(DailyWire) Transgressive activists are seeking to manipulate and pervert children into sexual identities in order to undermine Western values, institutions, and norms, according to Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro.
Shapiro delivered a speech at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, on Tuesday night. The focus of Shapiro’s speech was identifying and countering the ideology of leftists using education and entertainment to groom children into embracing sexualized identities and lifestyles: transgressivism. Shapiro first explained the ideology in depth earlier Tuesday in an op-ed in The Daily Wire.
The ideology has infected U.S. culture and is exemplified in internet influencers such as Dylan Mulvaney and Jazz Jennings, two popular transgender personalities who have leveraged their identities through social media and television into massive platforms. The portrayal of Mulvaney and Jennings’ sexual identities is part of a broader effort to normalize transgressive ideas that break down traditional values and seduce confused or impressionable people, especially children.
Mulvaney and Jennings’ new lifestyles as trans women are anchored through a process known as gender-affirming health care, which “ought to properly be termed sex-denying health care,” Shapiro says. Such health care involves estrogen or testosterone treatments, cutting off the breasts of a female, or surgically inverting a male’s penis to craft a fake vagina.
“The transing of the kids has become the latest symptom of a far deeper and more profound evil in Western civilization. That evil is the broad redefinition of Western identity as a whole around subjective sexual feeling,” Shapiro said.
Western morality has discarded the traditional idea that sees “identity as a symbiotic relationship between the individual and society.” Identity lies between “biology and the institutions that shape us.” The goal of parenting, Shapiro says, is to “civilize your child.”
“Today, Western morality has discarded this idea. Who we are is not a question of society or institutions or roles. Instead, who we are is a question of internal feeling alone,” Shapiro said.
“Transgressivism treats both behavior and desire as immutable characteristics, like race or sex, thus removing freedom or responsibility,” the conservative commentator continued. The removal of responsibility, and thus purpose, has generally left people feeling aimless, empty, and depressed.
Transgressivism seeks the destruction of Western values, institutions, and norms because they are seen as corruptive influences that constrain and warp one’s true identity, which lies in pure animalistic freedom and desire. Transgressive identities have not just become normalized in society. Large swaths of the Democratic Party, the legacy media, academia, and corporate America are celebrating them, and, conversely, punishing those who criticize them.
Transgressivism has spread with the aid of three factors: the decline of religious practice, the advance of science and easy birth control, and the spread of a belief that traditions and values must be explained “tabula rasa” without an appeal to ancient custom. To further their ideology, the transgressives’ chief target to remake society is children, according to Shapiro.
“There is not a lot of question that transgressivism targets kids,” Shapiro said after quoting the lines of a San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus song. The song goes in part:
