October 18-19, 2024
Readers, there are questions I fear to ask, and would likely not ask here, were anyone reading this. I am of my generation, and there are ways the world has passed me by. I grew up before video games, and never took to them. Most hip-hop, with its posturing vocal stylings, leaves me cold. We had no telephone in our house till I was in my mid-teens, not unusual for our neck of the post-war suburbs; as an adult, I’ve an active aversion to them. I’ve never owned a mobile phone of any kind, let alone a smartphone, and I once went almost a year, back in the 2010s, without participating in a single phone call. (And no, I don’t text either. I’ve texted fewer than ten times in my life.) I’m no Luddite, though; I like appliances, and computers, and am seldom without my laptop. Neither am I out of touch with popular culture—well, rather more so since I retired from teaching; but even in my early sixties, those online quizzes where they try to guess your age would peg me as a teenager. Nor am I a grumpy old man social reactionary: in most ways, I’m happily woke.
But I just don’t get the transgender movement. Oh, with some exceptions! I’ve known people who were clearly unhappy in their birth bodies, for whom transitioning was pure salvation. And I’m sure there are those whose discomfort was rarely overt, but to them, the true interior them, it felt equally raw. And sexually, I’m fully on board with any kind of fluidity, or need to explore, or to declare one’s queerness. Very healthy, to ask those questions of yourself, and if you find you are what we now call non-binary, to go claim that identity, and live by it. The pronouns thing is a bit in-your-face for me, and I doubt I’ve ever met anyone who wasn’t a “them” (we are all large and contain multitudes), but out of that need to claim and proclaim, I get it. In the same way that I get jewelry, and piercings, and tattoos: not my style, not my turn-on, but what of it? It’s you being unabashedly you. Do your thing, as we were fond of saying in my flower-power youth, which I have never entirely outgrown.
But why do that, exactly, TO your thing? In my flower-power dreamworld where all non-harmful freedom of self-expression goes, it feels like self-harm. Want to cross-dress, reject gender roles, reject sexual orthodoxy, what’s stopping you? I’ll go further: if you feel it's your body that's the impediment, and that you must transition to be free of its conditioning, could you please help us, as a society, as a progressive world, to combat gender stereotyping, by not, in your new incarnation, appearing to buy into gender stereotypes? In style, please don't restrict yourself to the old archetypes—that's not what modern men and women do. In behavior, in faithfulness to the self, be the woman you were as a man; be the man you were as woman; be the human you are, as different from every other human as we all are, regardless of gender. Sure, I believe there are differences between the sexes, maybe even beyond the obviously physiological. (Maybe.) In your new body, help us affirm which are the real ones, and which the false.
There are other aspects of our evolving trans society which disquiet me. Not so much the well-publicized but niche issue of new trans women being allowed to compete athletically, despite clear physical advantages, against women who were born women. That strikes me, excuse the terminology, as a transitional problem, one which we can deal with once we have the data and the will to do so. What concerns me more are the money being made off transitioning and the hostility to publicly voiced doubts and questions. I hate that those who are in the business of performing the surgeries, who have a financial interest in advocating for them, have such corruptible power to do so; that anything less than blanket support for the decision to transition is by rote decried as intolerance; that the mere raising of concerns—as there are social, medical, and legal concerns with any such new initiative—is prejudged, without concern for nuance, as bigotry. I have a friend who transitioned, and who transitioned back, and who now labels herself the victim of a cult. She was, she says, hustled into it. She feels brutalized by what was done to her. She is bitter. And now, when she and (she says) others of her ilk wish to tell their tales and come to terms with them, rather than being comforted and consoled, they are called traitors, and psychos, and silenced; or they silence themselves, as she has now done: she has been, she insists, so belittled and derided that she prefers to roll up in a ball and shrink into a hole in the ground. I have no strong opinion about whether J.K. Rowling is a bigot or not, as she raises her concerns about the differences between “real” and transitioned women, and the societal dangers of not acknowledging those differences. I just haven’t read her enough on the subject to be sure. But if her language sometimes strikes me as confrontational, her tone as aggressively defensive, her approach still feels to me more nuanced than in the arguments I’ve read against her, which root themselves in name-calling, often without having read her, let alone examining her points and debating them. Of course, such nuanced responses must be out there—my reading hasn’t been wide—but I can say with certainty that the reflex, received thinking vitriol of what I have read alarms me.
The ritualized shaming of J.K. Rowling is not so much my point as a public example of it. We’re in the age of the viral echo chamber; on all kinds of topics, we declare our allegiances, scurry into line behind them, and bounce from the club those who don’t belong. But among a group pleading for tolerance? If wokeness is to stand for anything, can it please, keeping its awake eyes open, stand tall for compassionate complexity? Can it bow to our world of opposites and contraries, of multitudes and otherness, and really look? Can it turn its ears to hear, to listen alertly, can it respond with responsible thoughtfulness rather than react with reactionary derision?
