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The Right Not to Applaud
In 2015, Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner was presented with the Arthur Ashe courage award. The award is for athletes who exhibit courage in the face of adversity. A unanimous standing ovation from a roomful of wealthy, successful actors, media figures, and pro athletes tends to undercut any narrative of oppression and persecution. In fact, anyone in that audience not in a wheelchair who remained seated risked immediate career-threatening blowback in social media. It would have taken far more courage not to celebrate the award that to be its recipient, a situation that bears resemblance to the expected audience response to speeches by Fidel Castro (he/him) or Saddam Hussein (he/him).
I bear no animus towards Jenner. I watched and admired Jenner’s performance from a very respectable 10th place in the decathlon in the 1972 Olympics to the especially electrifying gold medal performance in 1976 back in an era when Soviet bloc countries seemed to have the edge in a lot of track and field events.
I admit to being baffled by Jenner’s current journey or whatever you call it, with more pity than judgment.
Something is deeply out of whack in our social contract. As Americans, we are strongly inclined to grant each other the widest possible zone of personal autonomy. If you are an adult who wants to get some unfortunate tattoos and join a goofy cult, it is not my place to stop you, and certainly not government’s role. However, you do not have the right to mandate my approval of your choices.
The left has successfully destroyed any power to formally or informally enforce traditional, conventional values and replaced that state of affairs with a far more pervasively, broadly enforced, woke value system that is being applied in every corner of our lives and thoughts.
The right to withhold applause needs to be re-established and fiercely defended. It is precisely where mutual respect resides in a pluralistic society.
Published in General
So?
Two points: First, that the present, affirming/celebratory attitude towards the Queer (and condemnatory attitude to the Queer-Skeptical) is a huge moral step forward. It appears that you and I agree it isn’t—merely a variant on the same old same old. So much for progress.
And second: In the case of biological sex and its effects on the lives and realities of men and women, there is reality and unreality. Caitlyn Jenner is not a woman. That is simply a fact. Jenner doesn’t have to like it and, this being a free and remarkably tolerant country, he can pretend to be a woman to his heart’s content.
Tara Reade, on the other hand, is a woman. If it is true, as she accuses, that Joe Biden sexually assaulted her in the tunnel underneath the Senate, it was because she is a woman, not because she “identifies” as one. Pretending to be a man wouldn’t change that reality and probably wouldn’t have offered all that much protection from sexual predation—you’ve seen Boys Don’t Cry, right? Meanwhile, the women of Iran are being oppressed, American women in the 1800s were denied the franchise, and there are tampon dispensers in women’s bathrooms and not men’s bathrooms because womanhood is not a feeling or a costume but plain, harsh reality.
Accurate descriptions of reality—truth telling, I might say—used to command at least some measure of respect. Now, it seems, we must privilege the utterance of nonsense.
I hate it when we bully the queer sceptical. I don’t think that we should, even if they bullied us when they had the power to do so.
Zafar, as far as I know, you are a gay man. You aren’t “queer” in the modern sense, that supposedly encompasses heterosexual pink haired menopausal cat moms who want to make their loneliness sound more interesting and high school sophomores attempting to fit in with the current fad by declaring themselves “ambisexual” or “persiflage-curious.”
A gay man is a man who is sexually and romantically attracted to other men. Once you start in with the gender nonsense, not only is the word “man” meaningless, so is the word “gay.” It all turns to pointless and ultimately very boring mush.
First they steal our dance moves and then…
Perhaps, but why should I rain on their parade? It doesn’t hurt me.
If they eliminate the idea of men being attracted to other men because there is no sex than you are in for a rough time.
Why do you give these people so much power? They can’t do anything of the sort, and neither can anybody else.
You could not be more wrong Zafar. Hollywood made t.v. and movies with stories showing gays as being sympathetic and fashionable. As a result they convinced many Americans to be cool with gay folk. That is rule power. When a kid commits suicide, other kids often commit suicide as a response.
We absolutely have power over other people. Read Brothers Karamazov if you don’t believe me. A persuasive intellectual inspires a murder and a suicide.
Some trans activists are saying that I am transphobic because I don’t want to date a lady with a penis. They could very well accuse you of transphobia because you don’t feel like dating transmen.
We should both oppose such ideology while generally being cool with trans people.
Did life imitate “art”, or did “art” finally imitate life?
Do you think that was the the chronology? Are we really only a Jud Süss away from disaster?
So what? Toughen up.
Hot tip: there will always be people that disapprove of you. When you’re young and those people are your parents, or your whole social sphere, that can be very hard. But for most of us: we grow up. We discover the world is bigger. Things get better.
