The biggest con game going on in America is not the Nigerian prince, not the Power Ball, not the call from a fake kidnapper who claims to have your child.
It is the scam convincing “open-minded” (and empty-headed) youth that they are not cisgender, or, if you prefer, straight. (Some say “normal,” and others say that word is pejorative.)
The latest evidence is provided by Brown University, that elite, Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., of all places. Tuition tops $62,000 a year, despite it never having won a national football or basketball title.
And the way things are going, its teams will be getting even worse.
Why?
The student newspaper, the Brown Daily Herald, just polled the student body and found that 38% of students do not identify as straight, a number that has doubled since 2010, and is five times the national rate.
The poll was taken in June, you know, Pride Month. It may be that that celebration influenced the respondents.
What else might have generated responses so far removed from reality?
Yes, I believe in evolution, that our bodies and minds change over time, but not over one or two generations. That is not biology, that is self delusion.
The results are just unbelievable — not that the students didn’t self-identify that way, they did. I find it unbelievable they are actually that way.
It is preposterous, but not completely out of line with other findings, showing that non-binary responses are blowing a hole in the roof.
Back in April, I reported on Gallup polling that recorded an explosion of LGBT responses from Generation Z, who were born between 1997 and 2012. There are 68 million of them.
What Gallup found last year is that 15.9%, about 1 in 6 Gen Z people, identify as nonbinary, falling somewhere along the broad horizon of the LGBTQ+ alphabet string. This is an unprecedented high number, and completely unbelievable.
By contrast, only 9.1% of Millennials, the previous cohort, were queer-claiming, but that is gigantic when contrasted to the tiny 3.8% of Generation X that preceded the Millennials, a figure that seems in line with traditional estimates that 4-7 percent of the population is gay. I use “gay” to cover all the possible non-straight varieties and there are more of them than Heinz, which has 57.
Some people with medical degrees find as many as 72, maybe more. There is no limit to creativity. Gay and lesbian used to be enough. Now it is just a starting point.
So here’s the obligatory “I have nothing against gay people” line, because I am sure some will call me a homophobe for questioning stats that defy reason.
I also have nothing against religious people, but if they tell me the Bible is literal truth, I call bullshit.
I also call bullshit on 72 gender possibilities. This is manufactured in sociology department faculty lounges at Ivy League universities.
The Brown student newspaper gave respondents only eight gender choices. Wow! What a bunch of haters the editors must be. That’s a joke, but maybe not much of one if you believe there are 72 flavors to choose from. What about the missing 64? Student Council ought to investigate.
One student quoted said the explosive gay growth at Brown is because “queer people haven’t been able to be open in their identifications for that long, so it’s exciting that the numbers are growing and that queer people are able to be open.”
There is more gay acceptance. That’s for sure. We have gay governors, gay mayors, TV anchors, athletes, soldiers… In most places, the closet is empty. More than 70% of Americans accept gay marriage, a number that would have been impossible two decades ago.
So if acceptance and openness is so prevalent, why has there been no corresponding great increase in “gayness” among the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Gen X?
Surely they are feeling the openness, too. Why aren’t the Boomers, well, booming with gender shifting?
Among the young, maybe it is not openness, but peer pressure and mass hysteria, such as the type that created the Salem witch trials, where neighbor bore false witness on neighbor in a community descending into madness.
The greatest gender changes reported are among the young, and three things we know about youth: They are most agreeable to change, they have a great need to belong, and they have the least ability to process information.
I’m not saying they are stupid. I am saying they are products of their environment, as are we all.
And when they see — during Pride Month, let’s say — the virtues of being non conforming celebrated on every rooftop, that can seem very inviting.
The Brown newspaper reports “Brown’s LGBTQ+ . . . gay and lesbian population has increased by 26% and the percentage of students identifying as bisexual has increased by 232%. Students identifying as other sexual orientations within the LBGTQ+ community have increased by 793%.”
793%!
I. Just. Do. Not. Buy. It.
America is not turning queer. I find no scientific proof of that. The Brown poll, and even the Gallup poll, have people self reporting, not subjecting themselves to serious scientific scrutiny. Remember, too, college is a hot house of all kinds of experimentation. I remember the half-funny acronym LWIC — Lesbian While In College. College-age women make out with each other for fun, often while drunk. Guys don’t.
