Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
As Transgenderism Becomes the Next Big Thing, Let’s Remember What Sexual Revolutionaries Used to Believe
The cultural revolution spearheaded by the Left didn’t end after Obergefell (not that anyone expected it to). While polyamory is very likely to be one of its next phases, the next two big steps — both presently ongoing — appear to be the replacement of religious liberty as a social right with freedom of worship as a private right and the transgenderism revolution. This is a big deal and worth our attention. As Maggie Gallagher reports in National Review:
New York’s Andrew Cuomo, and the governors of four other states, are banning official travel to Mississippi.
Charles Barkley is asking the NBA to take the All-Star Game away from North Carolina. PayPal is cancelling plans to expand there. And more than 100 corporations are attacking North Carolina over a bill protecting women from having to share bathrooms with transgender biological males.
Meanwhile the president’s administration has unilaterally redefined the gender-discrimination provisions of Title IX so that its rules forbidding gender discrimination now forbid “LGBT discrimination.” Meaning: Your daughter must shower with transgender biological males or else her school district will lose all federal funding.
Before we are all shoved into this brave, new, crazy world, let’s take a glance backward.
There used to be a fundamental moral principle on which the proponents of each successive wave of the permanent sexual revolution would rely: You have the right to engage in whatever sexual activity (or take up any sexual lifestyle) you like, so long as you don’t hurt anyone else or violate another’s rights.
This is the principle I formerly called “sexual libertarianism.” Later I called it “sexual libertinism.” In between I called it “sexual narfblarism,” which was by far the funnest term. (Follow that link to locate my reasons for modifying my terminology.)
Anyway, there was a time when it seemed that sexual revolutionaries actually believed that principle. Back then, we could all agree that women and girls have a right to not encounter male genitalia in their restrooms and locker rooms, and to not be seen in these settings by anyone with male genitalia (at least not without consent).
But with the transgenderism revolution, the same movement that used to trumpet that principle is now turning against it–the rights of those women and girls are now subordinate to the rights of certain others to adopt whatever lifestyle they want.
Why?
My guess is that many in the movement never believed it anyway. It was just convenient to their revolution. But I’m open to better explanations.
Published in General
It depends on how one looks at it, doesn’t it? Isn’t it possible to frame it that everyone is just the gender they feel they are, but there is simply very high correlation between 23rd chromosomes and/or sex organs and feeling like a specific gender? And humans, being the way they are, want to make as simple of models as possible and so conflated the sex organs as specific genders just because it is easier to ignore outlier situations?
Agree. But the problem is that politicians on the right will respond in kind, because some conservative voters, too, like to feel like they are nobly manning righteous moral barricades… about potties.
I wonder whether part of the appeal of Trump is precisely that he evinces lackadaisical disinterest in the culture wars?
A cable news reporter self-identifying as a lesbian asked him last Thursday after a rally in Exeter, “When President Trump is in office, can we look for more forward motion on equality for gays and lesbians?”
“Well, you can and look – again, we’re going to bring people together. That’s your thing, and other people have their thing,” Trump told Sue O’Connell of New England Cable News. “We have to bring all people together. And if we don’t, we’re not gonna have a country anymore. It’s gonna be a total mess.”
It’s not responding in kind, and it’s not about potties. Any response by the right to the idiotic yet so dangerous machinations of the left is defensive. We’re trying to defend our traditions and our very culture from the assaults of a bunch of fatuous anti-intellectuals bent on anarchy. You don’t see people on the right constantly casting about for a new cause, a new reason to chain themselves to a fence singing protest songs. We don’t defend our daughters from perverts masquerading as trannies, gaining access to public restrooms under this new false flag created by dumbass SJWs in order to “man righteous moral barricades.” Are you kidding?
I’m not talking about you, specifically—I’m saying that what you describe (accurately) as a desire to feel righteous isn’t exclusive to any one group and is a danger for those on the right as well (not an inevitability, just a danger).
What is the most effective and least destructive way to preserve tradition and culture from dumbass SJWs?
The issue I have with the bathroom kerfuffle is not the transgender man that I cannot differentiate from a woman in the bathroom—I am sure it has happened often with me totally unaware—it is a man who gets off at looking at women and girls.
This will probably be the tipping point for me. I am trying to be both intellectually consistent and honest. If I get bent out of shape when someone boycotts NC, I cannot turn around and penalize Target employees for a corporate blunder. Seriously, accommodating less than 1% of the population while making 50% of the population uncomfortable is good business? But I don’t plan to go in angry and complain. I plan to shop and politely voice my concern. Being quiet is not the answer. Being combative is not the right answer.
Several years ago, I mentioned to AUSon that I could remember the days when the gay political goal was said only to be to get the government out of their bedrooms. My father said then it would not be the end. He was right. Today I wish I could get their sex lives out of my bathrooms, off my tv, and absent from FB newsfeed. It is not discrimination. I don’t really want to know anyone else’s private business. Oh, for the days when it was still deliciously private.
