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Kurt Mahlburg
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.
Even broken clocks are right twice a day.
This trusty proverb has proven right again thanks to NBC News, which last week published an in-depth, 2,000-word article that completely obliterates transgender ideology.
You read that correctly.
Sanity has prevailed. One of the wokest news outlets on the planet has just offered a comprehensive rebuttal of the idea that a person can change their gender simply by wishing it be so.
To be fair, NBC News made the admission by accident: self-awareness, as ever, is in short supply in the corporate press.
How did they blow up the transgender narrative?
Quite simply, with an article entitled “Inside the online world of people who think they can change their race“.
By seeking to disprove the misguided notion that one can opt into another racial category, NBC News provided a point-by-point rebuttal of transgenderism. Every argument raised against “transracialism” ends up refuting the idea that people can change their gender, too.
The NBC News piece begins by introducing a 15-year-old girl called Alisa from Maryland, who has always “felt a special connection with Japan”:
She now goes by the Japanese name Miyuki and listens to “subliminals” that promise she will wake up and be Japanese. So far, she believes that by listening to YouTube videos with lo-fi music and photos of East Asian facial features while she sleeps, her vision has cleared, her eyelids have become smaller and her hair is just a bit darker.
NBC News confirms that Alisa’s is not an isolated story:
Practitioners of what they call “race change to another,” or RCTA, purport to be able to manifest physical changes in their appearance and even their genetics to become a different race… [Subliminals] exploded in popularity during the pandemic…
So what are the arguments that NBC News mounts against this growing madness?
First, it’s an illusion, a misguided belief:
Experts underscore that it is simply impossible to change your race. “It’s just belief,” said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of cultural and media studies at Queens College, City University of New York. “It doesn’t ever really work, because it’s not doing anything, but they have convinced themselves that it works because there’s other people who have convinced themselves, as well.”
As for race, so for gender. It doesn’t take a scholar to note that even after a person socially and medically “transitions”, every cell in their body still testifies to their original maleness or femaleness.
Second, it’s appropriation. NBC News warns that a person’s attempt to become East Asian “could be a form of modern yellowface,” adding that “some scholars say it is another case of cultural appropriation, rather than appreciation.” Another expert is quoted as saying, “It’s not just putting on the hair and the makeup and talking and walking [in] a kind of way. That… reduces the beautiful and complicated cultures of people of colour.”
The scholars have spoken.
With respect, how is womanface any different?
Third, it fetishises Asian cultures. “The intense fixation on and enamoration with East Asian traits and appearances has led some members of the East Asian community to criticize RCTA as fetishistic,” NBC News contends. The article even provides a helpful definition for “fetishisation”: “being revered for these kinds of exotic characteristics but not really fully seen”.
Google “autogynephilia” if you need the parallel to transgenderism spelt out.
Fourth, it’s a misguided way of escaping shame. “Some psychologists say people’s inclination to change their race can stem from many motivations, including… shame associated with their race,” according to NBC News.
Naomi Torres-Mackie, a psychologist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, explains: “If you hold a highly privileged position in society and that is brought to your awareness, it can give you feelings of guilt or shame” — and “a lot of people try to find refuge from that shame.” Mackie singles out “white guilt”, explaining it can “lead white people to want to escape from the guilt through RCTA or transracialism”.
Just as men, who are demonised for being men, might want to escape by identifying as a woman.
Fifth, it perpetuates stereotypes. According to the article, “Subliminals that aim to make someone more East Asian can also inadvertently use antiquated, erroneous stereotypes”.
Haven’t we seen that from transgender celebrities who are constantly paraded before us?
Finally, it’s a false identity. Here’s the linchpin. Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of cultural and media studies at Queens College in New York, warns: “Some of them go too deep; they get lost in the sauce. They’re really in it to the point where it’s unhealthy, and they start owning an identity that isn’t theirs.”
There you have it. Transgender ideology is officially defunct.
Thank you, NBC News!
