Maybe there is some hope for the tarnished Ivy League progenitor after all. Maybe.

I cite as the evidence for this the near unanimous beat-down a Harvard Crimson editor received from the presumably Harvard community commenters on an arrogant screed called “I’m Trans, and I’m Not up for Debate.” If there ever was smoking gun evidence of the political Left’s attitude toward opposing views, unwelcome speech and “offensive” ideas, this is it.

The essay, posted in the venerable Harvard student-run daily newspaper, begins, “For a community that represents such a small percentage of the population – less than one percent – trans people have occupied a strikingly large portion of public and political discourse.” Why yes, and whose fault is that? Who decided that public school teachers had any business delving into the problems of that tiny percentage of the population, or that the sliver would decide to assert imaginary rights, like being able to crush women in athletic competitions?

“As a transgender person, it has been exhausting to watch my community’s basic rights put into jeopardy and framed as subjects for debate,” undergrad E. Matteo Diaz ’27 writes. “Should trans people be allowed in public bathrooms? Should we be allowed to play sports? Should we be included in school curricula? Should we have access to healthcare? We are treated like a question to be answered, a problem to be solved,” he (She? Readers are never ordered to use specific pronouns) continues. “To cast trans rights as a “debate” suggests that the opinions of all parties — however ignorant of the reality of trans existence — are equally deserving of merit and consideration,” we are told.

Well all righty, then! No debate! What trans activists say must be accepted as revealed truth! How typical of the 21st century Left: challenging the cant is blasphemy. More:

It implies that there is a trans “question,” that it is not yet answered, and that the right answer may indeed be denying us our rights and refusing to let us participate in society as our complete, authentic selves. Such rhetoric is dehumanizing and reprehensible, and it does not manifest by accident. Rather, it is part of a deliberate political strategy promulgated by the right. Republican politicians have chosen trans people as the issue that will rile up their religious, conservative voting base. To do so, they rely on pseudoscience and outrageous falsehoods that generate mass hysteria, including that ….children are being “mutilated” by gender-affirming surgeries.

There’s no debate! Removing a child’s penis before he’s 12 isn’t “mutilation”…of course not.

The degree of pushback against Matteo’s screed was remarkable, and suggests that Harvard’s woke indoctrination methods aren’t nearly as effective as I thought. The tone of the debate Matteo declared impermissible was set by the very first commenter:

“Gender dysphoria is a mental disorder. (It’s in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders, volume 5, so this part isn’t up for debate.) Hey, no big deal; I have depression and anxiety disorder, and those are mental disorders too. These things happen. But gender dysphoria is part of a larger class of mental disorders called body dysmorphic disorders, which are classified by disordered (dys-) thinking about one’s body (-morph). Bulimia and anorexia nervosa are two of the better known body dysmorphic disorders. So why do people think we should treat gender dysphoria by affirming the disordered thinking? We don’t treat depression by affirming the disordered thinking. We don’t treat anxiety by affirming the disordered thinking. If we treated anorexia and bulimia by affirming the disordered thinking, people would literally die. So why is gender dysphoria the one mental disorder that we treat by affirming a certain set of thoughts which we already know are disordered? Why is that the one mental disorder where we assume the disordered thoughts tell you deep truths about yourself, rather than correctly identifying them as flawed and treating the disorder?

Yikes. But the commentary got more critical as time wore on. Receiving only “thumb-ups” was this observation:

All that “Woke” and it’s current ‘Trans’ fixation is, is just Maoism and Maoism’s war on the “four olds”:
– old customs
– old culture
– old habits
– old ideas

If that sounds like a scorched earth approach, that’s because it is.

Maoism believes that you have to tear down completely the society and culture in order to build a Communist utopia on top of the ruins.

All you need to do is study Mao’s “cultural revolution” for 5 minutes to understand precisely what is and has been happening.

This reaction attracted 109 “likes’ and zero “thumbs down”:

“You already lost Matteo, you just don’t realize it. Society is done with the fiction. You had it for a moment there. The progressive machine managed to jam the lie down our collective throats for a few years, but the deep harm of the collective lie (that we can change our gender) has finally come to the forefront. Sanity has prevailed in spite of the howling protest of the progressive movement. Nobody cares how you dress, or what pronouns you use. “Weird” became common and accepted as a price for a free and open society long ago. To each their own. But no man should ever compete in women’s sports. No man should ever go into women-only facilities. No child should be exposed to the sexualized content, certainly not gender ideology. Even the broader LGB community is coming around, realizing that transgenderism is an attack on homosexuals. It has been a tragic and deeply harmful social experiment that is thankfully coming to a close. It’s over, you just don’t know it yet.”

There was only a single mildly supportive response among the nearly 60 comments, and only a handful of single-click objections to any of the critical ones. Significantly, there was no dissent in any of the comments from this statement: ”Policy regarding trans people is absolutely up for debate. You simply can’t force society to re-define human sexuality based on a foreign (to most people) ideology that’s barely a couple decades old. It’s just not going to work. Trans people should be respected just like anybody else. But respect doesn’t mean you get to make your own rules with no input from the rest of society.”

Exactly.

This single skirmish is not going to make me take my framed Harvard diploma off the floor or even to turn the embarrassing thing away from the wall. But there may be hope. (I fervently believe this would help.)