Transphobia enables fascists and bigots to hide behind vaguery

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Anti-trans activists have never felt the need to map their words onto reality.

One major expression of this is how often the talking points are couched in terms such as “gender ideology.” Ohio Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur and her recent ad campaign denouncing “transgender ideology” is only the latest one to demonstrate this.

The motivator in the Ohio Congressional race (other than transphobia) is team sports psychology. The Democratic Party is the half of the duopoly that has historically been more comfortable with espousing trans rights. Somehow, I think Ohio Democrats who support trans rights are hearing a lot of “you don’t want the Republican to win, do you?”

Basically: ‘it’s not trans people, it‘s wokeness and gender ideology- don’t get it twisted or you’re a traitor.’

One of my favorites in this category of hide the ball is the Cold-War-era-communism-to-wokeness theory. Jordon Peterson is fond of that one: he thinks trans people wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for communist sympathizers during the Cold War smuggling their ideas into western universities disguised as feminism.

There’s a handful of obvious refutations for these talking points, not least among them are the uniformity of the awareness of transgender people of their identity across cultural and geographical lines. What about the conservative trans people who would scream bloody murder if anyone connected that to them? What about the large numbers of us who just don’t follow politics that often?

I mean, most of us are tuned in pretty hard these days (living under the post-2024 Mafiosi regime leaves little choice) but there’s still some typical diversity. Lots of trans people are inclined to be apolitical for the same reasons as anyone else: it’s stressful, it’s a lot of information and we all have lives (or at least more of one than that, right?).

How many conversations on TV and the internet turn toward the dangers of cultural fluidity while casually tossing out things like preferred pronouns as examples without dwelling on it for longer than two seconds? How often is the name Dylan Mulvaney used as a byword for leftist-cringe? What did she do again? Oh yeah, her face was on a beer can for…what was it? A month or so, out of one summer? For making Kid Rock put sleeves over his beer so he doesn’t have to be seen drinking Bud Light in public?

This is particularly insidious when it comes form figures associated with the left like Marcy Kaptur and Bill Maher. Maher said- between 2020 and 2024 -that the solution to beating Republicans was not “throwing trans people under the bus.” Post-2024, he says that the Democratic Party needs to change it’s stance on “gender”. There’s a reason why he’s stopping at the most vague language: he doesn’t know what he’s railing against. He saw the Quiet On Set documentary about the rampant pedophilia at Nickelodeon studios throughout the nineties, drew a connection to Disney and jumped on board with Ron DeSantis calling LGBT representation in Disney media child grooming. Oh yeah, then he got drunk in front of children on Club Rando and used a little girl for a prop in a sex joke.

Tulsi Gabbard is another gem. Before her MAGA pivot in 2022, she professed LGBT ally-ship. Gabbard said, on at least one occasion, that she would “always” stand by the LGBT community. Post-2022, she said that the Democratic Party, as a whole, was ideologically committed to erasing biological sex. This, she said, amounted to a war on proper-noun Truth. She promptly hosted interviews with professional loser Riley Gaines about the fears of “men in women’s sports”.

The sports fixation in general is revealing. There is nothing to be said against us objectively so they have to hyper-focus on niche areas where complains can be found and elevated.

I could go on.

I’m a trans person myself so I’m bound to be a little provincial about this. Yes, it has the potential to weaponize public policy against me, my family and people like us. But there are consequences beyond the transgender community. Tulsi Gabbard may have hung her argument on trans people but she relates her conclusions to modern feminism in general. Bill Maher didn’t say the Democratic Party needs to change its stance on transgender people at first: he began with the Democratic stance on “gender.” Meanwhile, Roe V. Wade gets rolled back and public figures get to say- out loud, in public -that women shouldn’t have the right to vote.

If you don’t see the ripples then you haven’t been paying attention. Yes, equating civil rights for trans people to feminism in a conspiratorial idea-constellation is a neat little slight-of-hand move that your average dipshit won’t see past. It makes it easier for anti-feminists to get on board and obfuscates the fundamental reality of trans people regardless of societal context. While we are not and never have been a social movement, these lines of thought are designed to make people see us as one.

I wrote another entry a while back about this Gallup poll from a few years ago. The amount of respondents who said that being trans was morally acceptable exactly matched the percentage of respondents who said they knew a trans person. That’s kind of what my mind keeps coming back to. What if we just don’t occur in nature very often, which means only a tiny number of cis people know us, meaning only a tiny number of cis people aren’t afraid of us?

I really don’t wanna go down that route. But a lot of people make it look easy.

https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/the-ohio-democratic-party-is-silencing?img=https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F742cc126-5fe3-4dbc-9db1-9c023dbb69d5_2384x1666.png&open=false

https://youtu.be/Mufh9oKYf5Y?is=vP26PZA8dIKOBS7C

https://youtu.be/oGtseVUw-_M?is=VnEXTjTJuuZEEKch

https://youtu.be/giBhwQnuy9k?is=u9Yvkct-JInjyv_2

https://tulsi.substack.com/p/modern-feminism-is-anti-woman

https://scnr.com/article/tulsi-gabbard-quits-democratic-party-over-wokeness-and-anti-white-racism_f008d0b6d49111ed9f19b07b25f8c291

Wake of the black swan

There are two particular posts on this blog: one from last year and another from further back. Both ‘A perfectly good abstraction’ and ‘Me and American Patriotism’ are retrospectives on dialectics that have played out in my mind and my life.

