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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
The trans thing was politically useful because it showcased the most extreme, least defensible positions on the progressive side (like that even biological sex was fake) during peak woke that had very low mainstream public approval. In a way, it was similar to eg factions on the academic far-left being sympathetic to extreme sexual deviancy in the late 1970s, which was also useful for the right at the time leading into the comparative backlash in the 1980s.
Today it feels like we’re no longer even close to that level. Yes, progressive wine moms and aunts are still very pro-trans, that’s true. But even the NYT is now no longer as zealous about the topic as it once was, and the whole right is in agreement. It feels like this chapter of the culture war is largely closed, albeit without a total victory on either side.
And yet every time a Democratic official appears in front of congress, they are reliably stumped by the "what's a woman" question. The "trans thing" is still strong enough to demand the slavish allegiance of every single elected and appointed dem in the country, apart from Fetterman. It still runs every university, major corporation and media organization. They're being a bit quieter about it, they aren't pushing the maximalist stuff as hard, but that's a temporary thing. This is a religious invocation of faith, and it won't be dropped for some time, if ever.
And thousands, perhaps millions, are reliably stumped by the "is a hotdog a sandwich" question, because most people still think of words as living in the Platonic Realm Of Forms rather than being pointers to fuzzy-edged categories. (I am once again asking you to Read the Sequences.)
Bad analogy. The question "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a query about whether an edge case falls inside a category. In the sex/gender debate, equivalent questions might include "is an emasculated male with breast implants a woman?" or "is a person with androgen insensitivity syndrome a woman?"
It's also a bad analogy because nothing actually hinges on the question of whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich. Quite a lot does hinge on the question "what is a woman?"
The third reason it's a bad analogy is because "is a hotdog a sandwich?" is a question which inspires disagreement, but which no one feels the least bit of discomfort about answering, and will be happy to present arguments for or against ("it's a piece of meat surrounded by bread, so it's a sandwich!" "but it's only one piece of bread, while a sandwich has two pieces!"). By contrast, among progressives the stock response to the question "what is a woman?" is a sputtering refusal to answer, usually attempting to dodge it by changing the subject ("I'm not a biologist", "I take care of people with many different identities"). This is not because it's a complicated question, but because progressives know that one answer ("an adult human female") will anger woke people, while the other answer ("anyone who identifies as one") will make them look like a lunatic.
...until some arcane point of tax or tariff law depends on it (this was why the Supreme Court had to weigh in on whether a tomato is a fruit), and the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe converge on different answers.
Again, that might be different if progressives had read the Sequences.
Another possible response might be "With what purpose do you inquire?".
And what is a 'female'?
Even limiting ourselves to biological factors, there are at least five possible definitions.
I have a hard time envisioning a helpful "purpose" for which the answer to the question "what is a woman?" includes people with penises.
It's been awhile since I read the Sequences, but my recollection is that Big Yud put a lot of stock in the idea of definitions that "cleave reality at the joints". Like Zack Davis, I think he ought to take his own advice: I'm baffled as to how he (or anyone else for that matter) could think that the definition "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is one that cleaves reality at the joints, as opposed to "a woman is an adult female human".
An entity born with the organs associated with the production of large gametes.
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