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Conservatives and Gender Nonsense Tolerance
The whole gender identity movement, the so-called “trans” thing, the idea that sex is not biologically determined, the idea that it’s really more complicated than two overlapping bell curves of masculine and feminine traits — all of that seems pretty absurd to me. It also seems important, in that it’s the first time we Americans have been told that we have to profess belief in something patently absurd or face censure in the workplace and society — and possible prosecution in New York City.
I comment on it more often than something as ridiculous as the “trans” movement would seem to deserve. I usually comment about it on Facebook, rather than here, because I assume most people here are broadly in agreement that the whole thing is silly.
I have about 875 “friends” on Facebook. Almost all of them chose to “friend” me because of my politics and cultural criticism, since that’s about all I post there. They’re a self-selected lot, overwhelmingly conservative, and I can count on them for a decent number of “shares” (re-postings) of what I write, and a reasonable number of “likes”: most posts will get 20 or 30 likes, and a popular post might get 80 or 100 likes, with a couple of dozen shares.
Earlier today I posted the following, after reading some ridiculous article about a “trans-man” complaining about the “pain of menstruation.”
Birds and Bees 101
As far as human reproduction goes, people come in two varieties: male, and female.
Healthy males produce sperm and are capable of fertilizing eggs. Only people born male are capable of doing this.
Healthy females produce eggs and are capable of becoming pregnant and giving birth. Only people born female are capable of doing this.
No one born male is capable of giving birth. No one born female is capable of fertilizing eggs.
People can choose to affect whatever kinds of sexual identities they like. Transvestites, people who like to dress like and pass themselves off as members of the opposite sex, have always been with us. This has nothing to do with their ability to fertilize eggs or give birth. In other words, it has nothing to do with their biological sex. It is matter of style and presentation, of how they choose to act.
So-called “trans-women” are not women, but rather male transvestites dressing as women. There’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. But it is a mistake to think that they are in any sense biologically female, simply because they dress and make themselves up, and sometimes modify their bodies, so as to appear female.
Similarly, so-called “trans-men” are not men, but rather female transvestites dressing as men. Again, there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion. But it would be a mistake to believe that these women are, in any sense, biologically male.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but I keep reading about people who think “trans-man gives birth” is an extraordinary event. Women — and only women — have been giving birth for millennia, at the very least. While a woman giving birth is beautiful and wonderful, it’s nothing new.
I found the response — or lack of response — interesting. My Facebook posts about the trans movement get far fewer likes or shares than any other topic on which I post, other than the occasional obscure post about quantum computing or the like. I don’t know if the topic is just not interesting to most people, if my particular take on it is somehow off-putting, or if people have a reluctance to express an opinion about it. It doesn’t seem likely to me that hundreds of reliably conservative Facebook friends would shy away from the subject. On the other hand, I know that I’m far removed from popular culture, since I don’t watch television or listen to the radio or work in an office and mix with a lot of people. Maybe this stuff is more accepted than I want to believe.
I’d like to believe that most people simply find the topic boring or irrelevant, rather than think that people have grown to accept the nonsense and are reluctant to question it. Either way, I’ll keep commenting on it, because I think it matters. But it perplexes me just a little.
Published in Culture
Henry, thanks for your thoughtful responses.
How is your strategy working? If you don’t object to cross-dressing, how exactly are you going to defend traditional and reasonable standards of dress and grooming?
I would certainly prefer that these matters, and many others, be regulated by informally enforced social expectations, not by legal compulsion. I think that this approach has been an utter failure on every issue, or at least every one that I can think of, from premarital sex to illegitimacy to abortion to haircuts to tats to piercings to ridiculous clothing to cross-dressing and even public nudity.
The problem isn’t really the breakdown of the idea of social stigma. It is the transformation of social stigma. Stigma and ostracism are now deployed against anyone standing for traditional values or standards. It is very strange to me.
On matters of dress and grooming, people deliberately make themselves ridiculous, and we are prohibited from responding with ridicule. Ridicule is the proper response to the ridiculous. Treating a person with dignity is the proper response to a person who acts dignified. Now, the dignified are ridiculed, and the culture demands that we accord dignity to the ridiculous.
I suspect that the underlying cause is a combination of post-modernism and nihilism. These actually arise, logically and necessarily, out of the fundamental assumptions of the atheistic so-called Enlightenment, built on a quite appalling deification of the Self.