I’d say the problem isn’t the right’s response, but the fact that what they are responding to is completely insane. So their response, even if “un-nuanced”, is hardly unexpected. A liberal approach to the perceived problem might not be the conservative approach, but it would not involve imposing the very same thing on the vast majority that is considered discriminatory when imposed upon the vast minority.
Or, come to think of it, maybe it would. That is the essence of reverse discrimination isn’t it?
I think “mixed” or “family” restrooms are a perfectly fine invention if a facility elects to have them, that should be fine.
While I prefer to put as few regulations on business as possible, I think it’s reasonable that when someone encounters a restroom labeled “women,” they have reason to expect that biological men are not allowed to enter. If a women’s room is not really a women’s room, then labeling it as such could be construed as a form of fraud
Maybe so, but in that case the transgender bathroom initiative seems even more arbitrary.
I don’t think people should be making such a big deal out of it on either side. The proponents are drawing attention to things we don’t draw attention to in polite society. This should be worked out organically on an individual basis, not loudly proclaimed so people become hyper aware of who’s sharing a bathroom with them and creating policies that give cover to perverts (though I think that fear is way out of proportion.)
The whole thing is even more arbitrary than that.
A buddy of mine went to a Melissa Etheridge concert, which he described as both “excellent” and “fifteen thousand screaming lesbians throwing their underpants at the stage.” (Your taste may vary). He is a heterosexual U.S. Marshall, BTW… so when he went to use the men’s room, guess what? It was full of women. Why was it full of women? Because the whole freakin’ place was full of women, and when you gotta go, you gotta go. He lived with it.
Should there be a law against women taking over a men’s room at a Melissa Etheridge concert? Most of us would say no. Most of us would say that, when it comes to bathrooms, there are often exigent circumstances that we accommodate with reasonable ease.
Let’s say I went into a ladies room wearing my uniform and, with my very short hair and no make-up or jewelry, was mistaken for a man and therefore made someone’s daughter uncomfortable?
On the other hand, let’s say I went into the ladies room at my local Target, cranked up some Melissa Etheridge tunes on my IPod, took off my clothes and began dancing around. Even given that the parts I had uncovered were the correct parts, I would nonetheless alarm someone’s daughter and the police would be called. I assume I could be arrested and charged under any number of laws already in existence. Why couldn’t the child molester or sneak-peeker who dresses up like a woman (something, by the way, he could do (and has done) without the protection of a tranny law) be charged under the same laws?
Incidentally, child molesters and sneak-peekers perp on both sexes, so whatever laws exist to protect little boys in the men’s room presumably also protect little girls in the ladies’ room.
All of which is to say that a grandstanding, gratuitous municipal ordinance solemnly and unnecessarily voted into being in Chapel Hill does not have to be countered with an unenforceable, gratuitous state law that makes it sound like we all have to carry our birth certificates around with us in order to use the rest room.
Aug,
I want to direct your attention to another pressing problem on the Social Justice horizon. Many people have a difficulty with heights. In the past they have been labeled as Acrophobic. This is insensitive to their suffering. They are a victim of the heightphilic majority population’s narrowmindedness.
As of now, all socially conscious people should support a new federal requirement that no building be over 2 stories. It is unfair to ask our height afflicted brothers and sisters to be subjected to this stress.
Power to the Psychotic.
Regards,
Jim
Agree.
I’m glad you stopped calling it that. True “sexual libertarianism” would posit that the owner of a washroom should have the right to decide who gets to use it.
In addition, the financial “needs” of those who have made Social Justice their livelihood must be considered. There are those who have a vested interest in the problem, whatever we conceive it to be, not being solved or even ameliorated. How much money would NOW extract from its donors if their fundraising letters said things like “wow, things are so much better for women! Women are doing fine! Indeed, here in the USA women are, by many measures, doing a whole lot better than men!”
I sense a double-dog dare in the air…
I wonder, what percentage of the male population is perverted and would game the system in order to get access to the ladies’ room in furtherance of their sick–or at the very least, unsavory–compulsions?
I wonder what percentage of the “male” population consists of legitimate m to f transgenders who simply want to use the ladies’ room because of their gender dysphoria?
I don’t think concluding that the former probably outnumber the latter is bigotry.
Part of the answer — I’d wager there’s a lot of non-mutually-exclusive parts — may be that the movement has self-radicalized through its successes. That is, the same person who is attracted to the movement because he wants his gay friends’ marriage to be recognized by the government may not be behind this at all (for a handsome example, consider me).
I wonder what would cause more of a ruckus in a Target restroom, nude dancing to Melissa Etheridge or Kate dressed in a clerical collar giving her sunday sermon.
Jonah Goldberg wrote something on the matter awhile back that I think is instructive. The basic gist was that, prior to Jack Kevorkian, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a doctor to — with the patient and/or families’ request — give a fatal dose of morphine to in someone’s final struggles. Folks largely turned a blind eye to it because it was under the radar and social norms could govern it rather than law.
A similar thing is going on here: these damned activists are forcing people to deal with a matter that had been very tolerably accepted on a don’t-ask-don’t-tell basis.
