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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32799 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?" 😁

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.

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