In the season finale of “Generation Indoctrination,” host Brandon Showalter and his guests trace a cultural trajectory they say has led from the sexual revolution of the 1960s to what they describe as today’s “gender chaos,” including transgenderism and pornography.
“If you spend any time in the land of gender confusion, there’s a common question you’ll hear asked among bewildered people: how on Earth did we get here?” Showalter says in the episode, “From ‘Free Love’ to Gender Chaos: Tracing the Road from the Sexual Revolution to Today.”
“The assault of gender ideology on natural reason … is so profound, it precipitates further questions about what led to this insanity. It didn’t emerge from a vacuum.”
Canadian journalist Jonathon Van Maren, host of “The Jonathon Van Maren Show,” contended that the roots of transgender ideology can be traced directly to the sexual revolution.
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“The sexual revolution was a revolution. It was the tearing down of all boundaries surrounding what is sex, what is procreation, what is family,” Van Maren said. “It was to a degree inevitable that eventually they would begin to redefine the very concept of self.”
Van Maren called the movement “the bloodiest revolution in all of human history,” pointing to the legalization of abortion across the West in the years that followed. Unlike abortion’s “silent and unseen victims,” he said, the victims of trans ideology are living and speaking out. “The barbarism perpetrated against the bodies of these primarily young people can be witnessed by all,” he adds.
Nathanael Blake, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All, said the revolution promised freedom but ultimately undermined the meaning of male and female.
“The Sexual Revolution promised that if we pursued pleasure and disregarded commitments and obligations, we would be freer, more authentic and happy,” Blake said. “But instead, if you say there’s no meaning to sex other than what you feel about it, that necessarily means male and female don’t matter.” He noted that same-sex marriage was quickly followed by a cultural pivot to transgender activism, a logical outgrowth of the claim that biological sex is irrelevant.
Jennifer Roback Morse, president of the Ruth Institute and author of The Sexual State, stressed that contradictions within the revolution are inevitable. “We’re at war with male and female. We’re at war with the human body,” Morse said. “As long as we’re at war with that, we’re going to be creating one bit of craziness after another.”
Former LGBT-identifying individuals also contributed perspectives. Joseph Sciambra, now an Eastern Orthodox Christian, described the LGBT community as “powerful” for young people seeking belonging. “It’s trauma bonding,” he said of his experiences in San Francisco. “There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of fear.”
Elizabeth Woning, co-founder of the Changed Movement, said her encounter with God led her to rethink the political and ideological roots of the movement. “It redefined human ontology,” she said. “It allows us to dissociate from our bodies in many ways, and I think that is the on-ramp” to transgender ideology.
Showalter and Van Maren also highlight the role of the pornography industry in accelerating cultural change. “Pornography is the scorched earth final assault of the sexual revolution,” Van Maren said, asserting that it has rewired sexual expectations and fueled hostility between men and women.
Looking to the future, Blake warned that if the revolution continues unchecked, even darker outcomes could follow.
“We could certainly see a push towards pedophilia,” he said, noting that such movements had intellectual support in the 1970s. “I hope we’ve reached a point where this evil of transgenderism will recede … but we need to be faithful, and then we need to trust and hope that God will deliver us from evil.”
