We Can Make A Deep Impact In California

And break the cult power of the 'trans child' forever

Live shot of Planet Detransition arriving. Most large asteroids are actually not very dense. They tend to be loose collections of rubble and dust that disintegrate, turning kinetic energy and mass into heat and enlightenment. If the object is big enough, density will not matter. Annihilation will ripple outwards in waves

California is a national bellwether. As goes the Golden State, so goes the nation. I am old enough to have personal recall of this political history.

Ronald Reagan was the governor of California in 1978 when voters approved Proposition 13 to limit their rising property taxes. The measure won 62.5 percent to 34 percent. Since then, this addition to the state constitution has been what political science calls a ‘third rail,’ a subject that no politician dares to touch for fear of political death. Two years later, Reagan won the presidency in an unexpected landslide election. Political wisdom shifted.

Fitfully, regretfully, progressive-minded Americans understood that the era of the Weathermen and soaring urban homicide rates had not produced the expected glorious revolution, but political marginalization. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected president after denouncing activist rapper Sister Souljah. It had taken twelve years for a Democrat to learn the art of “hippie-punching,” as the disaffected left now called it.

Clinton used this political capital to raise gas taxes by 18.4 cents per gallon in 1993, resulting in such popular resistance that Washington Democrats have never raised the federal gas tax ever since, even when they held all the reins of constitutional power. The new political wisdom seemed even wiser.

Direct democracy has significant power to drive lasting political change. Political science studies Prop 13 as a deep impact event that altered the partisan balance in America and changed the electoral map colors of states. Idealists of all stripes have used California’s ballot initiative process to attempt a replication of that event ever since.

The political problem we must resolve with the ‘trans child’ is that it has no political price tag on it yet. Democrats as a body do not think they will suffer at the polls for legislating the programmatic exploitation of children for a sex-change cult. California Democrats are of course the worst of all offenders in a large field, Scott Wiener being merely the most well-known example.

Yet even in California, the trans agenda lacks majority support, and so they cannot win a popular contest. Indeed, this is exactly why the ‘no debate’ tactic exists in the first place. We have already broken the taboo of no debate asunder. To abolish it forever, we can signal the true political costs of public participation in the cult of the ‘trans child,’ as well as transgender demands for sports, as well as the war on parental rights.

We must expect that an organized and monied campaign to “protect the trans kids™” is about to begin. For that reason, we have limited planning and preparation time. An asymmetric, moderately funded, and comprehensive strategy can overcome the inevitable ad blitzes that invert reality with an imaginary human right to make every other Californian participate in their imaginary reality.

We can do this with our wit and wisdom and facts, as we always do, because the strategic situation advantages us. Ballot initiative 23-0027, the Protect Kids of California Act of 2024, “has the strongest polling result (75 per cent) of the three, with support from 67 per cent of sampled Democrat voters, 89 per cent of Republicans and 77 per cent of independent/other voters,” as Bernard Lane explains at Gender Clinic News. These numbers are in line with expectations from prior polling.

The proposed initiatives combine gender medicine, parental rights and fairness in female sport. These ‘issue lanes’ already enjoy high public visibility and support as well as popularity.

Plenty of issue lanes have been left out, though: what about detransitioners? What about trans widows? What about differing opinions on everything? What about that man who showed up at that one place in a dress and has a couple of bad opinions? What happens when that person is in the room with everyone else listed here — as well as hundreds of parents of ROGD kids?

These are issue lanes. An organization devoted to slaying the WPATH dragon is going to be focused on slaying the WPATH dragon. It might be able to do something for the beggar or the sexton, but “The St. George Committee” is in town on business and has no time to work out your internecine squabbles. The stakeholders in a sociopolitical movement are never few enough to actually all like each other. What they must do instead is organize within their respective lanes.

The phrase “watch your lane” has become an ironic complaint about being told to butt out of the conversation. This is not the meaning of the phrase used here. In the language of military strategy, “watch your lane” refers to each organization or soldier having a limited lane of reponsibility for defending or attacking. Another way to think of it is driving in traffic at speed: “watch your lane.” Contribute to the discussion of the California ballot initiative within a limited window of responsibility. Stand on your strengths and avoid situations where you may have weaknesses. Watch your lane.

This will allow you to maximize your expertise within the topical areas you know best. If you have an opinion about the lunch line at the St. George Committee confab, fine, but how is it part of your lane? If you were not there, do not feel uninvited to the little town that loses sheep to the dragon living in the nearby mountain. Focus instead on your lane in California.