I’m becoming much grumpier about all of this. Like you, I was raised in our culture of individualism and liberty, or so they were called. Now these values are looking more like childish selfishness and libertine sociopathy. I actually get the sense that I’m beginning to see things clearly for the first time, which may be true, or may be a sign that I’m going a bit nuts.
But I don’t think that I’m going nuts, as there is empirical data, ranging from the currently exploding rates of bizarre LGBT identification — which are supposedly hard-wired and immutable, so how exactly could the prevalence be skyrocketing — to the celebration of the most ridiculous cross-dressing, to the truly appalling chemical and physical castration of confused children. And reverse castration, for which I don’t think that we even have a word — “addadictomy” is a crude joke, but the only term that I know.
Marriage is collapsing, illegitimacy is at 40%, the birth rate is well below replacement. Suicide rates are up.
But hey, we’re told, things have never been better. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Jerry,
I want to have a bigger conversation about all of this when I have more time, because I think a practical discussion of strategies of conservative argument could be useful and productive.
But I want to respond to one detail of your comment. We are not yet legally “prohibited from responding with ridicule,” though we’re on the cusp of that with this idiotic trans language stuff and the “hate speech” laws that progressives keep trying to push. It’s still legal to mock; it isn’t always socially or professionally practical to do so. I think it’s incumbent on those of us who have the practical freedom, who can express criticism without risking more than they can afford to lose, to do so.
I think we conservatives are reluctant to cause friction in social settings. Comity is a traditional value in our tolerant society. But I think it’s time that we — again, those of us who feel we can afford the consequences — express ourselves more bluntly, even if it risks causing offense.
Actually, in some jurisdictions, you are legally prohibited from responding with ridicule. This includes the entire State of New York. The very idea of anti-discrimination laws have been weaponized, for quite a long time, to stifle the express of opposition to the strange Leftist agenda on these issues.
I think NYC has restrictions regarding pronoun usage for some commercial and public entities. Are there state laws that prohibit normal citizens from expressing a view, including one critical of trans nonsense? (I hope not; I’m a normal citizen, and I live in New York state.)
Jerry and Henry: I routinely wears what are, in fact, men’s clothes to work. I wear FDUs, designed for men, lots of pockets, plus a lot of outdoor gear (parka, snowpants, boots) all likewise made for men. I’m also known to wear a barely-feminized version of a clerical shirt, pants and blazer with patches. Plus, I have very short hair.
But my guess is that you, Jerry, are probably far more uncomfortable with men dressing like women than the other way around. The horror-show of Pride parades and Drag Queen Story Hour notwithstanding, some transgendered people are really good at passing for the opposite sex.
So, frankly, what is so irritating about the current, aggressive trans activism is that if someone is good at passing, they tend to…well, pass. And no one would even notice that they were in the wrong restroom or whatever.
To instead demand—demand!—that a trans-woman be accepted merely on his say-so, without even making an effort to reduce his obvious (and, for women and girls, threatening) masculinity is not about protecting the rights or safety of a miserable minority, but rather about forcing everyone far beyond the requirements of kindness or civility and into a kind of madness.
I agree that this is beginning to fall apart.
I love that Mark Steyn asked how we can be sure that Elizabeth Warren actually is a woman?
GrannyDude, you’re generally right. I don’t mind women wearing pants and a collared shirt, though even male-style clothing for women is a bit different than actual men’s clothing.
Are the shirt buttons still on the opposite side?
Your employer is responsible for preventing you from being “transphobic,” or whatever. If you are an employer, or if you sell to the public, you are liable to a discrimination suit.
Here’s the really nifty way that this works. I don’t think that people know this, because they never thing about how a discrimination case is proven. You hardly ever have evidence that a specific decision was made on the basis of race, or sex, or gender identity (or gender identity expression or whatever the rest of the navel-gazing distinctions might be).
What you do is: (1) cite an adverse decision (you were fired, or didn’t get a promotion, or whatever), and (2) prove that the decision maker is a racist or sexist or “transphobe” or whatever. You prove #2 by showing that they made racist or sexist or “transphobic” comments.
So you better keep your mouth shut.
I think you two may be talking past each other a bit, as it’s not obvious to me that your points regarding tradition are necessarily at odds. Social norms (in this case appropriate attire) make up one type of tradition. First principles (in this case freedom of individual expression) make up another.
When Henry says “there’s nothing wrong with men and women cross-dressing,” I can both agree and disagree, depending on which tradition I am referencing. On the one hand, I DO have a problem with cross-dressing (or tattoos, to take another example) . I find it unbecoming and inappropriate. On the other hand, I’m perfectly “okay” with it in the it’s a free country sense.
