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Tier 1: Some children of both genders would like to wear clothes and accessories traditionally associated with the other gender. This has been widespread for a long time, or at least I've ready many stories of parents coming home to their young boys dressed up in their mother's pearls. I dressed up as a woman for halloween in grade 6, one or two people did it most years. I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere of me wearing my mother's heels, necklace and TMNT pyjamas, although I was too young to remember it.
Tier 2: We should tolerate such behavior. Rationally, there's nothing wrong harmful about men wearing dresses and makeup or women wearing overalls or suits. Even historically, fashion trends have been ephemeral and men wearing foppish or feminine clothes has come and gone.
Tier 3: We should provide a supportive environment for people who feel this way. People should be validated and feel positive about their chosen identities without being shamed by society.
Tier 4 (going to have to try and model this one): Sexual attraction is the ultimate form of acceptance/'passing.' The way we can best support/validate trans or gay children is to validate their attractiveness to the other sex...? Someone would have to explain this one to me as well.
Thing is, most events I've seen are somewhere between 1-3. It's likely that had the event happened, some children wearing makeup, wigs and dresses would have walked across a stage and been applauded and told they were beautiful, brave members of society with bright futures as the 'twerking with stripper poles and dollar bills' seems to have been the vast minority of such events. Mr. Burns immediately dialed it up to 10 the least charitable take and I respect his intelligence too much to think that he's doing anything other than culture warring, but maybe my expectations of someone living in a red bubble are unfair.
For the record, I get off the train somewhere between 3 and 4. If I had to guess I'd say that the worst excesses of #4 are driven by hyper-liberal moms thrilled that their children are brave culture revolutionaries rather than pedophile groomers, but I confess I'm not very close with people in those circles. The closest thing I've seen is parents pushing feminine toys on their boy-tots, only to be heartbroken that they want to play with monster trucks.
I think the steelman for this is 'sexual attraction' isn't really a coherent category, and a lot of things that social conservatives put into the 'sexual attraction' bin don't actually seem like central examples of what people are actually objecting to, but rather parts of t2 that just have additional cognitive loading.
The internally-used example here is something like the Jessica Rabbit: a style of dress and presentation that's charged... but not actually doing anything. Putting on thick lipstick and a sparkly dress isn't playing hide-the-sausage more than Rabbit playing pattycake was; to the extent the former is sexual and the latter isn't, it's because we've assigned a whole lot of identifiers-for-being-female-socially as sexualized (probably by a mix of taboos and mode expectations?) . But these same things remain as identifiers-for-being-socially-female, separately, and it's pretty common for trans people to glom onto them in that role, in ways that can exist separately from the sexual attraction (although sometimes it doesn't!).
There's a plausible argument that we don't get appalled over the same stuff when done outside of this specific culture-war context. Letting a pre-teen (cis) girl dress in gaudy costumes and make a mess with lipstick might get you shunned, but it's not going to turn into national news, and if we're talking your own kids, probably not get CPS called on you. We don't pass out prison sentences to everyone who lets a kid use an insufficiently-filtered internet connection. At the extreme object level, the serious harms caused by seeing someone's dick through their panties got Ace Ventura a PG-13 rating, and I'm not sure it was actually about that; RuPaul's Drag Race usually nets a TV-14 for broadcast. Or for non-sexual drag, Eddie Izzard probably isn't appropriate for pre-teens, but that's more because of the cursing than the dress.
This is a broader problem for the L, G, and B spheres, too (as well as fandom): it's not uncommon to see people worry about whether Pride parades allow under-18s, which makes sense in the context of Folsom Street Fair... but most parades aren't that, and the complaint remains. The nearest Pride for my situation's most adult situation is the rampant alcoholism, but that's shared with the nearest Nascar event, too.
((This is further complicated because a lot of advocates from either direction aren't aware how limited their understanding is, even as they're motioning about limitations in understanding. Progressives point to various young-teen or pre-teen beauty contests, except these are also things that the vast majority of socons find appalling, as naraburns points out. Conservatives point to endless twerkfests... but it's not like these are some unheard-of thing in straight culture. "Penis inspection day" is and was a regular joke on reddit and tumblr in relationship to trans politics, derived from an older UrbanDictionary meme, but it was also not an uncommon thing for schools to have either full-time staff nurses or contracted doctors who'd perform physicals in bulk, including the turn-your-head-and-cough bit, although this has thankfully fallen out of favor.))
