Why Didn't They Have A Trans Guy On The All-Women Crew?

What's pestered me about this whole Blue Origin all-women space flight is that the crew is obviously a DEI administrator's dream: one Asian, one Hispanic, two blacks, and two whites. Leave aside the Hispanic is Jeff Bezos's girlfriend, or two blacks is 33% of the "crew", when blacks are 14% of tbhe population, we get an appreciation of Bezos's current mindset: no matter he's purged most of the liberals from the Washington Post editorial board, he's still stuck someplace in 2022.

So why wasn't there a trans guy among the women? In fact, if Bezos's aim was to pick women who were prominent in media, why not go with Dylan Mulvaney? After all, according to People, all the ladies saw this as an opportunity to act like drag queens themselves:

"Who would not get glam before the flight?!" said Sánchez, whose fiancé Jeff Bezos, founded the spaceflight company in 2000. "We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule!"

"Will the lashes stay on? I’m curious," asked King, to which Sánchez, 55, replied, "Mine are glued on. They’re good."

Perry, 40, added: "Space is going to finally be glam. Let me tell you something. If I could take glam up with me, I would do that. We are going to put the 'ass' in astronaut."

. . . Getting dolled up is more than just about looking good for the group of women too. "I think it’s so important for people to see us like that," said Nguyen, who in February teamed up with e.l.f. Cosmetics for its empowering film series Show Your(s)e.l.f. "This dichotomy of engineer and scientist, and then beauty and fashion. We contain multitudes. Women are multitudes. I’m going to be wearing lipstick."

Fashion, along with safety, of course, is also top of mind for the ladies, especially Perry whose first thought was, "What am I going to wear?"

Isn't this the sort of female superficiality that drag queens eagerly limn? So why not have a real drag queen along for the ride? Yahoo News reports more on the real reason for the flight:

Though Blue Origin and its most famous flyers repeatedly promoted the 11-minute journey as a push to get a diverse mix of young people interested in the sciences and achieving their dreams — Perry, for her part, told Elle Magazine for a pre-launch cover story that she hoped the trip would "inspire a whole new generation and make space and science glam" — nothing about the flight was particularly scientific or boundary-pushing. . . . And while two of the flight's crewmembers do have backgrounds in STEM, as Amanda Hess noted in The New York Times, the crew's "central mission" wasn't to conduct science but "to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it."

"They are like payload specialists," Hess wrote, "with a specialty in marketing private rockets."

One thing that puzzles me is that, possibly driven by Musk's example, Jeff Bezos had been developing a public profile as more of a mensch lately, especially in attempting to drive the Washington Post toward the center. The Blue Origin stunt has wiped that whole slate clean. According to The Guardian,

[T]he flight, and its grim promotional cycle, might be most depressing for what it reveals about the utter defeat of American feminism. Sánchez, the organizer of the flight, has touted the all-female crew as a win for women. But she herself is a woman in a deeply antifeminist model. It is not her rocket company that took her and her friends to the edge of space; it’s her male fiance’s. And it is no virtue of her character that put her inside the rocket – not her capacity, not her intellect and not her hard work – but merely her relationship with a man. (The fact that the rocket itself looks so phallic does not help to lessen the flight’s message that the surest way for women to raise themselves in the world is to attach themselves to a man.)

There are at least two women on the mission who can be credited as serious persons: Aisha Bowe, an aerospace engineer, and Amanda Nguyen, a civil rights entrepreneur whose past work with Nasa makes her something closer to an actual astronaut. But most of the crew’s self-presentation and promotion of the flight has leaned heavily on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness that insults women by cavalierly linking their gender with superficiality, vanity and unseriousness.

. . . It is not misogynist to say that these women do not have their priorities in order. Rather, it is misogynist of them to so forcefully associate womanhood with cosmetics and looks, rather than with any of the more noble and human aspirations to which space travel might acquaint them – curiosity, inquiry, discovery, exploration, a sense of their own mortality, an apprehension of the divine. These women, who have placed themselves as representatives for all women with their promotion of the flight – positioning themselves as aspirational models of femininity – have presented a profoundly antifeminist vision of what womankind’s future is: dependent on men, confined to triviality, and deeply, deeply silly.

So again, why wasn't there a trans guy, or at least a drag queen, on the flight? Trans guys in sports, for instance, have been seen as anti-feminist, males showing the physical inferiority of women by beating them and sometimes injuring them badly in the bargain. A trans guy or a drag queen would be just the thing to focus the vanity and superficiality of the women.

And poor Bezos showed how vulnerable he himself was to women's superficial appeal as he tried to celebrate with his girlfriend at the end of the flight:

Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos face-planted onto the Texas desert as he ran up to greet his fiancée Lauren Sanchez and the all-female crew when they returned to Earth on Monday morning.

The livestream of the historic launch caught the moment Bezos, 61, fell face first to the ground as he went around the windows of the capsule carrying his fiancée.

He needs to fire his publicist. It'll take him years to dig himself out of this disaster.