The problem, of course, is the one Henry spotlights: where we’re increasingly told that some people are free to engage in whatever behaviors they wish, but that others are not free to have (or state) opinions about those behaviors — or, worse yet, are forced to endorse those behaviors. It’s hard to understand how so many people are oblivious to how dangerous a road this is to go down.
Women’s fashion is much more fluid and flexible than men’s. I don’t know if it started with the 1970’s Boomer Generation, but very few would blink now-a-days if women wore men’s clothing. Perhaps it correlates with women going out into the work world, I don’t know. But men wearing women’s clothing is a definite non-starter.
Women and men are, of course, very different creatures. One of the ways in which they’re particularly different is in their sexual flexibility. I think women can get away with dressing like men for the same reason that they can get away with all sorts of casual intimacy with each other: women are, usually, the subordinate partner in a sexual relationship, and so there’s no status cost associated with being with another woman. (In fact, the opposite is true: women in woman-to-woman relationships are relatively empowered compared to women in woman-to-man relationships.) In contrast men, not accustomed to being subordinate, generally have to reduce their relationship authority when similarly associating with another man. That cost is unappealing to most men.
This is why I believe so many women can be casually bisexual, whereas that’s unusual for men.
Funny thing is, enough women’s clothing is androgynous that it would be hard to tell it was from the women’s section if a man were wearing it. I know some guys who do this, and the effect ranges from nondescript to foppish. Not the look of your classic steak-and-potatoes man, but not “Why is that man dressed as a woman?” either.
Someone with obviously masculine features wearing distinctly feminine items is the most conspicuous.
Pay attention to the lesbian couples you know. You will see that, despite both being nominally female, one of them usually takes the male role, dresses like a man, wears a short, mannish haircut. Human nature. Couples arrange themselves in “male” and “female” roles, regardless of actual sex.
Yes, that certainly seems to be the normal arrangement. But I think there is also a lot of casual same-sex activity among women, in which the distinct sex roles, if adopted, are transient.
Pictures! I’ve only seen pictures!
Androgynous is the perfect term for what I was trying to say. I don’t know the history of fashion, but would you say it started in the 1960’s? From my understanding of women’s fashion, I don’t think that sort of androgenic look occurred before then.
Yes. For the most part, these are actually men’s clothes, the source being the common warehouse where a very nice lady sensitively asks whether you are still a small or perhaps now a medium? And my fellow supplicants and I make our requests (“one size up…”) while assuring each other that the manufacturer has obviously been stinting on the materials lately.
Recently, a politician complained that the women in my workplace are “forced” to wear men’s clothing rather than uniforms designed specifically for them. This small group of capable, brave women were called to a special meeting where they had to assure the command staff that no, they did not object to the gear they were given. Being singled out was irritating and embarrassing: if they’d had a problem with the clothing, they would’ve said so. Since they don’t see themselves, in fact, as being especially oppressed.
It started earlier than that, and hasn’t just been about dissolving dress distinctions between men and women, but also the rise of “athleisure wear” as acceptable everyday attire.
As early as the 1800s (and perhaps before then, but we have photos from the 1800s), a woman dressed mannishly for a specific purpose might not be encouraged, but might be tolerated. Pit Brow women had hygiene and safety (particularly sexual safety — trousers really do leave one less, um, accessible to the uncouth) reasons for wearing trousers. Surgeon and abolitionist Mary Edwards Walker was raised in a devoutly Christian home, but a freethinking one where boys and girls shared the farmwork and were educated alike. To dress as a man on the farm seemed no big deal, because that’s for something. To casually stroll about in public in manly dress often got her arrested — what’s that for, after all, except usurping the masculine social role?
By the 1920s, girls out for a sporting adventure might not look too different from the guys — and I’d add, not all that different from what girls look like today doing the same thing:
Save for that one gal in plaid, those girls basically look like they’re in modern sweats with galoshes. But again, sporting clothing is for something — and probably many girls of the time would have disdained such androgynous clothing as too unflattering to wear if they had the resources to go sporting in something more feminine.
The more sporting or “athletic” clothing became acceptable for simple leisure wear, leading to “athleisure”, the more androgynous clothing was likely to become. Many Americans now wear athleisure wear if they have no specific reason for dressing up, and even quite conservative Christians tend to accept athleisure wear these days as long as it’s reasonably modest and well-fitting.
In the beginning, there was the loincloth. And then the robe. Human beings discovered weaving, which produced a rectangular strip of increasingly fine and flexible fabric, expensive because the weaving was done by hand.