Small teams have an organizing advantage on the ground, and in fact this is going to be crucial getting the initiative passed. In grassroots organizing, ‘affinity groups’ are the clusters of people who make up a movement. Three people who have become friends over the issue of, say, puberty blockers; or women’s sports; or women’s prisons, can be more effective, by applying their issue to the task of getting ballot signatures.

Watch your lane, everyone. They create crossfire. They support one another without even trying. They reduce ‘safe spaces’ for the opposition to fight us. Clear communication between us, even angry or stressed out communication, will reduce friction and train our fire collectively on needful targets. Planning and coordination — organization — will maximize resource efficiency.

Consider “NoMenInOurJails,” a notional organization devoted to the horrific state of affairs in which the trans-identified man is allowed to abuse women in California because of his faith claim to having been ‘born in the wrong body.’

They are not included in the proposed initiative, yet I absolutely expect NoMenInOurJails to do something public, like a pop-up booth at a busy venue, in order to help obtain ballot signatures, promote the initiative, and leverage the situation to stimulate public conversation about Barbie Kardashian.

I do not expect NoMenInOurJails to adopt radical feminism, or speak for trans widows, or have the facts about desistance and detransition in the young at their fingertips. I do not expect them to care who showed up where in what costume last weekend. Even those who presently do will care more about their own issue than what some dude was wearing, or what he says in his book. We do this naturally, in fact, and that is my point. Stick to what is in your nature.

Detransitioners are the secret weapon in this fight. It is in the nature of detransitioners to avoid attention. The ones who do court it are incredible. Every one of them moves me to tears. I am in this fight because of them. I feel rage every day because they exist. They are not supposed to exist but do. Their existence is inconvenient to The Narrative, so the story must change. California can be where you change it.

Or you can struggle session unity-disunity-unity until the genderal assembly (heh) of Preoccupy Allstreets reaches 85 percent consensus. Your choice, reader. Ahem.

The detransitioner does not need to leave their home in order to do this. This mission can be accomplished through information channels that are already available, via media purchasing, to blast the online video format within California. The full picture of such a program is beyond the scope of this essay. Legal and PR professionals will need to be on hand to respond immediately if social media companies balk at running the advertisements. Recognized leaders in the detransitioner world must be on standby for interviews with any media outlets that are willing to report any such gender industry shenanigans.

They exist, and that is an outrage. Detransitioners must leverage the outrage. To accomplish this limited mission, and attract the resources necessary, will require organization.

Detransitioners: I know you are hurting. ORGANIZE. The elites do not remain elites because they have money; they are in power because they are organized. Social change does not come through power; it happens through organization. Remember the ‘Tea Party’? Its effects still reverberate in American politics even though no one ever talks about it anymore. They were a thing, and they are now over, but they were organized. Effective change is never really about resources, but organization. Organize.

Detransitioners need their own space and conversational spectrum (their ‘lane’) to be more broadly recognized and avoid harmful attention from the opposition. Movement solidarity is already international and so the organization can be global. Have your own convention, guys, and please send me a media pass. The historian says your moment in history is here, he wants to witness it.

So does Wilfred Reilly. I met Dr. Reilly at Genspect last weekend to hear him describe the true size of the detransition cohort. A mother of a detransitioner was also present who was able to provide further information that I will be reporting on next week.

Long story short: the United States government has inadvertently supplied data confirming that about one-third of youth put on cross-sex hormones detransition, a claim consistent with the numbers Reilly cited from other sources which hint at the true size of the cohort. He believes the estimates are low.

As the harms and regret rates become impossible to deny, the climate within American medicine will have to change. The trick is to make the harms and regret rates impossible to deny, which is where the detransitioners come in.

{Video ends, ad loads]

DETRANSITIONER 1: She affirmed my so-called identity on the first visit.

DETRANSITIONER 2: The doctor gave me hormones and it was terrible.

DETRANSITIONER 3: The school counselor suggested that I have this surgery.

D1: The effects will last my whole lifetime.

D2: My therapist said it would cure my depression. He lied.

DETRANSITIONER 4: My whole community said it would make me happy.

D3: I am never going to be whole again.

D1: It was a lie.

D4: They were lying.

D2: I was living a lie.

D4: Stop lying about us.

DETRANSITIONER 5: We exist.

D4: Detransitioners exist.

D1: There are too many of us already.

