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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.
I'd say the main trade-off to our contemporary Western settlement on The Gay Question is that it has cast in suspicion huge swathes of male friendship, more than it has caused effete men to have a particularly harder time than they would have otherwise
It's a commonplace observation that male friendship outside the West can look pretty gay to modern Western eyes. Men holding hands, openly prioritising male relationships ahead of their romantic one with a woman, openly declaring love for one another, a warmth and intimacy that seems gay as hell to me, frankly, as a typical Western man.
It's also a commonplace observation that there's a crisis of loneliness in the West, more acutely among men, and downstream increases in depression, misery, suicidality and addiction and all the rest.
I don't think these two facts are unrelated, and I think that's quite a heavy burden that all Western men, and the women that like them, have borne for the ostensible liberation of our irrepressibly-gay brothers
I recently rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy and was reminded of how much people were claiming that Samwise was obviously in love with Frodo, rather than that they had a fraternal love for each other as friends, which I saw a bunch in the 2010s. Watching it again now, I can kinda see it that way if I squint, but it definitely strikes me as the modern audience projecting something onto what was likely something inspired by the type of brotherhood that someone like Tolkien probably experienced among men in the early 20th century.
Of course, to a lot of the types of people who see homosexuality in Lord of the Rings, that's just proof that a huge proportion of the men back then were actually in-the-closet homosexuals who just couldn't express their inner innate homosexuality due to the repressive society in which they resided.
That's actually a really great example of what I meant yeah
Of course, the motivation for a lot of retro-homo-spotters is more often a fervent desire to see boys kiss than homophobic revulsion at same
These are generally all women. Men are attractive to the average woman, so 2 of them kissing is even more attractive.
These are generally all men. Men are not attractive to the average man, so 2 of them kissing is even less attractive.
Compare/contrast the generally-positive male reaction to lesbianism, though it's overall tilted a bit towards positive on lesbianism and negative on gayness because women are (correctly) perceived by both genders to be, on average, more aesthetically pleasing than men.
This is, I believe, a part of why races of people that are less sexually dimorphic than the average have a better cultural relationship with gayness.
Women love to claim this because reasons, but we know from the pornography available and popular at that time that this is... uh, not exactly true.
Woman here. I find nothing arousing about men kissing. Women who are into gay anime do exist but this is far from universal.
I find myself in the weird position of introducing Yaoi to the Motte. Or, not actually introducing, because a lot of Mottizens are far more acquainted with Japanese pop culture than I.
Yaoi, for those who do not want to click:
I have known some (Japanese) girls in the past who were into this genre. They were without exception very feminine in appearance, often wearing frilly dresses, a good deal of makeup, etc. The one girl I asked about this type manga explained that the love expressed was "pure," whatever that means. I have no further insight.
Edit: I disagree with the Wikipedia pronunciation of this term, as Japanese has no stress on syllables, so it should be something more like YAH OH EE. But then I could be wrong because I don't know if I've ever heard it pronounced.
Edit 2: See also Shojou manga
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