This footnote by Amia Srinivasan, taken from her book, the Right to Sex, poses the question in a useful way. It is a hard question that is part of the psychosexual pre-history of our times. I will feel I have satisfied my purpose as I writer when I have answered it.
What I like about the framing is the way at looks at two pieces by the same author and uses it as a lens to look at the way the world change. Here are two of my favorites: salon.com/2005/09/20/kun…
The story told in Srinivasan's sequence is in a way the same story told in mine. This is the story that hasn't quite been told, merely acted out by the culture industries.
The question is not hard in itself, it just becomes hard because of all the ways the culture has become involuted, but the work of writing is to master those involutions in such a manner as to make them straight them again
The rhetoric of the prior tweet is sure to be parsed as illustrative. And it is!
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Norm MacDonald's joke from 2016 is now an actual template for news coverage
The joke of course was merely translating into slightly exaggerated form the existing template for Islamic terror coverage. But it became the general template for other kinds of crime coverage after 2016.
The moment when dozens of trans activists in NYC tried to break through a barricade and past a line of NYPD officers to get at a small contingent of women, mostly middle-aged lesbians, demonstrating against the sterilization of children.
The cops barely hold the human surge back and ask the demonstrators to end their demonstration early for their own safety. x.com/CentristLogic/…
Absolutely insane Orwellian nightmare coverage of an app where viral misinformation has resulted in incitement to murderous threats against a journalist for impartially and scrupulously coverage an ongoing medical scandal
It happened with essentially no deliberation and debate. Sometime around 2019 it became clear that you could have your livelihood destroyed if you dissented from a dogma introduced a few weeks prior.
Many good liberals accepted a series of claims about child transition -- that it was evidence based and lifesaving -- that have since been proven to be utterly without foundation.
But even before we received this proof, many good liberals had to shut off their sense of reality and their instinct for humanity in order to accept the dogma being pressed on them -- they had to cross a threshold into a cultlike obedience to the organs of social consensus even as they reconstituted themselves into vectors of a gospel of medicalized self-harm
A man kills his wife and two children and in the immediate aftermath begins identifying as a woman.
The local paper covering his case honors the preferred pronouns of the triple murderer, referring to him as "she."
They are doing so because the transgender movement defines a "woman" as "anyone who claims to be a woman" -- that is to say, the same reason that a 6'4" non-medically transitioned man was allowed to change with NCAA swimmer and set a woman's world record, the same reason that a serial murderer of women who beheaded and dismembered a woman upon his release from a prison sentence for two prior murders of women is now housed in a women's prison, the same reason that Kamala Harris wrote a letter congratulating Dylan Mulvaney, a 29-year old man who identifies as both a female and a child, for his "365 days of being a girl," the same reason a Seattle Human Rights Commission fined a Korean nude spa for women for denying entry to a non-transitioned man who claimed to be a woman, the same reason YouTube will ban content referring to Mulvaney as a man.
All claim to be women and are therefore women according to the criteria established by the transgender movement for who is a woman -- rules obeyed by the cultural, political, financial, legal, medical, and corporate establishments of the Western world.
How did this movement immunize itself from the weekly reductiones ad absurdum that it generates? Why does it keep marching on from power to power despite the repeated exposure of the depraved illogic at its foundation?
It succeeded in dismantling reason and replacing it with the will of the party to a greater degree than anything ever has.
Mayo is just doing what most other private and public healthcare institutions are in the process of doing -- imposing an ideological mania on everyone that interfaces with it.
Rothblatt is a key actor in all of it everywhere and Mayo is at the forefront because of his direct participation, but not necessarily more so than many other similar institutions