D2: Way more than they want to admit.

D3: Please vote yes on [PROPOSITION]

D4: Please help stop the lies.

D1: If you are lying, please stop.

D5: I am a detransitioner.

DETRANSITIONER 6: I am a detransitioner.

DETRANSITIONER 7, 8, 9…?: I am a detransitioner.

VOICEOVER: Please vote yes on [PROPOSITION[ and end the lies. The ORGANIZATION paid for this advertisement.

It is likely that someone will put ads on traditional television and radio as well, and it is always advisable to provide a competing message even if the opposition has superior resources. However, contemporary audiences are as likely to be looking at a phone or tablet as a television. The cost of 400 million video ad impressions is also minuscule compared to traditional TV or radio, and there are only 40 million Californians. Not being a mathematician, I still see an economy of scale.

Such a campaign would prepare the psychological environment for a decisive electoral victory. Gathering ballot signatures will be dangerous in the woke urban centers, but Californians (and allies who come to California) can find a ready market to serve and protect them if necessary. Anyone considering a large rally event should consider the Rose Bowl. Fill it with TERFs and let the opposition try to tune them out. As they largely control establishment/legacy media, this will still have to be reported, so it will be condemned and savaged and trashed and monstered. Good. Let them.

We are, again, preparing the psychological battlefield of California. Everyone has an opportunity to make their voice heard. In fact, this is where the most militant people in this pop-up ‘gender-critical’ movement-like thingy are going to shine the brightest. I expect nothing less than epic virtuoso stickering. Yes, someone will start clawing ‘HUMAN FEMALE ADULTS ARE CALLED “WOMEN”’ stickers off of the telephone poles and so forth in certain places in California. The trick is to catch Hamassy the Trans-Supportive Lunatic on video as zhey/zhem break their nails and screetch about safety doing that to a restroom door. The more viral and newsworthy the freakout, the better. Put up an ‘I HEART J.K.’ billboard on the I-405 interchange and the freakout will be earned media. Individuals and small groups can contribute creatively in any number of ways to get the message across and accelerate the conversation: Gender is over. We are over gender.

Direct democracy can exert epochal impact on all the actors in this tragedy. This campaign will circumvent the courts, where the American Civil Liberties Union has built their pseudolegalist bastions and made the bench into a minefield with ‘judicial education’ programs to slow our progress. Even an injunction will not stop the message from getting through to ‘Gender-Americans’ that they are a minority. They will see the majority. They will have to acknowledge that it exists.

Consider two election maps. Here is the way things looked after Election Day in 1978.

Here is the way things looked after Proposition 8 passed in 2008, the measure against same-sex marriage. Bear in mind that American public opinion on that issue was still in flux at the time, and a consistent polling majority only formed in the first Obama term. A helpful Wikipedia political geographer has color-coded the map for confusion. Prop 8 was challenged for constitutionality in the state supreme court before it was ever voted on and then challenged in, and ultimately overturned by, federal courts. These are two very different issues, but note how one of them became common wisdom and the other became history. We want the 1978 map, not the 2008 map, in order to get the message through the interference.

Erin Friday, co-founder of Protect Kids California (PKC), told Bernard Lane at Genspect that “the savings would amount to millions of dollars, pointing out that a public data request in Pennsylvania—a state with about half the number of gender dysphoria diagnoses of California—revealed that $16.7 million in public funds was spent on youth gender medicine from 2015-22. The annual figure had risen from $78,000 in 2015 to $3.9m in 2021.”

“On this basis, California’s public funding for paediatric transition could be $8m or more per year, Ms. Friday said.” This is how a California ballot initiative promoter talks. The reader will now understand why. Playing up the cost savings of not sterilizing kids is in fact a selling point she has to make. She will be criticized for this necessity from all sides and it will not stop her. She won’t even feel it. She won’t help anyone make their idea of perfection into the enemy of her good judgment.

Also, she will not resolve our differences as a ‘movement,’ or take responsibility for covering your lane. Her lane, already hard enough, is to get the damn initiative on the damn ballot and passed, full stop. Winning will be hard and expensive and that will also take up her time. Help gather 95,000 signatures and perhaps she will have a hot minute for your elevator pitch.

The resource requirements will however be entirely justified by the potential payoff. Donations can of course cross state and international boundaries to support organizations, probably pop-ups, that will do all this work. Who even knows whether PKC will need to exist in a decade? And with the example of Stonewall, or the ACLU, or a dozen organizations I could name, that is a good thing.

