Victor Davis Hanson is generally terrific, but this piece on intersectionality and the self-inflicted challenge it poses for the Democrats is particularly delightful.
https://amgreatness.com/2019/06/23/crack-ups-at-the-crossroads-of-intersectionality/
Let me offer a couple of factually incontrovertible statements, and then assert what seems to me an ineluctable conclusion based on those statements.
Only people born female are able to become pregnant and have babies.
Only people born male are able to impregnate females.
Given these simple truths, it follows that “women” who were born male are really not women in the same sense as women who were born female. They are, at best, women with an asterisk.
(Of course, I would argue that they’re simply transvestite men, albeit, in many cases, highly motivated overachievers in that regard.)
Today is Father’s Day. June is Pride month. Until a few years ago, I’d have found nothing particularly incongruous about that conjunction: there is nothing about the celebration of one’s sexual preference, however odd it may be to call that “pride,” that precludes, obfuscates, or undermines an appreciation of the role fathers play in the lives of their children and their value to society.
But times change, and not always for the better.
Today, the LGB community — those people who are, to varying degrees, attracted sexually to members of their own sex — has chosen to associate itself with a distinctly different group, those who embrace one or another form of gender-identity fantasy or delusion. That’s what the T in LGBT refers to.
I’m sympathetic to homosexuals, as we used to call people who experience strong same-sex attraction. (I think it’s no longer considered appropriate to use the term, but I’m nothing if not no slave to fashion. Parse that at your leisure.) Attraction, whether to members of one’s own sex or the more quotidian kind, is what it is, and I’m perfectly willing to believe that it isn’t something one can change even if one wishes one could. I’m glad that being gay or lesbian is legal, tolerated, and accepted.
I’m sympathetic as well to those who suffer one or another form of gender dysphoria, who imagine or wish themselves to be of a different sex, or who are so confused about the nature of sexuality as to imagine that there’s a meaningful category of human sexual identity that is neither male nor female. People suffer all kinds of emotional and psychological troubles, and their suffering is real.
But the so-called trans movement is nonsense — the self-righteous pouring of gasoline on to the sputtering psychoses of true gender confusion. That it has been elevated to the level of a fad, and given a patina of the same victimhood status to which the homosexual community could once lay legitimate claim, is a sign of the narcissistic unseriousness of our time.
The gender identity movement — the trans movement — is a self-contradictory celebration of inchoate and childish urges, of the desire to make it so by wishing it so. Pursuit of its confused fantasy of sexual mutability, of parallel universes of ever more contrived sexual identity, necessitates the abnegation of the simple truth of sexual reality: that there is male and female, man and woman, and — barring a handful of ambiguously and unfortunately malformed individuals — nothing else.
The world can not gracefully accommodate both physiological reality and gender-identity fantasy — and neither can the culture. Unfortunately, the levers of popular culture are in the hands of deeply unserious people, and so the tide of opinion favors the fantastic over the actual.
Which brings us to Father’s Day. The point of this holiday is the recognition that being a father matters — that men have something unique to offer, that masculinity is distinct from femininity, distinct and valuable. That claim is incompatible with the spiraling nonsense of the trans movement.
My favorite band will play at my favorite bar this week in celebration of Pride month. I’d go, if it were merely an LGB event. But the trans thing is stupid, is on the march, and has to be opposed by people who think Mother’s Day and Father’s Day are acknowledgements of something non-trivial.
A recent article on the subject of Florida’s legislation authorizing teachers to carry guns in school (albeit with various restrictions and qualifications) prompted me to ponder, not for the first time, the left’s peculiar antipathy toward guns.
It’s often said that guns scare people. I suppose that must be true in some instances. Shoot, I grew up with a modest fear of spiders, something I only forced myself to overcome — through repeated and unpleasant exposure — when I had children and decided that I had to man up and deal with it. So I understand that phobias can be irrational and yet quite real and intense. But whereas I still find pictures of spiders unpleasant, I think few Americans are nonplussed by the appearance of a gun in a movie or television show. I don’t believe that there is a widespread fear of guns, in the sense we normally think of fear — not, at least, a fear sufficient to motivate the more strident anti-gun activists.
Guns don’t frighten liberals so much as they offend them.
