What is Chris Thinking?

I anticipate that more than a few of my readers will not share in the high esteem in which the author of this guest post holds the MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes. They will sneer at the naive hope undergirding her sincere appeals that Hayes begin engaging in good faith with the mounting evidence that pediatric transition is an ongoing medical scandal that the United States is lagging far behind its more enlightened Social Democratic European peer nations in bringing to heel. “Don’t you realize,” they will demand to know, “that Chris is a richly compensated hatchet man on behalf of whatever manufactured pseudo-consensus the Borg directs him to advance with no capacity or latitude for the exercise of independent judgment?” They will scoff at her dismay that Hayes has not broken with his party to exhibit curiosity about all the evasions and lacunae that riddle the trans-activist dogma, despite providing evidence that he clearly knows about some of them. Some will exhibit a certain schaudenfreude as they say: “You voted for this. And you’re going to keep voting for this — whatever happens to you and your child is fully deserved.”

While none of this is strictly wrong, I don’t share in this punitive attitude toward the growing contingent of former progressives defecting from the latest moral novelty they’ve all been instructed is mandatory for those who wish to remain in good standing with the right thinking to embrace. Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria — the by now well-documented and well-understood affliction of troubled adolescents, most of them girls, persuaded by online communities to believe that sex change is a magical cure-all for the vicissitudes of adolescence — began by mostly targeting the children of well-educated liberals and progressives ensconced in Blue enclaves for reasons that are not hard to guess. They were the people most susceptible to the latest moral novelties, having trusted in the righteousness of so many they joined in championing prior to the one that came into their households as a wolf in sheep’s clothing. These were the people proverbially adjacent to the lab where gain of function research was being conducted on the memetic contagion that infected their children.

Many of these parents have written anonymous posts at the the Substack Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans, which lays out the contours of the ongoing social contagion in terms that are easy to