The American Conservative Reports: The other night I met with a group of Hungarian students. You'll find that Hungarians love the US, but are also very wary of it, afraid that what has happened to America (the Great Awokening) is going to happen to them if they aren't careful. One of them put a great question to me: If you could change one thing about the last twenty years, what would it be? In context of the discussion, he was asking me for the single event that was the tipping point, the crossing of the Rubicon, that led America to its current mess.

It's not an easy question, is it? You have to stop and think about what, exactly, constitutes "America's current mess." The Great Awokening covers sex, gender, and race, and it's hard to come up with an event that entails all three (though maybe you can). It's also tricky to think in terms of cause and effect. I told the questioner that I would say the loss of the one-male + one- female binary as the exclusive model for marriage was the turning point. You lose that, and you lose so very much else, I said (I was thinking of transgenderism).

As I thought about it later, though, I realized that Hungary doesn't have the same civil rights laws as America does, so the phenomenon of identifying particular characteristics as constitutive of personhood, such that it triggers civil rights protection for a minority, isn't in effect here. Still, there's no denying that granting same-sex marriage rights to gay people (a sexual minority) was the necessary precursor to the entire panoply of trans rights.

I don't find the granting of marital status to gays to be nearly as radical and revolutionary as the demolition of the gender binary, which did not have to happen, but did. Strictly speaking, the T doesn't have to do with the LGB, but in popular culture, and now, increasingly, in the law, gender expression is granted the same ontological status as sexual desire. Recognizing that wokeness is a broad phenomenon, if I had to pick a single event that can be seen as the most causative in terms of advancing wokeness, I would say the 2015 Obergefell decision constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.