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.
Caitlyn Jenner’s Run at Newsom
Yesterday, former reality star and athlete Caitlyn Jenner (born Bruce Jenner) announced her candidacy for Governor of California, thanks to a recall effort aimed at current Governor Gavin Newsom. Jenner is working with a team of former Trump communications strategists, and it appears Brad Parscale helped produce this breathtaking first advertisement announcing her candidacy:
WATCH: I came here with a dream 48 years ago to be the greatest athlete in the world. Now I enter a different kind of race, arguably my most important one yet, because California is worth fighting for! pic.twitter.com/BHglwn5ZSE
— Caitlyn Jenner (@Caitlyn_Jenner) May 4, 2021
In response, we saw the political media scoffing at Jenner’s announcement. You remember those experts, don’t you? The same ones who laughed off a 2016 Donald Trump candidacy, and who learned exactly no lessons from the experience. Jenner has a winning communications team, high name recognition, a great deal of cash to fund a run, and a deeply unpopular opponent. Sound familiar?
Published in General
Oh, well that’s the Democrats, easily.
So, can I play the “My principles!” card now? Because my principles are that we do not entertain the mentally ill. We get them compassionate care. We do not elect them to high office.
Is the governor of California, high office? what could go wrong(er)?
I disagree with your opening sentence, Skyler. If Bruce Jenner wants me to call him “Caitlin,” that’s my business. I say no.
I agree with the rest of what you say.
He is mentally ill, if he has gender dysphoria. If not, he is acting in a ridiculous way without the weak excuse of mental illness.
Sullivan and Peterson are wrong. They have yielded to the trans nonsense, and so have you. You, and they, just want to pretend that you haven’t.
This is particularly disappointing in Peterson, as I believe that one of his rules is to speak the truth, or at least not lie. Even he has a spine shortage on this issue, for some reason.
I live in California and will vote on this.
Jenner is more conservative than Newsom, and therefore preferable candidate. Absent another viable option, she (or he, or whatever) will get my vote.
I suppose I should be concerned over the dangers of supporting a fiction, but honestly, California is pretty fictional already.
I have a lot of high regard for Jordan Peterson. In the end, however, he’s still an academician and he’s also a psychologist. He’s better than most, but he will always have that staining his personality.
I’m happy that these… embellishments?… of English are holding on. I think I’ll call them Rushlish.
Arguably, Trump was an old-style Democrat. But someone like that would have to run as a Republican today. And he did.
This “trans” stuff seems to be the only time when people with mental problems are indulged rather than… corrected, or whatever. Nobody (at least nobody with any sense) would agree with an anorexic “Yes, you ARE fat!” etc.
The Democrats ARE the most intolerant, but they put a lot of effort – and lies, etc – into not SEEMING that way.
Might be smarter to use Jenner to split the Democrat vote.
Yeah, I got ’em from Rush . . .
Before the modern indulgement fad, every effort was made to “correct” the person’s mental condition via therapy. Only when those efforts failed was the person put on the path to surgery.
At the Hillsdale Leadership Seminar we recently attended, one of the speakers was Abigail Shrier, author of Irreversible Damage. She spoke about how modern leftists, instead of treating teenage girls who think they have gender dysphoria, actually become supportive of their “decision” to identify as something other than a teenage girl with the usual angsts growing up. This being “supportive” includes going straight to testosterone treatment, sometimes without parents consent or even knowledge (varies by state). Her book is in my reading queue . . .
Unless his x’s and y’s were changed as well, he’s still a he in my world.
I totally agree that there is a lot of bad (woke) medicine practiced around the trans issues. And worse politics. But Jenner is an adult and to dismiss the candidate as “mentally ill” is nonsense. Being trans in itself is not a mental illness any more than being gay is. It used to be, of course. Maybe Republicans should kick out all the gays, too?
As to pronouns. Calling a he a she is nothing but a legal fiction and always will be. Like the assumption that Mr. so and so is actually rational. The contradictions in the trans ideology are too glaring (especially the conflation of biological sex with gender identity–a nonsense on stilts) . But that does not mean conservatives have to live up to their stereotype as intolerant prigs who dismiss others for trivial reasons. There is a lot more at stake in the election than if someone strikes me as weird. Heck, I managed to vote for Trump–twice.
(When Caesar was a young consul in Egypt word reached Rome that he had become a parent. “Was he the mother or the father?” was the quip of the day, given his reputation. Hardly significant historically.)
Yes, and your point? Just because an organization of psychologists, dominated by homosexuals and other mental illnesses (that’s often why they study psychology, because they are very secure in their own mental health) say that homosexuality is not an illness, doesn’t make it so. I don’t work for them, and they have psychology degrees, so it’s very unlikely that they are at all smart.
There is a world of difference between being gay and being trans. The Ls, Gs, and Bs should never have let the Ts into the club.
Ls, Gs, and Bs don’t reject their own biology. They don’t believe they’re something they’re not. They don’t demand fantastical made-up pronouns, or demand everyone use them or face prison time.
