Recently, I began playing a video game called Hollow Knight. The main character in this game is merely called "the Knight," and is described as "genderless." This is not because the game's creators were catering to gender ideology; rather, the Knight is not a living creature; it is an entity, per se, and it doesn't have a mind. In fact, the Knight's lack of a mind is an extremely important plot point, as it cannot contract a mind-corrupting plague that serves as the main antagonist.
According to gender ideology, "gender" is the mind's internal "feeling" of what sex one is, so by all logic, the main character of Hollow Knight cannot have a "gender." ...Right?
I was talking about my love for this game to a friend of mine who is so immersed in "gender" that I struggle to find conversation topics that she cannot lead back to transgenderism. While giving me directions once, she started to say "continue straight," before correcting herself to "continue heterosexually!" The minute I brought up Hollow Knight, she called the main character a "nonbinary icon."
This inherently doesn't make any sense. "Gender" is in the mind, according to transgender-rights activists. If something lacks a mind, it cannot, by this logic, have a gender. It would be like saying "my computer is nonbinary because it doesn't have a biological sex."
Gender activists are obsessed with transgenderism. Gender is the lens through which they view the world, and anything which can be redirected to it must be. I pointed out the fallacy in my friend's logic; she quickly retreated to calling it a joke and moving on. But if this ideology is so serious that it cannot be questioned without transgender-identified people supposedly being murdered, is it really something to joke about?
If this friend had a more neutral stance on "gender," perhaps loosely believing in it only because she had not learned otherwise, a simple joke could be just that: a simple joke. But this friend warps everything she sees into gender. She refuses to use the word "straight" according to its grammatically correct meaning; she always replaces it with "heterosexual." She once commented on my somewhat colorful outfit, saying "you're wearing the nonbinary pride flag!" While talking about Star Wars with her, I mentioned the Confederacy of Independent Systems, and she immediately shouted "CIS! As in cisgender!"
Sadly, my friend is a prime example of a gender ideologue. Even when labeling something "nonbinary" or "trans" contradicts her ideology, as in the case of the Knight, she is so immersed in the illusion of gender ideology's infallibility that she can't see the cognitive dissonance she's wallowing in.
Even now, our friendship is delicate. She initially unfriended me after I desisted from identifying as transgender and started to question transgender ideology. We're only still friends because I painstakingly watered and tended to our dying relationship over the course of several years.
This is what transgender ideology is. This is what it does. It takes anything that can be warped and warps it to fit its needs. Anything that cannot be turned into trans fodder, it amputates.
My friend labels anything that does not praise and indulge transgenderism as "transphobic." Anytime she sees something that does not perfectly fit into stereotypical sex roles and categories, like the Knight, she labels it as "transgender," regardless of whether or not she is contradicting herself. This is why I call transgenderism a cult: because like a cult, it separates everything into "supportive of my beliefs" or "must be destroyed," barring any middle ground or room for discussion.
Petra Harangir is a detransitioner who serves on Advocates Protecting Children's Advisory Board.
Comments