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The rules are ambiguous as to which thread should be used for culture war related/adjacent small questions, but I'll take a guess that the mods would prefer questioners err on the side of the culture war roundup, so I'll ask this here:
How much of the "Michelle Obama is transgender" conspiracy theory is genuine vs trolling? And, among those who genuinely believe it, what are the proposed explanations/is there a consensus for the Obama daughters' parentage? Adoption would be too difficult to cover up, but so would Michelle being transgender, to begin with, so I suppose that's not a great threat to the theory. If the full amendment history of the relevant section of Illinois legal code is available online, finding it would require more effort than I care to make, but "the exception that implies the rule" indicates that it was the Illinois Gestational Surrogacy Act enacted in 2005 that allowed pre-birth orders for putting intended mothers on Illinois birth certificates:
"Birthers" didn't hesitate to demand the release of Barrack Obama's own birth certificate - what about his daughters' birth certificates? (Or is the conspiracy theory all trolling or are those who genuinely believe it the kinds of people who wouldn't consider even its immediate implications or ...?)
The Michelle Obama trans thing is a good example of the trade-offs that social liberalisation impose.
Like, back in the late 2000s, when Michelle Obama was not any more popular on the American right than today, I don't recall anyone proposing that she was trans, simply because "trans" was not on most people's radar.
Michelle Obama, and millions of other mannish-looking women, have been negatively impacted by trans liberation. Trans liberation has brought it into the realm of the thinkable, the reasonable, that any given mannish woman or petite man could in fact be biologically not their presenting gender. What previously would have been only a cruel, childish insinuation now has to be... seriously considered?
30 years ago, in a workplace, if someone had suggested that Sandra with the square shoulders, or Sarah with the sharp brow, was in fact a transsexual - this would just straightforwardly be a (fireable) insult. Now though, the same woman can be concern-trolled and made insecure by ostensible tolerance.
It's as though, in a future which continues leftward socially, we were to see emancipation of incest and "motherfucker?" become a polite and reasonable query.
I really feel for these mannish girls. When I was a teenager, I went out with a beautiful girl who nonetheless had kind of a square jaw - more square than mine anyway. She was terribly insecure generally (like most teenaged girls?) and I happened across an old photo of the pair of us in my parents' house yesterday and thought, damn, the way the shadow falls on our faces there - a 2020s teen might well read this pretty 2000s girl as actually trans
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.
But actually there clearly is, or at least, it's reasonable that even an otherwise orthodoxly liberal young woman might not want to be read by strangers (potential romantic partners particularly) as MtF. There is a certain harm imposed by this.
The general public is no good at Bayes - there are quite a lot more mannish-looking women around than there are genuine MtFs. Yet now young people, even when looking at old photos from the twentieth century, are apparently having their trans-radars ping on like pictures of dowdy kitchen maids and 1940s housewives
An interesting point to consider in the utilitarian calculus of trans liberation
The concern over mannish girls being concern trolled en masse with no recourse looks like concern trolling to me. If the Obama transpiracy is anything to go by, cruel childish insinuation is quite bad at masking itself.
From what I see, young men that look a bit gay have not been smothered by concern trolls who insinuate they're actually gay and do it so cleverly that they can't be rebuked. Those are the benefits of a culture that promotes accepting people as who they say they are.
Oh boy, ‘faggy’ or ‘gay-looking’ men absolutely have it bad. It’s just 1) no one cares about the problems of low status men and 2) not in polite company.
They have solved this in Japan by creating musical dance groups and cultivating hundreds of thousands of screaming female fans.
Even ignoring cultural differences in what is considered 'faggy' or 'gay-looking', you are mostly talking about men who happen to otherwise be extremely conventionally attractive (including personality traits like confidence and gregariousness). I don't think that generalizes well to the larger group.
There is a certain fey demeanor in many of the young guys who join these bands, which one cannot directly relate to physical weakness--they go through extremely rigorous training or, in some cases, vetting because they've applied to an agency, to reach a level of dance skill that is deemed acceptable. I would, in most cases, disagree that many of these guys are what you are calling conventionally attractive (at least physically) unless you are including in that net the conventional attractiveness of the feminine.
I once grew my hair out long, because I was young and influenced by films at the time. My buddy used to look at me and say: "Never go to prison."
There's a prettyboy look to the boybands that is not masculine, and is decidedly, at least in my view, more feminine. And as I say, it's not just the make-up, it's their way of laughing (covering their mouths, a very female gesture in Japan), of moving as they walk with what is clearly an affected swagger that has more in common with actresses in Takarazuka who are pretending to be men than an actual man. There's a particular gesture of using one's hand to lightly brush away one's bangs or forelock from the eyes that I have noticed common in these guys, that is to me very marked as female (the guy gesture would be to run the hand through the hair straight back and clear the bangs, not wipe them with one hand very delicately, as if parting a bead curtain.)
As for gayness, there was a scandal a few years ago regarding one of the main companies that produces these bangs, alleging that the owner/mastermind--who had perhaps conveniently died four years earlier--had forced young boys into sexual acts with him. He obviously never faced any prison time or trial because he was dead, and to me at least this was less of a scandal than a revelation of an obvious process that had been covered up for years. The man who had arguably begun the boyband trend in Japan by manufacturing many such groups had been cultivating, if not the actual members of the groups (but maybe also those guys) but applicants, as his personal catamites.
To your point that these guys demonstrate gregariousness and confidence, I concede. At least in public or in publicized interviews they're pretty happy and, cough, gay. <-- Note that in this interview, with the group named "King & Prince" when there were several members (all but two have "retired") they are dressed in more traditionally masculine clothes than what you often see.
A final thought: Despite my distaste for these bands I've noticed almost all the guys have enviably really deep speaking voices.
What women find attractive in men /= what men think women find attractive in men.
To be sure. I'm simply expressing my own distaste, not projecting on women. Many times I've seen dudes way different than I am and suspected, "well he wouldn't be looking or acting like that if it weren't getting him laid somehow."
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I was really thinking about more gender neutral signifiers of conventional attractiveness--eg, facial symmetry, straight teeth, etc--than specifically masculine or feminine ones. For example, consider the three stereotypically "gay-looking" burglars from Survive Style 5+. I don't think it is very controversial to say that the pretty boys you linked are more conventionally attractive than Yoshiyuki's character, even when judging by masculine standards. As for feminine mannerisms, I think some kinds of performative femininity in men should be considered masculine because it is puffery that signals confidence and fitness rather than signaling weakness or true vulnerability.
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