Matt Walsh thinks gender ideology has now been defeated in the USA - is he right?

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Basically he thinks that making congress bathrooms single sex is a sign that the debate has been won. That Senators are now prepared to speak out on this issue in a way they wouldn't have three years ago.

He thinks the argument have been won and its just a matter of hoovering out the last remains of GI from other institutions in the USA.

Do you think he is right and if so, will this have a ripple affect elsewhere in the world?

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No. But he has a very superficial understanding, so would think that.

I think legally america is in a better position to us at the moment. But socially i dont think so.

He's obviously wrong, isn't he? In California, they're still putting rapists in women's prisons. They've still got surgeons performing mastectomies on teenage girls. Lots of sports are still allowing men onto women's teams. I think they've got a long way to go.

No.
It's far too deep in schools, the police, the government, healthcare, social media etc. It will take decades for the roots to be killed, and I don't think that's even possible at this point.
If the balance of power ever swings the other way over the next election or two, all the laws will just be changed again anyway so it's never going to go away.

He wants the "gender identity war" to have started and ended around the times that he first became interested in using it and when it became surplus to his requirements.

I take him here to be making a "beginning of the end" kind of statement. He might be right, but it will certainly take time for that to percolate down and through society if he is right.

My worry is that really, GI isn't a think of it's own, that surprisingly arose from nothing. It comes out of identity politics thinking, hierarchy of oppression thinking, the sexual revolution, and some ideas in popular feminism, from the last 30 years. If those things aren't dismantled they will continue to cause problems.

I don't think it's defeated, no, that will take years (maybe decades) but I think the death blows have been struck.

It's now up for discussion in the public realm and we all know that it ultimately can't survive that.

There are still loud Democrat voices trying to hold on to the status quo, but even during campaigning, the Harris camp were distancing themselves from the issue. So I think it will become the preserve of the far left in the party.

I suppose his point is that if senators are saying ' No gender ideology here, for us' then they can't really be implementing or allowing it anywhere else. They have essentially admitted its all nonsense and single sex matters to them, so it has to matter to all their voters and institutions too.

It amused me hugely in the run-up to polling day when there were voices on the moderate side of the Democrats crying "Kamala, you have to respond to the Trump campaign's they/them adverts, they're cutting through and damaging us, please" when it was clear to me that there wasn't anything she could productively say.

I think GI arose from good old fashioned misogyny. Look how no-one cared about what GI meant for women and girls.

Well those voices, that I heard, were telling her to say that there was no problem with boys/men in girls/ women's sports.

No. It is deeply and institutionally entrenched in far too many places, as in the UK - perhaps even more so. There are far too many people who think they are the good guys or who are making a hell of a lot of money out of this who will not back down. This is our opportunity to persuade the reasonable woman on the Clapham omnibus. Sport is a great help. Many ordinary people who wouldn't dream of reading about gender wars are shocked by men stealing women's achievements and scholarships and see right through the gaslighting.

Agreed - individual states make their own rules and the blue states are totally captured. Plus, standing up to Trump/the GOP on this is a matter of principle for them. They will NOT change their minds just because the party that happens to be in govt for the next four years (led by a man they universally hate) had made a rule that so far only affects the Capitol and may possibly be rolled out to include federal buildings nationwide.

I have family and friends in blue states and for the believers in gender ID the level of capture is DNA-level deep. They have been indoctrinated for so long to be kind, be tolerant, that TWAW and TMAM and that anything else is hateful and bigoted, that I can't see that changing.

SIL is a state employee in a blue state and despite having two degrees she has absolutely zero understanding of the GC viewpoint. She thinks I come from a quaint little island where our views are backward and we haven't been educated. Because she's my SIL and I don't want to upset her and because anything I say just elicits a tolerant smile from her, I realise that I can't say anything that will change her mind. She is 100% captured, but so are many other people I know. School teachers, college professors, artists, web designers, you name it. All totally and utterly captured and without any curiosity or questioning about it.

No, it's a start but individual states will do their own thing. I would say it's fairly defeated for now in most red states and MW probably doesn't care about what happens in more liberal blue states.

No. The democrats just seem to be doubling down.

The bubble has burst a bit in terms of people now feeling able to stand up to it more but time will tell if the dems can be persuaded that they are wrong.

I think the curtain has been raised and that those who had assumed the project was a benign extension of civil rights have had a rude awakening.

Obviously the bulk of the gender radicalism was achieved quietly within institutions, without any proper oversight but I think there has been a huge shift there.

I don't think it'll be dead until the full scale of harms inflicted onto children by the true believers will be known but I think the reality taboo has lost its momentum. Maybe that will be all it takes? The truth is quite catchy.

The acid test is whether the Democrats campaign on pushing forward "trans rights" in the next election. The mid-terms will be interesting in this regard.

I don’t know if he is right but I sincerely hope that this is the beginning of the end for gender ideology. My children will hopefully stand a good chance they won’t be influenced by those ideologies.
Only a few years ago people were still speaking in hushed tones about the harms this was causing, no main stream media would touch on the subject but now the tide is turning and I hope it becomes a tsunami.

I don't think it'll be dead until the full scale of harms inflicted onto children by the true believers will be known

Agreed - it will be lawsuits from people who were harmed/mutilated as children that will eventually turn the tide. When all those harmed DC grow up and write books and sue doctors and hospitals and get in the news - only then might the truly captured alter their viewpoint.

To be fair, they didn't campaign on that this time. So unless the party swings significantly to the left, it seems unlikely.

I think as an ideological/political position, it's over. But it will take huge effort to root it out of all the institutions where it has taken hold.

I hope this is what happens. When people start seeing what it really means, which is what the sports issue makes visible, and when people are able to talk about it, and when politicians start to feel able to talk and campaign too, then light is shone on what GIs real world implications are.

And then when people start talking, and they hear reasonable views, like that man the other week saying ' I don't really like boys playing against my daughters either' and they see that view being shouted down by an angry man yelling ' Transphobia, transphobia, they are girls, not boys.' Then the bubble starts to burst.

One democrat campaigner said about a quarter of houses he called on expressed concerns about GI.

The message is getting through. In my life, I have found that people who think they support GI, realise they don't when they understand what it really means.

Which is maybe MW's point.

I'm going to take a punt that Matt Walsh is getting a bit bored with it now. He's made his intervention - which I won't deny I thought was helpful - but now I imagine he wants to move on. Framing it as having won the battle means he can claim the plaudits and leave all the clearing up to the women who were in the fight long before he took any notice (and whom, I understand, he has never credited?).

Indeed. But wind it forward a couple of years during which time there have been all kinds of "anti-trans" measures put in place (or not, it'll be interesting to see what does actually happen) and the Democrats will be faced with a fork in the road. Either keeping quiet again hoping no one mentions the war which will be an abandonment or feel that they have to throw bones to the activists to stop them drifting away.

It's an interesting one. The Democrats might dig their heels in as an anti Trump statement. But I can't think of any political issue where one side is so clearly wrong. Once people realise what has been happening, especially to children, they know it's wrong in a way that is so clear cut it's impossible to stay party political about it. So the Democrats will have to back-pedal or lose forever. It will be interesting to see if and how the Republicans implement their policies and what they will actually do given States have a lot of self-governance.

I don't think it's over but I do think the Republicans are going to implement policies where they can. Title IX and government funding guidelines seem to be areas they can have an effect quickly.

It is really interesting to see how men who take an interest in this issue a) get listened to (Starmer listened to Tony Blair not Rosie Duffield) and b) get and take far more credit than they deserve. It's really woken me up to how very misogynistic our society is still.