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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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