Your basic cover-all robe (djellabah, caftan, mumu, habit, tunic, housedress, burkah, nightgown) is simple to sew from rectangular strips, and its manufacture wastes little, if any, material. Hence its cross-cultural and historic ubiquity. (Garments sewn on the bias do waste fabric, one reason—along with the flattering drape—that a bias-sewn garment was a sign of wealth.)
A robe can be adjusted to suit most temperatures and is modest and flattering to just about everyone, and given how much is left to the notoriously imaginative eye of the beholder, it’s even sexy. But then, in truth, what isn’t?
This, by the way, is why the Muslim practice of swathing women in ambulatory body-bags to constrain male lust is either a gross error or, more likely, a useful fiction. Male lust can easily attach itself to just about anything it remotely identifies as a potential reproductive opportunity. The body bag presumably informs the possessor/possessed of that lust that the body inside the bag belongs to someone, and must be categorized as “Madonna” in the age-old Madonna-Whore dichotomy by which (so I’m told) men roughly—sometimes very roughly—sort the reproductive-aged women with whom they come into contact.
But if you are going to live and work in mixed company, and if you’ve got the technological know-how to cheaply manufacture fabric, and your society has the wherewithal to give you time to figure out how to engineer that fabric to fit the human form like, well, a glove…suddenly the possibilities for comfort, practicality and—most important!— social signaling are endless.
So we signal. OMG, do we signal!
That embarrassing and yet riveting little…detail in these images are of what, in the Middle Ages, was called a codpiece or “brais,” basically a souped-up fly so that men in pants (or pantaloons or culottes or whatever) could pee without removing all their clothing. (Eventually, the pantaloons + brais would evolve into undergarments).
And who could resist adding decoration along with, ahem, a bit of flattering amplification? (Fun fact: Henry VIII is credited with inventing what trans-men now call “packing”.)
I can’t be the only one who has had to explain to my enthralled children why some of the gorgeous suits of armor on display at New York’s Museum of Art sport large and definitely erect phalluses?
But metal work was way ahead of fabric-work: Roman armor-makers whose creations would eventually evolve into the kevlar vest I wear (sometimes) to work, sculpted beautiful muscles into their patron’s protective gear. My body armor might compress my breasts and broaden and harden my chest into a more masculine shape, but at least it doesn’t sport pecs with nips, or a six pack.
I think Twiggy may have started the fashion trend . . .
Hmm, interesting. I would think women dressing masculine for a specific purpose was normal. I would imagine in the wilderness and pioneering westward, women’s clothes might be a hindrance. But you did prod my memory about the 1920s. That might have been the first of the optional selection of masculine attire. I remember in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby that Nick Caraway’s love interest, Jordan Baker (I had to look that up, so don’t be impressed with my memory), was dressed in masculine athletic clothing. And now that I also think of it, the Brett character (I’m not going to look up her last name) in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was said to have a masculine haircut. There was a thematic point to both characters being masculine, but we don’t have to get into that here. Both novels were written in the 1920s.
LOL. OK. I’m not going to touch that.
This also prodded my memory. One of the charges against Joan of Arc that got her burned at the stake (all fallacious charges by the way) was that she dressed in men’s clothing. I believe shew wore a suit of armor. But that also goes back to functional dress rather than optionally selecting male clothing for the male look.
When Joan was on trial, she defended her choice of masculine clothing as being at least in part an anti-rape measure. Though she still got burned, I believe her accusers admitted she had a point.
It sounds so stupid, but when, ah, push comes to shove, one more sturdy barrier to get past is one more reason for the situation to de-escalate.
I think that it started as an explicitly political thing. This Atlantic article reports that early American suffragettes created controversy by wearing “bloomers” in 1851, at Seneca Falls, NY. The article is a bit unclear on the timing — this appears to have occurred after the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848. Elizabeth Smith Miller wore the pants, and was reportedly copied by the (very famous) Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her neighbor and friend, Amelia Bloomer. The word “bloomers” derived from Amelia’s last name.
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The wearing of pants by women, then, appears to have begun in the US as an overtly political act. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s husband was a noted abolitionist and Republican politician, Henry Brewster Stanton (who was also an organizer of the Free Soil Party in 1848, which eventually merged into the Republican Party when it was formed in 1856). Mrs. Stanton was a prominent political figure and abolitionist in her own right, as well.
