Jonni Skinner was 13 when his therapist told him that the only way to be happy as a gay man with a “feminine essence” was to become a woman.
You can’t exactly blame Skinner for believing her. He’d been bullied for liking butterflies and the color pink, and acceptance in society was something he, like every human on the planet, craved. He hadn’t hit puberty yet and had no idea that flooding his body with estrogen and testosterone blockers would result in debilitating pain and permanent damage that his doctors would dismiss. He later discovered his doctors weren’t quite sure what that kind of medication would do to him either.
His mom was told her son would likely commit suicide if he didn’t transition. When she asked an endocrinologist if he was just gay and suggested delaying any permanent changes until Skinner was older, the doctor threatened to find a new home for the teenager.
Skinner is now 23. He considers himself gay — a label his family used to describe his behavior when he was still in kindergarten. He’s detransitioned and is speaking out about what he went through. But he’s hardly alone. Some 22 percent of his generation identifies with some letter in the LGBTQ acronym, a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone given that libraries hosted drag queen story hours when they were kids while Target dressed them in rainbows every June. (READ MORE: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 219: Lesbian Minister Cancels July 4th to ‘Understand Our Own Whiteness’)
There is good news, though. It’s June now, but when I went to grab bagels at a local shop, there were no rainbows in the window; meanwhile, Megan Basham isn’t getting doxed for telling the Republican senators who celebrate this kind of degenerate stuff via social media to stuff it.
Last year, in the wake of the Bud Light boycott, major corporate sponsorships of Pride parades simply dried up. That, fortunately, wasn’t a one-off. Pride organizers in Pittsburgh told NBC that they expected to secure just “30-40 percent of the sponsorship dollars they were able to fundraise a few years ago.” Meanwhile, in Tampa, Florida, there simply won’t be a Pride parade. According to the Wall Street Journal, a number of Pride organizations have decided that they’ll just have to get used to a future without the big corporate sponsorships they got back in 2019 and 2020.
The unfortunate piece in all this fortunate news is this: “Grassroots” Pride support seems to be filling in some of the gaps. Sure, maybe Tampa won’t be participating, but middle-of-nowhere Idaho is going to have a rainbow festival. That Pittsburgh Pride parade? As of two days ago, it’s been funded via state grants, local sponsorships, and private donations. (READ MORE: The Spectacle Ep. 424: How a ‘Trans Period Pride’ Event Exposes the Left’s Public Money Grift)
It’s tempting to claim that we’ve accomplished all our goals, that now that parents are facing down school boards over the rainbows in their kids’ classrooms while detransitioners make the doctors and pharmaceutical companies that destroyed their lives pay for it, we’ve won. The truth is, we’ve actually just reached a critical moment in this fight.
We, as a culture, now have a choice. On one hand, we can simply accept that some small percentage of people will close down Main Street so that they can put on deviant performances while waving brightly colored flags. We can turn a blind eye to the one random post from our representative celebrating rainbows on social media. It’s just once a year, after all; it’s not in front of our toddlers. Maybe, if we give them their parade, the people who have successfully promoted sexual deviancy by being “loud and proud” about it will just vanish into their fancy coffee shops and bookstores, and we won’t have to worry about them.
Or, we can do the more difficult thing. We can call the LGBTQ+ lifestyle what it is: sinful and immoral. We can excise it from our streets, our libraries, and our schools. We can refuse to give it even the slightest bit of cultural ground. We can do what our ancestors did before us and make it a social pariah, all while treating those who find themselves in its evil clutches as individuals who deserve our love, help, and support — after all, but for the grace of God, there go I.
That tightrope is a difficult one to walk, but it’s the only way to make sure that no generation ever faces the trauma so many Gen Z kids have had to live with.
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