The trans panic has reached an alarming stage: transphobes, most notably Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, have escalated their rhetoric and become more obvious about their stochastic terrorism, with Tucker Carlson broadcasting the names and faces of board members of Vanderbilt Hospital, which offers gender affirming care to children. Bill O’Reilly gave the same sort of “publicity” to a prominent abortion doctor years ago; the doctor was murdered by an anti-abortion fanatic.
But for a lot of those on the right today, the war on trans people is as much a source of amusement as it is a regular provider of righteous indignation. Consider former Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s treatment on her podcast of a trans teacher in Canada who showed up for school wearing enormous fake boobs.
The teacher has been a source of continual outrage on the transphobic right in recent days, making headlines in publications ranging from the New York Post to LifeSiteNews.
It’s basically this in action:
So Kelly brought the story to her Sirius XM podcast on Wednesday, and managed to sound quite outraged about the whole thing. “Take your fetish behind a closed door and do not shove it in my kids’ face,” she declared.
“There’s something wrong with this guy,” Kelly continued, deliberately misgendering the teacher.
He’s trying to turn somebody on. He’s probably turned on. Honestly, it probably turns him on to rub his weird little fake nipples or to have people see them. …
I don’t want him getting off near my kids and I don’t want him getting the nipples near my kids and I don’t want to have to think about anybody’s sexuality or boobs when my kid is in shop.
But Kelly’s performative outrage isn’t the whole story. If you actually watch or listen to this segment on her podcast, you see that she’s laughing — sometimes so hard she cries — during much of the segment, as she trades dumb jones and double entendres with her guests, who are also laughing hysterically the whole time.
You can watch the segment here; I’ve got it cued up to the appropriate point.
How can you be legitimately outraged by something if you also seem to think it’s the funniest thing in the world? Why would you consider this teacher’s actions to be equivalent to a sex crime — as one of her guests seemed to suggest at one point — if you can’t stop giggling?
“We have to laugh about it but then we have to talk about how how effed up this is,” she insists at one point, seemingly having to remind her guests that the whole topic is “deeply serious” to her. Is it? She and her guests manage to sound appropriately somber for a time, but soon they’re all laughing again.
The current trans panic is driven by hate. But it’s also driven by boredom, and an endless search for new things to at least pretend to be outraged over. In some ways, given that what’s at stake is the ability of trans people to exist in public, that’s as chilling as the outright hate.
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also, hilarious and ironic for you to be saying anything about bad faith arguments because that’s literally the only thing you do.
We have very good quality data that allowing people to live as their preferred gender and to access medical treatment to present as their preferred gender improves their quality of life and reduces suicidality. I don’t know if it makes me rather utilitarian, but I feel like “access to this very literally saves lives” should be a very convincing argument that outweighs “it makes me feel weird that some people do this”.
@Lard you should have better faith in people generally knowing what characteristics they want to change about their own bodies
Society treating you different based on some of those characteristics doesn’t make changing them ontologically invalid. (I’d argue the opposite even)
Lots of people choose to get tattoos in discrete locations, specifically because there are plenty of areas in society that would still treat you differently for having them on public display.
Even if its not applicable to literally every facet of society, it still changes things for that person’s individual relationship with society, if only by a little bit.
@Chase: can you please explain why not permitting this woman to wear distracting and huge breasts to class amounts to:
“our basic human rights will continue to be withheld and violence against us will be ignored?”
You’re angry that this bullshit reflects on trans people as a collective, and yet you’re draping yourself in the flag of other trans people’s victimization. You personally are not being denied life, liberty, or security of person, and neither is this idiot who thinks dressing like a woman means dressing like a cartoon stripper.
@Margaret: What motivation do you think Kelly and others have for talking about this story? Do you think there is any relationship between their news coverage and the anti-trans legislation popping up all over the US? How about this type of news coverage and the bomb threats against hospitals that provide trans-related medical services?
Also either you are deliberately misrepresenting what Chase said or you need to read it again.
And what is your basis for knowing that, “You personally are not being denied life, liberty, or security of person“?
@Margaret Please tell me- a trans person- how you- not a trans person- know about my personal history of transphobic discrimination and violence.
Do you also hang around rape clinics badgering survivors to denounce false accusations? Because otherwise no one will ever believe women who have been assaulted, because one bad-faith actor delegitimizes the existence of any actual victim and it is the duty of actual victims to distance themselves from false accusers.
If not, then ask yourself why it’s SO MUCH MORE important for you to focus on this woman’s action-KNOWING this feeds the fire of anti-trans rhetoric and violence. ESPECIALLY if you’re not putting 1000x MORE energy into actually fighting transphobic violence.
So is Megyn Kelly in good graces with the Right again? I remember there was a period when Fox News ostracized her after Trump decided she was ugly.
@lard
It’s not cross dressing you dumbass. I’m sorry your to stupid to figure out that a tattoo of a flower on my wrist is not the same as a tattoo of something nasty across my forehead. You seem to not understand what boobs are as well given this.
@lard
Oh your so right. Our asexual priest went on and on about how pink my vagina was and my fat titties would make the perfect mother for reproduction when my husband I got married. Oh wait he didn’t. Because my sex characteristics were not mention or written down on a document when I got married. You are an idiot
@Crip Dyke:
You can’t even tell that looking at a cishet couple. For all you know, when they get home she’ll put on a strap-on and peg him. They may very well take turns or something.
