You see the new Adidas pseudo-men playing in women’s athletics ad? It’s in heavy rotation on ESPN right now:

It’s so brave that men use their biological privilege to dominate and destroy women’s sports — and woke capitalists like Adidas praise it.

This is how it works. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

These powerful corporations are part of the well-developed network of cultural elites who are pushing hard to make transgenderism normal. Even the Walt Disney Company, once beloved and trusted by American families, has become toxic.

This informal network includes some prominent religious leaders:

Becoming transgender is “a sacred journey of becoming whole”, the former Archbishop of Canterbury has said, as the Government’s U-turn on conversion therapy sparked a boycott of its LGBT conference.

Lord Williams of Oystermouth made the comments in a letter to the Prime Minister, along with a number of other senior bishops urging him to ban trans, as well as gay, conversion therapy, calling it “a wrong-hearted notion of care”.

He said: “Conversion to Christianity is the event or process by which a person responds joyfully to the glorious embrace of the eternally loving and ever-merciful God.

“It has nothing to do with so-called ‘conversion therapy’ – pressure put by one person on another to fit their expectations; the attempt to induce vulnerable and isolated people to deny who they truly are.

“To be trans is to enter a sacred journey of becoming whole: precious, honoured and loved, by yourself, by others and by God.”

Lord Williams signed the open letter to Boris Johnson, along with senior clergy, including the Bishop of Buckingham, the Right Rev Dr Alan Wilson; the Very Rev Dr David Ison, the Dean of St Paul’s; the Very Rev Andrew Nunn, the Dean of Southwark; and the Very Rev Rogers Govender, the Dean of Manchester.

In the open letter, obtained by ITV News, they added: “To allow those discerning this journey to be subject to coercive or undermining practices is to make prayer a means of one person manipulating another.

“It is a wrong-hearted notion of care and a wrong-headed understanding of conversion. Every church should be a safe space that affirms people in being who they are, without fear of judgment. We see no justification for the ban on so-called ‘conversion therapy’ excluding trans people.”

If the former Archbishop of Canterbury and these other senior Church of England clerics have their way, to try to talk someone out of going on this “sacred journey” to lopping off their breasts or their todgers in an effort to change their sex would be against the law. Think about that.

And look at these top US government bureaucrats:

A handful of Biden administration federal agencies were unable to define the meaning of the word “woman” – in some cases, even in relation to their own uses of terms such as “women’s health” – when asked by Fox News Digital.

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Education, Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Federal Bureau of Prisons were all contacted by Fox News Digital requesting a definition of “woman.” None of the agencies provided their definition or criteria for an individual to be categorized as a “woman,” despite each boasting entire initiatives aimed at helping women and DOJ declined to comment.

Fox News Digital also reached out to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to request the organization’s definition of “woman” in relation to terms such as “women’s rights” and “women’s healthcare.” NIH describes itself as “the steward of medical and behavioral research for the Nation,” and its purpose as “[seeking] fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems.”

You could say that these agencies did not want to participate in what they regarded as a “gotcha” question from Fox News. Maybe that’s so. But I bet you would get the same kind of response if these agency heads were brought before Congress and asked the question directly.

Madness. It’s all madness. If you had said to just about anybody in 1965 that in just over fifty years, a former Archbishop of Canterbury would be describing sex change as a “sacred journey,” and lobbying the British government for legislation that would prevent attempts to dissuade people from undertaking this pilgrimage, they would have assumed that by then, British society would have lost its moral minds. But now this is barely noticeable.

It is going to a very, very bad place. The destruction of the gender binary, and of the legitimation of total gender fluidity, entails the total destruction of the relational bases of society and its refashioning to serve the needs of the sovereign Self. Back in 2016, Camille Paglia (of all people!) called medical intervention to change a minor’s sex is “child abuse, a crime against humanity”. She goes on to say that from her historical studies, she observes that “the move towards androgyny” occurs in late phases of culture — that is, before “heroic masculinity” comes roaring back, in destructive ways. She says that the emergence of androgyny is a sign that civilization no longer believes in itself. Watch:

We are going to see this. Most people alive today are going to see this happen. If, or when, we have a major economic collapse, the decadence that has permeated the structures and institutions of Western civilization will be violently borne away. At this point, I doubt very much it can be stopped. Better to prepare yourself and your house to survive it. Those useless Church of England clerics, and simply-divines like Germany’s Cardinal Marx — run the other way, because they are lost, and will take you down with them.