I was going to say that the gay man and penis connection is unlikely to be broken, but who knows what will happen in the future?
I have [male] friends who have dated trans men. If they’re all adults and happy why should I get hung up on whether they’re “really gay” or not? It’s not really my business and they aren’t hurting me. Let them be gay if they want.
And let people not applaud. It needs to work both ways.
I was reminded of this conversation when I heard about this story. It’s not quite the same circumstance as we were discussing, but it does highlight one important fact. Thought crime will be punished regardless of your sexuality. The ultimate goal is not that you agree with a particular set of beliefs but that you dare not deviate from the authority issuing the pronouncements. This is the soil from which Totalitarianism springs up.
So it doesn’t hurt you. Thanks a bunch. It—the trans nonsense— has already hurt women, both individually and as a group formerly protected under, among other laws, Title IX. It has made women’s lives harder and more dangerous than they were before.
Gay trans men do not hurt women.
Do trans women hurt other women?
I get the sports competition angle, but surely there are better ways of dealing with that than throwing anybody under the bus?
These, for example, were the choices available to me at an art museum I attended not long ago. Note that, were we to attend together, you @Zafar would have two bathrooms to choose from. I—a woman—would have…well, one. Sort of.
Now imagine that you are one of the many, many women who have been subjected to male sexual violence. (Show of hands? Mine is up…) The only restroom on offer is one in which anyone who feels like it—male, female, anything in between—can wander in, unchallenged, unembarrassed…
The world has been made less comfortable for women…but who cares? They’re just, y’know…women. It’s not like our comfort is important, especially when compared with the comfort of….men. Like you.
Plus ca change.
Thanks, Progressives! Regress once more masquerading as progress.
Meanwhile, Zafar, I was pointing out to a gay male friend that women’s history has been altered by trans nonsense. To illustrate, I asked him “Who was the first female athlete to appear on the Wheaties Box?”
Answer? Nope. Not Mary Lou Rhetton….but Bruce Jenner.
Because Bruce…that is, Caitlyn’s…contention is not that Bruce was a man who became a woman, but that Bruce was always a woman. Even when he/she was winning the men’s decathalon.
So much for Mary Lou, eh?
“Well, but does it really matter?” My gay male friend asked.
Or, as you put it, “It doesn’t hurt me.”
Raining on women’s parades is fine, eh? As long as we don’t impose even a fine mist upon the whims of the biologically male.
You’re leaving trans men out of your argument. Do they not matter? Does their existence, and our acceptance of them, hurt you?
Were those bathrooms you show signs for multiple person rooms (with stalls, etc) or were either of them single person rooms?
I am not about anybody being actually under threat – not you, not me, not anybody – but the response to trans women using women’s rooms reminds me at some level – I can’t put my finger on it exactly – to straight men responding to gay men in common spaces. (Like men’s rooms.).
I’m not a threat to anybody, but in those situations I could be perceived as such solely because I’m gay. Or at least my presence would make some straight men uncomfortable. Should I be excluded to keep them comfortable? Or should this be based on facts?
Re sports, I agree with you. I think it’s nuts. But also – it seems less important to me, and that’s certainly a personal take.
Edited to add:
I guess my take is that people are entitled to safety – that should be basic – but don’t think each of us is entitled to always feel comfortable?
There have been not an incidental amount of rapes by transwomen (men) using female bathrooms.
Source?
Must I uncritically affirm everything that does not specifically injure me? That is a pretty lame standard. If I were an ethnically German Lutheran or Catholic heterosexual in Nazi Germany, the government hauling off Jews would not threaten me personally. In a less dramatic example, if people choose to believe that vaccines and masks prevent COVID spread, babies have no personhood, hurricanes are caused by climate change, there are 57 genders, or that the earth is flat, they have a right to be demonstrably wrong but should they also have a right to sanction, exclude or fire me for not nodding in agreement? That is kinda the whole point here.
Jenner was a male when he won the decathalon. The figure on the Wheaties box was not wearing an evening gown. What Jenner is now is a male with a disposition to attempt to choose not to be male.
I do not have standing to tell Jenner to man up and stop cross-dressing. He does not have standing to compel me to pretend he is a woman. There is an injury to personal autonomy and/or intellectual freedom if either of those previous sentences is invalidated.
Of course not. But there’s no need to claim offence and victim status from things that don’t hurt you either.
By setting up a precedent for how human beings could be treated yes, it would.
Because men and women are biologically different, trans-women and trans-men are different. Trans-women (that is, men who assume the identity of women) are a threat to women. Trans-men are not a threat to men.
