Well, how special .. we have several state Attorney Generals who want to put in prison people who deny the Settled Science(tm) of Anthropomorphic Global Warming, at the same time, we had the 4th Circuit Appellate court rule that biological sex is a myth. (from page six of the ruling).
The scare quotes around biological sex are especially precious.
Black is white; up is down; and ….
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” (“1984” Orwell)
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
I saw this story earlier today on the Bing Carousel of popular news stories.
An appropriate quote that we’ve all seen before:
How long we will continue to indulge the mentally ill? Play dress-up all you want, but the rest of it stays “normal.”
The drag queens use the men’s room, and that’s how it has to be.
This is a joke, right?
Great post. I was just talking about Orwell in my classes today, and on this issue of transgenders.
Class, the words for today are “en banc hearing on appeal.”
How long would it take for The Forces Of Tolerance to key my car if I applied a bumper sticker reading “Nouns Have A Gender. People Have A Sex.”?
Have the bumper sticker made in a language where actual gender rules apply and you should be safe.
Oh no! Someone casually used the N word. They prefer to be called PPoTs now! (Person, Place,or Thing)
-Thought Police Intervene-
I denounced my overly snarky pedantry. In my defense, my spirit animal is a neck-beard. Also my toenails got ripped out when I accidentally fell down the stairs.
Yeah, Mac, but in most of those languages the adjectives and pronouns have gender too, and then the sticker gets too long, and then it loses the whole impact.
Although now you make me want to start using the words “actress”, “waitress”, and “aviatrix”. Just because.
Songstresses lead to Stressstresses
Personally I would feel funny always having to use the toilet when all the guys get to use the urinal. I suppose getting rid of urinals will be next.
I have a feeling that if men everywhere go into all of the genderless bathrooms and piss all over the seats, the laws will change back pretty darn quickly.
Or peeing standing up becomes a felony.
Trump bows before tranny-Zod.
He sure gave PC what for, didn’t he?
I can’t wait for the Sitzpinkler Enforcement Act to come around.
Yeesh, but we live in an increasingly stupid totalitarian country.
Named in honor of the former governor of Cully-forniya.
Things seem to have become profoundly weird lately.
Whom the gods would destroy . . . , right?
The drag queens use the men’s room, and that’s how it has to be.
Well, no, the dude with the facial scruff—who was born with lady parts (and is a co-worker of mine)—goes into the men’s room, enters a booth, and uses the toilet there.
You guys are none the wiser, and I don’t want him in the ladies’ room.
K?
It should be possible to prosecute a perv for being in the ladies room. It should not be possible for a perv to claim he’s trans and escape prosecution.
So how do you tell the difference between a perv and a trans?
The perv is peeking into your bathroom stall; the trans is fervently hoping that no one is peeking into his.
This is not about transsexualism: It’s about the state violating our most private of spaces to soften us up for further control. It’s about humiliating us by forcing us to accept an obvious lie. It’s about bludgeoning those icky red-staters into submission via weaponized compassion.
If you argue about who is a dude and who can pee where, you’re consenting to do battle on THEIR turf according to THEIR terms, and they know from past experience that they will win on those terms.
The issue is never the issue. Power is the issue. Push back against that aspect.
And please remember that nobody transitions except as a way of escaping a relentless hell that they did not ask for. Smug remarks about genitalia are gratuitously cruel.
Focus on the coercion; ignore the Kafkatrap.
I’m all in favor of some consideration for them rare poor souls born with chromosomal abnormalities and ambiguous genetalia and the like. The boy who decides he likes Barbie more than baseball and wants to wear a dress, not so much.
Having actually spent time around drag queens, I know where they went.
For the the personal is political/you will be made to care subset of the LGBT– community, however large or small that subset is, I think it’s about them using the state to force us to accept as normal their narcissisistic pathologies. So from where I sit, it’s both transsexualism and state coercion.
Isn’t the Kafkatrap unavoidable as long as subjective realities are allowed to prevail over objective ones?
Serious question.
