Ben Shapiro does a fine job of addressing Exhibit A, which is a New York Times column by Charles Blow:
On Nov. 22, 2020, New York Times columnist Charles Blow unleashed one of the most bizarre tweets in recent memory. "Stop doing gender reveals," he stated. "They're not cute; they're violent. All we know before a child is born is their anatomy. They will reveal their gender. It may match your expectations of that anatomy, and it may not. If you love the child you will be patience, attentive and open."
This is patently insane for a variety of reasons.
First, the characterization of gender reveal parties -- parties during which parents celebrate finding out whether their unborn children are boys or girls -- as "violent" is, in and of itself, radically nuts. Parents are excited to learn whether their children will be boys or girls. That is absolutely unobjectionable. But for an ardent fan of abortion on demand such as Blow to characterize a gender reveal party celebrating the sex of an unborn baby as "violent" while characterizing the in utero dismemberment of that same unborn baby as "choice" is so morally benighted as to boggle the mind.
Blow's tweet goes further. The implication that parents are doing violence against their own children if they connect sex and gender is utterly anti-evidentiary. Sex and gender are interconnected. For nearly every human being born, biological sex will correspond with genital development in the womb. And gender, contrary to the idiotic, pseudoscientific paganism of the gender theory set, is not some free-floating set of biases we bring to the table. Males and females have different qualities in a variety of functions, attitudes, desires and capabilities. In every human culture -- indeed, in every mammalian species -- meaningful distinctions between male and female remain. To reduce children to genderless unicorns simply awaiting hormonal guidance from within piles absurdity upon absurdity.
It's not just a matter of one columnist at one outlet:
Why does any of this matter? Because Blow's perspective has become mainstream on the left. In October, Healthline, a supposed medical resource, ran an article reviewed by a licensed marriage and family therapist titled "'Do Vulva Owners Like Sex?' Is the Wrong Question -- Here's What You Should Ask Instead." Whether "vulva owners" like sex is indeed the wrong question. The right question, to begin, might be what makes "vulva owners" distinct from women; as a follow-up, we might ask how one would go about leasing or renting a vulva if ownership seems like too much of a burden.
But the madness gains ground. CNN reported in July that the American Cancer Society had changed its recommendations on the proper age for cervical cancer screenings for women, only CNN termed women "individuals with a cervix." Which seems rather degrading to women, come to think of it.
Exhibit B is ably handled by Ross Kaminsky at The American Spectator:
. . . on Tuesday, Nasdaq, the second-largest stock exchange operator in the world, announced that they would file a proposed rule with the Securities and Exchange Commission to, according to the Wall Street Journal, “require listed companies to have at least one woman on their boards, in addition to a director who is a racial minority or one who self-identifies as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer.”
There are so many problems with this proposal, even beyond its “beyond parody” wokeness.
The first problem is fundamental: Other than legislators and regulators, the only people who have the authority to compel a company’s behavior are its owners and the management hired and paid by those owners. For publicly traded companies those owners are shareholders; the management directly selected by the owners is the Board of Directors, who in turn select executive management.
I don’t have an objection if a company wants to put an African transgender pygmy on its board, if she’s qualified to serve, and if I’m not a shareholder I don’t care at all. Because it’s not my business. As someone who has served on a couple of small boards of directors, I know the goal is success. If that addition increases the chance of success, then great. Furthermore, it’s not ridiculous to believe that a board comprised solely of straight white guys might, depending on the markets they are trying to serve, benefit from the addition of members with different backgrounds and experiences.
But that’s not the same as having a third party with no ownership in the company demand that we comply with their idea of what is best for us. I repeat: it’s literally none of their damn business. If they want to have a voice in corporate management, then they can buy shares in the company and try to get the question in front of the board or a shareholder’s meeting. (I presume that an exchange is barred from owning shares in other unaffiliated companies, so this path should not be available to Nasdaq, fortunately.)
It's examples of cultural rot like this that exhaust my patients with oh-so-objective analyses of how conservatism fares when it brings "social issues" into its panoply of matters it wishes to include in the national conversation.
We cannot afford not to have this be part of our national conversation. With each new incremental departure from thousands-year-old assumptions about what human beings are - indeed, the basic architecture of all biology - we are told that it is a done deal and that we should "move on" to more "relevant" issues.
In thirty years at the outset, we have upended the most basic norms universal to all societies everywhere.
Yes, mask policy, getting vaccines to market, Donald Trump's unfitness for office, the nail-biter runoff for Senate seats looming in Georgia, world-stage considerations such as tensions with China and Iran are all important for us to discuss. But if the transformation of human beings from creatures with inherent dignity imparted by their sovereign Creator into grotesque, self-invented monsters gets completed, we'll be ill-equipped at best to come up with solutions for the rest of it.
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