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His Excellency Joe Biden has declared March 31st a certain ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’, which has generated derision due to its simultaneity with the Western date of Easter Sunday. If this happened outside of Holy Week, it likely would have prompted the regimented groans from the right side of the isle, and that would be that; coincidentally, however, this ‘holiday’ (which has been declared such since 2009) happened to fall on the holiest day of the year for Christians, the group which is perhaps the biggest collection of resisters against transgenderism. Naturally, this has created a lot of controversy. Trump and his team even issued a statement calling for Biden to apologize for his ‘blasphemy’, which is probably a unique event all things considered (when’s the last time you’ve heard of a politician smear another one for blasphemy? In 2000+24, no less?) Such personalities as Caitlyn Jenner and Musk have responded with similar negative attitudes.
Now, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Biden didn’t make this decision himself. It was definitely his team which did this, in order to show his support for the ‘marginalized’, even as he has declared this day one for ‘visibility’ years before in his term. It raises the question, though, on whether or not Biden actually has these thoughts of support for these people and their identities, with this support even superseding the remembrance of Christ’s resurrection (keep in mind that Biden is an 80 year old ‘devout Catholic’, allegedly). I really doubt he does, but I’m more interested in what he actually thinks about these developments. And, how would his team react to the fact that the black community would significantly oppose this, given their high rate of religiosity? Does Biden still think this is 1969, where if you were transgender you would probably lose your job and become exiled from all institutions in society? Thoughts?
From the statement:
That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply (see Google trends here. This is just absolutely wild to me how quickly this term has taken hold and how quickly people seem to have come to believe that this is something they pretty much always thought, that it's a good and normal thing, that this is medical care, and only a bunch of hateful extremists could think otherwise.
But pause. What exactly are "trans kids"? On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender. I don't understand how people are capable of holding these ideas in their heads simultaneously and that they've adopted these ideas that are so new, so utterly untested consequentially as not just right, but obviously morally right and opposed only by a bunch of bigots. My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
I am disturbed.
It is good that you are disturbed.
It’s a trope in fiction of malign regimes requiring that a logical paradox be treated as official truth, such as 1984’s “two plus two equals five”, but it has a long history before that of being used to illustrate fashionable or politically advantageous absurdities. And of course, the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is a tool to immunize children against swallowing such propaganda.
I have proposed facetiously that there be four categories for clarity: male men, female men, male women, and female women. Of course, nobody who accepts the trans paradox wants this; they want “trans woman” to be treated as the same type of category as “red-headed woman” and “short woman”, and anyone who disagrees to be shouted down for their offensiveness.
I actually have a question for you. Would you be more okay with a regime like the Weimar republic had of transvestite passes? They were doctor's notes that smoothed out the act of cross-dressing in public for people, and made it less of a hassle to interact with authorities.
They’d instantly complain it was like Jews being forced to wear yellow stars, despite the historical incongruity. And I wouldn’t blame them. As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives. Emergency responders need to know which set of internal organs to expect, of course, and police should be able to describe suspects by apparent gender. But gay civil unions and divorces (as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land) should be legal, as long as the state doesn’t force churches, wedding photographers, etc. to accommodate and celebrate things that are heretical to their faith or which fill them with loathing of repugnance.
I remember back before gay marriage was legalized in the United States. Toys were on color-coded aisles, blue for boys and pink for girls of course. In 2012, a group was founded in the UK called Let Toys Be Toys which pushes the agenda of the movement which urges toymakers, toy stores, publishers, and so on to reduce the gender coding of toys and the gender stereotypes in children's books, and toy playsets and commercials. Target later made national news by declaring it was no longer going to explicitly gender-code toy aisles.
This appeared to be an appeal to classical liberalism, in which the freedom of the individual is paramount. I agree with that part, though not the activism.
But almost as soon as the ink was dry on Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Cthulhu swam left and suddenly everything was about trans. It wasn’t long before we heard about parents using gendered toys to test which gender their toddlers or even babies identified as.
This was a whiplash pivot from freeing children from the “tyranny” of gendered toys to using the toys as a bed of Procrustes, carving their flesh to match which toy they picked, and declaring it genocide if they weren’t allowed to.
So no, I’d rather we not follow the literal Weimar Republic in using the power of the state to say who’s legally a woman. Who knows what the next lap of Cthulhu would be, and which moneyed powers would use it for lifelong medication paid by the state.
