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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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This is possibly only very vaguely Culture War, but it's an update on the Sam Brinton luggage stealing saga. Before I begin, I want to say that this is not to dunk on the Biden administration or even non-binary persons. It's simply because this story is so ridiculous it is laugh out loud funny.

Seems like (and I have no idea if this is really true, but if it isn't, it should be) our person is a three times thief - allegedly. A Tanzanian-born fashion designer has now come forward, claiming her suitcase went missing back in 2018 and that subsequent photos of Brinton in particular outfits were her clothes. Yes, it's the Daily Mail, but it's got the best gallery of photos of what the designer alleges are her clothes and then photos of Brinton in similar outfits.

That would seem to answer the question "What does he do with the clothing in the luggage he steals?" 😁

I mean, this would seem to confirm the idea that he dresses the way he does because he's just wearing clothes he pulled out of random people's luggage.

Thanks for the update. We don't get nearly enough of that around here thanks to the format, so 90% of what's discussed just gets forgotten and never followed up on.

Starting to appreciate traditional forums more, where a thread can stay dormant and be revived with news.

I haven't been able to find any record of her selling her designs, so I'm not sure the obvious alternate explanation works here, but I don't know for sure, of course.

She seems to be claiming that these are personal items that were in her luggage which went missing, including necklaces. If he did buy her designs legitimately, there would be bonus points for supporting BIPOC women in business. He could have a reasonable explanation for the clothes and jewellery, but the photos do seem to be very similar.

Now, she could be lying and faking just to get attention for herself, which is always a possibility. But if she really did report a theft of luggage in 2018, that should be something that can be established. And maybe even was Brinton in the airport on the date?

It's just that this case has gone beyond "serious misjudgement" on the part of all concerned, and is veering quickly to farce. Now are we going to have to look at every photo of Brinton in a dress and ask "hey ladies, any of you have clothes like this that went missing?"

EDIT: The claim is that these were items designed for a fashion show, not her own clothes. This article is a little better on what happened.

The allegation came after a Twitter user pointed out that Brinton was seen wearing Khamsin’s dress in an old Vanity Fair article. The story titled “All the style of Sam Brinton” was reportedly published in the Italian version of the magazine in February 2022.

The photos showed the LGBTQ activist wearing the outfit at a Trevor Project event in 2018, the same year Khamsin's clothing was stolen. The latter told Fox News Digital that she recently saw a news report that showed Brinton being charged for stealing luggage at Minneapolis and Las Vegas airports.

Shortly after, she came across images of them wearing outfits that she allegedly lost at the Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on March 9, 2018.

But yeah, if there are credible accounts of him stealing three sets of luggage, this is looking less like "an impulsive decision due to stress and a once-off, your Honour" and more like an established pattern of behaviour. I doubt he's getting his job back any time at all.

Two months ago when this was discussed I had some thoughts:

he has a fetish that he can’t control, probably related to the idea of stealing the identity of a woman and/or her clothes […] he has a fixation on stealing women’s luggage from the airport specifically. He would not have been able to make it this far in his career if he simply couldn’t control himself with stealing any random object. This perfectly mirrors his identity as a man that likes to dress and appear as a woman, and who likes to receive attention based on the strangeness of his doing so (his interviews, manner of speaking demonstrate this).

I do think this is a worthwhile angle to dwell on. Sam Brinton is a proclaimed non-binary person (NB, or enby). People outside of gender culture would call him a weirdo. It turns out he is a weirdo in the precise way that he transgresses his gender, ie he seems to get off (as a fetish) to wearing women’s clothes that he steals, and he also makes a big deal about being non-binary (as a man dressed like a woman). This, to me, strongly indicates a pathological genesis to his enby identity. The odds of being both “naturally” a man who dresses and expresses as a woman, and being a weirdo who loves to steal woman’s luggage to wear her clothes publicly, is unlikely to have incidental discrete etiologies. I think instead that Sam’s enby identity is the result of fetish or deviant behavior as a child, maybe getting off by going into his female family’s clothing. He repeats this high by dressing as a woman publicly, but the high is greatest when he dresses in stolen women’s clothes publicly. As such, Sam’s enby expression is not some natural gender orientation or whatever, it’s instead just being a weirdo, which proves conservative gender critics correct in at least this narrow instance. If this is so, progressives need to come up with some criteria for telling apart the weirdos from the naturals. Or they need to argue why normal people have to be a non-consenting party to weirdos getting off.

If this is so, progressives need to come up with some criteria for telling apart the weirdos from the naturals.

Why? They have sufficient power to force you to accept the bad actors wholesale in the first place; that's how the man got his sinecure in the first place. And while I'm very much "equality feels like oppression when you're privileged for so long" to female bad actors claiming "that means you're oppressing women" I can't magically summon guns to enforce that viewpoint.

Anyway, we already know who is and isn't acting in good faith- the test is very simple. (I'm sure the reason I don't see many examples of this is because they're inherently invisible, and not because they make up a vanishing minority of cases.)

If you're wearing unisex clothes, you're in good faith; this is what "dressed as a woman" is for women, so you would naturally do that if you wanted to fit in as one.

Casual dress is not fundamentally that different between men and women and hasn't been for the last 40 years (insert 70s-80s scandals of "women in pants" here), so if it's just "wearing women's clothes" that fixes an assumed fundamental psychological need, that is exactly what I'd expect to see from someone just trying to cope rather than call attention to it (or someone just wearing female undergarments and a properly-fit bra- the latter is required to make the shirts fit right anyway).

The difference when it comes to skirts (the only unisex clothing that men don't currently wear) is fundamentally their transparency; casual and business ones are usually opaque and don't have cuts in them (some of them have more pockets than their jeans), while the ones designed specifically to accentuate one's legs are... neither of those things.

