…during the mammoth six-hour-plus hearing on the bill.

We learned quite a few things, actually. I talked about several of them in an American Spectator column this morning.

One of the main things we learned was what’s going to happen as conservatives attempt to put a halt to the Left’s cultural aggressions by use of political power when it’s available. Namely, that the other side will do everything it can to make those attempting to hold up societal standards against the disorder and chaos of the cultural Marxist vanguard feel revulsion and disgust.

So efforts to restore order to the chaos must be met with more chaos.

In Montana, as everywhere else, the Left gins up oodles of freaks to descend on the capitols and make things as openly, obnoxiously unpleasant as they can. None of the advocacy — “I am trans. I am a big gay baby. My pronouns are they/them. What are yours?” — is aimed at persuasion. It’s aimed at intimidation, of a sort.

There’s an implied message: bring bills we don’t like, bills the public favors, and we will bully you. We will make you miserable. We will make you sit through hour upon hour of inanity, disrespect, contempt, and aberration.

And while it comes off as emotionalism, that isn’t what it is. It’s strategic. It’s calibrated to generate a perfectly reasonable response. It’s intended to make ordinary Republican legislators, the ones who didn’t sign up to fight the culture wars, throw up their hands and gripe at Gabe Firment and the others willing to take on this fight.

“I came here to build roads and do economic development. I just want to make the schools better and the taxes low. Why am I being subjected to this?” is that reaction. “Don’t bring any more of these damn bills and the freak show that comes with them.”

And this is how they win, without persuading a soul. Because disorder, chaos, violence, and filth … works.

This was the iconic video clip from yesterday’s hearing – a drag queen with a blue face disgracing himself and making a mockery of the hearing not just through appearance…

A drag queen testifies to the Louisiana House of Reps against a bill to ban pediatric gender changes:

"I am trans. I am a big gay baby. My pronouns are they/them. What are yours?" pic.twitter.com/yL8abAdkNO

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 2, 2023

That was one of countless absurdities the members of the House Health and Welfare Committee had to endure. But they also had to endure this…

This lady says that she had a gut feeling that her daughter was a boy when she liked to play with male toys when she was 18 months old and is now going to start "gender affirming care" at 11 years old. pic.twitter.com/cEV2jVZ845

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 2, 2023

What’s the significance of those two obviously-unstable women prattling on about their trans children? Well, back in December 2020 Andrea Widburg of The American Thinker offered up a 1991 study which signaled something we now know to be true through copious observation…

Just a couple of weeks ago, HBO premiered a documentary about allegedly transgender kids.  Footage made the rounds of a scene in which a woman tries to force her manifestly six-year-old son, Phoenix, to stand in front of an LGBTQ church and proudly identify himself as a girl.  You can see the clip at the beginning of this Matt Walsh video:

…

Walt Heyer, who was one of the first Americans to take hormones and have surgery to “change” from a man to a woman, realized that (a) the medical community unconscionably pushed him into these drastic changes and (b) the problem was with his upbringing, not his misgendering.  In his case, he blamed his grandmother, who gave him big ego strokes for wearing girls’ clothes and being feminine.

Based on my own experiences living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the company of a lot of people living on the LGBTQ spectrum, I think Heyer’s right.  Probably 70% of the people I know on that spectrum had suffered childhood traumas, whether it was absent fathers, overbearing mothers, or abuse at a parents’ hands.

It may be that those overbearing mothers, the same ones Matt Walsh focused on, are the biggest factor in transgenderism.  Someone trolling through the literature discovered a 1991 study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry that compared mothers of boys with gender identity issues to mothers of “normal boys.”  (Yes, just 29 years ago, it was still “normal” to call a boy a boy.)  What the study revealed is that, for the boys who identified as girls, 53% of their mothers had Borderline Personality Disorders. For boys who knew that they were boys, only 6% of the mothers had Borderline Personality Disorders.

Seemingly, when boys are transgender, it’s not because, baby, they were born that way.  More often than not, it’s because they had the spectacular bad luck to be born to a mother with a serious mental disorder.

I’ve long said that when people claim to be members of the opposite sex, rather than destroying their bodies with hormones and surgery to create a Frankenstein-like simulacrum of that opposite sex, we should first give them a trial treatment of hormones aligned with, not the opposite of, their biological sex.  It seems they also need time with a good psychiatrist who understands the emotional trauma of a disordered mother.

Nearly every time you see a “trans” kid, you see an unstable, narcissistic mother given to magical thinking and you also see a weak or absent father incapable of providing a masculine, stabilizing influence for the child.

Years from now when countless lives have been destroyed and this fever has finally been broken, it will be understood for what it is. In the meantime, it’s important to understand that transgenderism is a symptom and product of cultural decline. Bad families and a toxic culture made this, and efforts to stop the bleeding in law, such as HB 463, the bill in question yesterday, will expose that fairly regularly.

But you can’t fix bad families with state statutes. You can only provide small incentives for good behavior. Ultimately this is a cultural problem which has to be fixed in the culture, and just as I noted at the American Spectator this morning, the other side will do everything it can to brutalize those who make that effort.