Reversing the Harmful Effects of Transgender Ideology: Tyranny of the Absurd and the Overton Window

Reversing the Harmful Effects of Transgender Ideology: Tyranny of the Absurd and the Overton Window

The recent executive orders and other government measures to save women’s sports and recognize only two genders come as a breath of fresh air and sanity, after years of witnessing the ruthless imposition of an absurd ideology with extremely harmful physical and mental consequences. In the Introduction to her highly informative and compassionate study of transgenderism, Abigail Shier remarked:

In October 2017, … California enacted a law that threatened jail time for healthcare providers who refuse to use patients’ requested pronouns. New York had adopted a similar law, which applied to employers, landlords, and business owners. Both laws are facially and thoroughly unconstitutional….

Historically, [gender dysphoria] afflicted a tiny sliver of the population (roughly .01 percent) and almost exclusively boys. Before 2012, in fact, there was no scientific literature on girls ages eleven to twenty-one ever having developed gender dysphoria at all.

In the last decade that has changed, and dramatically. The Western World has seen a sudden surge of adolescents claiming to have gender dysphoria and self-identifying as “transgender.” For the first time in medical history, natal girls are not only present among those so identifying—they constitute the majority.

While we ought to treat people with actual gender dysphoria—just like any other human beings—with respect, kindness, and compassion, this does not mean that we should be forced to violate the laws of grammar and biology by using their preferred gender or pronouns in our speech.

“The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to,” wrote Albert Camus (p. 11). Promoting absurdities as reality is a favorite method of totalitarian socialists to sway public opinion.

One insufficiently known example of attempted communist practices illustrates the absurd nature of totalitarian socialism. Few people in the West are aware that the Soviet government supported eugenics experiments to crossbreed human beings with apes, ostensibly to prove Darwinian theory and create the Soviet “ape man”—a superhuman warrior who would possess increased physical strength but no undesirable traits such as free will and insubordination.

In the late 1920s, Stalin’s government financed an expedition by the famous biologist Ilya Ivanov to French Guinea in West Africa, where Ivanov unsuccessfully tried to inseminate female chimpanzees with human sperm. The scientist then asked local doctors to allow him to inseminate African women, without their consent, with chimpanzee sperm, but the governor of French Guinea rejected the proposal. Ivanov continued his research in the Soviet Union and recruited several women as volunteers to carry primate babies, but the experiments failed. A few years later, Ivanov, like many other scientists, was sent into exile.

We may sigh with relief that our free society seems impervious to such monstrous experiments, but we must not forget President Reagan’s warning that freedom is “always one generation away from extinction.” In the early 1930s, American psychologist Winthrop Kellogg and his wife attempted, unsuccessfully, to raise a baby chimpanzee alongside their baby boy, based on the belief that an ape could behave like a human if subjected to the proper social environment.

Over the past decade alone, leftist ideologues have managed to persuade millions to believe that “men give birth,” that minors should undergo chemical and physical castration, without parental consent, if they wanted to change their gender, and other absurd propositions. While totalitarian regimes use brute force, radical leftists in Western societies promote absurd policies both by threatening and shaming their opponents and by shifting the window of public perception known as “the Overton window.”

Joseph P. Overton was Senior Vice President of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy when he sadly lost his life in a plane crash in 2003. He developed a helpful model later termed “the Overton window of political possibilities.”

The Overton window presents a spectrum of the ideas surrounding a political issue, ranging from the unthinkable to what is instituted as a public policy. The stages include: “unthinkable,” “radical,” “acceptable,” “sensible,” “popular,” and “policy.” Overton argued that in order to successfully enact a new policy, politicians needed to “shift” or “expand” the window. He frequently gave positive examples of shifting or expanding the window to change policies that needed improvement.

As Nathan Russell remarked,

The example Joe Overton often used to illustrate his window theory was the Michigan school choice issue during the 1980s and ‘90s. The political spectrum for education ranges from full parental choice on the high end to a complete government monopoly without private schools, home schooling, charter schools or any other school choice on the low end. On this spectrum the politically possible range of options was very limited during the 1980s…. As citizens became aware of education options and their success in other places, the political climate became more favorable and the window of political possibilities in Michigan began to expand… Not only was the upper limit of the window expanded, but the lower boundary has also moved upwards as well—making it politically unwise to push for restrictions on the education freedoms that have been gained.

Well before the formulation of Overton’s theory, totalitarian ideologues were instinctively aware of the inherent power of shifting the window of political possibilities but not for the noble reasons that Overton advocated. They would take an unthinkable or radical concept and depict it as a reasonable alternative to a traditional viewpoint, then shift the balance in their desired direction.

Until very recently, for example, the notion that small children could and should freely select their gender was unthinkable; now power-hungry politicians are trying to institute this as a universal policy in order to uproot traditional values. Totalitarian socialism is a radical and violent ideology, incompatible with the Western liberal tradition.

By calling liberal attitudes and policies within a normal capitalist society “socialist,” and, conversely, socialist ideas “liberal,” totalitarian ideologues and those who may wittingly or unwittingly follow them are constantly blurring the terminological boundaries and shifting the perception of socialism from a radical ideology to a sensible or even a popular one.

One way to implement this shift is by intentionally encouraging terminological confusion. As F.A. Hayek wrote,

This confusion concerns nothing less than the concept of socialism itself. It may mean, and is often used to describe, merely the ideals of social justice, greater equality, and security…. But it means also the particular method by which most socialists hope to attain these ends and which many competent people regard as the only methods by which they can be fully and quickly attained. In this sense socialism means the abolition of private enterprise, of private ownership of the means of production, and the creation of a system of “planned economy” in which the entrepreneur working for profit is replaced by a central planning body.

There are many people who call themselves socialists, although they care only about the first, who fervently believe in those ultimate aims of socialism but neither care nor understand how they can be achieved, and who are merely certain that they must be achieved, whatever the cost. (p.83)

Thus, focusing on socialism’s warm and fuzzy utopian goals and ignoring the actual means by which socialism is enforced is a widespread method of making the term socialist appear less radical. Another way to insert it within the normal political spectrum is by leveraging moral relativism and critical theory to exaggerate the historical or current flaws of democratic societies and use these flaws to minimize and dismiss the crimes of totalitarian socialist systems.

Orwell pithily remarked regarding intellectuals’ tendency toward absurd beliefs that “[o]ne has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” We must keep rejecting the tyranny of the absurd by exposing the left’s insidious attempts to shift public perception and normalize unthinkable concepts.

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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