Get a free copy of Parental Rights & Education when you subscribe to our newsletter!
The left’s use of cancel culture has caused Americans to self-censor and stay quiet, but when it comes to transgenderism and its impact on children and women’s sports, it’s backfiring as more and more Americans are ignoring the threats and speaking up.
Cancel culture is part of our daily vocabulary. It’s when someone gets canned from their job or kicked off a social media platform for daring to speak their mind on topics well within the mainstream. There’s no shortage of examples, but let’s zoom in on one that shows how cancel culture can actually backfire — specifically the debate over transgenderism.
Despite the relentless public pressure, Americans aren’t caving on this issue.
Enter Jennifer Sey, the visionary behind XX-XY Athletics. Her company’s TikTok account was yanked recently after she ran ads promoting — brace yourself — women’s sports. The very framing of her branding alone, XX-XY (the chromosomes for female and male), is enough to make the leftist gender warriors lose their collective minds.
TikTok wasted no time notifying Sey. According to the social media behemoth, her ad violated “TikTok’s advertising policies by featuring offensive content.”
And what was this “offensive content?” It was a simple clip showing girls playing sports, with a young female narrator calmly stating that girls “deserve our own sports, privacy, fairness, safety. We deserve a chance to compete and win.”
Apparently, that message was just too radical. The ad wrapped with a call to “be brave” and “stand up” for what’s right. TikTok’s reply: Suspension!
What’s wild is that Sey isn’t new to cancel culture. Back in 2022, she was booted from her executive role at Levi’s for criticizing COVID-19 school shutdowns and masking policies for children.
For the record, she’s no conservative. Sey has supported plenty of liberal causes, including marching in San Francisco pride parades. But the moment she stepped off the progressive plantation by questioning unreasonable COVID mandates, she was ousted from her high-paying position.
This is exactly the intended effect of cancel culture — to create a minefield where Americans tiptoe through life, terrified that one wrong word could cost them their career or their online voice because they are aligned with the wrong “team.”
It’s a game of survival, where staying silent is often the safest bet.
And sadly, the intimidation is working.
The polling firm Populace underscores how pervasive self-censorship has become. An eye-popping 61 percent of Americans admit to biting their tongues instead of expressing their opinion, which makes it difficult to understand where people sincerely land on a particular hot-button topic.
In response to this phenomenon, Populace developed what they call the Social Pressure Index, which tracks “the gap between Americans’ privately held beliefs and their publicly stated opinions.” The group accomplishes this task by using a “survey technique designed to maximize respondents’ privacy.” Their data sample is impressive — 19,000 people took the survey between May and June of this year.
One of the biggest reveals? Social pressure isn’t working when it comes to the topic of transgenderism. In spite of the White House, Big Business, academia, and the legacy media force-feeding gender ideology to the public, Americans aren’t convinced. Far from it.
Here’s one of the statements that Populace tried to get a candid reaction to: “Sex change procedures should be available to minors if they feel like they are not the gender they were assigned at birth.”
The public response was abysmal — a paltry 12 percent of Americans think that such practices are a good idea. But get this, the private response was worse: only 8 percent were on board with it. That means 92 percent of Americans are completely opposed to pumping kids full of puberty blockers or offering sex-change surgeries to minors.
What’s even more striking is that this aversion crosses party lines. Sure, 21 percent of liberals think sex changes for kids are fine, but when “minimizing the biases introduced by social desirability” that number plummets to a lowly 12 percent.
The Social Pressure Index also hit on the question of whether “transgender athletes should compete on sports teams that match the gender on their birth certificate.”
Nearly two-thirds of Americans publicly believe that, yes, players should compete based on their biological gender. Whether you’re a man or a woman, that sentiment holds privately as well, with men being slightly more resolute at 74 percent, compared to 57 percent of women.
The insights from this poll demonstrate why progressives can’t be upfront about their true agenda. They mask mutilating surgeries as “gender-affirming care” and try to pass off biological men dominating women’s sports as “gender diversity” or “inclusive participation” because they know that Americans won’t buy the nonsense they’re peddling, like trying to market dog food as filet mignon.
The lesson here? Cancel culture is a threat — no question. It’s already caused people to self-censor and stay quiet out of fear of losing their livelihoods or their ability to participate in the digital square. But more and more Americans are done with the threats and are speaking up.
And they’re being rewarded for it.
Take the aforementioned story of Jennifer Sey. After TikTok sacked her account, she remarked, “Whatever [TikTok’s] intention was, it certainly backfired for them because our platform is bigger, and our voice is louder.” Moreover, sales for XX-XY Athletics have surged.
The left is banking on your silence. Don’t give them the satisfaction.
If you like this article and other content that helps you apply a biblical worldview to today’s politics and culture, consider making a donation here.