There is no scenario under which a trans-man will be “the first male four star admiral!” or “the first male athlete on the Wheaties Box!” A trans-man will not be smashing existing records in men’s sporting events or taking medals from male athletes at the Olympics.
A trans-man in a men’s bathroom does not present a threat to other users. A man who discovers he is sharing the facilities with a biological woman might be unsettled, weirded out or offended, but he will not be (or feel) at risk of physical or sexual attack.
Men are stronger, more aggressive, and equipped for sexual assault and rape. The presence of a biological male in a woman-only space (bathroom, locker room, domestic violence shelter, prison) makes that space less comfortable, safe and private for the biological women such spaces were designed for.
A trans-man convicted of a crime and placed in a men’s prison would be at risk of serious bodily harm; a trans-woman convicted of a crime and placed in a women’s prison would present a risk to his fellow inmates. This, by the way, is not a merely theoretical concern: While trans-men, when asked, admit they’d just as soon go to a women’s prison, trans-women leap at the chance to go to a women’s prison, as do plain old men who realize that the whole “trans” thing presents them not only with the opportunity to do time in a safer institution, but also potential victims for sexual predation. That little experiment has already been tried, the stupidity of the Woke West being apparently without limit. Rapes and pregnancies have already resulted.
I have a friend who is a trans-man and a police officer. By altering her appearance so that she looks like a man, she has actually given up the protection offered by the vestiges of chivalry—e.g. “don’t hit girls”—without actually possessing the strength a man of her size and weight would be able to draw upon. She performs a traditionally male function—protect and serve—without biologically male capabilities. If she was on the Titanic, she would yield her place in the lifeboat on the principle “Women and children first.”
Trans-women do not and cannot take on the burdens and responsibilities of female life. These are manifold and, frankly, onerous. If this character was on the Titanic, should he take a seat in a lifeboat…on the grounds that he is a “girl?”
Sources, plural. You just have to keep up with the news.
Just a little bit of linguistic straightening out. Modifiers precede a noun, they do not change the definition of the noun. The fact is that men who claim to be women are in fact men, and should, if anything, be linguistically referred to as trans-men, and the same for trans-women.
Changing the noun is deliberately deceptive. And women who claim to be men, are still women. Unless you accept the progressive line in which sex is just a social construct and really doesn’t exist.
I understand the theory Kate. But life is not so straight forward.
A few years ago a friend of mine was convicted of dealing drugs and went to prison for two years. I went to visit her every weekend, and learned a lot in the process.
She was in a medium security prison on the outskirts of Sydney. There were two (at least) trans women in prison with her. They were not perceived as threats – if anything they were targets of abuse.
Through the same friend I met a trans woman – who had been in prison, where she’d met her partner. (So romantic, right?) She’d had the choice between men and women’s prison, and she’d chosen men’s.
These are just anecdotes – I don’t pretend that they’re anything else – but they are not abstract conjecture either – they actually happened.
It’s worth noting that men don’t claim to be trans women in droves to avoid men’s prisons. And that women are not completely safe from other women in prison. And that there is a problem of sexual violence in single sex men’s prisons.
Clearly his choice upsets you.
Why is that?
Is there something about his choice that is threatening?
Also, do you refer to him as ‘she’ in front of him?
There have been a few of them. Landau county was particularly egregious. There was a convicted sex offender who identified as a trans-woman and exposed his phallus in a Korean sauna in L.A. It being L.A. they had a room for any gender but apparently that wasn’t enough for him/her. California and British prisons have put men who identify as female in prisons and they get all rapey. This is a serious issue about women’s safety.
And it has happened (plural) in school girls’ bathrooms, and also in US women’s prisons from what I understand.
What I don’t understand — because I think it’s not meant to be understood — is those who say that everyone deserves to be comfortable but then dismiss the great discomfort of women encountering men in the powder room with them.
People are uncomfortable with much of what is good. And people are often comfortable with all manner of stupidity, corruption and superstition. Remember how quick humanity was to kill Socrates and Jesus for speaking Truth.
This has nothing to do with what we are discussing but I just like complaining about stuff.
Give it time. This didn’t use to be a “thing.” It was a rare and strange phenomenon…now, we have clusters of girls claiming to be boys, and gay men (like the one in the photo, Derek whatsisname) who declare themselves “girls” and refer to their genitals as “Barbie Wands” etc. Which we could count as mere fringe silliness, except that Derek and His Barbie Wand recently met with the President of the United States.
