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Transgender ideology is not going away. Understand the movement and how to respond by checking out this brand new documentary.

Transgenderism was a fringe idea just a few years ago. Now it is a booming industry.

It has been tempting — for Christians especially — to ignore the movement in hopes it will fade away like other fads.

Yet the ideology has only grown in strength, and now asserts itself in children’s classrooms, public libraries, sporting codes, TV, movies and politics.

A brand-new, 12-minute documentary has been released that explains transgenderism in clear terms and accounts for its wild popularity in Western nations.

How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life is the latest film by Christopher Rufo, a writer, political activist, investigative reporter, and contributing editor of City Journal.

Rufo’s previous documentaries have featured on PBS, Netflix, and international television. In prior years, the Daily Declaration has highlighted Rufo’s incisive commentary on Critical Race Theory and the poverty, homelessness, addiction and crime plaguing America.

How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life is possibly Rufo’s best film yet. 

The Transgender Empire

Rufo begins his commentary by declaring, “the transgender movement has conquered American life”. He lays out his case:

Activist teachers have converted classrooms into propaganda. Influencers are driving billions of social media impressions. And doctors are cutting up kids in the name of ‘gender-affirming care’.

The story goes deeper than you might imagine, featuring rage-filled intellectuals, a trans billionaire benefactor, and large-scale medical experiments in a Detroit ghetto.

“This is the story of the transgender empire,” he summarises — “how it came into being and how it hopes to change the face of American society forever.

The Origins of Transgenderism

As with the same-sex marriage debate of yesteryear, the way many people encounter transgenderism today is through human stories. It is understandable that people feel sympathy when hearing about the experiences of people who identify as LGBT.

However, Christopher Rufo warns that behind the human face of transgenderism is a political ideology that was carefully designed to desecrate the traditional Western way of life. He explains:

In the late 1980s, a group of writers, including Judith Butler, Gail Rubin, Sandy Stone and Susan Stryker established the disciplines of queer theory and transgender studies. They argued that gender was a social construct, used to oppress racial and sexual minorities. They denounced the categories of man and woman as a false binary that upholds a system of heteronormativity, the “white-male-heterosexual power structure”.

Rufo adds that the aim of these writers was to reduce traditional views of gender to dust. “The most visceral, dramatic way to achieve this,” he narrates, “is transgenderism” — “If a man can become woman, if a woman can become man, they believed, the entire structure of creation could be toppled”.

Susan Stryker’s contribution is especially noteworthy:

Susan Stryker is one of the founding theorists of the trans movement. In her best-known essay on ‘Performing Transgender Rage’, Stryker argues that the transexual body is a technological construction that represents a war against Western society. “I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster,” she wrote. “And this body is destined to channel its rage and revenge against the naturalized heterosexual order, against traditional family values, and against the hegemonic oppression of nature itself.”

Thus, according to Rufo, the transgender movement is inherently political. It uses “the construction of personal identity to advance a collective political vision”.

Moreover, transgenderism and Marxism are closely intertwined. Rufo highlights the work of Rosa Lee who saw trans people as “the new vanguard of the proletariat” who will help “abolish heteronormativity in the same way that orthodox Marxism promised to abolish capitalism”.

In short, argues Rufo, “All of society must be reorganised to affirm their identities and more importantly, their politics.”

The School-to-Gender-Clinic Pipeline

Among Rufo’s most startling revelations is the influence that a small number of powerful people and institutions have had in moving the transgender movement from the fringe to the centre of public life.

One of them is Jennifer Pritzker, born James Pritzker in 1950. Pritzker served in the US military and also inherited a sizeable portion of the Hyatt Hotel fortune. Rufo explains:

In 2013, Pritzker announced a male-to-female gender transition. The newspapers celebrated Pritzker as the first trans billionaire, and almost immediately, Pritzker began donating untold millions to universities, schools, hospitals and activist organisations to promote queer theory and trans medical experiments.

Pritzker’s cousin is none other than Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, who has pushed radical gender theory in state schools and directed state Medicaid funds towards trans surgeries.

The Governor of Illinois has also funded activists at Chicago’s largest children’s hospital, where activists “expose children not only to trans ideology but to kink, BDSM, breast binders and artificial penis packers”. Pritzker’s use of the hospital, Rufo explains, helps give transgender ideology a “scientific veneer”.

At the same time, trans activists have flooded social media with propaganda. 

The result, Rufo summarises, “is a sophisticated school-to-gender-clinic pipeline”:

Teachers, counsellors, doctors and influencers, many of whom are governed or subsidised by members of the Pritzker family, all push kids towards the science and politics of transgenderism.

The Synthesis of All Oppressions

For those still convinced gender transition is an empathetic solution for gender-confused teens, Rufo has a wake-up call.

He profiles Highland Park, an inner suburb of Detroit, Michigan, and “one of the poorest and most miserable cities in America”. According to Rufo, Highland Park “has been plagued by poverty, violence, crime and death for decades”. It is a city that “can’t even afford to keep the street lights on”.

The one well-funded institution in Highland Park is the Ruth Ellis Center — “Metro Detroit’s central laboratory for the synthesis of transgender science and politics”.

While the centre advertises itself with fashionable left-wing buzzwords like ‘trauma-informed care’, ‘restorative justice’, ‘harm reduction’ and ‘racial equity’, the reality is far more grim: “Each year the Ellis Center and its partners conduct large-scale medical experiments on a population of predominantly Black youth who’ve run the gauntlet of homeless shelters, foster care, juvenile hall, and the streets.” The centre provides puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical referrals to “scores of Detroit kids”.

Rufo clarifies:

Keep in mind, these are not the white, affluent, educated male-to-female trans individuals who are the public face of the movement. These are poor, Black, traumatised youth from the furthest reaches of the Detroit ghetto. They suffer from enormously high rates of family breakdown, substance abuse, mental illness and suicidal behaviour. And they’re told that gender transition — the latest promise of therapeutic liberalism — will solve all their problems.

Rufo laments that “the most elite members of our society” are “using the marvels of modern medicine to manufacture the ultimate oppression, the poor, Black trans woman,” whom he dubs “the new face of the proletariat, the highest authority in the intersectional hierarchy”.

Frankenstein’s Nihilism

Rufo concludes his documentary with a heartbreaking comparison to novelist Mary Shelley’s 1818 science fiction book Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus.

He explains that “the premise of the book is that modern science, stripped from the constraints of ethics and nature, will end up creating monsters” — a perfect parallel for the “trans-affirming doctors” who promise salvation through transition for their “patients” but end up disfiguring and traumatising them.

Rufo highlights one doctor in particular: Dr. Blair Peters, a plastic surgeon who performs trans genital surgeries at the Oregon Health and Science University. His specialties are phalloplasty, the creation of an artificial penis, and vaginoplasty, the creation of an artificial vagina.

But Dr Peters’ most horrific surgery is what’s known as ‘nullification’:

In this procedure, doctors perform a castration or a vaginectomy on the patient, then create a smooth, continuous skin covering from the abdomen to the groin, reducing the genitalia to nothing.

Rufo reflects:

This barbaric procedure is the perfect symbol for the ideology itself. Nullification is the pursuit of the Latin nullum, meaning nothing, and that is exactly where trans ideology ends: a profound nihilism that denies human nature, and enables barbarism in the name of progress.

Christopher Rufo’s short documentary is powerful, tragic, informative and daring. The more who watch it, the more young people will be spared from a dark future and given the care and treatment they really need.

Watch How the Trans Movement Conquered American Life here.