So I Reread Tom Wolfe's "The Me Decade"

Tom Wolfe's "The 'Me' Decade and the Third Great Awakening" is impressionistic and somewhat scattershot, but it's peppered with insights that are still productive almost two generations later. Wolfe is not a systematic social theorist, but one point he makes throughout his writing is that the American working class isn't behaving the way a proletariat should -- instead, in an era of prosperity, they take the money and run.

I reread the essay because, reading Emma Jo Morris's series on Survivors of the Trans Panic, she mentions gnosticism, and I recalled that Tom Wolfe mentioned it there as well. Speaking of New Age movements like Arica, Esalen, and Scientology that characterized the 1970s, he said,

I, with the help of my brothers and sisters, must strip away all the shams and excess baggage of society and my upbringing in order to find the Real Me. Scientology uses the word “clear” to identify the state that one must strive for. But just what is that state? And what will the Real Me be like? It is at this point that the new movements tend to take on a religious or spiritual atmosphere. In one form or another they arrive at an axiom first propounded by the Gnostic Christians some 1,800 years ago: namely, that at the apex of every human soul there exists a spark of the light of God. In most mortals that spark is “asleep” (the Gnostics’ word), all but smothered by the facades and general falseness of society. But those souls who are clear can find that spark within themselves and unite their souls with God’s. And with that conviction comes the second assumption: There is an other order that actually reigns supreme in the world. Like the light of God itself, this other order is invisible to most mortals. But he who has dug himself out from under the junk heap of civilization can discover it.

It looks like Wolfe wrote this essay right before Star Wars premiered, but the Force fits into this scheme as another 1970s manifestation. This is also consistent with accounts given by detransitioners in the Emma Jo Morris series. For instance,

"The trans community has this stupid line, ‘When you become trans you become your authentic self.’ It’s actually the complete opposite,” Pamela Garfield-Jaeger, licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), told Breitbart News. “You’re actually becoming somebody else, you’re actually, in a way, killing off, or getting out of touch with your authentic self, and you’re now becoming this almost fake identity.”

The objection many raise to Dylan Mulvaney's public persona isn't that it's "almost fake", it's that it's completely fake. Some use the term "womanface" instead of "blackface". But as with New Age cults and religions, transgenderism is sold as a therapeutic solution to life's problems. Morris quotes Pamela Garfield-Jaeger in another essay in her series on transgender:

"I don’t understand it, in terms of from the professional side, how they can believe in this,” Garfield-Jaeger told Breitbart. “I understand how a person can be tricked to believe in it if they’re told, ‘All of your pain and suffering will go away if you take this, almost, magic pill,’ which is become transgender, and then you get all this positive reinforcement.”

. . . She said that “naive” mental health providers, though, are acting out of codependence, as they do not “affirm” any number of other maladaptive behaviors, such as drug addiction or eating disorders.

. . . “If you look at other disorders — of course now they don’t want to call it a disorder, they compare it more to an immutable characteristic, but we know that’s not the case because people are choosing to do it — if you look at other mental health issues, like an eating disorder, or drug addiction, you don’t have institutions being, like, ‘Well you need to affirm their addiction,’ ‘We need to affirm their eating disorder.'”

Tom Wolfe has another important insight in "The Me Decade":

In 1961 a copywriter named Shirley Polykoff was working for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency on the Clairol hair-dye account when she came up with the line: “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” In a single slogan she had summed up what might be described as the secular side of the Me Decade. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a—!” (You have only to fill in the blank.)

This formula accounts for much of the popularity of the women’s-liberation or feminist movement. “What does a woman want?” said Freud. Perhaps there are women who want to humble men or reduce their power or achieve equality or even superiority for themselves and their sisters. But for every one such woman, there are nine who simply want to fill in the blank as they see fit. “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as … a free spirit!” (Instead of … a house slave: a cleaning woman, a cook, a nursemaid, a station-wagon hacker, and an occasional household sex aid.) But even that may be overstating it, because often the unconscious desire is nothing more than: Let’s talk about Me.

Wolfe attributes these aspirations to women, or at least women of the prosperous 1960s and 1970s, and the slogan was clearly meant to influence women of that time -- but the implication now is that it applies even more to transgender pseudo-women like Dylan Mulvaney. Wolfe is no longer around to draw new conclusions from this, but it seems convincing that the transgender movement is yet another outcome of the 1960s cultural changes.