It’s not every day that a news article from a mainstream media outlet truly shocks you. We’re all used to the predictable narratives at this point. Most of it’s just noise. But the other day, there was a very notable exception to this general rule.
An article published by NBC News, of all places, just blew up the entire narrative of transgenderism. Out of nowhere, NBC came out with a well-researched, in-depth piece that completely debunks the entire concept — eradicates the whole ideology, you might even say. They even quote several all-important experts at prestigious universities, who concur that the madness needs to end. That’s right — after years of insisting that anyone can change their gender at will, simply by wishing it, they’ve given up. Sanity has prevailed. Not since NBC News aired Katie Couric’s colonoscopy, live on air, has the network produced content so unexpected and jarring. Yet it is a very welcome departure from the norm. I mean this article is welcome, not the colonoscopy.
Now, to be clear, as you might have guessed by now, NBC News published this in-depth analysis without realizing what they were doing. Self-awareness, as ever, is in short supply in the mainstream media. But there’s no denying that’s what they did: they obliterated, point-by-point, any logical argument in favor of transgenderism.
How did they do it? The piece in question is on NBC News’ website right now. It’s headlined, “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race.” The article is, apparently, intended to disprove the idea that you can “opt into” another racial category. And along the way, accidentally, every argument from NBC News and their “thought leaders” ends up refuting the idea that people can change their gender too.
The piece begins by describing a teenager living in Maryland who thinks she’s transforming into a Japanese woman. She’s changed her name. She also thinks that, just by wishing it, her hair is getting darker, her eyelids are getting smaller, et cetera.
Right away, the keen observer might note, that sounds exactly like the lingo that trans activists use. According to NBC, this girl also watches videos like this one, apparently to help her ‘transition’ proceed at some mental level. Here’s the video , but be forewarned that it might turn you Asian apparently:
Well I don’t know about you but I’m feeling more Japanese already.
Now, any sane person might look at that clip and conclude that it’s crazy — and that anyone who watches this, thinking it changes their race, is delusional. Case closed.
But at NBC News, they weren’t ready to move on so quickly. This is something of a sensitive subject for them. They’ve spent the last few years telling us that anyone can change their gender at will. So, they understand that they have to respond to the obvious question, which is: why shouldn’t we affirm the identity of this teenage trans-Japanese girl? She says she’s Japanese. She watched a few YouTube videos and maybe even bought a kimono or two. She feels more at home, more herself, in her Japanese identity. She recognizes inside herself her innate Japanese-ness. Why isn’t that good enough? Who are we to deny her lived experience? Who are we to reject her truth?
Well, here’s the crux of NBC News’ argument, “Experts agree race is not genetic. But they contend that even though race is a cultural construct, it is impossible to change your race because of the systemic inequalities inherent to being born into a certain race.”
Think about what they wrote for more than two seconds, and the logic falls apart. They’re saying you can’t change your race because there are “systemic inequalities inherent to being born into” certain races. But wait a minute. Aren’t these the same experts who tell us that women live under the thumb of the patriarchy — that they can’t even earn an honest living because of how sexist our society is? That sounds a lot like “systemic inequality.” And yet they have no problem with men deciding to identify as women, despite all the “systemic inequality” women have allegedly endured. Why is that?
The NBC piece doesn’t say, which is strange, because they’ve had a lot of time to prepare for this question.
Remember when they destroyed Rachel Dolezal a few years ago? She claimed to be black, and she drove them absolutely crazy because they had no way of refuting it. Here was Matt Lauer’s attempt at taking her down:
Notice Matt Lauer uses all these “transphobic” arguments to disprove Rachel Dolezal’s claim that she’s black. First, he confronts her with a photo of her in her teenage years. He suggests that because she was white then, she can’t possibly be black now. Matt Lauer then calls in Dolezal’s parents, who deny her lived experience as a black woman. We’re meant to take that as proof that Dolezal is lying.
So why exactly aren’t we allowed to refute transgenderism on the same basis? Why exactly can’t we show photos of William Thomas, before he started pretending to be a female swimmer, as proof that he’s really a man? Why aren’t we supposed to call the parents of transgender activists, and ask them what gender their kid really is?
At the time, Matt Lauer and NBC News didn’t resolve that question. But now NBC is intent on addressing it, because there’s a lot more Rachel Dolezals coming out of the woodwork all of a sudden. And that’s a big problem for the trans movement. They desperately don’t want you to apply the incoherent logic of “transgenderism” in order to justify “trans-racialism.”
It’s clear why that is, and in a moment I’ll get to that. But for now let’s focus on NBC’s argument, such as it is. NBC News called in a series of experts for their article. Unfortunately for NBC, every single one of them managed to accidentally undercut the trans argument even further.
They quoted a trans activist named Tiq Milan, for example, who objects to “trans-racialism” on the grounds that people with fetishes are into it. Can you imagine? Milan says, “It’s not just putting on the hair and the makeup and talking and walking [in] a kind of way. That is fetishizing, and it’s objectifying, and it reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of color.”
In other words, going full Trudeau and layering on the blackface doesn’t make you black; in fact it fetishizes and targets black people in a way that’s totally inappropriate. That seems intuitive enough. But strangely enough, the expert did not condemn autogynephiles who dress up as women for the sole purpose of arousal and debasing women. Why not? NBC News was, again, silent on that point.