If you're wearing the showier female clothes (in an environment where the real women aren't similarly dressed), you're in bad faith/it's definitely AGP. This is what "dressed as a woman" looks like for men and makes no attempt to change that impression. This generally applies to dresses, the "sexier" skirts, low-cut shirts, those transparent shawl things whose proper name escapes me, etc.- the stuff that you don't see women wearing more generally. Brinton pretty obviously falls into this category, as do all of the most egregious examples.

Now, the obvious counter-claim from someone in these kinds of clothes is that "I'll get constantly misgendered if I'm not in the sluttiest showiest getup I can muster", and the value difference ultimately comes down to "that's a you problem, because a nontrivial number of women have manlier faces than you do and nobody has a problem telling male from female there". The "but I should be wear whatever I want to without other people judging me" is also invalid; I can change the judgment of others by changing my clothes (and have to, when on the clock) and you can too.

It's important to note that this actually can't go the other way (for ex-women exhibiting autoandrophilia) because men have no gendered clothes (men don't wear packers for what should be obvious reasons)- even the part of male undergarments that you can occasionally see have distaff counterparts that look very similar and nobody will question boxers in general despite them being impractical while on one's period since the pads won't fit.

Yeah, I'll eat crow, here: I was willing to consider alternative-if-unlikely explanations, and that's pretty much blown out of the water. And I don't find the inevitable 'oh, Brinton's a creepy thief because of trauma' very compelling, at least at the level Brinton was operating.

That said, while I can't and don't want to speak for Movement Progressives, it seems like there's pretty good Schelling Points around people either stealing someone else's clothing. It'd be a little less creepy to publicly float wearing someone of the same gender's clothing that you stole, but not much, and there's some causes that overlap enough for it to be a thing! I don't think that the consent framework is the end-all be-all -- as evidenced by the 'do you need people to consent to see a man in his own dress' -- but it's pretty useful for this sorta problem, along with a variety of other related ones.

We speak often of Quokkas, but it seems to me that the Quokka-nature is not in the raw amount of charity, but in the rules that extend or withhold that charity. It does not seem like a mistake to ask, in any given situation, "what would the most charitable interpretation of the existing evidence be"? The problem comes when, having asked this question, one treats such a theory as the default assumption and acts accordingly. Recognizing that the alternatives may be unlikely is good evidence that one is on the right side of this line.

Sam Brinton is a proclaimed non-binary person (NB, or enby)

I've been coming across the term "enby" for months without knowing what it means (or, given context, daring to look it up). So thanks, this hard-hitting reporting justifies my continued doomscrolling!

A complete aside, but I find this practice of spelling out the syllables of acronyms interesting. I'm not sure what to think about it. I ran into it for the first time a long time ago in a galaxy very very nearby when I downloaded a copy of the Star Wars script on a whim and noticed that the robots were spelled something like "Seethreepio" and "Artoodeetoo" (or just "Threepio" and "Artoo" at times, IIRC). I figured it was because, for a film script, you need the actors to know exactly how things are pronounced, so removing any sort of ambiguity in pronunciation was the highest priority. But recently, running into "Enby" for Non-Binary or "Ace" for Asexual (not technically the same thing as the others, but pretty similar) made me confused. Again, I'm not sure what to think about it and why such practices have come about.

Ace has been around for a while -- I think my first encounters were sometime in the tail end of the Obama era (cfe). Part of it seems like it was just joking-not-joking self-aggrandizement and partly because it allowed a lot of really convenient puns around cards, but 'demi' (for demisexual) and 'poly' (for polyamory/polysexual, bonus points where these mean drastically different things) started to be more common around that point.

My guess is that the 'why' is pretty boring, though: it just reflects a move away from IRC or other solely-text formats with rare physical meetups to an environment where voice, video, and physical meetups were increasingly common, along with remaining solely-text formats increasingly having an autocorrect (eg smart phone). A preference for short acronyms make sense when you're interacting from a desktop computer through mIRC; in the modern world, even LGBT(QAwhatever) is a mess to say and harder still to type without getting corrected to logorrhea.

In Star Wars media, this was very consciously done in an effort to humanize the droids. People have names, not numbers, so any robots the reader was expected to empathize with was given a "name," usually but not necessarily related to their alpha-numeric designation.

Which probably hints at what's going on with "enby." Reducing a human identity to an acronym feels wrong and dehumanizing (though so is reducing their identity to their sexuality or ethnicity, but hey), so now we have a bunch of Artoo Deetoo people walking around.

There's a similar practice that's been around for a long time in things like pipefitting when connections are named after letters they resemble. When written, they're often spelled out as "tee", "wye", etc.

I downloaded a copy of the Star Wars script on a whim and noticed that the robots were spelled something like "Seethreepio" and "Artoodeetoo"

Note that this practice was carried over to the Star Wars Expanded Universe books as well—only in dialog, not in narration, IIRC.

I think instead that Sam’s enby identity is the result of fetish or deviant behavior as a child, maybe getting off by going into his female family’s clothing.

G.I. Joe in pantyhose is making room for the one and only…

Ugh.

Unpleasant if true. Kind of a moot point for those of us already on board with consequences.

I find the tabloid approach distasteful. Seems more like an excuse to point and laugh than any sort of meaningful journalism.

As with most of these things, the choice seems to be "tabloids and dissident press" or dead silence. Meaningful Journalists had to be dragged to cover this saga at every step, and only spoke up when the tabloids hit hard enough that the need for damage control made ignoring and silencing untenable.

Since Sam Brinton is (or, until recently, was in any case) a powerful and privileged individual with important decisionmaking power over the lives of the little people, isn’t mockery in itself a valuable tool of legitimate journalism?

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