The opposing steelman against is that just because something varies by culture and time doesn't mean we have to accept it in this culture and time, and you have to draw lines in the sand somewhere, and that socons have (sometimes even honestly!) drawn lines well before these points in the past.
Don't have much to say in response, but thank you for sharing your thoughts.
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I think there's a lot more involved there, when we consider the realm of "obvious and predicable next steps". One of the common gotchas I see coming back from leftwingers is to point out that children's beauty pageants are similarly creepy, objectifying, etc. But this is firmly in the category of "not the rebuttal you think it is", because I've heard mountains of scathing criticism of child beauty pageants for exactly those reasons. And while I doubt Honey Boo Boo's mom is trying to rape any kids, it's a common refrain that the adult male judges at these events look like a portfolio of "caught with 56 terabytes of CP" mugshots.
The point at which we normalize kid drag shows, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those events.
The point at which we normalize teachers having confidential sex talks with kids, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those professions.
Church leaders, boy scouts, sports coaches, karate instructors, tutors, etc, etc. We've spent decades building up a corpus of best practices to ward off the opportunities for people to take advantage of kids. If you want to validate a child as trans, it seems very obvious that you can do that in ways that don't sexualize nine year olds, or otherwise trigger Youth Protection Red Flags. Demanding that vast corpus of best practices be set aside because "bigotry or something" is wildly suspicious. Even the people who aren't doing anything directly wrong, who would never do anything directly wrong, have a responsibility to be aware of how they might be enabling other people who are and will.
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A lot of these child drag events seem to be number four.
Sure, they’re tacky and not plausibly seductive, but everyone knows the context of throwing money at a dancer onstage, or what ‘it’s not gonna lick itself’ means. Well, except probably the child drag stars.
And having kids act out a simulacra of adult sexualization, even in a tacky and ritualized manner, should make us all uncomfortable.
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What if they identify as White?
Then you should be shamed and excluded from the Hugo awards.
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This is mostly how I model this and a good writeup on it. A minor nitpick that I find important:
I don't think this is something that should be elevated to an identity. or more specifically identity is a strange concept in general. Do you remember the hubbub about disabled person vs person with a disability? Disabled person is considered bad because it raises the disability to the level of identity while person with disability is preferred because it doesn't. The way someone dresses is about as surface level as it gets, while I agree it shouldn't be something discriminated against and it would be better if no one cared when men wore dresses. This is all of course suspiciously similar to the other culture war rail, transgenderism. What's the actual blue tribe model of the separation of cross dressers/drag queens and transwomen?
Um, not sure if you were genuinely asking me as I assume you know at least as much as I do, but I can try in the event that you were.
I had straight male-presenting friends who would come to social dances wearing a dress or skirt and it was just a superficial thing independent of their gender identity as you mention above. Others were non-binary/queer and would do the same but it seemed more meaningful to them as their exterior gender presentation was matching their interior identity, although superficially it may not have looked that different from the outside.
Seems to get back to the classical tension between (some) non-binary folk who want to end the gender binary and trans people who find the gender binary affirming. Maybe someone, somewhere has squared that circle but I'm unaware.
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Too many things being conflated here; your Tier 1 example is very non-central to what we're actually talking about. Getting into your mother's jewellery box in the privacy of your own home is quite conceptually different from being invited to be dressed up by a third party in public and cheered by strangers, at least to me. In addition, doing it out of boredom is different than doing it habitually out of some deeper desire.
For the record, this is where I get off; it is never, ever my duty to validate anyone.
Maybe tier was a poor descriptor and it was more a train of thought or logical chain. I think 'children haven't been inculcated with our social constructs of who should wear what' is the least controversial and easiest to accept, even if it is a far cry from trans pre-teens.
If you'll forgive my assumptions about your gender and relationship status, do you ever feel like it's your duty to tell your wife that she's beautiful? Your child that they're smart or talented, your coworker that they aren't completely useless, your friends that They're Totally Right and their partner is being unreasonable?
We're constantly validating other people, often times even in the face of what (we see as) the truth - it's the lubricant that keeps the gears of social interaction turning. It costs me next to nothing to call someone by their chosen pronouns or accept their choice of clothes, and seems important to them, so why not? You can link Picard counting lights, 1984, or clips from They Live, but the truth is people pick and choose whom to validate all the time.
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