Doesn’t upset me at all. I love this kid. I admire her for taking on the hardest parts of being male. I can wish for her that she did not feel the need to mutilate herself in order to feel whole (or at least whole-er) but she’s a terrific police officer and a friend. Tragically, by the way, she is not welcomed and supported by self-consciously- woke Lefties in our neck of the woods. Not, of course, because she’s trans. Because she’s a police officer.
In her presence, and in the presence of her friends and colleagues, I call her whatever she wishes to be called.
Individual by individual, I’m fond of eccentrics. I like odd ducks. And I am happy to accommodate all sorts of people, especially if their quirks and peculiarities are (like mine, come to think of it) largely a means of managing pain for which we have thus far found no remedy.
Now, of course, it is verboten to search for another remedy for the suffering of the gender dysphoric—even though at least one of my acquaintance told me he wished there was a pill he could take that would allow him to live in his body. There isn’t. And I wouldn’t hold my breath on researchers finding a treatment or cure anytime soon. Not when the Wokestapo are shrilly accusing therapists of committing “conversion therapy” and surgeons, Planned Parenthood and Big Pharma are all making boo-coo bucks on “gender affirming care.”
Why do I care? Precisely because people I know and love have been hurt, and will be hurt by this stupid “movement.”
Oh, and I also care about reality. Science. Language. You know…the ideas, practices and processes that took centuries to discover and/or construct, which are now being torn down with breathtaking rapidity.
Incidentally, Zafar: You will recall my defense of Same Sex Marriage? Because of the behavior of the Zealots, I am beginning to think I was stupid and naive. I was one of those who scoffed at the notion that same sex marriage would prove a slippery slope. Well, guess what? Monogamous gays and lesbians are indeed being shoved aside in order to make room for the polygamists, the pederasts and the child-marriage proponents…and what constitutional obstacle is there to impede them? Love Is Love, amiright? And if some guy publicly declares himself a puppy schtupper and wants to marry both his daughter and his doberman, who am I to stand in the way?
And then there’s this…which frankly sounds to me like a bit more than asking merely to be allowed to “live and let live.”
” On October 1,[Norwegian Lesbian Tonje Gjevon]posted a comment on Facebook about the Norwegian Supreme Court, which the previous day had found a man guilty of making “hateful statements” about a “trans woman.”
“Men who permanently play-act [permalaiver] as women,” she wrote, are “perverse fetishists who are discriminating against women.” She singled out for criticism Christine Jentoft, born Christer Jentoft, a biological man who sleeps with women but who’s employed by a lesbian organization called Fri (Free) because he calls himself a “trans lesbian.” Refusing to hold back her outrage over this insanity, Gjevjon let loose with a wonderful tirade, including the passionate run-on sentence that begins this passage:
“Heterosexual lesbian men like Christine Jentoft have, by parliamentary resolution, been authorized under the law to report lesbian women like me and all other women and men who express disgust at these people’s attempt to use the law against straight men/women and lesbian women who point out how [REDACTED] humiliating it is that we are expected to have to approve of this [REDACTED] gender identity that entails, and that is disguised, as a minority’s vulnerability. Gay organizations like Fri and men who fetishize full-time about being lesbians are now using a law adopted by the parliament to report people who don’t want to submit to this crazy system of belief. It’s as impossible for men to be lesbians as it is for men to get pregnant. Men are men regardless of their sexual fetishes.”
That was October 1. On November 17, Gjevjon received a letter from the police department in Follo, a suburb of Oslo, summoning her to an interrogation because the National Competence Center for Hate Crimes had reported her Facebook post for violating paragraph 185 of the Criminal Code, which forbids hateful statements about vulnerable identity groups. “
If convicted, Gjevjon could receive up to three years in prison—in a country where actual rapists often serve no more than a year.
But he did feel that need. And – realistically – what were his options to feel whole-er?
To be fair, we haven’t been too successful so far.
Your friend the cop?
I’m quite surprised by this – but perhaps I shouldn’t be?
Hindu mythology has a legend where the Devas and the Asuras joined together and churned the ocean to make amrit – which bestows immortality. Lots of details, plot twists, etc. – but in brief, the churning created many good things before amrit appeared – but it also created a poison that was deadly enough to kill creation. And we were saved only because Shiva swallowed the poison and held it in his throat.
The point is, every churning will create something bad as a side effect, it’s unrealistic to think that the results will only be good and we can relax.
In this instance – it’s uncomfortable, but ideas need to be interrogated to retain valence. There are many (imo) good reasons to not accept polygamy, pederastry, child marriage or bestiality. But I need to be ready to make the case against these if it comes up.