Indeed. And I don’t know if this was marketing genius on the part of the T people, or simply an effort of the LGB people to keep their movement relevant once they had achieved every plausible goal. Or perhaps both.
I will call Mr. Jenner Caitlyn because he legally changed his name, I assume, and I respect the ability to legally change one’s name.
I will continue to use masculine pronouns when referring to Mr. Jenner, and every other man, for a combination of reasons.
First, I do not believe that Mr. Jenner is other than a man. And so it would be inconsistent of me to refer to him as something else.
On the other hand, I routinely hyphenate the word God out of respect for my Jewish friends, even though I don’t believe that any deity is offended by my use of the unhyphenated word. I do that as a courtesy because I don’t consider it a declaration on my part that I believe their religious doctrine. I also don’t think that thousands of foolish young people are being led astray by Jewish activists on our college and high school campuses.
In contrast, I believe that the insistence that I use someone’s preferred but incorrect pronoun is specifically to compel me to acknowledge some thing that I don’t believe, to make a false confession, about their sexuality. I also believe that thousands of young people are being led astray and damaging their social, intellectual, and physical well-being by embracing this nonsense. And, finally, I believe that people with true emotional or physiological problems are being swept under the carpet as “normal“ when they should be seeking psychological and medical attention.
Sexual dysphoria is abnormal. It deserves attention, but not embrace as a simple alternative lifestyle. I don’t want to encourage it, and I certainly don’t want to be forced to pretend that I believe that gender and sexuality are fluid.
My point is that there are gay conservative Republicans. It is idiotic to reject them because of a term I bet you cannot define: “mental illness.” The idea that being gay is an illness in itself and not just a difference is not tenable. If you think otherwise, prove it; don’t just claim it.
No. I don’t’ have to prove anything. Being homosexual is by definition perversion. It is not natural or normal for people to prefer the same sex; as Monty Python said, “The world must be peopled.” Anyone with that inclination is a mental deviant by definition. My definition is better than theirs and I am under no obligation to academics to observe their opinion.
If there are homosexual republicans, that’s too bad. If there are homosexual democrats, that’s too bad. If there are homosexuals at all, that’s too bad. I’m not going to hurt them, but I don’t have to pretend to think it’s all peachy. Twenty or thirty years of brain washing on TV and the movies doesn’t change what is real.
What you call belief I call a feeling. No feeling, per se, is verbotten. Insisting that I change my beliefs about biology is a whole nother thing. As for whether Jenner claims to be biologically female or merely claims that her feelings of being a woman are absolute, I do not know and I doubt you do, either.
The problem is that we actually believe in these ridiculous categories of sexual identity. We think a person’s race or a person’s sexual feelings define the person. Pretty soon bust men will be calling bottom men sick.
Abnormal is not the same as mentally ill. Like you, I abhor the attempt to force people to act as if they believe what they do not and cannot believe. Unlike you, I think I can say “she” with what Jesuits used to call a “mental reservation.” In fact, I doubt that even the most woke person you can find really believes that male is female biologically. It is really a semantic argument. Conservatives used to claim that “he” included all “shes” and railed against the idea that women were NOT included in sentences like, “Anyone coming to the workshop must get his paperwork in by Tuesday.” Just think how much confusion about reality that must have caused for all those centuries…not.
Regarding your closing point, the use of man as a collective for humanity, and variations on that, seems irrelevant here to me.
Regarding mental illness, I don’t generally use that phrase. Most people swept up in the nonsense of the trans movement are going along with a fad, for various reasons. A relatively small number are suffering from emotional disorders, in my opinion. I will leave it to you to decide whether you think an emotional disorder is a mental illness. I don’t care about those semantics.
Of course, a much smaller number have an actual physiological deformity.
There’s no inconsistency. The generic is “he” when referring to unspecified people. Referring to a specific man as a she or a specific woman as a he is not correct.
I also don’t work for the Jesuits and feel no obligation to comply with their recommendation, whatever it might be.
You object to the trans imposed definitions (as do I) and then expect me to accept your definition of gay as pervert “by definition.” Round and round we go. I get that you think less of gay people than of “normal” people. I still wonder that you think that matters more than the impending debt, China’s emergence, woke universities, etc.
Who is rejecting gays? Frankly, a lot of the prominent gay conservatives I know of seem to have more balls than our RINO-infested GOP.
I don’t remember asking you to do anything.
I don’t know what that has to do with debt, China, or the like. California is lost. Nothing will save them in our lifetimes. Whatever they do just needs to be contained.
Gad Saad is not Gal Gadot:
This is the kinda thing that warms my heart. Finally someone is coming to the defense of a Republican candidate! How different would the past have been if someone stood up for Sarah Palin?
Really? You think the most prominent Jewish names now are Epstein and Weinstein? How about Einstein, Feynman?
I don’t think that’s Wonder Woman. Unless she also went trans and got a hell of a lot older.