Should LGBTs Lose the Ts?

Yes. It's time to disconnect from this reactionary "movement"

It’s no news that Elon Musk has brought us NewTwitter, a more open place that feels welcoming to social media outcasts (it’s a long story) like me.

But as I started posting on NewTwitter I had a nagging worry: How would the enlightened Mr. Musk deal with that third rail issue, the issue involving what Dave Chappelle calls “the Alphabet People — the Ls, Gs, Bs and especially the Ts.”

“There is one unwritten rule in show business” thunders Chappelle in “Sticks and Stones”:

“You Are Never, Ever Allowed to Upset the Alphabet People…especially the Ts”

He then imagines the different “letters” as characters sharing a cranky cross-country car trip, to make the point that though straight society may see LGBQT (and so on) as a block, it is anything but. It is, he points, out separate movements with very different cultures and goals, uncomfortably crammed together. Here’s the thing about the people in the car, they don’t even like each other,” he says:

Sitting next to the Gs in the passenger seat are the Ls. Now, everybody likes the Ls…except the Gs.…The Gs and the Ls think the Bs are gross…And there’s one group, sitting in the back of the car, minding their own business, looking out the window. That’s the Ts. Now, everybody in the car respects the Ts, but they also resent the Ts…Because they think the Ts are gonna make it harder to get where they’re trying to go.

But we are gonna upset the Ts now because we can’t put this talk off any longer:

This is getting out of hand. Public policy around Ts (transgender people) is shaping up to be one of the most divisive issues of our time. Every day new bad stuff comes down the pike—and, no, it’s not just staged or cherry-picked by people out to make an anti-trans case.

We know there are stately British trans-ladies living out what’s left of their lives, happier in their new skin, happier (for complicated psychological reasons) without their penises.

For some reason they thought they needed a kind of medical permission to do “feminine” stuff like tend their rose bushes and throw divine dinner parties for twelve, and just so long as they did what amounts to cosmetic surgery on their own dime, I’m happy for them.

And there are other adults (and, yes, this must be a “movement” for adults only) who, after long, sober reflection, have decided they must change their bodies to fit a sense of who they really are—and that is their business.

Problem is, these choices are not staying just their business. In 2012 I wrote an article titled “You Get to be the Sex You Choose and Everyone Else has to Go Along” for the American Spectator (that long title has not been reproduced in the archives), and the trend I saw shaping up then, the one I’m going to talk about now, is more true than ever: It’s beginning to look like a lot of the bad stuff around the “trans movement” — sexual exhibitionism of all kinds (for means of menacing), the invasion of girl’s sports, the invasion of spaces, like battered womens’ shelters, where traumatized women really need a sense of safety, may be baked in to this “movement” especially now that school systems and BigHealthCare have jumped into the party with both feet.

Just last week, for instance, the Federalist published a shocking piece about a fourteen- year-old girl who was effectively taken from her grandmother (her care-giver) and put into various kinds of state custodies (where she was raped and generally sexually abused) because, very early on, her school had decided she “identified as a male” and needed to be kept from her “unaffirming home.”

It turns out that the elementary, middle and high schools—public and private—are full of teachers, administrators and counselors who seem to be trans idealogues first and educators a distant second.

Meanwhile public policy around adults, and when and how they can change their “gender assigned at birth” on official documents, like birth certificates, is being made increasingly “tolerant.”

In an effort to “streamline the process”…and remove burdensome “evidence-based requirements,” Scotland, for instance, has lowered the age at which one can “self identify” as the opposite sex from 18 to 16, and has reduced the waiting time for the all-important Gender Confirmation Certificate from two years to three months.

So, as the language defining “woman” grows vaguer (even our new Supreme Court Justice wouldn’t offer a definition) and more convoluted, chaos reigns in public spaces because nobody knows what the laws say anymore. They just know, as Dave Chappelle put it, “You can’t upset the the Alphabet people” (whom everybody has always assumed were unified around the T movement.)

So there are an increasing number of skirmishes on the ground, like the recent tussle in Arizona when the transwoman in the photo below upset a biological woman when she entered the womans’ changing room in a gym and allegedly stared pointedly at the biological woman’s—no doubt gloriously real— breasts as she changed. (Perhaps she was jealous.)

The bio woman called the police, recorded herself doing so (which is how the episode went viral), and was told that they could not do anything, “because this is a very delicate issue for society.”

I learned of this most recent locker room skirmish on NewTwitter because Elon seems to be holding to his vow to allow “a thousand flowers bloom,” so to speak, and this has liberated at least two new constituencies: First, the women who’ve had to put up with this BS silently for years now, and, second, gays and lesbians who are, just as Chappelle explained, mad that they’re stuck in the same hot, airless car with the Ts.

The women are expressing themselves under hashtags like #NoToSelfID (which may have been created in Scotland), #WomensRightsAreHumanRights (which may have originated in Canada), #LetWomenSpeak, #ISupportJKRowling, #adulthumanfemale and etc.

