John Oliver s Misinformed Transgender Commentary | City Journal
According to Oliver, it s a good thing that more people, and specifically youth, have come out as trans of late. The explanation favored by trans activists, and by Oliver himself, for the meteoric rise in transgender identification among Generation Z is that society is now more accepting of transgender and gender-nonconforming behavior and identity. Yet the same activists, and again Oliver himself, also seem to regard America in 2022 as exhibiting unprecedented levels of hostility toward trans people. Oliver rails about the anti-trans bills proposed in red states in recent years. He even suggests that it is conservative Republicans, not progressive Democrats, who have made the trans issue into a focus of national furor, a statement so demonstrably false one doesn t even know where to begin to debunk it. (A good place, though, would be with the story of how bureaucrats in the Obama Department of Education and lawyers in advocacy organizations exploited a highly opaque administrative process in order to change how schools must define male and female. )
Oliver can t have it both ways. If trans kids, including teenagers like Dylan Brandt, the named plaintiff in the Arkansas lawsuit, are coming out in droves because of warming social attitudes rather than social contagion (an explanation Oliver dismisses as horse shit ), it cannot also be the case that America is increasingly a hellhole for LGBTQ people. This is just one of many tensions that Oliver and other media cheerleaders refuse to acknowledge, much less interrogate, in the trans movement s narrative.