Every media outlet has chosen to share Lila Perry’s delusion that he’s a girl, which explains why noone can find the teen’s real name anywhere

I can’t find Lila Perry’s real name anywhere

reports Benny Huang, who never refers to the Hillsboro High School crossdresser as "she" or as "(s)he" or as "he or she."

The seventeen-year old gender-dysphoric male student from Missouri has become a news item in the past week because he wants to use the girls’ changing room for gym class and, oddly enough, the girls aren’t thrilled about it.

 … After first coming out as a “gay” male, Lila announced in February 2015 that he would henceforth identify as female, which I guess makes him a heterosexual girl…who happens to be a boy? This stuff gets really confusing. Hillsboro High School accommodated his mental illness—and that’s what it is—by allowing him to use a gender-neutral faculty changing room. As the new school year began, however, Perry decided that even this accommodation wasn’t good enough. “I am a girl,” said Perry. “I am not going to be pushed away to another bathroom…”

I understand his point. If he accepts the gender neutral changing facility he’s necessarily conceding that he is somehow less of a girl than the others—which he is, of course. But because the entire point of this asinine exercise is to force other people to validate an enormous lie, no compromise is acceptable.

Nowhere in the whole mess can I find the student’s actual name. I doubt his parents named him “Lila” because he wasn’t born a girl. I suspect that “Lila” selected a more feminine name when he grew sick of being a boy. That doesn’t make it any less a pseudonym.

Every media outlet I know of has chosen to share Lila’s delusion that he’s a girl, which explains why I can’t find the student’s real name anywhere—not in the Washington Post, the New York Times or even on Fox News’s website. They all refer to this gender-confused boy with feminine pronouns or as “Ms. Perry.” To mention that “Lila” is actually Bill or Norm or Hank would send the message that “Lila” is an adopted persona. Which it is.

Some people will wonder what the big deal is. If people feel more comfortable in their skin when they “identify” as something other than what their chromosomes or sexual hardware define them to be, what’s the big deal? And that’s nearly always how this issue is framed—as people having the autonomy to define themselves, which is the first step to being themselves. The rest of us are just big, mean bullies who want to force them to live as someone they’re not.

But Lila Perry is a boy. That’s a fact. He was, in the parlance of the homosexual movement, “born that way.” So if we’re “forcing” him to do anything, we’re forcing him to be who he is. I think he’d be a lot better off if he’d knock off the charade and seek therapy before the homofascists make it illegal.

Speaking for myself, however, I must say that I don’t want to force Lila to do anything. If he wants to revel in his mental illness that’s his business—but he shouldn’t make the rest of us join in. Unfortunately, there may be times when his right to believe a delusion will collide with everyone else’s right not to believe it. Gym class happens to be one of those times.

Such is his dilemma—if he settles for the gender neutral changing room or, heaven forbid, the boys’ locker room, he is in fact conceding that his feminine identity is a sham. But if he plows ahead with his false identity, he is essentially asking every member of his high school to assent to a lie. These are two mutually exclusive positions—either he will use the girls’ room or he will not, either he will receive the validation he so desperately craves or he won’t. There’s no middle ground.

 … essentially what transgenders are asking us to do [is] to pretend that we believe something we know to be a fiction. Bianca [the life-sized sex doll from the Ryan Gosling movie “Lars and the Real Girl”] is not a real woman, and neither is Lila Perry, but for the sake of people’s feelings, we’re asked to play along.

Be nice. Be polite. Pretend you believe the lie until you do believe the lie.

It might be overly generous, however, to say that transgenders are “asking” us to believe a lie. The increasingly militant transgender movement is doing a lot more demanding than asking these days, a fact that conservative author and attorney Ben Shapiro can attest to.

 … The transgender community, like the homosexuals before them, are not happy to live their lives as they see fit. They crave acceptance, validation, even celebration. It isn’t even primarily about them—it’s about you, your attitudes, and your conception of their bodies. There are reliable indicators that they will not use gentle persuasion as a means of changing minds.

Indeed, states Elizabeth Price Foley, who sounds pretty disgusted:

This is typical far-left hyperbole, branding those who disagree with you as “bigots.” 

The Instapundit guest blogger concludes:

I’m sorry, but “Lila” is clearly just a dude with a wig, and I wouldn’t want my teenage daughter to share a locker room with him/her/it

Human needs aren’t nearly as important to the average liberal Democrat as sustaining a poverty-stricken political fiefdom

 … the United States is, for better or worse, a European-style welfare state that just happens to be located across the ocean

deplores Benny Huang.

Whether our massive welfare spending is a good thing or a bad thing is a very debatable point. I know some people would say that money spent on “human needs”—as if that’s all it ever goes to—is money well spent. I would counter that “human needs” aren’t nearly as important to the average liberal Democrat as sustaining a poverty-stricken political fiefdom. They buy power with other people’s money and expect the rest of us to stand in awe of their supposed generosity.

 … The poor in my state of Massachusetts, however, live pretty well on the dole. I was not at all surprised to discover that only Hawaii and the District of Columbia offer more robust benefits packages than the Bay State.

Come to Massachusetts’ post-industrial inner cities and you’ll see satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from the government-subsidized housing. No one would be caught dead without their iPhone. They spend almost three hundred dollars a month on their pack-a-day cigarette habit and they prefer top shelf liquor. That’s how “poor” people live in Massachusetts. It’s not exactly a “Feed the Children” commercial.

 … It’s a form of national suicide, a rather peculiar phenomenon that deserves some explanation. Ever since the Watts riots happened fifty years ago this summer, American politicians have sought to “invest” in poor inner city neighborhoods. As “investments” go, it’s been about as lousy as buying confederate currency in 1864. The War on Poverty was launched the same year that Watts went up in flames but that didn’t prevent Detroit and Newark from burning in 1967. Nor did it prevent the nationwide urban conflagration of April 1968. Looting and rioting returned to Los Angeles in 1992. Ferguson exploded in 2014, followed by Baltimore in 2015, followed by more Ferguson rioting on the one year anniversary of Michael Brown’s attempted murder of Darren Wilson.

Paying people not to riot clearly isn’t working.

  … facts absolutely never penetrate the liberals’ bubble. They revel in asking snappy questions that contain the implicit assumption that we as a nation have almost no social safety net to speak of. Here are a few:

“Why is that we always have plenty of money for the military but not for basic human needs?” Answer: the military budget, though expensive, has been constantly decreasing, adjusting for inflation, since the end of World War II. We call on today’s military to do more with less. Welfare on the other hand is always growing. The inflation-adjusted $22 trillion that we’ve spent in the War on Poverty is more than three times the combined cost of all wars since the Revolution. The War on Poverty is undeniably the most expensive we’ve ever waged, and the longest.

“Why can’t we be more like Europe?” Answer: We are like Europe. Our welfare state is on par with theirs and it’s killing us.

“Why do people go hungry in a country as rich as ours?” Answer: Very few actually do, but even those who don’t have enough to eat can’t blame a lack of programs or appropriated funds. There are state, federal, and local programs, not to mention private charities.

A rational discussion cannot begin with an irrational premise. The idea that somehow our country adheres to a philosophy of rugged individualism is absurd. We hand out other people’s money like it’s going out of style. Our social safety net is deep and wide. The moment we acknowledge this stubborn fact is the moment we can begin a useful dialogue. I’ll be waiting with bated breath.