Let’s pause for a second. You might be wondering whether this article was a kind of “cry for help” from deep within the bowels of NBC News. And honestly, it might be. The author of the piece is a college student at the University of Pennsylvania who’s currently interning at the network. This intern is majoring in philosophy. Why would NBC News assign a college kid to write their big takedown of ‘trans-racialism’? Who knows. Maybe they got played.
Either way, it’s entertaining.
And the more you read, the better it gets. At one point, the piece tries to rebut the idea that trans-racialism and transgenderism are comparable. They quote that same activist, Tiq Milan, with this line — which may be the single dumbest statement ever uttered by a trans activist, as mighty a hurdle as that would be. “Race historically emerged as a social construct to establish a racial hierarchy with the white race at the top, whereas variances in gender identity have existed for thousands of years, he said.”
It’s hard to know where to begin. The first line is simply false, for one. The concept of race did not begin with colonialism. It began in antiquity. The Roman poet Virgil called his people the “toga-ed race,” for example. And many cultures, like in Asia, established “racial hierarchies” that had nothing to do with whites. Other cultures created “racial hierarchies” that put the white race at the bottom. In fact, they’re calling for a white genocide in South Africa right now. In case you missed it, here’s footage of a leading political figure in the country chanting “kill the white farmer” as a massive crowd cheers him on:
Shocking video shows South Africa’s black party singing “kill the Boer (Whites), kill the White farmer”
This is all downstream from the rotten secular religion of wokeness and CRT plaguing America today.
You have been warned.
WATCH.
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) July 31, 2023
That doesn’t seem like a “racial hierarchy with the white race at the top.” So we’re left with the trans activist’s claim that “variances in gender” identity that we’re seeing today have been around for “thousands of years.” Yes, we all know that there were a bunch of pansexual aromatic non-binary’s walking around in the 1600’s. It’s just that nobody ever mentioned them. We have to believe this on faith, I suppose. It takes faith, because in fact, as it turns out, there is no recorded history — anywhere in the world, in any culture — of people believing that men could actually be women and women could actually be men. This concept did not exist anywhere until it was invented by gender ideologues in the 20th century.
But even putting all the factual issues to the side, what that “expert” said doesn’t begin to explain why people can’t change their race. Even if you assume it’s true that gender identity has been around for longer than racial distinctions, there’s still no answer to this basic question: Why can’t we change our race? Do we have to wait a thousand years or so, and then we can do it? Besides, if race is a new concept then doesn’t that make it even more fluid and negotiable? Doesn’t that make it even more valid to reject the social construct of race entirely?
Who knows. The NBC piece just moves on. They flail a bit and cite Jamie Cohen, a random Queens College professor, for some support. He says people can’t change their race because, “It’s just belief. … It doesn’t ever really work, because it’s not doing anything, but they have convinced themselves that it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well.”
Social contagion, anyone? By the way, Jamie Cohen, like the author of this piece, is not a scientist. He’s a culture and media studies professor. On his website, he says he specializes in “memes,” something called “advertising inequalities,” and social media. That’s not to say he can’t comment on this topic, of course. But it’s notable that the very same people who yell things like, “You can’t comment on transgenderism; you’re not a member of the American Medical Association,” — those same people are now quoting meme professors to explain away trans-racialism.
It’s worth pausing to note something that’s curiously absent from this NBC bombshell. And that’s the word “sex.” Nowhere in this five-page article does the word “sex” come up. They talk about “gender” and “social constructs” throughout the piece, but never sex. Why is that?
Here’s one possibility. Maybe it’s because they know that sex has a clear biological component. And at a biological level, there’s an objective, genetic explanation for why some people are men, and some people are women. And these genetic differences between men and women are far more substantial than any conceivable genetic differences between racial categories. Men have a completely different set of chromosomes than women do, and that affects the entire body and how it functions. What that means is that trans-racialism, while completely crazy, is a lot less crazy than transgenderism. The transracial Japanese girl has a much more valid claim to her Japanese identity than any man has to a female identity or vice versa. Race actually is fluid, after all. Everyone is a mix of races and ethnicities.
So why do they want to avoid talking about genetics and objective reality? Why can’t they just come out and admit that, yes, if you support transgenderism, then you must also support trans-racialism? The truth is, they embrace transgenderism, while rejecting trans-racialism, for a simple reason — one that has nothing to do with logic or science. The Left has constructed a race-based spoils system that punishes their political opponents and elevates loyal members of their party. They don’t want that system to come crashing down on them. Self-identified transgenders are the Left’s dependable political allies. The people who could take advantage of a trans-racialism are not. If Asians and white people could instantly claim to be oppressed black men, then all of their cynical racial politics would collapse overnight. And they can’t have that. It’s that simple. The pseudoscience is a cover, and not a particularly effective one.
A lot of people have tried to make that case over the years, especially since the Rachel Dolezal episode. But few of them have done it better than NBC News and their intrepid philosophy intern. In their attempt to shut down trans-racialism, they have exposed transgenderism. To be sure, like a confused teenager in Maryland who thinks she’s Japanese, NBC has no idea what it’s doing. But in this case, they accidentally did some journalism. And for that, we should all be grateful.