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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
Possibly. We don’t actually know. At the moment, we are conducting a vast experiment on human subjects—transsexuals used to be very rare, particularly the surgically-altered kind. What effect might a lifetime of large doses of male hormone have on my friend-the-cop’s body? If she goes for phalloplasty, what happens to what amounts to a wad of flesh sutured to one’s crotch after decades? And, for that matter, what happens when—as is likely—(s)he finds it difficult to find and maintain meaningful relationships because in real life (as opposed to woke fantasy) heterosexual women prefer men and homosexual women prefer women.
It has already come up. In Massachusetts, the town of Somerville has already moved to legally recognize “polyamorous” relationships.
And, of course, there’s Biden Administration muckety-muck Sam Brinton (they/them) who said, in a 2016 interview: ““One of the hardest things about being a handler is that I’ve honestly had people ask, ‘Wait, you have sex with animals?’” Sam says. “They believe it’s abusive, that it’s taking advantage of someone who may not be acting up to a level of human responsibility…. The other misperception is that I have some really messed up background, like, did I have some horrible childhood trauma that made me like to have sex with animals.”
Only when
hethey* got caught stealing luggage from an airport carousel did Brinton’s behavior cause disquiet among the Wokeratti.Meanwhile…remember when I argued that same sex marriage and the discussion/debate about it might actually repair some of the damage heterosexuals have done to the institution? Yeah, well, scratch that. During the famous MonkeyPox non-epidemic, a gay pundit publicly announced that, to protect himself from the simian scourge he would be limiting his sex life to his husband…oh, and his boyfriend.
So it would seem that the slippery slope was pretty darned slick after all.
*My pronouns are “me/I.” Use them at all times when referring to me.
It’s hard to be successful at something you are forbidden to attempt.
Ack-shully, “we” are (or rather, we used to be) very successful when it comes to the treatment of gender dysphoric children. “Watch and wait” turned out to be a splendid treatment, resulting in the vast majority of cases resolving without need for further (let alone lifelong) medical intervention. I benefited from this treatment myself when I was young.
Hopefully he’ll end up with a lesbian, like a lot (?) of trans men seem to? Set him up, GD, set him up!!!
The conversation has been causing me to ponder – like all Good Granny Dude Convos should.
I admit that the quickness to intervene medically with children shocks me – the ‘wait and see, they’ll grow into whatever they will, let’s see then’ seems to be the most sensible (and safest) approach. In terms of ‘want’ – well this week it’s firefighter, next week doctor, the week after that truck driver – why would we give children’s wants about gender so much more weight or permanence? There were a lot of things wrong with it, but in a lot of ways I’m glad I was a child when and where I was.
My feeling is the reluctance to ‘wait and see’ is linked to the unwillingness to allow discomfort (uncomfortableness) – or a growing belief that we shouldn’t ever feel discomfort or uncomfortable – which is linked to medicalising (?) things that really don’t need to be. Feeling discomfort, being uncomfortable, is part of growing up – certainly it’s a core part of coming out – not that we need to encourage it, but perhaps at least accept that it’s a necessary part of life?
I’ve also read (I can’t find the link just now) that along with the skew to younger cohorts (which makes sense) for people reporting trans on non-binary gender identification (what a phrase what a phrase!) there is also a skew towards young females who don’t identify as women. Basically more young females report non-binary gender ID than young males.
That’s a really interesting stat – and makes me wonder what it is, about being a woman, that they’re finding unappealing or off putting. Is the issue more about women’s perceived experience in the world than it is about anything else? iow are we looking for the key out on the street instead of where we dropped it in the dark corners of the house?
“A growing belief that we shouldn’t ever feel discomfort or uncomfortable…” well, it depends on who you mean by “we.” There is—clearly—zero interest in the discomfort of women and girls who do not wish to share a bathroom, locker room, sports team, summer camp cabin, domestic violence shelter etc. with men. Or the discomfort of lesbians, who—surprise!— do not wish to share their beds and bodies with men either.
Why on earth would any teenaged girl, looking clear-eyed at the social landscape today, wish to be a woman?
This may be old news, but in 1990 or so, I joked with a female co-worker (sexual regulations were not as stiff then as they are now) that I was a lesbian trapped inside the body of a man. She thought for 1.5 seconds and then a broad smile spread across her face. It was funny, man.
I thought that I had made that up, then years later I heard a comic say the same thing, so maybe I hadn’t. But especially if somebody was making money off the joke, it’s a shame that that joke couldn’t be told today. It’s a shame that male lesbian jokes are now a crime in some jurisdictions.
They even made me tear up my Male Lesbian Liaison Club card.
Has it gotten worse or are there just more options today?
It’s gotten worse.
“[S]ince 1972, the first year the United States General Social Survey (GSS) began asking men and women, “How happy are you?”
The study reported several findings:
The illusion is that “more options”=happiness. It isn’t true.
Unhappiness = what? Discomfort?
Sure. Along with depression, anxiety, loneliness, addictions of various kinds, despair…the Wokestapo who patrol more and more of the culture, hyper-vigilant for signs of -ism and -phobia getting in the way of the only choices that are—if only temporarily—free? They do not leave bliss in their wake.
Endless, open choices permitting infinite individuation sounds like liberation but in practice it means that each person has to laboriously re-invent the wheel (psychological, spiritual, moral, physical, existential), and create meaning out of a deliberately-cultivated mushy, chaotic nothingness (since anything else would be a fascist imposition).
“Those who have a “why” to live can bear with almost any “how.”” said Viktor Frankl who, having survived real oppression, real violence, real fascism in a Nazi concentration camp, knew whereof he spake. Stripped of every possible”why,” the young today find unendurable the most luxurious “how” the world has ever seen.
At the risk of flogging a sleeping (if not dead) horse: This, according to those who have a pecuniary interest in keeping a finger on the pulse of our culture, is what a woman is. Someone who wears make up.
Can you not see how demeaning, dehumanizing and sexist this is?
And why is it that the progressive left—supposedly sharp critics of capitalism—overlooks the role of Big Bidness greed and profitable mass-manipulation in this?
Huh. This reminds me of something.