Serious answer: oh hell yeah — and that’s how the lefties like it.
Thinking more about dicentra’s comment, I see some good points, but no hard solution. If I can tease it out properly, the argument is to leave the laws as they are and let people use the facilities that they superficially should. I’m not sure how workable that is given our litigious society. No matter how careful a man identifying as a woman is, it’s always possible someone else will see “the truth” about them and raise a stink about it, with good reason.
It will take a lot of convincing for me to get to the point of indulging someone’s mental illness as a matter of law.
However, I agree that who is peeing where is not the point. The point is to destroy societal norms, and in the process make us even more uncomfortable around strangers. That makes us easier to control.
Eventually all public restrooms will be single-user, and there will be quite a lot more than just two in any establishment with as much traffic as, say, a Target.
Besides eliminating the tranny question, it will make bathroom use less social. Which will suit us guys just fine I think, though “the girls” when dining out will need to find someplace else to go and girl-talk away from “the boys.”
Fed progressives captured the bathrooms back with Teddy Kennedy’s ADA: found that so successful they’re merely following on to see what all can be milked from more of it. States? Resisters are rather like beaten wives, when they haven’t given up and begun acting like wives gleefully participating in the beating of others.
Listen, proteins, let me tell you something, look, lighten up.
Two Corinthians turn in to a supper club that’s perilously close to the Chequamegon National Forest and can’t decide whether to choose Stall #1 or Stall #2.
Say, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
If you argue about who is a dude and who can pee where, you’re consenting to do battle on THEIR turf according to THEIR terms, and they know from past experience that they will win on those terms.
Under some current laws (the most permissive, I’ll grant you), I could walk into any women’s restroom in that jurisdiction, without even putting forth the minimal effort to “appear” like I belonged. And any woman who didn’t like that would just have to grin and bear it, because — hey — gender identity is all in your head, after all, and it’s pretty fluid. Maybe I just had one too many 901 PMs and decided I was feeling girly. Point is, it’s now legal, and it’s within my power, to decide what gender I am at the drop of a hat, for any reason at all or for none whatsoever…and any cis-gender who disagrees is free to suck my cock. Or clit. Whatever I feel like having that day.
If you can show me a way to address that situation — which I think we both agree should not happen — *without* bringing up the plain and simple facts that 1) I am clearly a dude and 2) that I shouldn’t be able to piss in the ladies’ room, I would appreciate it. Biologically speaking, there are men and there are women. The basic binary option for public restrooms was created in a time when people understood and acknowledged the difference. I don’t see how to wage this fight without making that difference explicit again.
And look, speaking only for myself, I don’t care about finding myself in a restroom with your trans-male friend. If she’s passable, I won’t even notice. No big deal. And if she’s not, well, I may be thrown a bit but I won’t say anything. Nor would I say anything if she decided to use the women’s restroom, though that would obviously look odder the more passable she got. I can deal with outliers to generally binary options, like most people can. What I can’t deal with is when the outliers get to define the binary option.