I've read widely in the libertarian, minarchist and anarcho-capitalist traditions, and while I think they are often good at identifying certain problems of government, and I'm convinced by the arguments of Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority and Ellickson's Order without Law that these forms of government could potentially work in the real world, I still find myself more attracted to social democracy as a set of principles for organizing society, especially since it's actually been tried in the real world and seems to work reasonably well.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very sympathetic to the view of government that it is just the largest and most successful gang of thugs in an area, and that there is actually little moral grounding for the idea of political authority. But I'm a pragmatist and a consequentialist, and I'm more willing to shrug and say, "if the big bullies take care of the little bullies and make people more free, that's better than the alternative." I tend to agree with Noah Smith's argument in The Liberty of Local Bullies that there are many "intermediate" groups between the government and the individual that often have just as much power to reduce your liberty as the government does.
Imagine a devout Jehovah's Witness in high school refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because oaths are against their faith, and constantly being punished by their overzealous home room teacher for it. The only way to resolve the issue in a way that preserves the liberty of the Jehovah's Witness to not say the Pledge is to go over the teacher's head, via school administrators. But what if the school administrators support the teacher over the student? The only way to force the teacher to respect the student's religious freedom is to go a level higher to the government, and hope that they will force fines or other coercive measures in order to protect the student's rights.
I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom. Obviously, it would be foolish to claim that centralized governments with high state capacity always results in increased liberty, but most of the countries I can think of that are good places to live in are some form of liberal representative democracy with free markets and a government with enough state capacity to secure people's rights, and create money transfers and social safety nets (even the United States.)
That’s the good intention which paved the road to Hell, the road we call the anti-trust laws. Alan Greenspan wrote a detailed yet eminently readable paper, later published by Rand, about the US government’s efforts to stop “monopolies” and the resulting unbridled growth of the bully state.
Outlaw unequivocally evil externalities, to be sure! But don’t let the law become non-objective, subject to whim or pull. If you give a man a gun and tell him he’s the defender of justice, pretty quickly he’ll think his job is to find the right time to pull the trigger. Find the proper size and role of government, and provide better incentives for it to protect the individual even at the cost of outcomes for pressure groups with sob stories or crocodile tears.
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You're thinking the of the line marriages and so forth in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?
Stranger had polyamory too, was five years earlier, and (according to some accounts) kicked off the free-love Sixties as pop culture knows it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/polyamory/comments/23du3h/the_early_poly_movement_and_heinleins_stranger_in/
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I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress? Women wearing trousers/pants were once upon a time regarded as "that is men's clothing" but now we accept that "no, it's women's clothing too". So for the people who want "skirt go spinny!", let's normalise it in the same way that dresses and skirts are men's clothing too. That way, you can wear the crop tops and fishnets and miniskirts and heels to your heart's content with nobody having to fight over "this is a woman, a Real Woman".
I acknowledge that for trans people, it's more than cosmetic. But it sure seems like a portion of the online set do treat it as "makeup and long hair and dressing like anime girls, wee-hee!" So let's go back to "this is a transvestite, not a transsexual/transgender person" and get that out of the way and sort out some of the confusion. Guys who like to dress up girly are not the same as "I feel that I am indeed a woman and suffer from not being recognised as such". Don't lump them all in the same basket and that way the more egregious cases won't have to be defended by the trans rights set for fear of "if we accept condemnation of this case, then we will be vulnerable to attacks on all trans people, so even if this is a fake, we have to support them".
You're not gender-fluid, Phil, you just like wearing dresses. Let's accept that some days you like to come to work in drag, that men can wear dresses the same way women can wear trousers, and nobody has to get into fights over 'are you a man or a woman or neither or both'.
in theory, nothing. But I think these days porn has ruined it for everyone. It's like that Gore Vidal quote about how "turgid" belongs to the porn writers now. There's no way I can see a dude in a dress now and not think either (a) he's a trans person making a political statement or (b) this is fetish. Or possibly both.
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There are in fact macho kilt makers, and if I had to bet of random trends to eventually become socially acceptable that would be one of my draft picks. That I personally think it's a rather dumb thing to get caught up on doesn't make the utilikilt a feminine garment; it would quite clearly look a bit butch on a woman whereas on a man it just looks a bit unusual and hipsterish. You know, goes with three days of stubble and an IPA.