Apparently, so the recent meme goes, most women alone in the woods would rather come face to face with a bear than a male stranger. Female fear of the male predator is that visceral, and with cause. Fear of transgender predators, however—one of Rowling’s bugaboos—is, apparently, irrationally and offensively phobic. Well, let’s say it is. After all, anyone, man or woman, cis or non-binary, might be a predator; cis men are just disproportionately so. Still, it’s surely why Sweet Briar, a Virginia women’s college, recently declared that it will no longer accept transgendered women—will not even continue to assess the applications on a case by case basis. But let’s call that fear-mongering. In a student population that has so expressly chosen to isolate itself from the male, let’s say we understand the skittishness but must not cater to it. Sweet Briar has been under fire not just from the outside world but from students, alumnae, and faculty members who make exactly that case. Yet why, to play admissions department advocate, would a transitioning woman want to go to a woman’s college any more than compete athletically against women? A fully transitioned one, if there are many of college age, fine, but where does one draw the line between process and integration, between integration and power play? If I were a Sweet Briar student I would be leery of such a roommate's insensitivity to that line: is there some thrill or threat in the crossing of it? Or perhaps some kind of clingy plea, for my acceptance and my validation? My fear might be a fear of shadows, but men know we cast such shadows; a mid-transition woman should have particular reason not to forget it. But the accepted compassionate wisdom is that it is the transitioners' needs which take precedence; that they are the vulnerable ones, and must be supported. So Sweet Briar has made a pariah’s choice, and been widely condemned for it. (The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, for example, which has long shared facilities with it, has dissolved their partnership.) However debatable the college's position, all I see on social media is the rote dismay of the woke, and the rote approval of the happily comatose right. No debate; not the generosity of the empathic; just sides being taken.
Back to the medical choices. Let’s assume good will on the part of the surgical practitioners, and of the scientists who continue to make strides in the fields of human physiology. Let's call this too a transitional concern: our understanding of the issues, as of the procedures, is evolving, and the profession will learn, and monitor itself. It had better. In not too many years, if human civilization survives to permit it, we may face even more extreme choices about our bodies. And no doubt it will become routine for some of us to say yes to all kinds of surgical interventions and enhancements. To which there will always be a cost; which may or may not be warranted. For enhanced prosthetic limbs, would you sign up? For a third hand, x-ray vision, gills? Maybe, maybe not, but at least I see the potential rewards.
About sex-change operations, as a commonplace rather than a desperate measure, I’m struggling to grasp the benefits. Why are you doing this? What do you think you can do, as a member of the opposite sex, that you can’t now, that other men and women don’t already do, in the body you were born with? Or if nothing much, it’s just that maybe you would feel better about yourself, is it perhaps that you are freer of carnal identity than I am? Is your body merely less sacrosanct to you than my antediluvian, over-the-hill self feels it should be? Perhaps you find what I feel is desecration to be no big deal? Well, I suppose, after all, that you must! So then, that question provisionally answered, your decision to proceed made, how will you embody and ensoul the person you are electing to become—so as to honor the men and women who have preceded you—fighting to nurture the individual rather than harden class and gender roles; working to free us all of society’s gender stereotypes?
These are Socratic, not rhetorical questions; I’m being curious, not prescriptive; an outsider, not an antagonist. To sum up: friends, why are you doing this to yourselves, and is it as faddish a choice as it appears? Of what are you freed by it, how are you made more whole by it, and could you maybe have achieved such wholeness without first ripping your body apart? Does it concern you, now, that you have done so? What can you achieve now, in this rapidly changing 21st century world, thanks to this, that was never before possible for you? How will the kind of manhood, womanhood, or otherhood that you elect to model help free us of sexual stereotyping—because let’s face it, doesn’t your choice to transition imply that gender differences are so significant that which sex one is matters? So are they, and does it? How, and why?
One last query. We are so marked by the generations we are born into that we are grouped by them. "Okay, boomer," you may say to me, chuckling at my boomer cluelessness. So your tribe, then, what does your tribe stand for, and what kind of world does your tribe wish to favor? Where and to what kind of promised land are you leading us? Is there room for it in other tribes? Will there be dialogue between you?
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I'm still working on the cover images puzzle. Recently, they have started to fix themselves one post later. Here—appropriately or not; I'm concerned that I too should maybe curl up into a ball and crawl into a hole in the ground—is another picture of the excavations in our alley. Let's see if it happens again.
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