One can argue whether it is the personal handgun or universal education that is “the great equalizer,” though chronological priority for the phrase probably goes to the latter (Horace Mann, 1848), but it is true that, purely in terms of physical security and autonomy, nothing levels the playing field like a gun in the hand of a competent user. In an era when endless lip service is paid to the idea of female empowerment, guns remain the only means by which most women can approach physical parity with most men. That would seem compelling, if women’s safety and independence were a high priority, and yet the left remains steadfastly opposed to empowering women in this critical regard.
The problem, I think, is that a gun is not merely the great equalizer, but the great individualizer. The left’s conception of equality is collective, the balancing of disparate identity groups each composed of essentially anonymous members sharing common interests and grievances. That is, after all, pretty much the definition of identitarian bigotry: the group to which you “belong” determines what you need, value, resent, and believe.
But guns are all about the individual. One individual holds the gun, aims the gun, decides whether or not to take on the awesome responsibility of actually using the gun — and, ultimately, pulls the trigger. The gun is the practical means by which one individual is given the power to make a life-or-death decision with neither the assistance nor the approval of anyone else. The gun is how a man or woman says, irrefutably, that he or she is equal and empowered without the collective — an identity group of one.
I think it is the individualism of gun ownership and use, more than anything, that keeps the left so passionately opposed to guns even in the face of compelling evidence that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens are practical and beneficial.
(None of which explains the left’s affinity for abortion, which also grants a single individual the authority to determine the life or death of another human being without support or approval. I don’t know how to reconcile that with what I just wrote about guns: why is one kind of individualized ability-to-kill celebrated, and the other condemned?)
I believe both in the right of individuals to express their personal pronoun preferences, and in the right of other individuals to ignore them. It’s the same right in each case, the right of freedom of expression. And it’s a right I hold dear.
I understand that some folks in the trans movement would like to tell other people which words they can and can’t use. I don’t approve of that, because I really do believe in freedom of expression: the same freedom that lets a guy put on a dress and say “I’m a woman” lets me chuckle and say, “yeah, no. But let’s agree to disagree.”
Live and let live. I know there are some men who like to dress up like women. There always have been. And I know there are people who are deeply confused about who and what they are. That’s too bad, but hardly new: troubled people have always been with us.
What is new, and what I can’t abide, is this insistence that I go along with their fantasy. Everywhere else we disagree in this wonderful country, we stop short of telling other people to use our words, to profess our beliefs. We let people think differently, and we tolerate their expression of their ideas, of their differences, even if we find them odd, off-putting, or offensive.
I believe that people are born either male or female and stay that way their whole lives, regardless of what they wear or what treatments they get. I think the trans movement is a silly, often destructive fad, and a way for people to avoid the stress of living up to their sex in a confused and sometimes challenging cultural climate.
But, as I said, I respect the right, if not necessarily the choices, of people to express themselves as they wish — while retaining my own right to choose the pronouns I’ll use when referring to them.
We don’t have to agree. We can just tolerate each other. I’m okay with that.
Back in the early 1970’s, Camel ran a series of magazine ads featuring arrays of colorful characters, each with an amusing “gimmick.” Each, that is, except for the Camel Filters smoker, who didn’t need a gimmick: he was confident, secure, rugged, good looking, relaxed — and usually had a jacket hooked casually over his shoulder. A key on the page, or occasionally on the reverse page, named the gimmicky characters and described their particular affectations.
I loved those ads when I was a kid.
I thought of those ads recently while listening to Joe Biden struggling to make himself relevant to an identity-obsessed Democratic party. Biden’s pandering misandry was cringe-inducing, as he groveled for his failure to be something more than a pathetic male while taking part in the attempted Clarence Thomas lynching, and then debased himself (and men in general) in a weird riff about old world wife abuse half a millennium ago, and how it relates to 21st century American sexual relationships. It didn’t make much sense, but this is Joe Biden we’re talking about: his thoughts wander as much as his hands.
Poor Joe. He isn’t gay, or a member of a minority, or a woman, or an ersatz Native American, or a hip skateboarder, or some winning intersection of the above. In a Democratic Party that demands a gimmick, he comes up short, and so he’s having to fall back on self loathing, claiming for himself a toxic masculinity that, while it might describe his penchant for being “handsy,” still rings hollow.
He could call himself a socialist, but that’s pretty much the universal gimmick for this crowd. And when everyone’s a socialist… well, then you still need another gimmick.
Or he could be the guy without a gimmick. He could be a plain old liberal, from back in the days when liberals were wrong and destructive, but not obviously crazy. He could be the voice of substance and reason in an increasingly unhinged party.
But then he wouldn’t be Joe Biden. And he’d still have the problem with the hands.