Last week, Steven Crowder, a conservative commentator with the podcast show Louder With Crowder, posted a new video to his viral web series Change My Mind. The topic of this video was "There Are Only 2 Genders: Change My Mind." Regardless of your belief on whether or not there are two genders or not, I wanted to call attention to a word phrase that was numerously said throughout the course of the dialogue in the video between Steven and the brave volunteers who disagreed with him.
Watch, and see if you can find the phrase I am talking about. Steven Crowder even points it out himself.
The phrase I'm referring to, incase you didn't catch it in the first 15 minutes is "My truth."
The first guest to sit down was Danielle Skidmore, a Transgender Woman running for Austin City Council this year. Consistently throughout her argument for the existence of more than two genders she keeps telling him that "her truth" tells her that there is more than two.
"My truth" is not a legitimate argument. Just because it is how you view yourself, the world around you, and what makes sense to you does not make it true for everyone else. That is called your experience. The better phrasing would be "in my experience, I have come to believe," not, "I'm living my truth. This is why I believe it and why you should too."
Steven Crowder points out that he wants "the truth" numerous times to combat her "truth." Danielle Skidmore tells him that the truth is her truth. This is not how problems get solved or how we advance society. If we all believe "our truth" and refuse to look at "the truth" with facts and statistics that back it up then nothing will get accomplished. Anything that does will not be concrete laws or rulings because everyone will have their own way of interpreting it.
It is time we start as a country to base our laws on facts.
There is so much calling for miscellaneous laws that we already have one for, the right to, or the need for a law has no foundation to it. If we actually began looking at the laws we have and the background of them, we would find that most, if not all, cover a lot of what Equal Rights Activists fight for.
The idea of "my truth" is tainting society's way of thought, and how we comprehend the world around us.
People's truth does not always contain all the facts because of their bias and their unwillingness to see the other side. I fall to this too sometimes, and I have moments where I say something should not be a way because I just think that. This is wrong, and it should not be how our country is run.
Laws and policies need to be thought out with all the facts, and with the complete truth. "My truth" is not going to get us anywhere because not everyone has the same experiences and thoughts as that one singular person. The truth is the only way America can be promised just and rightful laws and protections.