The eminent Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman was not a religious man, but in his 1940s classic Family And Civilization, anticipated Paglia’s claim — this, from his study of history:

We have entered a period of demoralization comparable to the periods when both Greece and Rome turned from growth to decay. Divorce, premarital sex experiences, sex promiscuity, homosexuality, versatility in sex, birth control carried to excess, spread of birth control to every segment of the population, positive antagonism to parenthood, clandestine marriage, migratory divorce, marriage for sex alone, contempt for familism, even in the so-called educated circles —  all are increasing rapidly. In spite of our virtuous words, and without even the intellectual honesty of the Greeks and Romans, we have gone as far as they, and it would appear that we are going even farther.

Zimmerman said these things were not causes of advanced decline, but symptoms of it. The cause was a collapse in the ideal of the family, and the abandonment of familism, the belief that the family is a sacred institution upon which a strong society is built.

In the 1940s, surveying the social science evidence, he concluded that we in the modern West were further advanced than even Greece and Rome as those societies were declining towards collapse. Adidas, the Church of England clerics, government bureaucrats, and all those among the elites who are pushing transgenderism — they are doing nothing more than accelerating the process.

The Benedict Option has just been published in Romania. I’m leaving for Bucharest on Wednesday, and will be giving a lecture there in the evening on the book. A lot has happened in the five years since it was first published. Maybe the book will give the Romanian Christians the information they need to prepare themselves for what is rapidly coming to them. Maybe those Christians in the West who dismissed the book at first, or who have not yet read it, will find it helpful in the face of the undeniable.

UPDATE: Duke Divinity School is one of the most prestigious in the United States. And now, obviously, poison:

Praying to “the Great Queer One,” students at United Methodist-affiliated Duke Divinity School proclaimed God’s acceptance and support for LGBTQ relationships in a Pride worship service March 22.

Divinity Pride, a student group affirming the “dignity, faithfulness, and strength of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, and gender/sexuality non-conforming Christians,” sponsored the worship service.

“Strange one, fabulous one, fluid, and ever-becoming one,” prayed second-year Master of Divinity (M.Div) student Caroline Camp in opening the service. She stated that God is “mother, father, and parent” and “drag queen, and transman, and gender-fluid.”

If Duke Divinity were actually a Christian institution, it would expel these heretics, so they could continue their “sacred journey” elsewhere. But, hey, they’re really worshiping Baphomet. Those with eyes to see, see.

And read this infuriating story about how a mom had to go to war with her emotionally disturbed daughter’s school district in a futile effort to get them to stop encouraging her transition. Excerpt:

The school principal told her that he couldn’t control how the students referred to her daughter. “And he said, ‘Well, there are some teachers who would like to respect your daughter’s wishes.’ And I said, ‘While I appreciate that they want to do that, that’s not my expectation at this point. This is a medical condition. I have control over what sort of medical care my child gets. And she will not be referred to with a different name or gender at school,’” Theresa said.

The principal suggested that Theresa hold her daughter out of school another day. A day later, she said, he called back. School leaders would not abide by Theresa’s expectations. Instead, they would honor her daughter’s wishes to be called Leo and a boy.

Theresa said she was told that if the school district didn’t identify her daughter by the name and pronouns of her choice, they could be accused of discrimination because of new Biden-administration executive orders about gender and sex.

The child went to a different school, and is fine now. Notice, though, that everyone from the government to the school administration — the authorities who ought to be on the side of parents — conspired to ruin the child’s mind and negate parental authority. This is why we should understand the trans-formation of society as an attack on the family, and familism.