The Gift of Critical Thinking

If you are a PITT reader, you know the myriad things gender ideology has taken from parents: spousal harmony, trust in professionals, community leaders, and so-called experts (like psychologists, clergy, doctors, journalists, and teachers), friendships, the parent-child bond…since trans destroys everything it comes in contact with and rots our society from within, the list goes on and on.

This holiday season, I’d like to call out the one positive from my own harrowing brush with gender ideology in my home. The trans contagion has given me (back) the gift of critical thinking.

I thought I was a critical thinker. I thought I was informed. Prior to my son’s unexpected pronouncement that he was trans, I really felt that I was in tune with current events, and I felt pretty smart about my independent opinions and variety of balanced news sources too.

Actually though, what I had was apathy and, what seems to me in hindsight, an appalling lack of intellectual curiosity. I remember back in high school and college when I was eager to explore every academic and intellectual angle, to open every curiosity door, as that teacher in Stranger Things suggested. What happened to me? It seems like I spent the next 20 years on a treadmill, just doing all the expected things in life, career, money, family, house in the suburbs, blah blah blah. I left it to others—to the “experts”—to think about the rest of it, everything that didn’t pertain directly to me.

Then, out of the blue, my family, my child’s health and safety, my whole way of life was under attack. This shock—which I would not wish on my worst enemy—jolted me out of complacency. To help my son, I had no choice. I had to open my eyes—and what I learned shook my worldview to the core, dramatically and irreversibly. While I was living my life, queer theory had successfully reframed society and even subconsciously retrained me and my way of thinking, in a way that flew completely below my radar.

Transgender was totally made up, the emperor with no clothes. And, if that was true, what else that I had accepted as fact was based on false premises or completely fabricated?

Now that my son has desisted, I’m able to think about gender about 25% of my day, instead of the 99% of my brain process it consumed for almost two miserable years of my life. But I will never, never go back to my former complacency. I’ve been backstage now, I’ve seen the man behind the curtain. And, with my fresh eyes, I saw that gender isn’t the only problem that decades of stifled curiosity and free-thinking has created. Pick any area of interest you have and you’re sure to find false assumptions treated as facts by a tiny number of self-identified experts who are very happy to tell you what you should think. Maybe the silver lining of our society’s mass insanity is the creation of a new generation of skeptics.

So, thank you, gender ideology, for the newly re-discovered gift of critical thinking, and for renewed curiosity, the most human trait of all.

Question everything. I know I will.