Strictly speaking I’m aware what I’m about to do here is uncalled for (and may be greeted with some justified hostility owing to the interruption). I do it nevertheless, simply on that account (that it’s uncalled for), for there are indications here — even here in 4th century BC Athens — of our current problem: reconciling nature and custom (nomos, law) in our politics. It’s an enduring problem (or tension, as Strauss puts it). So, herewith a brief passage from ch. 4, “Pausanias [1]”, in Leo Strauss’ On Plato’s Symposium:
*** In the Symposium, the analysis of eros is modified not only by the command to praise Eros. I refer to the allusions to the year 416, the gross impiety committed at that time and then somehow forgiven in 407. The background of that is the accusation against Socrates, and this means the question of the life of the philosopher in tension with the life of the polis. By the link-up of the years 416 and 407 Plato indicates that in studying eros we must not forget for one moment the highest activities of men — political and philosophic. This raises the question of the relationship of eros to political life on the one hand and to philosophy on the other. As to political life, we have seen in the Republic that in the purely political consideration on the highest level silence is preserved regarding procreation. In the second book, where he gives reasons for the desire of men to form society he mentions food, drink, and shelter but is completely silent about procreation. Later on, in the ninth book, the tyrant, the worst degradation of political life, is identified with eros. Furthermore, in the psychology of the [p.59] Republic, eros, which is the same as desire — in the Greek epithumia — as we shall see later in the Symposium, is presented as the lowest part of man, lower than spiritedness, to say nothing of reason. The polis, we can say, necessitates law, nomos, and eros is not essentially legal. I think that everyone must admit that — the final and essential concern of eros is not legality. Yet we could say, is not love of country a modification of eros? There is this difficulty: What is the opposite of love of country? Let us say treason. But what is the primary object of high treason? Is it selling out a given country, or is it not at least as much selling out the established order? Political crimes are never really crimes against the country; as political crimes they are directed against the constitution. The polity, however, never lets you meet the country naked. We always meet it clothed in a political form. And the loyalty which is demanded, as every loyalty discussion shows, refers not to the unclothed country but to the country defined in terms of its constitution. Love of country, then, is in a concrete form a love of country as modified and constituted by its polity, and the polity expresses itself in law. This means that the country is unthinkable without the element of compulsion — laws — and therefore of punishment. There is a certain harshness which essentially belongs to political life, which shows the tension between eros and political life.
To take a Platonic example, which is always best when discussing a Platonic problem, the best polity as presented in the Republic stands and falls by the noble lie. The indication is not that in imperfect polities we do not need a lie, but that they are based on base lies. There is an element of the artificial and untruth that is essential to political life. Philosophy, on the other hand, is love of truth. There is an old presentation of this difference: the naked soul confronted with the naked truth, in a gymnasion, the Greek word for gymnasium. In other contexts, this is also taken as a place for intellectual stripping. Eros is connected with stripping. Philosophy is a stripping on the highest level, the mind. The political life is never a life of stripping. I can also state this as follows: political life is, of course, public life. The erotic life is private life, and therefore there is a fundamental tension between the two. I can illustrate this as follows: There was a man who in a way demanded absolute politicization and that was Marx. Marx spoke of the collectivization of man to be brought about by the communist society. All privacy, all private property, as well as all misery, is connected with the division of labor, and therefore the perfect society would be one in which the division of labor is completely abolished. But the same Marx, at least in his early writings, mentions the fact that the root of the division of labor [p.60] is man’s bisexuality. He says in so many words that the fundamental act of the division of labor is the sexual act. The paradoxical conclusion would be that perfect communism would have to abolish sexual difference and produce men in test tubes. Whether Marx intended this is not for us to investigate here, but it only shows that if you think through the problem of public, publicity, collectivization, you see with the greatest clarity that there is something fundamentally and absolutely irreducible in man on the most massive level — the erotic life, which in this respect agrees with the life of the mind — which is not susceptible of being collectivized. ***
.
Pausanias (we come to learn) is a pederast who puts the demand that law, nomos, make normal his passion, for nature cannot. Something similar is going on among us.
As an adult I am not worried about a passable transgender/transvestite/whatever. The point is that someone should not get sued or jailed for tossing an obvious pervert out of a locker room.
And pave the way for far more unsavory activities in said bathrooms…
There’s a secondary, related point when the girl kicker on the h.s. football decides she should get to use the team’s locker room & showers too because she’s just one of the guys.
Or some school recruits a ringer to the girls basketball/hockey/softball team.
Or, in the less-and-less-private sphere, when somebody decides to go for one of those first! boxchecks a la first “man” to become pregnant to being the first woman (who identifies as male) to be awarded the BSA’s Eagle rank.
***
This crap doesn’t end until we reach the Huxlean point where the adults stand around and coo over the prepubescent children molesting each other in the sandbox.
I also think “Brave New World” whenever I hear about legalized recreational marijuana legislation.
I’m really awfully glad I’m a Beta, because I don’t work so hard