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Im going to plant my flag in the ground and say that dresses as a general class are awesome, and I would wear them in a heartbeat if it were socially acceptable to do so. By “general class,” I would include things like robes, kilts, togas, vestments, opera capes, and so forth. These are all much more aesthetically pleasing than modern clothing, even if they’re not always as practical. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but your comment makes me wonder if some transgender people (those on the transvestite end of things) just feel the same itch and find that women’s dresses help them to scratch it. If so, it’s just too bad that wearing clothing styles of 200+ years ago just makes you look like a twat.
Actually, a second thought on that point: men used to enjoy dressing up in fancy dress in the Masons, Shriners, Knights of Columbus, etc., but now young men have no such outlet. Maybe they should.
In that case, they are going way out of their way to alienate conservatives for no good reason, making it about sex rather than clothing. Even if people think it's kind of dorky to wear a robe just because you like it, almost no one thinks it's morally wrong, or threatening.
If someone were cool enough, they could probably bring back menswear that's open at the bottom. Women find kilts and such sexy (see, for instance, Outlander), but modern kilt-wearers weird, for reasons unrelated to the garments themselves.
I think that's because the people who wear kilts outside of, like, a renaissance fair, are in fact weird. Not due to anything about the garment; you can buy kilts that clearly look like men's garments, albeit hipsterish men's garments, but just because the man who makes that choice is at least a bit eccentric.
The people who wear them inside of a renaissance fair are weird too.
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Isn't that just fashion, in general? Almost anyone who tries to wear a weird fashion is going to look weird because they are weird. The exception is rare, exceptional people who are very good looking, very charismatic, and very tuned-in to fashion trends, so they're able to pick up on new fashions and wear it and make it fashionable.
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We accept women wearing pants, but women don't wear pants in the context of getting sexual excitement from being women who wear pants. More generally, there's a difference between wanting to wear something of the opposite sex as clothes, and wanting to wear something of the opposite sex because it's from the opposite sex.
But I do think that transvestites have been folded in, as it were, to the transgender movement (the way Asperger's Syndrome became part of the autism spectrum) and that there is a sub-section of people who do want the dressing-up part but are not really transsexual, but now the push is on that "of course if you're not 100% gender compliant, consider that you're trans".
The contradiction around "gender roles are socially constructed, there's no such thing as gender" and the advice that "you can know if a child is trans by, for instance, if they pull open their onesie so it's like a dress" is irreconcilable for me. How do you match up the two parts? Gender is not real, and at the same time, strict gender roles show us if you're cis or trans.
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One of the odder real life interactions I've had with a (presumably) trans woman was at a ranger station. Women rangers wear pants and don't wear makeup while at work. But this male one was wearing a skirt and makeup. Clearly he was making a statement, rather than trying to blend in with his female co-workers.
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This feels like it works best for middle and upper middle class trans/gender non-conforming (GNC) people, and terribly for every other kind of GNC person.
Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job. Good numbers are hard to get, but there's plenty of anecdotal accounts from trans people who had trouble finding work because they were non-passing trans people, and I don't think there's any strong reason to doubt their accounts even without good hard data on discrimination that shows up in "legible" parts of society.
I seriously doubt affirmative action, and DEI initiatives have made things much better for all trans/GNC people in this regard. (I mean, isn't it common knowledge that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been cis white women?) Sure, a progressive tech firm might happily hire a trans woman as a software engineer, but for every company like that there's probably a dozen bodegas and fast food joints in more conservative areas that don't want to hire a teenage cross-dresser in their first job, and that lack of work experience might echo out into their job prospects down the line, amplifying the effects always present because of their status as a recognizable cross-dresser.
Part of the reason that Weimar transvestite passes looked interesting to me, is that they seemed like exactly the sort of legal vehicle that one could attach non-discrimination laws and cultural norms around. I know more libertrian or social conservative types would still have issues with such a regime, but I do think it would overcome the basic issue of "telling a societal lie" that many people claim is their main objection, and I think a world with transvestite passes and social norms of pronoun hospitality (enforced by social censure, and not legal censure) could get 90% of where trans advocates want things, and without any obvious "lies" or "metaphysical nonsense."
I think it's going to be a lot easier to move the needle towards "okay, boys can wear dresses too" the way we moved it on "okay, girls can wear trousers too" than inflicting on society that we must believe "in fact biology not real, you can be a girl or a boy or a girlboy or a no-gender if you just feeeeel it".
