Instead of “Trans Rights” – “Trans Community,” How About Return to Reality?

By Steven Yates

September 2, 2025

Although I’ve never discussed it much, I have a masters degree in public health, earned at an accredited institution, back in 1999. Specifically, my transcript says: Health Promotion and Education, School of Public Health, University of South Carolina. (It became the Arnold School of Public Health a couple years later.)

The program — like nearly all such programs at the university level — emphasized sexuality education. The person who oversaw the start of my program specialized in what he described as teenage pregnancy prevention. He was fine with the mixed message: don’t do it, but here’s how. (I was later advised by the resident specialist in systems theory, with whom I collaborated on a paper resulting from studies which have born additional fruit).

I once took an epidemiology course that emphasized not the origin and transmission of diseases through populations, but sexually transmitted infections and how to minimize the risk within the assumption that “kids are going to give into their natural impulses and do as they please.”

Verboten was the idea that morality might have something to do with their choices.

Sexuality permeated the curriculum like water through a sponge. Also the fundamental goodness of diversity-politics, etc. (What was I doing there? Trying to change careers. A story for another day.)

But guess what?

I heard nothing about “transgenderism.” Not once did I even hear the word transgender. This was 1997-99.

Just recently, I encountered a 2022 Gallop statistic that 1.9 percent of Generation Z (born from 1997 to 2012) self-identifies as “transgender.” This is roughly double that of Millennials (born from 1981 to 1996), and even higher than that of earlier generations.

Roughly 8 percent of Gen Z identifies either as transgender or “nonbinary” in some broader sense which rejects the sex “assigned” to them (interesting way of putting it) at birth.

Almost a quarter (24 percent!) self-identify as “LGBTQ+,” a percentage which dwarfs that of all previous generations.

Folks, this is not normal!

For some time now I’ve been posing a singular question that remains answered. I’ve posted it anonymously in several places online and generally been verbally attacked by the platform’s resident cultural Marxists for even asking: where, precisely, were all these trangenders just a quarter century ago? Involved as I was in a health education curriculum that emphasized sexuality education, surely I would have at least encountered the term!

The question matters.

The Minneapolis shooter who killed two children and wounded 18 other people, adults as well as children, self-identified as transgender. I’ll assume the details of this case don’t need repeating; they’re all over mainstream media. The latter, of course, has totally fallen for (or, possibility out of intimidation, allowed itself to be led into) tacit support for transgenderism, as should be clear from their repeated use of the name Robin Westman instead of the shooter’s birth name Robert Westman.

To do this, I’ve been told, is to “misgender” a person: refusing to use the name they chosen to accord with their “gender identity,” i.e., refusing to live in their fantasy world.

All that we’ve heard about pronouns goes along the same lines, and it matters because professors have been fired from teaching positions for refusing to use “preferred pronouns.”

Apparently, Robert Westman’s mother signed off on his legally changing his name since he was a minor when he “transitioned.”

What kind of mother does something like that?

He’d posted a manifesto of sorts to YouTube (since scrubbed) in which he says, “I was corrupted by this world and have learned to hate what life is…. I am not well. I am not right. I am a sad person, haunted by these thoughts that do not go away…. I am severely depressed and have been suicidal for years….”  Other images speak of “kill[ing] Trump” and “Defend Equality!”

Obviously, Westman, age 23, was one messed up kid. All of this may help explain the kind of rage that leads someone like that to kill innocents.

He wasn’t the first transgender killer of children. A couple of years ago, it was “Audrey” Hale. It is interesting that both killers shot up a private Christian school. Transgenderism denies what Scripture says: “ … male and female He created them” (Gen: 1:27). Hence the professed hatred within the “transgender community” for Christianity.

Hale left a written manifesto. It was immediately sequestered, and to this day, no one knows what was in it.

But again: where were these people before Gen Z came along?

I submit that the answer to my question above is simple: they did not exist! Not as a movement, at any rate.

There have always been a handful of people who suffered from sexual dysphoria, some with chromosomal abnormalities that caused such. But under normal circumstances, if your chromosomes are XX at birth you are a girl or a woman, and if they’re XY, you’re a boy or a man.

The matter is no more complicated than that. This is a matter of biology, not politics or ideology of personal choice. This was part of our basic scientific knowledge base until the past couple of decades.

Now, we have a Supreme Court Justice (Ketanji Brown Jackson) who when asked by the Senate Judiciary Committee how she defined a woman, she couldn’t do it.

This is a psyop, and a big one. Its purpose is confusion and disruption (and a further assault against the Christian worldview). I attempted to trace its history beyond what I’ve noted, that sexual dysphoria is a real phenomenon but not what we’re talking about here. The term transgenderism was coined in 1965 by psychiatrist John F. Oliven, in a work entitled Sexual Hygiene and Pathology. Interesting title, that. Dysphoria was considered a pathology, to be treated, until the 1990s.

That disastrous decade introduced political correctness and along with it, “gender” fluidity, amidst an “all lifestyles are equal” ideology. Thus transgenderism was slowly not just mainstreamed but treated with the respect seen in mainstream media accounts of these shootings which don’t provide a birth name; you have to dig to find it.

We need to return to reality, before “gender-affirming care” maims more teenagers and gets more children killed. What will it take to do that? I honestly don’t know, when the only thing that allows me to write and publish an article like this one is the fact that I don’t have a job or work for anyone but myself; only Substack could penalize me by removing it, and I doubt I’m important enough for Substack to do that.

This is not about “freedom of lifestyle choice.” Psyops don’t work that way. They aren’t about individual choice. They destroy free will by encircling it with confusion, often aimed at impressionable children, supplying nudges, and eventually creating a movement that will further confusion and social disruption.

This spread through dominant academic institutions and dominant media along with the rest of the cultural Marxist hard left. A friend of mine speaks of mass psychosis. Psyops seem to be capable of producing such.

So although, What will it take to get back to reality? is surely a valid question, beyond writing this article, I can’t answer it. I doubt very much that Trump is going to fix this. I suspect that, sadly, more children will have to be killed by “Robin” Westman type nutjobs before we’ll have a critical mass in the population both able and willing to stand up against this juggernaut.

© 2025 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved

E-Mail Steven Yates: [email protected]

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Steven Yates’s Substack publication is entitled Navigating the New Normal, and on it you will find commentary, images, and information not available here — including his decision to return from “retirement” to do pieces like this one (here; scroll to the section on “taking care of the Remnant.” Do consider subscribing. It’s how the algorithm knows I exist.

Steven Yates is a (recovering) ex-academic with a PhD in Philosophy. He taught for more than 15 years total at several colleges and universities in the Southeastern U.S. He has authored three books, more than 20 articles, numerous book reviews, and review essays in academic journals and anthologies. Refused tenure and unable to obtain full-time academic employment (and with an increasing number of very fundamental philosophical essays refused publication in journals), he turned to alternative platforms and heretical notions, including about academic itself.

In 2012, he moved to Chile. He married a Chilean national in 2014. Among his discoveries in South America: many of the problems in the U.S. are problems everywhere, because human nature is the same everywhere.

He has a Patreon.com page. Donate here and become a Patron if you benefit from his work and believe it merits being sustained financially.

Steven Yates’s book Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (2011) can be ordered here.

His philosophical work What Should Philosophy Do? A Theory (2021) can be obtained here or here.

His cosmic horror novel The Shadow Over Sarnath (2023) (written for the sheer fun of it) can be gotten here.

SPECIAL NOTE: Steven Yates’s new book So You Want to Get a PhD in Philosophy? will be published in September.

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