Her practice of wearing bloomers resulted in mockery of her husband in a political campaign, using the ditty:
These lyrics do seem worth of The Steve Miller Band, so perhaps things haven’t declined as much as we tend to think. :)
Here’s link to a Google book result discussing the issue further, if you’re interested (see page 26). It is rather entertaining, but also suggests that “wearing the pants” was an explicitly political act by early suffragettes.
There was a political aspect to it.
There’s little reason to doubt the “devoutly Christian home, but [] freethinking one where boys and girls shared the farmwork and were educated alike” in which surgeon and abolitionist Mary Edwards Walker was raised was also making a political (though primarily religious) statement.
Still, part of the political statement being made is an assertion of practicality and safety: bloomers were among the first garments for women actually closed at the crotch. The reason it’s called a “pair of undies” is because it first was a pair — two legpieces loosely tied together, offering very little in the way of modesty or protection should the skirts be lifted.
Yes, wearing clothing that asserts a right to climb, stride, and in general freely move one’s body as a man does in his clothing while still being assured one’s privates are hidden does make a political assertion — but one worth making. The refinements of days gone by, when respectable women rode sidesaddle so as to not splay their legs in public and so on, had their charms, but the point Joan of Arc made to her captors has remained true: one is that much freer to move about unharmed in this big, bad world when one has the option of pants.
It was, but it was also practical. Among other things, bloomers—which had a lot less fabric around the ankles, weren’t nearly as likely to trip you as you went upstairs.
The two are not mutually exclusive (then or now). If I, as a woman, want to serve in a role traditionally reserved for men, wearing the clothing associated with that role is both practical and political. Female police officers in Britain used to wear skirts and pumps, along with small hats instead of helmets: the implications are obvious. A woman in pumps and a skirt can’t run after a perp and a helmet is both protective and increases both visual height and a real sense of authority.
High heels are a serious handicap to anything that requires walking quickly let alone running or fighting, and one might argue (well, I would) that this is part of what makes them attractive on women and creepy on men: If I go out with my husband wearing high heels (not likely, but anyway) the implication is that I am his, and he protects me. A man in heels has abdicated his responsibility for protecting the people around him, especially the women and children, from violence.
This may be why transwomen’s (MtF) clothing is disturbing: it tends not to be the ordinary, practical sort of women’s clothing and is, instead the kind that we stodgy middle aged scolds disapprove of no matter who wears it. Miniskirts, halter tops and tube tops, low-cut dresses, high heels…all the kit that is incapacitating and implies both sexual invitation and the jettisoning of adult, but especially male, responsibility.
Meanwhile, weirdly, transgendered MtFs can apparently retain what I think of as stereotypically male forms of conflict resolution. How’d you like to share a ladies’ locker room with that guy?
Yes, the cross-dressing we’re likely to notice is of this obvious sort.
I don’t know how large the population of those who deal with their feelings of gender nonconformity by “passing” for the sex they were born as (that is, they don’t avail themselves of pharmaceuticals and surgeries which would enable them to pass as the opposite sex, but instead settle for keeping the body they were born with, opting to limit what they wear from the opposite sex’s wardrobe to the inconspicuous) is, and I especially do not know its size relative to those who choose more drastic — and especially most obvious — measures. But it’s nonzero.
Good comments, GrannyDude, and that tranny video is . . . interesting. I’m not sure if it’s funny or disturbing.
I’m not a fan of high heels — for women, I mean, though obviously not for men either.
I get your point about pumps and a skirt making it difficult for a policewoman to chase a perp, but this evades the bigger question. Even in ordinary clothing, it is the very, very rare woman who is capable of chasing and physically taking down a perp. This leads into bigger questions about whether women should be police officers at all, which seems doubtful to me.
Well, my daughter’s done it, A.P. and more than once!
Being a police officer is different from being, say, a front line soldier. Combat is a comparatively small part of the job. An awful lot of it is talking to people. When an arrest goes “hands-on” both the smaller male and female officers have tools they can use to subdue a suspect if he or she isn’t cooperating. And if the suspect in question is female, a female police officer can search her, and do so a lot more rigorously than most male officers can or will manage. Investigation doesn’t require muscle, and interview/interrogation is something women are often good at.
But it does require an ability and willingness to keep strange hours, to stomach awful sights, sounds and smells, a willingness to be aggressive at times, the ability to project authority and, of course, physical courage. It’s a physically and emotionally demanding job, and it’s relatively dangerous, neither of which seem to attract a whole lot of women.
And it’s a tough job to combine with being the mother of small children.
Oh most definitely. I would imagine it’s hard not to bring the job issues and frustrations home.