This article offers an alternative hypothesis as to the reason why transgenderism has become the cause celebre du jour of Cathedral elites. The ordinary hypothesis, based on works like those of Paul Gottfried, says that transgenderism is an example of left-wing virtue-signaling and the escalating competition to be more holy than the next person. In an attempt to raise one’s status, the leftist must embrace more extreme signals of egalitarianism than others of his cohort. Thus, left-wing signaling is an arms race in which leftists are trapped by the terms of their religious status system in an escalating spiral to see who can find the most radical, most irrational expression of egalitarian ideas.

Instead, consider an additive hypothesis: the Cathedral elite know full well that transgender individuals are mentally ill and have chosen to embrace this cause for ulterior motives, as there is something inherent in the issue that provides them an advantage. Transgenderism is Type 1 Propaganda, and its primary targets are not loyal leftists, but individuals on the marginal Right capable of swinging either for or against the Cathedral.

What are these “types” of propaganda? In the collection of rhetorician Richard Weaver’s essays entitled In Defense of Tradition, Weaver describes the different forms which propaganda can take and their intended effects. Type 1 Propaganda is the “Big Lie” of the Soviet Union or Orwell’s 1984. The nature of the “Big Lie” is that the lie should be so big and so obvious that no sane person could believe it.

Superficially, this form of propaganda would be similar to the Chinese loyalty test referred to as “Point Deer Make Horse.” The difference is how the lie is used. As a loyalty test, the “Big Lie” is meant to distinguish those who will lie from those who will not lie for the authorities. As a form of propaganda, the loyalties of the targets are already known: they are enemies. Instead, the lie is a form of psychological torture meant to degrade and demean members of the opposition. Consider the following quote from Theodore Dalrymple:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is—in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

Weaver explains that this form of propaganda is aimed at demeaning, humiliating, and eroding the self-respect of those who oppose the regime. It is an expression of pure power, in that the propagandist can force the victim to repeat a doctrine that both people know is untrue. There is no potential gain for the propagandist except insofar his enemy is psychological broken and defeated. There is no intention for the “Big Lie” to have any effect outside the torture chamber. Whether or not transgender individuals are accepted by society is irrelevant to the exercise of power by the Cathedral elites over marginally right-wing individuals.

The best illustration of this type of propaganda is the famous scene from 1984 when O’Brien asks Winston how many fingers he is holding up. O’Brien knows that he is holding up four fingers. He knows that Winston knows there are four fingers. O’Brien is not trying to torture Winston to the point that he will forever be incapable of distinguishing four and five fingers. O’Brien is simply exercising power by demonstrating that Winston is utterly powerless and that his very words and actions are controlled by the Party. As soon as he walks out of the room, O’Brien does not care how many fingers Winston sees, only that Winston recognizes the power O’Brien, and by extension the Party, wields over him.

In the end, Winston’s broken state is such that he no longer feels the capacity to resist the Party. When Winston says that he “loves Big Brother” at the end, this is not to be taken as an act of will, that somehow he has been “brainwashed” and now believes in Ingsoc. Winston has been hollowed of the capacity to love at all. The only thing he is capable of doing is mimicking the commands of the Party. Insofar as he “loves” Big Brother, he is simply repeating the motions commanded by the Party robotically.

Likewise, the promotion of transgenderism is aimed at instilling such a state on the members of the marginal Right, which the Cathedral understand to be subject to radicalization. The Cathedral understands that the Outer Right will outright reject the propaganda, but doesn’t need transgenderism as a kind of loyalty test. The Outer Right has outed itself in a multitude of ways prior to this particular propaganda campaign. These days, one merely needs to look at a person’s Twitter or Facebook to identify them as loyal or disloyal to the Cathedral. Instead, this propaganda is aimed at religious and socially conservative or moderate individuals who are politically centrist or center-right. The threat is implicit: either admit that the man in a dress is a woman, or we will take away your job, take away your respectability in the community, send CPS after your children, and otherwise destroy your life.

To take it one step further, examine the various media pieces about how straight men are bigots because they won’t have sex with transsexual “women:” the implicit threat here is chilling. The message from the Cathedral mouthpieces is that the time is coming when dissenters will be told that they must copulate with a transgender or be punished by the regime. What could be a greater exercise of pure power than forcing your opponents to participate in soul-destroying sexual depravity and to pretend to enjoy it? Can one imagine a more powerful means of psychological destroying an opponent than to command them to defile their body and call it an act of love?

The typical individual this is aimed at is a moderate Republican who thinks John McCain is a hero for his military service, attends a traditional church but wants a little compassion for homosexuals, and who lives in a 90%+ white neighborhood, but says race has nothing to do with the flourishing of his community. He is understood by the Cathedral to be potentially disloyal, even if he is not disloyal at this moment. If he gets robbed at gunpoint by a young black man or if a member of his church gets sued for not baking a gay marriage cake, he could very well radicalize. Therefore, the Cathedral needs to get to him first. While his children can be converted via public education and mass-media propaganda, it’s much harder to change the mind of a grown adult. Therefore, the Cathedral focuses on blackpilling through propaganda.

As described in the Dalrymple quote, being forced to call Bruce Jenner a woman is only part of the blackpilling effect of Type 1 Propaganda. Being marched into the Boss’s office and having to lie about one’s beliefs do erode the self-respect of the victim. What makes this form of propaganda more insidious is that every person who submits to it participates in the attack on other dissenters. Type 1 Propaganda is more than just O’Brien and Winston in a small room; it’s the Two Minute Hates in public as well. When our moderate Republican submits to intimidation and spouts the transgender lie, he participates in pressuring others to submit to the lie, give up their self-respect, and resign themselves to apathy and helplessness in the face of Cathedral tyranny. In his assent, he becomes an agent of the Cathedral and an ideological Stasi agent no different than the one who attacked him.

Transgender individuals are puppets of his system. Their ultimate fate is irrelevant to the question at hand, and any discussion on the right about “compassion” or “understanding” is a non sequitur. Just like the Civil Rights movement, once the Cathedral gains its objective the superficial justification for the campaign is cast aside. Once the Cathedral demolished the ability of local competing political elites to resist the power of their national institutions, the plight of the black community was not longer relevant to left-wing politics, except insofar as they could be leveraged for further objectives such as nationalizing and centralizing law enforcement.

Likewise, acting like transgenderism has anything to do with helping actual transgender individuals makes one a participant in propaganda and a willing dupe.

Ultimately, the goal which the Cathedral has set for transgenderism is to blackpill the marginal Right into silence and compliance. The terror of retaliation by the political elites is used to instill the kind of hopelessness and passivity which would prevent individuals on the Right from breaking out of the false consciousness of Cathedral ideology and recognizing their true interests in removing the Cathedral from power.

They don’t need the men on the Right to physically cut off their genitals because the Cathedral is commanding them to do it psychologically.

How many genders am I holding up, Winston?