The initiative “prevents the sterilisation of children by prohibiting puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, genital surgeries and mastectomies for minors.” It “prohibits health care providers from providing transgender patients under 18 with medical care to affirm a gender identity that differs from the minor’s gender assigned at birth … even if parents consent or it is medically recommended for the minor’s mental or physical wellbeing.” Semantic differences between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ aside, as well as Bernard’s Australian spellings, and this is clear language that rules out exceptions. Let the opposition play the language games.

I met Erin Friday at Genspect. She is formidable. Also determined: “California started this [gender craze], California has to end it. We influence every other state in the union,” she told a packed hall. “And we can, oddly, even though California is so crazy liberal. The people can do it.” Believe her. She knows what she is talking about. It’s not a scam. No one is taking advantage of you or pulling the wool over your eyes. These things will be said about PKC because they are always said about successful organizers and organizations.

Genspect is not in the business of telling adult Americans that they cannot join a Skoptic sex-change cult of hormones and surgeries if they desire. That is not their lane. Genspect’s lane is the dragon of pediatric sex lobotomy and patent medicine poisoning. Imagine St. George comes to your village to kill the dragon eating villagers and their sheep; imagine that a fairy showed up at the village inn, and the whole land was abuzz only with that news days later, while St. George was slaying said dragon. Behold the mighty lance which hath pierced that unholy heart:

Image via Colin Wright, who watches his own lane at Genspect

This thing is called ‘a book.’ It contains ‘pages.’ These pages have ‘numbers.’ If you wish to convince me that Genspect is The Secret Conspiracy To Feed The Dragon©, then please provide the page number in your communications to me, dear reader. If you are reading this then I know you are literate in English. Quote the offensive bit and contextualize your complaint so that I know what the Hades you are trying to tell me about things that are not in my lane, either. This is the thing that Genspect critics are not doing, that they can never seem to do: the homework.

On that note, Sasha Ayad, Lisa Marchiano, and Stella O’Malley all signed a copy of their book, When Kids Say They're Trans: A Guide for Parents, for me at Genspect. I mention this not only in the interest of full disclosure, but to assign it as reading for anyone who wants to convince me that they are “true trans” believers or pandering to autogynephiles. They are staying in their lane. Watch yours, dear critic, or else read their damn book and provide citations for your statements. Here is your CliffsNotes version in the form of my review. I read the book, and there was so much information and advice in it that I only wrote about half of what I might have written about, so if you lie to me thinking I won’t know: guess again. There will be a quiz.

Also.

There were a lot of opinions about Genspect from people who were not there. Attendees had different experiences and I have not had time to catch up with all the feedback from them. Indeed, my lane contains so many ‘targets’ now because I went to Genspect that I have been at high OPTEMPO since I returned to my command post. If you were not there and were sad about it, or now you are mad about it, guess what, there might be something happening in California soon that is in your lane, and it will have absolutely nothing to do with Genspect.

It might center detransitioners.

Despite what you may have heard, detransitioners were very much in evidence there in Golden, Colorado. Present, visible, having a great time, having hundreds of conversations. I met them and talked to them and they were amazing. Here is photographic evidence with two young people who are not supposed to exist and were supposedly nonexistent at Genspect. An anthropologist should study this movement. There are so many tribes in this happenstance political coalition of people who just happen to believe that male and female human sexes exist. Lots of people to be found under a big tent that big, including clowns. There was plenty of clowning around. I had such a great time.

So honored to have this pic. They are amazing

I am not the one who tells anyone how to watch their lane. Nevertheless, I have one more piece of advice for the detransitioners: consider direct action. Nonviolent in-person confrontation is an effective strategy when it doesn’t involve blocking highways or smashing artwork. The time is ripe for actions that bring attention to the fact of your existence. Consider a flash mob. Consider a sit-in. Consider your safety and keep your future in consideration, but consider how you can make things incredibly awkward for people who say you don’t exist. Follow the Funk God path. Make things awkward. Force the dissonance out. Get it on camera. Become unavoidable to those who try to avoid you. Set the terms of their surrender.

My lane is history. I have been assigned a ton of reading on a short-term basis by a movement fraught with peril wherever I step, filled with harsh critics suspicious of their sources. I get it. We’ve all been through a lot. But we are here. At last. Don’t lose sight of the mission. Watch your lanes. Buckle up. Enjoy the ride.