My suspicious reporter’s nature tells me if I rounded up 10 male students who claimed to be bisexual, and I ordered them to have sex with each other, they’d turn straight right quick.
I suspect most of the youth “going queer” are trying to gain acceptance by signing up for a club that has achieved a certain level of chic, especially along the coasts. I have a very strong feeling the “gay” results would be far different at Oklahoma University, or the service academies.
Another “why” might be that youth love to rebel, and what could be more dramatic than rebelling against your own gender?
That’ll get a rise out of your parents, who are paying your tuition.
Many conservatives and deeply religious people think the gender confusion comes from indoctrination in the schools, but I don’t think that is it. Not all of it, anyway.
It may be “indoctrination” from a society that not only accepts gay people, but celebrates them in a manner heterosexuals are not. (Not that there’s anything wrong with affirmation, in itself.)
With slight exaggeration, I say almost every popular TV series has a gay character who is charming, funny, lovable, and loyal. Who wouldn’t want to have a friend like that, or be like that?
In almost every entertainment awards show, someone praises God and someone else makes reference to their non-binary status.
When do straight people go popping off about their sexuality? Spoiler alert: No, they don’t.
Impressionable kids are surrounded by favorable social media chatter about being “other,” which has achieved cult status. Dylan Mulvaney is one example.
Even the word gay sounds like fun.
What I am suggesting here is the power of suggestion.
Are you old enough to remember the McMartin pre-school child sexual abuse scandal in the early ‘80s?
In what was then the longest and costliest trial in American history, charges were brought against California teachers for sexually molesting their students, based on testimony from children.
It was a monstrous lie.
The children were either mimicking what they had heard from their peers, or were deliberately or accidentally coached by police detectives, supported by so-called sexual abuse experts, who were desperate to break up what they thought was a ring of raging, raping pedophiles.
There was no ring of pedophiles. It was groupthink.
I don’t want to draw too close a parallel between McMartin and Brown.
I am suggesting we shouldn’t accept these skyrocketing numbers as reality without asking a lot of questions.
Question: when did all this stuff get so damned complicated?? It’s really weird.
My question is who benefits from this insanity?
Don’t put too much faith in Ivy League stats anymore. Penn can’t even keep a man off the women’s swim team.
😀
Vladimir Lenin is heard to say “give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted”. The indoctrination starts before college. This belief system is not young men and women conforming to a fad. You are right the numbers are not realistic. Parents or those who pay college tuition should do some research before paying the costs of an education that is not realistic.
Hitler said the same, essentially, and when some Mothers for Liberty chapter made the PR mistake of referencing that, the Left said Mothers were neo Nazi.
As I pointed out at the time, Hitler was a vegetarian and if YOU are a vegetarian, you must be following Hitler? He also loved dogs, so, me, zigheil!
I am waiting for NYT or WaPo to do some SERIOUS straight (pardon the pun )reporting on this gender mess.
I remember Bill Maher showing such a graph and saying: “Broken down over time the LGBT population of America seems to be roughly doubling every generation… If we follow this trajectory we will all be gay in 2054.”
Yes, I remember Maher’s piece. It makes a good point. Maher does with humor what scientists try and often fail to do with statistics.
I love Maher when he attacks the Woke and protects animals.
Shaking my head , again. What the hell happened? You can’t make this stuff up. Or can you?
When I do fiction, I let you know. When I present something crazy but real, I always try to include a link to you can see for yourself.
Saw a cop video on YouTube yesterday. The cop tased a guy who was fighting him, then cuffed him and put him in the back of the black and white. What do you think was the first question the cop asked the guy when he began questioning him? He asked, “What is your preferred pronoun?” The guy casually said, “He, him.” If the cops have bought into this gender bullshit, the world is coming to an end.
The first question was not “What’s your name?”
Or, “Are you armed?”
PC gone mad.
I know PPD directs cops to use preferred pronoun.
To be precise, the first question the cop asked is “Are you okay?” Then he asked about the preferred pronoun.
Good column! I believe there’s power and politics behind this gay agenda in the schools.
