An article in the New York Times, “What Happens When Millennials Run The Workplace?” cited by Jane Shaw in a previous post, took a stab at defining college-educated millennials now holding jobs, a subject business owners and corporate execs deal with more and more as the 18-35-year olds trickle into the work force displaying their peculiar values.
One penchant of millennials is support for LGBTQ rights in bathrooms. Unlike their professors who joined various causes in college with a semblance of justification, millennials have been left with the bottom of the barrel: trigger warnings, safe spaces, micro-aggressions, and transgender bathroom rights. New hires out of college today are now browbeating their less-than-enlightened employers to allow male co-workers, who profess their preference to be female, to use what was called “the ladies’ room” before chivalry died a slow death over the past 40 years.
Since there is no litmus test in place, men who claim they prefer a female persona are demanding freedom to use women’s bathroom facilities, locker rooms and single-sex gymnasiums. This sick reality, sometimes involving taking bathroom photos and videotape of authentic females, will not evaporate with idealistic clap-trap from jejune activists about the “rights” of sexual predators slavishly disseminated by the hopelessly biased media in America.
This admittedly indecorous discussion demonstrates to what lengths the PC crowd will go to stand up for a preposterous cause, even if it is odious to most people. Ironically, there is the possibility the transgender rights activists have arrived at an issue so unsavory and preposterous it could drive the final nail in the coffin of the Left, who have done far more harm than good since its devotees invaded the politics of the world after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 and the official Comintern in 1922. It is pleasing to view fellow-traveling Leftists over the past 100 years ending up in the potty where their harmful ideas and crusades belong.
The LGBTQ advocates picked up this cause from the radical finishing school we call college — designed to “impoverish the life of the mind,” as KC Johnson put it in his thorough examination in Commentary of the radical tyranny inflicted on US colleges, faculty, students and compliant administrators. That’s why very few people saw the issue coming – and fewer still can believe it has become a nationwide cause célèbre. The bathroom issue spread to all colleges fast before oozing into the real world, verifying the nefarious role of radical academics to concoct and spread issues designed to undermine and alter American and Western society.
The subject is right up their alley for left-wing radical scholars running out of plausible issues to push. Their very existence has been based on seeking out groups to rally around to protect their rights. Women, blacks, gays, immigrants, the disabled, animals, sex workers, even grape pickers are suddenly shocked by the arrival of white middle class college students salivating to “care” for the plight of people they have never met.
Having finally run out of “diverse” groups, the caring radicals on campus landed on a fresh and, it appears, growing group of allegedly mistreated and discriminated against, transsexuals. And what a delicious cause. There’s sex at the very core of the issue, a subject students and faculty strongly feel should be taught in detail, mostly for prurient reasons, but justified as a throwback to Comintern obsessiveness with sexual freedom as representative of breaking the chains of bourgeois society. The result is Freedom Riders of the 1960s policing public toilets.
The freedom of sexual orientation sets left-wing minds atwitter. The act of changing gender at will represents not only ultimate sexual freedom, but in addition, transgenders are personas of the ideal member of a socialist society: free and rid of conflicts caused by sex, the Freudian underpinning of existence. And there exists a literature to provide provenance to sex change, most prominently Gore Vidal’s book Myra Breckenridge about a sex change operation that freed the title character to explore the subtleties of promiscuity from all sides.
Critic Dennis Altman called Myra Breckenridge “part of a major cultural assault on the assumed norms of gender and sexuality which swept the western world in the late 1960s and early 1970s.” This is what it’s all about for Leftists. The anarchy of sex change suits radicals, and the minds of susceptible and immature millennial activists.