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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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this is often genuinely a cover for a veiled accusation that the activists are only telling kids to transition because they get some perverse sexual thrill from doing so, or even because they want to physically molest the kids they initiate.

Not necessarily sexual. Back when LibsofTikTok was just posting videos of libs talking to their own kind, there was a recurring archetype that I'll roughly sketch. Imagine a woman in her late 20's. She has a degree in education, a boring real life and a rich inner life. She posts videos talking about making her classroom a safe space, and a mild cynic could easily come to the conclusion that she really, really wants that experience of the "safe space" being necessary. That she believes that "school" is the setting for a drama anthology in which she is the main character, guiding and saving 22-26 desperate young people per year from repressive, intolerant, conservative parents.

The thing is, there just aren't that many gay kids. In a class of 20, she'll have maybe 2, and the odds of a terrible dramatic confrontation with the family where they have to seek help from their favorite English teacher that comes to a head in exactly that year is much, much smaller. How often can that really happen? Thrice in a career seems like a high estimate.

And yet a lot of teachers seem to be hyped as fuck at any hint that they get to do a big dramatic Very Special Episode type shit, just like the movies. That's why they got into teaching you know, and not because they're a lower-midwit who was afraid to leave a comfortable environment.

Objectively speaking, there are millions of teachers and only a few who post videos on TikTok giving the impression that if there aren't enough dramatically crying trans kids then they'll make them, but there are enough for a Twitter account to find a few every week for a year and make the meme well known.

Although it is as rare as you point out, "gay or otherwise non-gender-coforming teen with conservative Christian parents" is probably the most common case in today's America of someone being oppressed based on identity-group membership in a Narrative-compliant way. Anti-black racism still exists, but has been driven to the margins. Patriarchal subcultures which actually oppress women are on the way out. And the Smollett affair proved that the demand for violent homophobia targetting adults exceeds the supply.

If you are a shitlib schoolteacher in a suburban district in a deep red state, you still have the same 1-2 actually gay/lesbian kids per class that you always did, they are more likely than not to get a hostile response from their parents, and you can credibly expect that affected kids from other classes are going to come to you because they don't want to talk about this to a red-normie teacher.

I suspect the typical shitlib high school teacher in a red state does, in fact, meet several kids per career who have a catastrophic breakdown in their relationship with their parents over this issue. Back in the day, these kids would have stayed in the closet.