Wear A Mask

Amid all the hubbub over the Nashville shooter and the Trans Day of Vengeance, I'm wondering if I'm the only person who recognized that the instructions for those planning to avenge things include "Assemble at SCOTUS -- Wear a Mask -- Bring a Buddy". While there are several variations on this basic sign, and not all contain the "Wear a Mask" instruction, that at least one variation would say this is telling. "Wear a Mask" is so 2022. What message are they trying to send?

I'm sure there will be well-publicized scenes from the demonstration, and we'll just have to wait and see how many people actually turn up in masks. But during the COVID panic, not a few observers noted that ordinary cloth or paper masks had no efficacy in limiting the spread of an airborne virus, Dr Fauci famously reversed his own position on masking, and the refusal of airlines and key transit agencies to continue mask enforcement by the middle of last year marked the end of that particular charade.

Yet the organizers of the 2023 Trans Day of Vengeance are urging attendees to mask up. I can only see this as nostalgia for the atmosphere of the COVID moral panic. COVID skeptics said throughout that the masks were far less a legitimate public health measure than a compulsory visible sign of assent, and it's hard to avoid thinking this is part of the message here: trans activists are with the program, and you'd better be with it, too. Thus we had all the right people scrambling to correct their pronouns:

The mainstream media did an about-face after Nashville police said several hours after the attack that the assailant was transgender, with some outlets issuing statements explaining their initial use of female pronouns as gender-identity advocates blasted them for misgendering and deadnaming the shooter.

“5 times @cnn misgendered. No correction. A mass shooting is horrible. Misgendering does not make anything better,” said a much-retweeted post by the “Karen Lopez” account.

There's an odd inversion going on here. On one hand, the trans rights movement might be seen as yet another stage in the sexual liberation movements that began in the late 19th century and culminated, at least for a time, in the Stonewall riot or Ms Magazine. But that was part of a trend in the 1960s and 70s to let it all hang out -- grow your hair and beard, burn the bra.

Instead, we now have a new generation of the grammar police, rewriting pronoun rules on the fly. In fact, I saw one media outlet so terrified of the new (but as yet entirely uncodified) pronoun rules that it noted that Nashville shooter Audrey Hale went by Aiden, and her preferred pronouns were he/him -- except that the story kept referring to Hale as they/them.

This isn't in fact just one more progression in the march of sexual liberation. Trans activists can't let it all hang out like old-time hippies or bra burners, because, er, the vast majority stop short of the one surgery that matters, male-to-female. In fact, this topic is verboten:

DON'T: Ask "what's going on in your pants?"

It's natural to be curious, but that doesn't mean you should ask. After all, nobody is coming up to you and asking you about your genitalia. "As a common sense and common courtesy, we don't going around asking people about their private parts," Milan says. "You don't ask me, I don't ask you. Just because a person's trans doesn't mean that you can ask them. They're still a human being, they're still a person, they're still a person that lives by the same etiquette standards that we all do, you don't just ask a person about their genitals. It's just rude. Don't do it."

But of course, this allows trans people to finesse the whole question of just how much they believe they're a woman trapped in a man's body or vice versa. This is the opposite of Stonewall, the outcome of which Wikipedia characterizes as seeking

“to create new ‘social form and relations’ that would be based on ‘brotherhood, cooperation, human love, and uninhibited sexuality.”

Instead, we have a new radical trans movement that urges its members to Wear a Mask, while warning even its allies not to ask about genitals. This is not what you see at your typical gay pride parade, which if anything celebrates genitals. Instead, we have a new prudery, a concealment of genitals, an insistence that they don't matter, a new grammar police imposing a whole new unwritten set of pronoun rules, and an endorsement of masking, not under even a pretense of public health necessity, but just masking for its own sake.

As I noted yesterday, there's a growing body of scholarly literature that suggests transsexualism is an entirely separate form of kink from same-sex attraction, and transsexuals have an entirely different agenda. Just what that is is hard to define, but it's there. Here's a piece at the BBC:

I became aware of this particular issue after I wrote an article about sex, lies and legal consent.

Several people got in touch with me to say there was a "huge problem" for lesbians, who were being pressured to "accept the idea that a penis can be a female sex organ".

I knew this would be a hugely divisive subject, but I wanted to find out how widespread the issue was.

Ultimately, it has been difficult to determine the true scale of the problem because there has been little research on this topic - only one survey to my knowledge. However, those affected have told me the pressure comes from a minority of trans women, as well as activists who are not necessarily trans themselves.

They described being harassed and silenced if they tried to discuss the issue openly. I received online abuse myself when I tried to find interviewees using social media.

Nevertheless, as I discussed yesterday, there are in fact studies that indicate that nobody, male or female, straight or gay, wants to have sex with a trans person. All I can think for now is that this is, if anything, a strange inversion of the traditional idea of sexual liberation.