Stonewall Movement Displays at Exeter, NH

Last night, two speakers from New Hampshire's branch of the Stonewall Movement spoke at the monthly Rockingham County, New Hampshire meeting.

They were speaking to a sympathetic crowd, to say the least.

One described marching in the Boston gay pride parade, under a banner "New Hampshire Stonewall" and he recalled, with evident delight, how many people from the on looking crowd called out support, apparently surprised there were homosexuals living in New Hampshire, or at least so many, or at least so many willing to march.  He felt welcome in Boston.

One of the questions from the audience asked: "Well, but you know, what we hear in our conservative towns is: Why can't we have a straight men's march? What's wrong with that? How do we answer that?"

It should be noted Rockinham County has 30% more registered Republicans than Democrats.

The Stonewall spokesman fumbled for his smart phone, so he could google the "9 reasons we need to march" and finding it, he listed 9 depredations suffered by homosexuals simply because they are homosexuals: being harassed on the job, fired for being gay, beaten, murdered, having the power of the state aimed against them: being outlawed from adopting a child in a state with legal gay marriage.

His emotional pitch rose as he elaborated on each of these outrages, matched by many in the audience.

But he never answered the question asked.
The question he answered was the question he was keen to talk about, to wit: These are the reasons we, as gays march. We have huge grievances, and to that question, he responded well.

But what he did not answer was the question asked. 
As if, the question was either not worthy of an answer or he simply could not hear the question coming from the "other side."

What Mad Dog was waiting to hear was the obvious answer:  "Look, anyone has a right to march to express their grievances. If straight white men feel oppressed, if they believer they are facing a 'white genocide', if they believe gays are displacing straight men and women in American society, they have a right to parade. 

It's a free country: Nazis had a right to march in Skokie Illinois, and in Charlottesville, Virginia. First amendment. Free speech. Right to assemble peaceably. Right to seek a redress of grievances. But, given the offenses against gays I have just listed, I'd be most interested to see what paltry and imaginary offenses these folks might have."

Or words to that effect.

But that was not what happened. What happened was the gay spokesman virtually said only he and his side should be listened to. 

The Dems were too polite to press him on this and time ran out.

There was more to what he said which was disturbing, if you are a Democrat worried about keeping his party unified. He spoke of transgender suffering. The New Hampshire legislature recently passed a law to put on drivers' licences a third option for "sex." You now have "Male" and "Female" and "X."

Sitting next to Mad Dog, a woman of most liberal and tolerant opinion, murmured: "What's wrong with two sexes? Male and female? I guess I'm a dinosaur."

It is understandable why gays have aligned with and sympathized with the tribulations of transgenders. Transgenders, like gays, have been humiliated, denigrated, beaten and even murdered for the crime (sin?) of being transgender.

But, Mad Dog submits, there is a significant difference between transgenders and gays. Mad Dog once thought himself alone in this opinion, but he has heard from gay friends how uncomfortable they are being lumped in with transgenders.

The fact is, gays do not need, seek or request help from the medical establishment. Gays are what they are, born that way, as far as anyone can tell. Efforts at "reprogramming" or "conversion therapy" have been thoroughly discredited. 

But transgenders need to get male hormones to "transition" to male if they were born female and female hormones if they wish to become female. For male to female transgenders, the removal of external male genitalia was once part of the program of achieving female identity.

But then the 40% suicide rate started catching up with "transgender clinics" and male castration surgery has become less common. 

Then there is the industry, the professional careers in "transgender medicine" and "transgender clinics" which drive the transgender movement.

Paul McHugh, MD

Paul McHugh, the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist in chief who closed the Hopkins clinic at one point, took the position that transgenders, unlike gays, suffer from a single captivating idea which rules their lives and which becomes an obsession, and any idea which does that is "wrong." 

Another way of seeing McHugh's point is anorexia nervosa. In that disease the patient has one supreme, controlling idea, that they are too thin, and that idea is wrong.  With anorexia nervosa, almost all agree this is a disease, a disorder.  But even with that disease, you do not see a 40% annual death rate.

Vilified for Raising Vigorous Questions: Accused of being a Hater

McHugh argues, doctors treating the transgender patient have abrogated their responsibility to say "no" to the patient. No, you are not too thin. No, your idea that all that is wrong with you is your assigned gender.  Instead, the doctors say, "Yes, whatever you say must be true because you think it is."  

And you see this dramatically at medical conferences where the treating physician at the transgender conference says he escalated the testosterone level to astronomical levels because "the patient wanted his voice to be lower. That was his goal."

"His goal?"

And the whole idea of the average citizen having to learn a new vocabulary, have to be careful to refer to the trans male as "she" or to the "fluid" transexual as "they" as in "Pat is going downtown and they said they is going to pick up some Thai food."

Now, really, are we, as Democrats prepared to embrace all that?

And why? Because we might inadvertently "hurt' the feelings of the fluid non binary or trans person, who feels victimized by our insensitivity.

Democrats have to face a determined, homogeneous, organized group which walks in lock step with a single purpose: Re elect Trump.

Can Democrats go to battle if we are forced to accommodate the Stonewall extreme?
Is it unfair to ask the aggrieved gay and transgender community to hear the other side? Aude alteram partem. Of course, many will say, the gay has been hearing nothing but the other side for years and it's now time to become militant. There is, in Martin Luther King's phrase, the "fierce urgency of now" for the downtrodden. But even Dr. King looked at those Negroes who aligned with him and criticized their excesses and approach: He famously disagreed with the Nation of Islam and Black Panthers and Malcom X for having "given up on America." Mad Dog would argue some in the Stonewall Movement have done the same. 

Well, maybe. Eisenhower, after all, managed a coalition of different and unfriendly allies. DeGaulle, far from being grateful for the landings at Normandy, reportedly dismissed the breaching of Hitlter's fortress Europe as "an Anglo Saxon invasion."

So it's possible to align and conquer.
But it won't be easy.