This weekend at National Review, Madeleine Kearns asked a serious question that speaks to a lot of unrest being observed around the country. Are conservatives winning the debate over transgenderism? She cites the results of a recent poll taken by the Kaiser Family Foundation which found that significant majorities of Americans support what are described as “anti-trans policies” being enacted by Republicans in many states. That might suggest that the answer to her question is yes. But she also reminds us that the views of Americans on social issues can be quite fluid from one generation to the next. The best example of this is gay marriage. As recently as 1997, less than one-third of Americans supported legal gay unions. Today more than 70% are okay with the idea. Could transgender ideology follow a similar path?

Are conservatives winning the debate on transgenderism? The Washington Post published the results of a poll it fielded with the Kaiser Family Foundation that showed that, as the headline put it, “most Americans support anti-trans policies favored by GOP.”

Of course, it wasn’t so long ago that similar findings were published about same-sex marriage. In 1996, only 27 percent of Americans favored redefining marriage to include homosexual unions. By 2006, that figure was at 37 percent. By 2016 — post-Obergefell — it was at 58 percent. Today, more than 70 percent of Americans, including 55 percent of Republicans, accept same-sex marriage. Might transgenderism move in the same direction, or is there something different about it?

Kearns supplies some good examples of why transgenderism is simply different than the gay marriage debate, drawing on the results of the Kaiser poll linked in the excerpt above. It found that 60% of Americans agree with the belief that sex is determined at birth based on obvious biological factors. (Or, more accurately, sex is determined at conception and observed at birth.) That figure is actually higher than it was in 2017.

But isn’t it worrisome that 40% of the country isn’t willing to state what should be patently obvious? If were to go back to the early part of the 20th century, that figure would certainly have been at or very close to 100%. Anyone saying otherwise would have been described as a nutter and locked up in a home for the terminally confused. So there clearly has been a shift of nearly 40 percent, likely in just the past twenty years or so. Has trans support peaked or will that continue?

The poll also reflects the generally accepting nature of Americans when it comes to differences between people. Most have no problem with people calling themselves whatever they like. But they also don’t find this a suitable basis for many laws when it comes to gender-segregated housing, bathroom access, and other areas where one gender (generally women) requires the privacy and security of single-sex environments. Support for women’s and girls’ sports being segregated by biological sex remains strong as well.

Most people still oppose medical and surgical intervention for gender-confused children, which is both sensible and logical. They do support psychological counseling, however. I would agree, but it depends on who is doing the counseling and what the goal of the therapy is. If it’s based on an effort to steer the child back toward reality and keeps the parents in the loop, that’s great. If it’s a form of indoctrination into transgender theory as reality, not so much.

Unlike Kearns, what I find most disturbing about the entire debate is that we’re having it at all. What changed in our collective mentality that led us to a place where we’re arguing about one of the most fundamental aspects of medical reality? One of the most flawed elements of the previous debate over gay marriage was a seeming denial of the fact that some percentage of the population is either homosexual or bisexual and has been throughout all of recorded history. But the reality that humanity is divided nearly evenly into two genders (with the rare exceptions of those with genetic aberrations), both of which are required for procreation, is even more deeply enshrined in our understanding of biological reality. You can’t change your gender by wishing it to be so any more than you can suddenly become tall enough to play in the NBA by wishing you weren’t five foot six inches tall. But if the current trends don’t change, we may be on the way to a place where a significant majority of Americans believe in these fantasies and begin legislating the behavior of the rest of us accordingly. We should all be alarmed by that possibility. Collective insanity could easily destabilize and collapse our government.