Trans people are people. …endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… and so forth and so on —248 years into our grand collective experiment even you should have learned the fucking drill….
Trans people are people. …endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights… and so forth and so on —248 years into our grand collective experiment even you should have learned the fucking drill….
I have a teeny-tiny bit of empathy for those who find themselves in twisted into a hairball of quiet genderized sexual insecurity (?)…. With effort there is hope for them. But, those folks who actively politicize their genderized sexual insecurity, or just grab the politics b/c it has legs need something else altogether; shunned at the very least.
You’re absolutely right. Empathy isn’t ever a bad thing, even when extended to someone who seems incapable of doing the same for others, “There but for the grace of God go I,” or its secular equivalent, applies always. And sexual identity insecurities are, short of the awareness of our own mortality, about as insecure as any insecurity gets. Still, people who look to ease their own fears by hurting others need to be stopped. Justice before mercy in this case seems appropriate, even though as a categorical imperative it can turn into the very evil it’s trying to ameliorate.
It’s taken me several days to realize that I may have totally misunderstood your comment, possibly because I was so invested in my own point of view that I didn’t give yours the attention it deserved. If that was the case, I owe you a more considerate reply, or at least a clarification of what I believe.
My post was intended to be a defense of self-determination, a plea for tolerance, and a condemnation of bullying and violence by those who object to forms of self-determination which demand social and political accommodation on their part—specifically adjustments to their own certainties about things which have proven to be far less certain than they suppose.
In the particular case of gender dysphoria—whether or not it is genuine, and if it is whether or not it should be treated medically, whether or not that treatment should involve hormone therapy, physical ajustments to the body via surgery, puberty blockers for children, etc., etc.—these are, I think, legitimate subjects for discussion by society as a whole. What I don’t think is that people with no direct stake in the outcome of these discussions should have the right to define gender dysphoria a priori as hysteria or confusion, and dismiss it as a legitimate cause for concern.
For me, the principle involved is painfully similar to one which is much more familiar: you don’t ask only the white person if what they just said to a black person is racist, you also ask the black person. Moreover, if a just decision is your goal, you take the historical context into account as well—including slavery, the Civil War, Jim Crow, lynching, redlining and so on.
As for the politicization of gender issues, another example springs readily to mind. When homosexuality was defined by the majority as a criminal perversion, laws were passed which allowed thugs to beat up or kill gay people without any legal consequences, and police were encouraged to throw them in jail just for how they spoke or dressed. Their only effective defense against this ignorant demonization was politics. Only mass defiance won gay people the right to participate in defining their own identity. (See the Stonewall riots, Harvey Milk, and ACT UP, among other historical turning points,)
As I see it, given the outright war bigots in the Republican Party and elsewhere have declared on them, the banding together of groups of trans people and their supporters as a self-defined political defense force is both justified and inevitable. This is what politics is for. Like journalism, one of its prime responsibilities it to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
Finally, on a more personal note, I believe that the sexual insecurities of a Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jordan Peterson, or Andrew Tate are far more damaging to the health of society than those of a Renée Richards or Elliot Page. Not everyone will agree, but that, too, is only what any reasonable person should expect.
I probably just owe you an apology for my off-the-cuff reply born out of a general annoyance with the cross social platform pissing contest over whether Democrats sacrificed the election over “woke” and whether those arguing that post-secondary institutions are using “woke” to cover for their myriad of institutional failings are “anti-woke”.
I’m with everything you’ve written and in glove. I cannot fathom some days why people can’t just be; as in b e. Just exist on their own terms.
You’re right. People have agency. And, the personal is political. And, if groups cannot form in affiliation then the political is strangled in its crib.
Apologies, William. You didn’t deserve such an ill-considered reply.
No worries. Like someone once almost said “These are the times that try people’s souls.” And you’re also absolutely right in your reaction to the ill-considered elbow jostling and oneupmanship that passes for discussion in our social platform sewers these days. I’m as head-bangingly pissed off about what some of my supposed allies on college campuses have been getting up to in the past five years or so as I could possibly be, even though—full disclosure—I was myself an SDSer back in the Paleolithic who on occasion did his share of university administrative office occupying, and who even today doesn’t regret a bit of it.
One last observation here: After all these centuries, the relationship between individual and collective, the proper structuring of their mutual responsibilities and tolerances, is still something of a puzzle. The divine right of kings didn’t solve it, neither did the vox populi, nor theocracy, nor representative government, nor the Enlightenment, nor Marx and Engels. If I had to identify the one thing that finally drove me to start Canecittà, it would be my despair at the pitiable ignorance of our current pundits when offering advice to both rulers and ruled. They could do so much better. So could I, so could we all, if only we could stop preening and “influencing” for a moment. The future, as always, demands it of us.