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This doesn’t seem to me like that much of an imposition. “I really like wearing dresses, putting on makeup, and doing up my hair.” Okay, great, do that on your own time, not at work, and especially not at a job interview. I really like dressing casually, not caring what my hair looks like, and only shaving every couple of days, but I wouldn’t dream of going to an interview wearing blue jeans and sporting two days of stubble, and if I did, I definitely wouldn’t expect to get the job.
There’s this idea floating around that you need to be your “authentic self” 100% of the time, and everyone around you needs to accommodate that, which is absolute nonsense. Anyone who’s ever had a non-PC thought or who’s ever enjoyed a dirty joke knows he can’t get away with expressing either one at most work places, and everyone accepts that that’s right and proper. Or, going back to clothing, take that episode of The Office where Jim showed up in a tuxedo. The writers of that episode relied on the audience knowing that a tuxedo is inappropriate attire in an office setting. But if Jim had instead come in dressed like Marilyn Monroe, somehow that’s supposed to be fine. No. Wear a tux, wear a dress, or tell an inappropriate joke on your own time.
(And while I’m grousing about clothing, Zoomers need to stop wearing pajamas and athletic wear in public. Sweat pants are fine for lounging about the house, but there’s no reason you should be wearing them at work or out in public. Show some self-respect.)
At the moment it's inappropriate because that's not tolerated gender role behaviour. Great, if gender is socially constructed, let's change the roles. I hate makeup and wear as little as possible. If Johnny there loves it and religiously watches contouring tutorials on Youtube, let him doll himself up for work and let me just cover the worst of the red blotchy skin with a dusting of powder, and neither of us have to claim that "in fact I am a girl/in truth I am a boy" to be permitted to do this.
If after all that Johnny is still "no, I really am a girl", okay, let's examine that. But if Billy just wants to wear heels to work, that doesn't mean he's not a boy, then live and let live. I think it would be a lot less stressful on everyone, and we'd have the advantage that the narcissistic exhibitionists couldn't use the figleaf of "I am being oppressed" so we'd all know the ones who are trouble.
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Depending on the job, I'm going to go ahead and take the conservative position that, yes, this is inappropriate at an interview and should not be protected, along with very visible tattoos and facial piercings. There are still employers who think that it's cool anyway, just maybe not as mainstream. Especially the lipstick, if it's showy. This is partly aesthetics -- most men are not going to be able to pull it off with visual dignity. I don't have a problem with Billy Porter's tuxedo ballgown, because it looks cool. But, yeah, if it's a basically normal service job, and they come in looking like this, then they are absolutely signaling, not so much femininity, as high maintenance and potential social and legal trouble. In my experience, women who dress up and apply showy makeup significantly more than their female co-workers, especially if they are older and/or already married, also tend to be Bad News.
This is distinct from non-work contexts. People should have all kinds of freedom to wear lots of quirky things in general.
The transvestite pass seems either useless (nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing), or oppressive towards everyone else ("pronoun hospitality" sounds like an outside force telling people what pronouns to use without the trans person having to do anything particular to win them over).
While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person. While the so called "walking while trans law" law (properly the "loitering for prostitution" law) I'm most aware of in New York was repealed in 2021 after years of efforts going back to at least 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if there are several other jurisdictions where anti-prostitution laws accidentally catch innocent trans people in their nets.
I think part of the problem is that underclass trans women probably are more likely to be prostitutes, and a police officer is going to Notice The Pattern whether he wants to or not, and then he's going to act on his experiences and stop non-passing trans people more often as a result.
I fully admit that this issue could be solved with reforms to prostitution laws, without any reforms of existing legislation around trans people (including transvestite passes), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for underclass trans women right now.
Than the average person, sure. Than the average woman dressed similarly... I'd have to see evidence on that one.
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I am absolutely willing to believe that things are really tough for this group in multiple ways, along all the intersectional axes.
I'm most familiar with South side Chicago, and was under the impression that current policing practices for underclass blacks were to try to do as little as possible within their own neighborhoods, but I suppose they would get unwanted law enforcement attention elsewhere in the city. I got some unwelcome cop attention for trying to visit a little beach next to a wealthy suburb, and I don't belong to any Concerning Groups. But I'm also slightly concerned that American police are currently being reformed into doing nothing at all, and if an innocent black trans woman is beat up by their local gang, I would probably like it to be investigated -- it seems like a very hard problem.
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