I’ll be honest. I don’t like the transgender movement. I especially don’t like it when it bullies teenagers, causing them financial loss and placing them in danger.

I, personally, don’t care if a man wants to put on lipstick and a dress and call himself a woman. And I don’t have a problem if he wants to change his name from Bruce to Caitlyn. Where I draw the line is using pronouns to refer to a man as “she” or “her.” I also really resent the vicious attempt to erase women, by activists claiming that a man who calls himself a woman is just as much a woman as I am.

I agree with Dave Chapelle that it’s like blackface. You can’t change your biology by changing your appearance, and it’s insulting to demand that people accept you as a member of a group to which you don’t belong.

Trans activists are getting nastier every day. A transgender individual shoots up a school, and the mainstream media do their best to hush up the transgender aspect of the story. Trans activists declare a Day of Vengeance. Is there anything more ominous than openly calling for vengeance? Yet under today’s rules, they’re not only allowed to do so but we are told we must sympathize with their need for vengeance.

Image: Makani Tran. YouTube screen grab.

And now a teenager has fallen victim to a nonbinary competition judge of indeterminate sex who goes by “they/them.” Makani Tran was blamelessly participating in a Pokemon tournament (which had an $800 registration fee, in addition to the airfare he paid to get to and from the destination) when a judge asked him his pronouns.

The poor kid laughed nervously at the odd question and was thrown out. Not just disqualified from the tournament but thrown out of the venue. Tran’s parents were not with him, his guardians were playing in the tournament, and he didn’t even have a key to the hotel room. (You really must read the linked article to get the full flavor of what happened to Tran.) The Pokemon Company and the tournament organizers, Overload Events, have declined to comment.

I suppose to them it seems fair and right that a belligerent judge ruined a teenager’s tournament hopes and stranded him in a strange city. I suppose to trans activists everywhere, it seems only fair that an adult offended by a nervous giggle from a child should be able to expel that child from a tournament he paid to participate in.

It doesn’t seem reasonable to me. It seems to me that it’s time to review Taylor Caldwell’s warning in her book Testimony of Two Men. There, she writes,

A woman isn’t really a man, though so many militant women seem to think so these days, and say “there is very little difference.” They don’t understand that that little difference is the most important thing in the world. There’s little difference...between lead and gold—until it reaches the marketplace. A woman stripped of her “difference,” in mere mind, was still not a man. Even those deprived of their generative organs were not men. The mysterious and inexorable “difference” remained, and...let the world beware when it forgets that. A woman who was not distinct from a man in a spiritual way could betray the whole race.

Testimony of Two Men was published in 1968. And in 2023, the human race is indeed being betrayed.

Pandra Selivanov is the author of Future Slave, a story about a 21st century black teenager who goes back in time and becomes a slave in the old south.