Michael Brown on Town Hall flailing around in yet another anti-trans screed
Michael Brown holds a PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Literature from NYU, so I’ve always assumed that somewhere inside the deep fog of his anti-homosexual activism, is a brain capable of rational thought. This article certainly won’t be Exhibit A in my evidence for that hypothesis, but I always hold out hope of redemption for this guy. I reckon it might be a legacy feature of the old Firebrand Evangelist firmware I ran on for a couple decades.
If his audience were as concerned about truth as they were with feeling outrage, they would see the manipulative trick that Brown has been using on them for years. America is on a terminal decline and on a slippery slope towards doomsday , he tells them ad nauseam. To prove this point, he
- Cherry picks the most provocative, isolated example of progressivism that he can find on Right Wing aggregator sites, and then suggests that this behavior is becoming mainstream. Or…
- Shamelessly misrepresents an example of progressivism, turns it into a grotesque caricature and then warns his audience that his nightmare Frankenstein monster is headed their way.
In this article he tries variations of both.
Brown is quick to preface his dire warning with suggestions that others, preferably celebs (!) or other well-known figures, might actually share his bigoted views.
Brown cites rock icon Alice Cooper as an imagined “common sense” ally, following Cooper’s recent off-handed criticism in Stereogum about gender care for young children. It’s worth noting that Cooper is indeed a self-professing born again Christian, but unlike Brown he has always been supportive of LGBT causes and has never towed the fundamentalist party line on these issues. In short, he’s the kind of believer that Brown frequently rails against, but that’s hardly relevant. Brown recruits him anyway.
It’s significant to note that Cooper goes on in the Stereogum interview to express support for young adults transitioning. Frankly, his comments strike me as the type of wooden boomer stuff you’re likely to hear from any 75-year old– be they on Left or Right. Regardless, is an elderly 70’s rock star the kind of person who we should be turning to for informed clinical views on gender? Another rock n’ roll dinosaur of Brown’s generation, Carlos Santana 76, also gets implicated here in this imaginary uprising against the “the bullying leftist Stasi secret police”. Of course, Santana later apologized for his comments, but Brown is willing to sign him up in his army anyway. Brown wants his readers to understand that all of this is somehow representative of a grass roots push-back against the Leftist woke agenda of trans activists. The fact is, while many Americans are uneasy about the issue of gender-affirming care for kids, America is not at all divided about rights for trans people.
The main subject of Brown’s outrage, is Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a developmental and clinical psychologist who specializes in gender-affirmative care for transgender and gender-expansive patients. She is also a professor of pediatrics at UCSF. This doesn’t make her an absolute authority on gender-care, but it’s not insignificant. It also means that behind her helpful descriptors for some of the gradients on the gender spectrum– i.e. terms like “minotaur” or “smoothie”– are decades of study, practice and published papers. Also not insignificant. Do you think the average reader of The Line of Fire understands this? Or do they think that kids are literally identifying as minotaurs and that some quack therapist is encouraging them to be mythological creatures?
The deliberate lack of explanation for Dr. Ehrensaft’s playful gender descriptors is a part of Brown’s strategy to paint such gender-affirming care as part of this 2023 rise of “wokeness” that he sees. The problem for Brown is that Ehrensaft has been using terms like “minotaur” to describe gender spectrums for a long time. This is not some 2023 pop-psych fad. She has published work and even YouTube interviews where she used this exact language over a decade ago. How and why this has become a sudden point of outrage for Brown in August 2023, tells you how behind the curve these folks are on what is actually happening in the real world– where real people, face real struggles and get real help from empathetic clinicians and other qualified medical practitioners.
The rapidly-rising psychosis that Brown sees in American culture is little more than the idea that gender is a fluid concept, with psychological ramifications that deserve to be addressed by qualified clinicians… and certainly not self-appointed prophets or Christian shaman. And emphatically not by politicians.