Some of the agenda germinates in Hollywood, and shows up, flagrantly now in movies and television.
In rounding up the suspects propelling these crazy ideas, I would list academia first, coastal elites second, and Hollywood third.
This too shall pass. Biology is strong. When nobody cares what someone’s “gender” is, is when we will get an accurate count. It’s only chic because the “wrong” people don’t like it.
“Gay chic” isn’t new. I saw it in the 90s when I hung out in arts/literary/theater circles. Being gay added a certain panache and entry into some circles. A lesbian writer friend of mine was particularly contemptuous of a women she considered a poser, and a “political lesbian.” (remember “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”?) A few years later the poser got married and literally moved into a house with a white picket fence. I suspect that within the gay community, there are private comments about such posers, but we’ll never hear about it because its politically incorrect to question someone’s self-identification. I’ve seen people’s “gay-dar” be pretty darn accurate.
However, I don’t think this current phenomenon is a “scam” or “mass hysteria” any more than, say, kids growing their hair, wearing jeans and listening to rock n roll. If you recall, this was the end of civilization as well. But now the former hippies mostly vote Republican. Where are the communes? From that perspective, I think the “scam” and the “mass hysteria” is the over-the-top screed that somehow, equal rights for, and ending prejudice against gays, et al, can somehow destroy civilization as well. If all “I’m gay” was met with was a yawn, and a “so what” then none of this would be happening.
Nixon got a lot of mileage running against hippies, and DeSantis is trying to emulate that by running against gays, or “the gay agenda”–whatever that is. As far as I can tell, it’s that gays be accepted as equal members of society. My experience is that the best way to discourage someone from doing something for shock value, is don’t be shocked. They then abandon that tack soon enough. As long as the mere public existence of gay people can cause folks to lose it and wail and moan, it will be a popular way to rebel. Of course if that changes, there will be something else. As Marlon Brando said when asked what he was rebelling against in “The Wild One”: “What do you got?”
The hippies mostly vote Republican? Not the ones I knew.
As to long hair and rock and roll, the long hair was a fashion. Maybe being faux gay is the same.
But rock and rollers never outgrew rock and roll. The fake gay 38% at Brown will outgrow this delusion.
And I believe it is a delusion. If not, by 2035, 75% of the Brown students will be gay. Do you believe that is remotely possible?
With the weird stuff college students ingest and inhale, maybe 75% is possible!
But hippies did outgrow “Turn on, tune in, and drop out.” I once saw a great cartoon in the 90s, that nowadays would have been a great meme. (Searched the internet and couldn’t find it.) It showed a scruffy hippie talking to a clean-cut guy in a suit and tie carrying a brief case, saying “You sold out!” The caption was “Radicals with a trust fund.”
One hippie I knew ended up as one of Trump’s lower profile/minor election fraud lawyers. I don’t know the exact stats but that generation–the boomers–i.e. older voters, vote Republican. I guess what I mean is “hippie fashion”–but how do you tell the difference? People still yelled “Get a hair cut” at ’em, and they went to Grateful Dead concerts. My grandmother thought it was all deplorable, immoral, disgusting and the Beatles’ fault (and please get a hair cut!) And, maybe the posers will continue to love show tunes and the Village People.
I agree that the number is overstated. My question is, so what? Doesn’t that mean that it is unimportant and meaningless?
Also, as an aside, schools do get reputations as “gay friendly” and therefore get a larger share of that population. My college had that rep (which in the 70s meant you could be openly gay without getting beat up, harassed or called names) and we had 5% gay students, 2/3 higher than the then national numbers.
Such disproportionate demographic concentrations happen all the time. (Greek restaurant owners, Chinese laundries). At my law school we used to joke that “All three great religions are represented here: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform!” You can’t judge national demographics by the makeup of one school.
Per hippies, I said not the ones I know. And I doubt many are Republicans.
Per Brown, I dodn’t try to generalize it into a national trend. I specifically questioned the reality of the students’ beliefs and said I doubt the gay factor would be true at Oklahoma U and the service academies.
I also referenced a Gallup poll in April that showed Gen Z “gay quotient” exploding. I also doubt those kids are actually binary.