#TransWomenAreConMen is now almost two months old and trends nearly every day. After reading the thread for a while, I posted a fairly anodyne tweet and watched as it piled up 342 likes and 57 retweets in a couple of hours. (That’s good right?  Right? Well, it was a record for me.)

As an “Emma in Florida” put it, “All it took for women to lose basic biological human rights was for men to pretend they're women.”

No, dude with the lipstick and orange hair. I am not going to call you a woman. My body started with Double X chromosomes. From that chromosomal blueprint the cells then built out into a beautiful machine that’s different in all sorts of ways from your body. The entire central portion, for instance, from shoulder to groin, of the softer, more delicately-boned female body is designed externally and internally around the imperative to make and raise children. Childbearing, remember that? Accordingly my history with my body has been very different from yours. You have no history with a womans’ body.

Meanwhile we have celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner (crowned “Woman of the Year” by Glamour magazine in 2015) contributing to this erasure of real women and buttressing the completely sexist notion that one becomes a “woman” by slapping on some fake breasts and tottering around in size 13 high heels.

“Caitlyn Jenner has been crowned ‘Woman of the Year’! By Glamour magazine; after just her first year AS a woman,” Dave Chappelle mused on a Detroit stage where Netflix was filming his act.

“Ain’t that sumpin’? She’s better than you, better than alllll you bitches in Detroit… And she never even had a period.…”

The other constituencies having their say without fear of being canceled are the Gs and the Ls, who have been out there fighting their fight for a loooooong time. As one put it on the LGBTwithouttheT thread:

“Gender Identity Ideology is destroying the decades of work done by gay rights activists,” (@ArabelsRaven85)

and

Here this self-described “dude who likes dudes” gets to the heart of the fundamental mismatch between revolutionary G and Ls and regressive, reactionary Ts.

Wasn’t the gay rights movement about expanding the notion of what you could do in your male or female body? Isn’t it a step backward to say I’ve got to hack up my body in order to “pass” as a person who lives the way I want to live?

Even drag culture, Paris is Burning, RuPaul’s Drag Race, is a celebration of difference. In Paris is Burning, for instance, grizzled old drag queens speak frankly to the documentarian’s camera in their male identity with humor and pride. And we admire them as we admire any great performer who’s perfected an act.

The newest trending hashtag as of this morning (1/22/23) is #DeCapitateTerfs. How sweet.

TERF stands for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. About four years ago when the acronym was coined, it was meant to be dismissive and insulting to a small, highly specific group of women who were critical of transwomen but were otherwise far left on most issues having to do with women (and, I suppose, everything else.) Then transactivists began using the term to describe J. K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author, who had the temerity to make a joke about a headline that used the awful phrase “people who menstruate.” And we began to see the rigidity (dare I use the word facism? Nah, it’s overused) of many in the trans movement, who didn’t just want more rights. They will brook nothing less than Orwell’s version of the totalitarian’s pure mind, the mind that harbors no impure thoughts about the new order.

They don’t just want to be tolerated (a perfectly legitimate desire as long as one’s not doing anything contra the Ten Commandments); they want, no, they insist, on being liked, on being approved of, all the time for any behavior.

(An old-school psychologist—like Jordan Peterson who may lose his license to practice over this very issue, one who was allowed to make interpretations and not just “affirm,” would suggest that they are trying to get validation from the world to assuage doubt they cannot escape inside. As long as they feel the self-hate which will migrate around the body, even if offending external parts are changed, and they don’t try to cure it within, they will continue to demand greater proofs of society’s love for them.)

We saw this in the swift, ugly, jeering reaction to Rowling when she merely wrote:

‘People who menstruate’. I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?

Rowling has now become a sort of symbol of “TERFism,” she is the arch TERF, the trans-hater, and she has her share of cancellations.

Here’s the urgent part: It’s clear a segment of the transwoman movement is saturated in woman-hatred. I am not going to get all psychoanalytical about the roots, though I have some theories, (stuff to do with absent fathers and waaaay too many boys being raised by single mothers, which, the Freudian would say, tends to create an imaginary dilemma: be your mother’s lover—and incur the distant father’s murderous wrath) or become your mother, thus disappearing in protective coloration.)

Ooops, I did it again.

Anyway, by now, watching this tension unfold on the streets and in social media is like watching an epidemic (and not a faux one) spread: From the good-ol’-fashioned locker room flashers of our youth, now souped up with mascara and lipstick, who look to enter an all female spaces, not to “pass” (as some do, quite peacefully) but to seriously shake women up;

to the out-and-out crazies who have been using the cover of a wig and a tatty skirt to commit real crimes like rape;

to the person who created the DeCapitateTerfs hashtag…There’s something going on here.

And we need to talk about it. Elon has created an important space.