Trying to legislate and censor transgenderism out of existence is as dumb as lying about its attributes
None of this bullshit will brighten young American minds, which should be the overriding concern
Every year, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) plays host to some of the most extreme public political rhetoric on offer. The bssic idea is apparently to extend the opening of Overton window rightward: Say it at CPAC, and maybe it shifts from an “alt-right” stance to a policy stance up for serious consideration.
At this year's conference, someone finally indulged the “they want trans genocide” crowd by essentially calling for an wholesale end to transgenderism by some unspecified mechanism.
Knowles, who looks and talks like someone so hooked on midget-porn that his sleep patterns are clearly being affected, advanced what he seems to believe is sound logic in declaring that if anyone can claim to be transgender, than the entire concept is moot.
I guess he's right. Consider the case of highly decorated bullshitter Latoya Snell. Because she's a fat black layabout who lies incessantly about her running accomplishments, any overweight person who takes up painfully slow running to deal with physical or psychological malaise is also a fraud and should be mocked back onto the couch.
The main problem—there are many—with Knowles’ statements is that's he's plain wrong. Gender dysphoria is a real, known, undeniable condition that has probably existed for as long as the fully human mind has. The fact that a high percentage of people currently swept up in gender-bending are fundamentally troubled by something else—mostly fucked-up adults—doesn't change this; it just offers lazy thinkers a lazy avenue toward a non-solution.
John Irving is a crass, brilliant and fearless writer known for "up close” prose, usually cringe-inducing depictions of intimate interactions between dysfunctional family members. His rare gift is the ability to unspool painful narratives that strike readers not in a “Look what happens to other, weird people” sense, but in a “I do believe I've lived some of this shit myself” way.
John Irving doesn't just report on his own characters. He gets down on his hands and knees and investigates them. (See also: Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Franzen, Harry Crews.)
Irving is perhaps most acclaimed for his 1985 novel Cider House Rules. Fair enough; A Prayer for Owen Meany is my favorite. But in 1978, Irving published a game-changer with The World According to Garp.
I read Garp soon after it came out in paperback and one of my parents bought it. Maybe in 1980, when I was ten years old. (Irving, Stephen King, and Edgar Allan Poe are not considered light or lighthearted reading for fourth-graders, and I'm sure I can draw straight lines between their work and my own manner of literary expression.) One of the characters in Garp was a former football player the Philadelphia Eagles named Roberta, a confidant of the titular character who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery.
Roberta was not portrayed as a deviant or fallen figure. Roberta was a thoroughgoing bad-ass.
In that era, such people, almost all of them born men, were called transsexuals. People who enjoyed dressing in the standard garb of the opposite sex—be this for performative reasons a la David Bowie or as part of a self-identity exploration, were known as transvestites.
I can't recall how at age ten I verified these things. I must have asked one of my parents. But wherever I got my info, I came away with the understanding that sometimes, this is how people can be different. I would later learn that sex-reassignment surgery is the best available treatment for some people with gender dysphoria, the “true prevalence” of which was maybe one in a hundred for a long time.
As a college senior I took an astrophysics class taught by a transsexual female professor. This was one of the most enjoyable learning experiences I've had. I'm already I'd have found the material engrossing no matter the instructor, but my professor was fantastic. It would have been hard if not impossible to conclude that there was anything "wrong with or even strange about her, other than all physicists striking most others as a little kooky or distracted.
The explosion over the past seven or eight years in younger people in Western societies identifying as trans or queer is plainly rooted in factors other than core gender identity. But even were this not the case, I think it's patently insane for teenagers to undergo reassignment surgeries, especially without their parents’ blessing or even their knowledge. The vast majority of teens who switch gender identities later change their minds, only to find themselves sterilized and maimed.
That such nasty outcomes are exactly what trans-rights advocates and Wokish people seem to want greatly complicates gender activism; despite these assholes blatantly announcing their destructive intentions through words such as “dismantle” and “disrupt” and “problematize,” the public refuses to accept that almost all Wokism is resentment-fueled social and literal vandalism. TRAs are just Michael Knowleses at the other extreme. And the Wokish hate educational proficiency and tools like the SAT that reveal it, because they themselves are sullen, drooling morons.
The governor of Tennessee, Bill Lee (not “The Spaceman”), recently signed into law a ban on drag shows in certain public spaces as well as the forbidding of reassignment surgeries and puberty-blockers for minors.
Note the amount of work the word “first” does in this headline. Fox News wants its readers to come aboard for what promises to be a long and lengthening national tour.
As I've mentioned, my issue with drag shows or gender-themed classroom instruction isn't that these are immoral. It's that they're useless in an educational context. American kids are already fucking dumb on an embarrassing scale, and they should be learning nothing but math, science, and communication skills in schools, at least through eighth grade or so.
Civic leaders like Bill Lee should be agitating to remove the Critical Race Theory bullshit that Wokish education consultants—all of whom are as viciously retarded as they are overpaid—have managed to ram into public-school curricula around the country (another think you can largely thank the sordid Bill and Melinda Gates for) and especially in social sewers like New York, Los Angeles, Washington, and San Francisco. This might require somehow dissolving existing school boards and entire administrative systems to get these morbid, ugly fuckers out of power.
I consider the proper schooling of children important. Are schools in Singapore or Seoul or Tokyo or Mumbai or Doha or Beijing awash in drag-queen or anti-evolution controversies? Sure, you can find a few issues with the workings of those places’ ambient societies. But their kids become adults who can solve problems, whereas ours tend to become scooter-riding, slack-faced pre-diabetic dimwits in alarming numbers. And that includes millions of better-off kids.
Don't expect either the Bible-bangers or the purple-banged to be of much help here, or with anything. Americans are far too distracted by bullshit right now to fret over the entire nation becoming an intellectual backwater. How many Asians do the leaders of this shithole expect to import to America's professional-technical sectors in order to offset its pasty, flabby, imbecilic native biomass and preserve the country's basic economic standing? Someone's surely pondered this.
The entire country is shit, and its schools are only one failing. Properly fixing schools doesn't include making broader targets of trannies. Pols like Bill Lee and goober like Michael Knowles know this, but they also know binary blather and ill-considered bans are one way to curry favor with yahoo in the electorate without actually fixing fuck-all.