuously, Imane Khelif has so far avoided doing the one thing that would lay everything to rest—taking a sex test. Also conspicuously, he hasn’t formally sued anyone—something I’d imagine he’d see rather good benefits from, if the charge of him being male was incorrect. If.

PPPS:

Some may be curious how I co-authored a book featuring a transgender character. I’d refer them back to me being a liberal and moderate. I am capable of entertaining ideas without accepting them, and I am capable of seeing people who are transgender, or those with gender dysphoria, as people, and as such are people who have individual liberties like everyone else. It is important to be aware that my views aren’t necessarily shared by others, such as my fellow co-author, and views of others, such as my fellow co-author, aren’t necessarily shared by me (e.g., I don’t think the book will be banned nationwide because it has a transgender character). Also, obvious as it may be, to be a writer you must be able to write characters with different perspectives than your own.

PPPPS:

Some may be curious how I conduct therapy with transgender people (i.e., people with symptoms of gender dysphoria). Being nonjudgmental and all those Rogerian things sort of comes with the territory of being a therapist. To put absolute clarity on this: I am critical of the hegemonic inculcation of and adherence to ideological doctrine, not of transgender people. The heart of my criticism and vindication rests in the past discouragement and recent encouragement of speaking honestly and being vulnerable—which the latter is ideally what a therapist’s work space aspires to provide. While the world doesn’t (and shouldn’t) wholly resemble a therapist’s office, I hope this ability to be open and vulnerable, without punishment or retaliation, becomes more acceptable in the world.

PPPPPS:

Some may be curious about wider implications given the pervasiveness of Gender Ideology having tampered with fundamental truths and the ability to have honest discourse about such things. There has been and there will be other ideological groups that go wild and tamper with liberties—as Jay Gatsby passionately told Nick Carraway, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” A different example of such past movement, the firing of James Damore was certainly stunning (and his quiet blacklisting was certainly chilling). Another separate example is when an astrophysicist that landed a probe on a comet’s nucleus was chastised into tears for wearing a shirt and his groundbreaking accomplishment became back-page news. I suspect such movement is currently underway (while not the topic of this blog post, I’d be remiss not to hint at a variety of other things Trump is setting in motion that I personally disagree with). Given my own anecdote of being indoctrinated, education has been a major area impacted by ideologies including Gender Ideology (and is fortunately seeing a turnaround); as mentioned earlier, sports, too, has been a big area impacted (and is also fortunately seeing a turnaround). A pressing concern in my field and in the wider medical field has been the treatment of transgender people—particularly the treatment of youth. Research and data is in its infancy on this subject, and as such (in addition to the ever-looming threat of having one’s personal livelihood subject to debate by the court of public opinion for voicing critical opinions let alone conducting critical research related to T) the efficacy of treatment can’t be definitively insisted on either way. As much as I’d like things to be easy and say, “Treatment works!” it really is case-by-case. Yes, my frustrating moderate stance rears its head once again.

Final Thought:

It is my hope that my own journey as told in this blog post more or less mitigates the very likely misgivings and dismissals to the thesis outlined in this same post. Prejudice and discrimination are real phenomena—it is prudent to not rampantly act on false positives or cry wolf, as doing so does injustice to the existence of both while punishing the innocent. I know that no matter how anodyne and reasoned I may try to communicate what I think there will still be knee-jerk reactions and refusals to listen. Such is life.