A square look at the most glaring manifestation of post-America's cultural rot

Per the post immediately underneath this one, the Most Equal Comrade and his junta are driven by some very mad notions (the post below has to do with their nonchalance about major post-American cities getting incinerated), but this one may top anything so far.

The federal government of post-America no longer recognizes a universe in which human beings come in two distinct genders.

President Barack Obama’s deputies will insert a rule in federal regulations on Friday to prevent federal facilities from operating single-sex bathrooms.

The rule in the “Federal Register” of regulations will open up thousands of bathrooms in federally operated buildings to employees and visitors who claim on any given day to be “transgender” members of the opposite sex.

Now, Target, being a private organization with a keen interest in making a profit, has listened to the public, which responded to this kind of wackiness with an uproar that sent its stock price into a tailspin, has decided to split the difference and "offer more options":

Target thinks it has a solution – they’re adding an extra bathroom to most of its stores.

Target(TGT)CFO Cathy Smith said Wednesday that the company has heard objections to the transgender bathroom policy from some customers, though she said other customers had voiced support. In response, Target has decided to expand its use of a third, single-toilet bathroom at all of its stores, which can be locked by users.

That bathroom can be used by any customer who needs some privacy, including parents with small children of a different gender or those who are uncomfortable with a public bathroom in which a transgender person is allowed. 

Most of Target’s stores already have this single occupancy restroom, but all will be equipped with one by 2017. The project is set to cost about $20 million.

Is an extra, supposedly private bathroom really going to appease concerned parents who are fed up with Target’s social agenda? 

All of this, of course, sweeps under the rug the basic fact that the idea of being able to determine one's own "gender identity" is a fantasy and a tragic one at that:

gatekeeping has been replaced by cheerleading. In the U.K., where records are easier to obtain, clinics are facing an explosion in demand for “gender-identity treatment.” As the Guardian reports: “Figures obtained under the Freedom of Information Act reveal increases in the number of referrals to all of the UK’s 14 gender identity clinics (GICs) in recent years, with a number of clinics experiencing increases of several hundred percent.”

At one major clinic, referrals quadrupled. At another, they increased 20-fold in ten years. At still another, referrals increased a jaw-dropping 28-fold in eight years. Clinics for children were seeing staggering annual increases: “The Tavistock clinic, the only centre for children and adolescents in England, has seen referral increases of about 50% a year since 2010–11. In the past year it has had an unexpected and unprecedented increase of 100%, up from 697 to 1,398 referrals.” The Guardian — because it’s the Guardian — laments that demand for gender-identity treatment is outstripping the available supply of practitioners, noting that the resulting shortfall is “leaving vulnerable people waiting years for a specialist appointment.”

Here in the United States, the evidence is more anecdotal, but the anecdotes are disturbing. Rod Dreher’s blog at The American Conservative has become something of a clearinghouse for concerns from anguished parents, many of whom note that entire peer groups seem determined to transition together. This letter was particularly poignant: 

As a parent living the nightmare of having a teen who suddenly announces she’s transgender, I can tell you there are NO doctors who will do anything but agree. There is NO science behind this. There is NO way to medically “diagnose” her. Her therapist knows that she is not transgender but fears there’s no way we can stop her. Three of her closest friends have already had full transition, paid for by their parents, so it is difficult for her to understand why we won’t do the same. It is no different than having your child captured by a cult, only this time the cult is a societal bandwagon which wants to do permanent physical harm to her perfectly healthy female body, all in the name of “love”. 

Parents have no idea how to respond, especially when doctors permit no dissent. Here’s another letter to Dreher: 

My own daughter professes to be a boy. It is a nightmare. It came out of nowhere at age 15 — this is not a case of a girl who always wanted to be a boy, or always acted like a boy. This is a girl who was proud to be a girl until she developed physically and boys and men started treating her like a piece of meat and a second class citizen. The nightmare is that doctors and therapists are not allowed to question why she wants to be a boy. The “cult of trans” dictates that her word must be taken or they can lose their professional standing. SO they are ready to prescribe testosterone shots and a double mastectomy despite the fact that she is a minor. These physical “medical treatments” for her psychological problem are permanent and barbaric. It is against “ethics” for professionals to provide any other treatment. It is a mother’s nightmare. 

To read sites like Transgender Trend (a mainly U.K.-based site that is “concerned about the current trend to diagnose “gender non-conforming” children as transgender) or 4thWaveNow (a blog launched by a “mother of a teenage girl who suddenly announced she was a ‘trans man’ after a few weeks of total immersion in YouTube transition vlogs”) is to go through the looking-glass — where troubled teens in groups will announce their intention to transition, typically with the enthusiastic (and smug) support of school guidance counselors and other educational professionals.

4thWaveNow is launching its own survey of what it calls “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” seeking input from parents whose children “experienced sudden or rapid development of gender dysphoria beginning between the ages of 10 and 21.” 

Naturally, the Left is furious. Nothing and no one can be permitted to contradict the narrative. Indeed, some on the Left respond to the women in the videos above by claiming that they’re still actually “trans.” To accomplish this trick, they do what the Left so often does — redefine common terms. To prominent trans journalist Julia Serano, “transgender” means people who “defy societal expectations regarding gender.”

But this makes no sense. By that definition, every female but Barbie herself is transgender because no girl has a personality that conforms in all ways to classical, stereotypical femininity. By that definition, Barbie’s boyfriend Ken is thoroughly transgender. What’s “manly” about him?

As I have said before, if you indulged yourself in a time-machine fantasy and brought back some friend of yours - or maybe a parent, sibling or teacher - from, not even fifty years ago, which indeed makes for a bracing exercise, but a mere ten years ago, and show that person 2016 in all its grotesqueness, that person would think you were presenting some kind of fictional vision. You might well be regarded as utterly mad.

I can't think of a front on which the death rattle of Western civilization is more on display than that having to do with the obliteration of basic human nature.

Our universities, our corporations, our municipal governments, our nonprofit civic organizations, are all going to open their doors tomorrow morning. And the day after that.

But the day is coming when they will have been subsumed into the tangled mass of supposedly human life forms piled high, slithering and groping for basic gratifications, humping and gobbling, much like what Moses found when he came down from Mount Sinai and became so enraged that he dashed the tablets inscribed with the basic moral instructions for human living to the ground.

But there isn't likely to be any Moses, no one who will be summoned back to the mountaintop to get a second copy.