Back To The Center Of Attention

Via The Washington Examiner,

Former University of Pennsylvania swimmer turned transgender activist Lia Thomas is back at the center of attention after the national champion was seen on social media appearing to embrace the "Trantifa" movement.

Thomas, a biological male who identifies as female, was seen on Instagram sporting an all-black outfit that included a BDSM leather harness and shirt reading "Antifa Super Soldier."

The image of Thomas was reportedly shared by the activist's partner Gwen Weiskopf, who purportedly identifies as transgender.

So who is Gwen Weiskopf? A quick web search brought up this photo and a writeup:

At the link:

[D]etails on Lia Thomas and Gwen Weiskopf’s relationship timeline & their dating history still need to be published in the public domain.

However, sources believe the couple is still together despite Lia’s name beginning to trend over the internet after participating in female swinging despite being transgender.

So by the accounts of the female swimmers on the Penn swim team, Lia is an intact biological male who claims to be "transgender", whatever that means, but is also conventionally attracted to women, and Ms Weiskopf appears to be an intact biological female, at least judging by facial features and the proportion of her hands. So I'm wondering if the whole Lia saga has been nothing more than an elaborate windup in the UK sense, an extended joke. If Ms Weiskopf claims to be "transgender" as well, then they amount to a conventionally cisgender couple who are just appropriating trans status for attention and privilege.

But this brought me to another question, now that notionally "trans" figures like Dylan Mulvaney and Sam Brinton have been in the public eye: can you make a career out of being trans? It looks like Lia is trying to rebrand himself as being more generally "transgressive", as opposed to just transsexual, posing as an “Antifa Super Solder” in bondage-style leather gear.

Sam Brinton has also been back in the news:

Sticky-fingered former Department of Energy employee Sam Brinton was on a taxpayer-funded work trip when they snatched a woman’s suitcase from a Las Vegas airport, documents obtained by The Post show.

Federal funds paid for non-binary Brinton, who uses they/them pronouns, to head to the city as a representative for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy in July 2022, according to internal expense reports provided to The Post by the federal watchdog Functional Government Initiative (FGI).

Although Brinton has a master's degree in the nuclear waste field, he built his working career largely on gay and trans activism within scientific fields, which culminated in his appointment as Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy, which lasted fully six months until his arrests for stealing luggage from airport carousels. During this period, he also had a side gig hosting spanking seminars at kink conferences, and it would appear that if his guilty pleas to misdemeanor charges for two prior thefts won't end his nuclear career, which requires a security clearance, pending felony charges for a third theft almost certainly will, and his future prospects are likely to involve headining kink conferences.

But this brings me to my favorite question: what problem are Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney trying to solve? They present themselves as trans activists, but they also stand for a principle that goes beyond just the problem of sexual preference -- and at least in the case of Lia Thomas, his day-to-day sexual preference is simply irrelevant. He identifies as trans even if he's apparently in a conventional long-term relationship with a woman and dates other women as well. This piece by radical feminist author Angela Saini explains the real issue:

I think the fight for transgender rights and non-binary rights is an anti-patriarchal fight, because gendered oppression flattens people and expects you to follow certain rules, which disadvantages everybody who doesn’t conform to that system. So we have to see it all as intrinsic. The anti-transgender movement in the US mainly is associated with religious conservatives, and that’s true in many other parts of the world, like Eastern Europe for example.

I find it bizarre that, in the UK, it’s associated with a certain section of feminists. I don’t know how that has happened. I really hope that we can reach a point at which we understand and accommodate the fact that we cannot wish people away. What happens at the administrative level and institutional level is a problem we have created because we’ve created our institutions in such a binary way. If we hadn’t created them in such a binary way we wouldn’t be in as much of a mess as we’re in right now. What you have to ultimately accept is that space needs to be made for everyone. We need to make everyone feel comfortable and safe in society – and surely that’s something we can all get behind.

The problem is that guys wearing lipstick and dresses or swimming on the women's team turn out to be just a totem for the bigger issue, which is the need to eliminate "certain rules" that "flatten people". The rules extend beyond conventional gender roles to questions like traditional respect for the rule of law, the role of logic and grammar in clear expression, or even the use of mathematics as a broad tool for understanding the everyday environment. Eliminating principles like these, which basically comprise "natural law", is the object of "smashing the patriarchy".

My question about people like Lia Thomas, Sam Brinton, and Dylan Mulvaney is how they can support themselves under the general principles of natural law -- they have to live out a normal lifespan and earn a living that will keep them comfortable. Leaving everything else aside, they're going to get old, and they're going to fade quickly from media. Can they cancel out that rule? I'm sure they'd like to. But things like Lia Thomas's phony claims of "trans" privilege are transparent. You can't cancel natural law, and to the extent that "patriarchy" is a reference to millennia of human experience about how the world runs, you can't smash it.