Sometimes you can hear some confounding snippets when you flip over to National Public Radio. On Tuesday's talk show Fresh Air, the guest was New York Times reporter Matt Richtel, discussing his series about teenage angst in a series called "The Inner Pandemic." I arrived just as the LGBTQ section of the chat came up.
DAVE DAVIES, host: These kids are also living through an age in which our notions of gender are certainly evolving. I want to be careful about this. But I mean, does this opening, you know, the gender binary - does that put pressure on kids in a way or - I don't know - create confusion?
MATT RICHTEL: This is a quote from a young person who said to me, "I was straight, and then, I was pansexual. And then, I was a lesbian but then was nonbinary. But then, I was like, if I'm nonbinary, I can't be a lesbian, right? So then, I was like, I'm bisexual. And then, I went back to pansexual. But then, I realized, you can be nonbinary and lesbian. So yeah."
Look, it's very easy to politicize issues of sexuality and gender, which are two very, very different things. I would argue that one of the great ways in which society has opened up is permitting the freedom. I would also acknowledge that as young people grapple with these issues, they are among the many different facets of life that are presenting new opportunity and complexity to the world. This is not a politicized issue. It's merely an issue of grappling with really difficult, beautiful issues at a time in life when the brain is still trying to make sense of the world.
Is the right word "freedom" here, or is it chaos? Is it making sense, or making nonsense? The most maddening part of this is claiming that this is "not a politicized issue," and it's "very easy" to politicize it. When you start telling parents that they should not object to schools "opening up" the gender binary to dissolution, it's going to be political. But as usual, the Left wants to win the culture wars by suggesting that somehow, the Left didn't start it.
Naturally, Richtel added the usual leftist tactic of suggesting opposition to the Left leads to youth suicide, and that opposition to them easily qualifies as "a million words of hate."
You see suicide rates very high still, at consistently high levels among LGBTQ+ young people. And the reason for that, according to the experts, is that in - even though society has become more accepting, ultimately, young people can still worry about the judgment of their own families. And this is a place where the internet can be quite foul. As one researcher said to me, you can find on a street corner one word of hate, but on the internet a million words of hate. So if you're a young person grappling with these issues of sexuality or gender and you wind up going on the internet, you can be called names for - infinitely. And so that can really add to the difficult feelings.
Leftist reporters don't often distinguish between name-calling and bullying and heartfelt opposition to radical gender ideology. It's easier to win arguments that way.
AUDIO: On NPR's talk show "Fresh Air" with guest host Dave Davies, @nytimes writer Matt Richtel discussed "beautiful issues" of teenager identity politics, including the discovery that they can identify as a non-binary lesbian. (via @Banned_Bill) pic.twitter.com/nakqOtiRUD
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) December 22, 2022
