The Cultural Ark
By ROD DREHER
Facebook, which forces people to use their real names to post on the site, has changed its ID policy in another area:
Future historians, I think, will look back on this decadent period as a time when our civilization lost its mind. But there’s a long way to go yet, and more disorder to introduce. Charlotte Allen, writing on “the transgender triumph,” explores how transgender activists have so co-opted the political and media class that any discussion, even among scientists and academics, of transgenderism that contradicts their preferred narrative is stigmatized, and even turned into a career-ender. As Allen documents, to contradict the activists, even if one is a transgender oneself, is to invite vicious, relentless attack. So everybody falls in line:
In 2013, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that allows K-12 students to use whichever restrooms and locker rooms they want. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia now have legislation in place forbidding discrimination against transgenders, including in access to public bathrooms (some of the laws exempt school facilities). The question of whether transgender students have a right to play on the gender-specific athletic teams of their choice has remained more troublesome. That’s partly because transgender girls tend to be taller, stronger, and potentially more successfully on the field than genetic girls, and partly because of the locker-room problem: Genital-transforming surgery is almost never performed on minors, so naked transgender adolescents tend to look, despite their best efforts to the contrary, like members of the sex to which they say they don’t belong.
To accommodate the preferences of an estimated 700,000 Americans (of a population of 320 million) — that’s 0.2 percent of the population — we are being instructed, indeed commanded, to abandon the idea that there is something essential and unchosen about maleness and femaleness. And to say, “Hey, wait, there’s something wrong with this” is to invite accusations of “waging culture war.”
The most radical, revolutionary thing any prominent American has ever said was articulated by Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing on behalf of the Court majority in the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey opinion:
Facebook, which forces people to use their real names to post on the site, has changed its ID policy in another area:
Facebook already has a range of gender options for those who don’t fit neatly into male/female categories, but it just took that accommodation one step further. Much like Google, Facebook now lets you specify any gender you want – you’re not limited to the social network’s definitions. As before, you can choose who sees that sexuality in case some of your visitors are less tolerant than others.Reality is increasingly impossible to satire. Do I care whether or not someone chooses to pretend he’s a woman on social media? Not in the least. Do I care whether the idea that maleness and femaleness is entirely a fiction created by the choosing individual goes mainstream? Yes, very much. And you can’t get more mainstream than Facebook.
Future historians, I think, will look back on this decadent period as a time when our civilization lost its mind. But there’s a long way to go yet, and more disorder to introduce. Charlotte Allen, writing on “the transgender triumph,” explores how transgender activists have so co-opted the political and media class that any discussion, even among scientists and academics, of transgenderism that contradicts their preferred narrative is stigmatized, and even turned into a career-ender. As Allen documents, to contradict the activists, even if one is a transgender oneself, is to invite vicious, relentless attack. So everybody falls in line:
Any sort of biological or genetic evidence to the contrary is dismissed as “transphobic” propaganda, and the phrase “Transwomen are women, period” has become a mantra for those who would like to stay on the good side of transgender activists. In a September 29, 2014, article for the online magazine Autostraddle titled “Please Stop Saying That Trans Women Were Born Boys,” male-to-female activist Mari Brighe argued that the mere description of someone as “genetically” or “biologically” male or female is bigoted. “I wasn’t born a boy, and I’ve never been a boy, and it’s like a knife to my heart every single time I hear that phrase,” Brighe wrote.Legislators, regulators, and school districts have duly followed the activists’ lead. During the 2000s many states passed laws allowing people to change retroactively the “M” or “F” designations on their birth certificates if they had undergone transformative surgery—and a few states did not require even the surgery as long as the applicant had undergone, say, hormone therapy or some other secondary sex-altering procedure. In December 2014 the New York City Council passed a bill, subsequently signed into law by Mayor Bill de Blasio, eliminating even those requirements: As long as a licensed health care provider states under oath that someone’s “assigned” sex as listed on the birth certificate doesn’t match his or her self-description, the birth certificate can be changed. “It won’t be about your body. It’s about how you identify,” the law’s sponsor, Democratic council member Corey Johnson, explained.
In 2013, California governor Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that allows K-12 students to use whichever restrooms and locker rooms they want. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia now have legislation in place forbidding discrimination against transgenders, including in access to public bathrooms (some of the laws exempt school facilities). The question of whether transgender students have a right to play on the gender-specific athletic teams of their choice has remained more troublesome. That’s partly because transgender girls tend to be taller, stronger, and potentially more successfully on the field than genetic girls, and partly because of the locker-room problem: Genital-transforming surgery is almost never performed on minors, so naked transgender adolescents tend to look, despite their best efforts to the contrary, like members of the sex to which they say they don’t belong.
To accommodate the preferences of an estimated 700,000 Americans (of a population of 320 million) — that’s 0.2 percent of the population — we are being instructed, indeed commanded, to abandon the idea that there is something essential and unchosen about maleness and femaleness. And to say, “Hey, wait, there’s something wrong with this” is to invite accusations of “waging culture war.”
The most radical, revolutionary thing any prominent American has ever said was articulated by Supreme Court Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing on behalf of the Court majority in the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey opinion:
At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.The idea that nature exists as a blank canvas onto which we are entitled to project our own wills, restrained by nothing except our imaginations, is at the heart of nihilism. Kennedy’s idea vacates the concept of the common good. Yet I believe that most Americans, even those who recoil at the idea of transgenderism, would agree with Kennedy’s statement, at least in principle. It is how we have been acculturated. We don’t believe that the point of life is to seek harmony with an unseen order; we, as Americans, believe that we have the right to impose our own idea of order onto the natural world, damn the consequences.
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