Bad idea.
I’d also point out that this tactic isn’t exclusive to the left. Though, the left at least appears successful when employing it. For the right it just seems to be a way to write direct mail campaigns. Having an issue, rather than a solution is highly incentivized by our political machine.
Right wing protests and other forms of organized bellyaching never seem to have the same moment, or are dealt with by the law far more effectively. I’m thinking of the pro life protests around the 90s, which, in retrospect, were rather quickly dealt with.
When the left protests one thing or another, very few arrests are made relativley, and no law pops up to hamper the form of protest. It’s not like any new law about Wall Street sidewalks on account of OWS, but there are laws about abortion clinic sidewalks as a direct result of the pro-life movement.
This, dear friends, is an economic opportunity. It’s time to short the manufacturers of, yes, urinals! You see the days of a urinal dominated mens’ rest room are over. As it will be politically difficult to legislate the requirement that all ladies’ rooms install urinals for those non-cis women who require them, the only alternative is to ban them altogether and legislate a sitting requirement for all public excretions. So Kohler, American Standard, Toto will take an initial hit – get on it, and then will rise as urinals are replaced with commodes. Capitalism at work!
Never say I didn’t provide some great investment advice.
See, one of the greatest things about urinals is that they’re the quick answer to the question of “Oh, crap… did I walk into the ladies room by mistake?”
“Kate Braestrup: Transgendered persons…don’t take on another gender on a whim. There is a young man…who is struggling with this right now, and whatever “it” is, it’s painful. It is far, far more unpleasant and difficult for him than it is for anyone else…he’s trying to play the hand that’s been dealt him and frankly, it’s a crappy hand.”
Agreed, but…
I treat a few TG patients, both directions, handling their hormones and especially, their endocrine morbidities. These are very very disturbed people. One must be very very disturbed, it cannot be easy for so central a thing as your sex to be uncertain to you. I am troubled by the fact that in my medical community, there seems to be little recognition that the patients are deeply disturbed, their delusional thoughts are instead encouraged and supported with only rare exceptions.
I can’t help but think that most of these people are not different from agoraphobics or obsessive-compulsives or depressives in that they have a mental illness that causes deep dysfunction, is hard to treat and has wide ranging effects on the mind and body.
For such a patient intense therapy, not mutilation and lies, would seem to be the right course of action. God loves us all and wants us to be well; medicos and lay people alike can help these unfortunates by being honest and supportive.
But what do I know, I’m just a hetero-normative bigot.
I fully realize that I’m drawing from my own personal experience to address a social phenomenon, but I’ll proceed anyway.
Before I joined the Jesuits, I always assumed that the biggest resistance to the priesthood would be sexuality. While that was certainly an issue, I found that -by far- the larger resistance was the vow of obedience. Let’s face it, people just don’t like to be told anything. After I left religious life and started as a married man with a normal job, I began to pick up the same sense in civilian life also. In religious life, it’s clearer because you’re deliberately living under a vow of authority. But even without any explicit promise of obedience, I’m now convinced that the same rejection of authority pervades our culture.
Sex is just the first face of the rebellion. The rebellion is about rejecting authority of any and all kind. Rejecting sexual morality is just the first step toward rejecting all morality. Somewhere along the line, people have internally become convinced that any obstruction of their personal opinion or behavior is an affront to their dignity. They interpret it as an attack against their freedom. The interpret freedom as absolute autonomy.
Maybe sex isn’t the problem. Maybe freedom (or a misunderstanding of freedom) is.
At Wal-Mart of course people would just put up with it. You see the strangest things there all the time.
We are now at the point in society where there are no boundaries. Kate mentioned there have always been trangendered people that have used public bathrooms – enough said right there. The percentage of transgendered people in our country is less than 1%. Keep using whatever bathroom you used before. I do not believe in calling attention to this cause anymore, or making special accommodations such as bathroom changes.
I am also tired of reading stories like Christian Group that was hosting half hour free lunches and are now banned as well as advertising being pulled or celebrities pulling support from states where governors are using common sense.
The slope was predicted years ago by clergy and here we are – we’ve slipped. There is no question that our moral foundations are going, if not gone. “Passing laws” where anyone who “feels” they are such and such, can use any bathroom is opening the door to perverts and child molesters into what until now was a safe and private area.
Let’s see how far we can go with the insanity, like introducing pot as legal for recreational use.
If one disagrees with the institutionalization of gender identity bathrooms in Charlotte by ordinance, the appropriate path would seem to be to use legal resources to overturn it, including state law. I don’t see that as being gratuitous. In the extreme instances that motivated the state law, it may even be enforceable.
I’d personally prefer to allow local jurisdictions like Charlotte to make their own rules, in much the way I prefer federalism, but there’s a legitimate argument to be made in the other direction once the first shot is fired.
It’s not just confusion. You could say that tolerance of sexual deviancy is wishing those people to have a higher risk of suicide, not to mention the host of other problems they are at far greater risk for.
Acceptance is the worst possible thing we can do for them.