Both of them also discuss ethics; distinct from philosophy. A philosophy can be a thought experiement, a belief or a way of life. Ethics are relatively simple: how we should behave toward one another. An ‘ethic’ is also a well-used way of denoting how people treat each other right now. Modes of behavior shared by large groups can denote the presence of ideas too diaphonous for meaning but thin enough to stretch far and connect much.

A widespread, unconscious attitude would match those proportions. While a given ‘ethic’ can also be an ideological commitment, they are often psychological. The mind of a given person may or may not make any connection between ideology and an unconscious attitude.

Speaking of all that: remember when I posted about Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan? I worried that I was being too critical of Biden and that I should be more willing to give points fairly.

I suspect I’ll continue writing about politics here but I don’t know that I will.

I’m not a sore loser and I don’t mind being wrong…but I may have been seriously wrong about some of the things I mentioned in those two posts.

I’m an American so I can’t help thinking about American politics and society in a provincial way. I took it for granted that Americans generally value the ethical enshrinement of the individual in the American Constitution. Consider many of the assumptions we make as we write: anyone is allowed to have any reaction to what I say but I am still allowed to say it. To call for someone to be deplatformed or for their message to be lumped into an ideological generalization is to discredit oneself. It testifies to a fear of ideas under discussion that can only be assuaged by throwing out the discussion.

Many Americans probably do value those things. But I made assumptions about scale.

A perfectly good abstraction

My parents were politcal opposites for the entire time they were married. My mother leaned left and my father leaned right. Their beliefs had something deeper in common, though: fear of tyranny. Both of them believed (as they do now) that a person is smart but people are stupid. From this it follows that institutions are zombies animated by the collective subconscious. A zombie is dependant on the magician who raises them. If such a creature is composed of more than one being, then control gets difficult for the magician (who is only one person). If the magician is subsumed by their creation, then the leviathan is bound only by the currents and eddies in the minds of its sleeping vessels.

Another way to put it:

Institutions are not evil. They are only tools. Yet there is a conflict between the ends and the means. It makes sense to want a stronger tool to do a better job. Often, institutions become more complicated as they grow stronger. The strongest institution is therefore the best tool and the hardest to grasp.

My parents had this in common because my mother was a member of the Green Party and my father was a Libertarian. Both perspectives fear the excesses of unchecked institutions. I tried to point this out to them more than once and they never agreed with me.

According to my dad, my mom made the mistake of thinking that one rogue institution can be checked by another. According to my mom, my dad made the mistake of thinking that the dream of a better world (or, let’s say, the social imagination) itself was the path to zombie institutions.

Skip a few decades and grown-up Ailix is still puzzling over this. If there is any love in America for zombie institutions…it can’t be said out loud. To say that an institution can take care of society’s every need, like the parent of a perpetual child, is to invite the accusation of authoritarianism. I agree. A modern American self-identified socialist would not (if asked) agree that social safety net institutions should be run on a non-democratic, top-down basis, as in the former Soviet Union.

My dad, in his characterisation of the left, often quoted Hilary Clinton’s “it takes a village to raise a child” statement. No matter what Hilary Clinton believes herself, she would never win another election for as long she lived if she said, out loud, that “individual autonomy is bullshit and we need institutions to run everything.” Maybe she believes that, maybe she doesn’t, but no one would vote for her again if she said so.

For another oddity, self-proclaimed Libertarians who enter American politics typically end up as doctrinaire Republicans in all but name. For all of their rugged individualism and Ayn Rand quotes, they almost always bend the knee to the right wing corporate and religious prerogative and almost always welch on matters of individual liberty that align with the left.

Libertarianism is the closest thing that exists to a national American ethic; and a societal ethic is more subtle than a political philosophy. Americans in general believe in individual autonomy. No American who wants a political career would openly deny that the thriving individual is the ground on which democracy is built. At the same time, those who espouse individualism the most treat it like a downer of a grown-up who doesn’t understand just how cool capitalist feudalism and theocracy are.

Asking a conservative about this often produces the answer that libertarianism is a perfectly good political philosophy but it can only be the letter of the law. Social conservatives believe in a separate but equally necessary spirit of the law.

Asking a liberal about this often makes them look at you like you’re crazy…while standing on the bedrock of libertarianism to resist conservative overreach. Social liberal values, like social justice, depend on a libertarian ethic. In a world where everyone is entitled to all the happiness that they can claim for themselves without disenfranchising or abusing others, there is no reason to marginalize differences simply for existing.

Like art and architypes, the gap between the American ethic of libertarianism and the realities of American politics is huge.

As someone raised by a liberal and a conservative who both internalized the libertarian ethic, I’m frustrated by the popular wisdom that the American duopoly is permanent. Many conservatives hate the RNC and many liberals hate the DNC. Many of those same conservatives and liberals also think that the Republican and Democratic parties are unstoppable and that the lesser of two evils must always be tolerated.

To paraphrase Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: Machievelli was not an evil genius- he was only the voice of fact divorced from truth. Hugo wrote that wisdom is the reconciliation of fact with truth. That reconciliation can only come from exposure and dialogue and the conflicts that may arise from it. It depends on contact which depends on patience, compassion and intellectual curiosity.

You probably don’t need one more person telling you that social media is dividing everyone by keeping us in our echo-chambers. But withdrawal from contact ironically makes you dependant on others. An isolated group that acts on a single unquestioned perspective will function exactly like a zombie institution. The hard edges of fact are banished completely and truth is reduced to consensus. Meanwhile: “Doesn’t it just suck that we’re stranded with this duopoloy that no one wants?”