Transgressive activists are seeking to manipulate and pervert children into sexual identities in order to undermine Western values, institutions, and norms, according to Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro delivered a speech at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, on Tuesday night. The focus of Shapiro’s speech was identifying and countering the ideology of leftists using education and entertainment to groom children into embracing sexualized identities and lifestyles: transgressivism. Shapiro first explained the ideology in depth earlier Tuesday in an op-ed in The Daily Wire.
The ideology has infected U.S. culture and is exemplified in internet influencers such as Dylan Mulvaney and Jazz Jennings, two popular transgender personalities who have leveraged their identities through social media and television into massive platforms. The portrayal of Mulvaney and Jennings’ sexual identities is part of a broader effort to normalize transgressive ideas that break down traditional values and seduce confused or impressionable people, especially children.
Mulvaney and Jennings’ new lifestyles as trans women are anchored through a process known as gender-affirming health care, which “ought to properly be termed sex-denying health care,” Shapiro says. Such health care involves estrogen or testosterone treatments, cutting off the breasts of a female, or surgically inverting a male’s penis to craft a fake vagina.
“The transing of the kids has become the latest symptom of a far deeper and more profound evil in Western civilization. That evil is the broad redefinition of Western identity as a whole around subjective sexual feeling,” Shapiro said.
Western morality has discarded the traditional idea that sees “identity as a symbiotic relationship between the individual and society.” Identity lies between “biology and the institutions that shape us.” The goal of parenting, Shapiro says, is to “civilize your child.”
“Today, Western morality has discarded this idea. Who we are is not a question of society or institutions or roles. Instead, who we are is a question of internal feeling alone,” Shapiro said.
“Transgressivism treats both behavior and desire as immutable characteristics, like race or sex, thus removing freedom or responsibility,” the conservative commentator continued. The removal of responsibility, and thus purpose, has generally left people feeling aimless, empty, and depressed.
Transgressivism seeks the destruction of Western values, institutions, and norms because they are seen as corruptive influences that constrain and warp one’s true identity, which lies in pure animalistic freedom and desire. Transgressive identities have not just become normalized in society. Large swaths of the Democratic Party, the legacy media, academia, and corporate America are celebrating them, and, conversely, punishing those who criticize them.
Transgressivism has spread with the aid of three factors: the decline of religious practice, the advance of science and easy birth control, and the spread of a belief that traditions and values must be explained “tabula rasa” without an appeal to ancient custom. To further their ideology, the transgressives’ chief target to remake society is children, according to Shapiro.
“There is not a lot of question that transgressivism targets kids,” Shapiro said after quoting the lines of a San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus song. The song goes in part:
You think that we’ll corrupt your kids
If our agenda goes unchecked
Honey, just this once, you’re correct!
We’ll convert your children, happens bit by bit
Quietly and subtly and you will barely notice it…
We’ll convert your children, we’ll make them tolerant and fair…
We’re coming for them. We’re coming for your children.
“They have to [target kids] because if you wish to construct a society that hates all the institutions, you have to start with a crowd of people that haven’t been shaped and molded by the institutions,” Shapiro said. “[The transgressives] actually believe they are doing a favor to kids, [that] they are liberating the kids.”
“The most obvious manifestation of this, which we’ve seen pretty much all over the United States, is Drag Queen Story Hour or Family Friendly Drag Shows across the country,” Shapiro said. “Why is this happening? Well, it’s promotion of transgressivism.”
Transgressivism has led to an explosion of children identifying as LGBTQ in certain areas of the United States. The ideology can be beaten back and eventually defeated, however, according to Shapiro. Conservatives must push their state and local governments to take action. The pundit used his fellow Daily Wire host Matt Walsh as an example.
Walsh recently uncovered child transgender surgeries going on at Vanderbilt Medical Center. He has since held a rally outside the Tennessee State Capitol and pressured state lawmakers to take up legislation that would ban such “gender-affirming” care for children.
Shapiro said conservatives must also fight transgressivism personally in their own lives. “The best way to fight transgressivism is to not only lead lives of purpose and meaning embedded firmly in the institutions that make our civilization great, but pass those values on to our kids and insist that we be able to pass those values on to our kids.”
“If we don’t, we are not just going to pay the price in terms of our country, we will pay the price in terms of our families, in terms of our children,” he continued. “But if we fight back, the weight of traditional wisdom is on our side. The weight of reality is on our side. The transgressives will lose, with the help of God.”