And it’s not really relevant to anyone else, as long as nobody’s being forced to participate without their consent.
@moregeekthan:
That may just be what’s commonly called “projection”.
@Margaret Pless:
They’re implants. She can’t just take them off before going to work.
In class, or in some other context, such as out clubbing?
(If in class, please see drag queen story hour. If not, please see so what?)
Oh, lovely, we have a concern troll, and to judge by her attitude toward a trans woman and her treating “dressed like a stripper” as pejorative, it seems a fair bet she’s been dining at the SWERF & TERF buffet …
@Margaret Pless:
What are you proposing, that we ban D, E, and H cups from certain professions? Just how much misogyny has been perpetrated over the ages via the mechanism of saying certain women, or women with certain characteristics, are “distracting” to excuse discriminatory treatment?
Members of marginalized groups should not have to police themselves so as to avoid shocking the normies. You’ve fallen into the trap of respectability politics, as you did before when you whined about “but what will the moderates think?!”
Here’s some news: we are the moderates. The extremists are a bunch of angry fascists on the far right, and a tiny handful of avowed tankies on the far left. AOC and Sanders are moderates. People who accept trans teachers and drag queen story hours and are generally tolerant are moderates, for the most part, though all too many espouse fairly far right views on economics and the poor, including most of the politicians who aren’t out and out fascists.
I do wonder what was going through that trans lady’s mind when she chose those gazongas to wear, ie if this is what she actually wants to look like, or if it’s a form of protest or self-soothing. Maybe she doesn’t feel feminine enough? Maybe she is getting misgendered by some students or people at her school and decided to make her womanhood Very Absurdly Obvious until further notice? Did anyone actually TALK to her or did they just snap a bunch of photos and film her like she’s some sort of spectacle and not a human being?
I’d just really like to know her reasoning. “Because I want to” is a valid reason. The impracticality of having a pair of beach balls on your chest while operating a circular saw IS a little questionable, but it isn’t a good reason to fire her.
It is pretty unfair that people seem to be requiring all of us to disavow her, though. Our human rights and basic respect should not depend on us rejecting the weirdos among us. And unless accusations are made, this is just weirdness. If she’s not actually hurting anyone or harassing the kids in her class, leave her alone. Breasts exist, nipples exist, some people have very large ones and YOUR feelings about how other people’s bodies look are and always will be YOUR problem. We are not going to play the acceptability game and draw lines because most of us know that those lines always wind up getting moved and eventually exclude ALL of us. There is no such thing as “one of the good ones” because that’s how these fascists work.
@Margaret
Our basic rights as trans people _will_ continue to be under attack, with our without the ridiculous teacher and her ersatz bosom. Asking trans people to disavow her behavior lest it paint us all in a bad light without addressing the basic facts of our existence is fucking rich with irony. Whether or not we disavow her we implicitly acknowledge that her behavior is something that needs to be addressed by us. I say fuck that, I don’t give a shit. I am not going to be put in the position of speaking negatively about another trans person to mollify the prejudices of people who think it’s representative of us at large. It’s disgraceful and counterproductive.
The focus needs to be on the people who are doing _real harm_ and want to see us suffer, not outlandish individuals who are ultimately harmless in the grand scheme of things.
Weird, Seth thinks this is about reasoning. Unchosen things aren’t reasoned.
You can type “breasts” Seth. You aren’t interested in reason anyway. Neither is anyone else who needs to react to large breasts in this situation with discomfort that I’ve seen.
It’s also normal to feel bad for someone you feel a kinship with undergoing such gossip.
Isn’t behavior the problem? Is this awkward or predatory?
@Seth S Whenever people do something that seems… strange or more specifically drastic or “loud” (for a lock of a better word) my first impression is, that the person is kinda crying out for help. So maybe you’re right. And maybe she’s been not just misgendered but bullied by the same kind of bullies like Megyn Kelly.
Because that’s what these people are doing: Bullying. They even use the same sort of dumb strategies. Pretending to be serious about their bs when really they find it all hilarious and get giddy with cruelty.
“The current trans panic is driven by hate. But it’s also driven by boredom”
What it is, is decadent, in the classic and technical sense. These people are seeking a real fake emotion: a fake emotion which will be real enough not only to persuade the audience but also to convince the folks who are in on the game. (What Faye Dunaway was after in Network, IOW.) Superficially there’s a similarity to the Realness contests which used to take place in drag, with the major difference that the drag queens knew they were playing. Their enterprise was ludic through and through. Kelly & Co., OTOH, appear to take themselves seriously, or to want to take themselves seriously, or to want to have other people take them seriously; something like that. They know that seriousness has to come into it somewhere, because the effect they intend to produce, or that their bosses tell them to produce, is a serious effect: their job is to set populations at each other’s throats and to bring nations down. No laughing matter. That they laugh over it anyway hints that they may be not merely decadent but Bad.
@Margaret:
I don’t know a thing about that story. Was it Halloween? Was there another event at the school that day that encouraged teachers to be silly? Was this (as others have suggested) an over-the-top reaction to bullying to force people to talk about important issues going unaddressed?
Since I don’t know a thing about that story, I have to ask: What proof do you have that the situation cannot be handled by local school officials?
In what sense and for what reason is public condemnation necessary? In other words, David brought this up to talk about how the behaviour of Kelly is not okay. Unless you have evidence that the behaviour of Kelly actually **is** morally and socially acceptable, then asking someone on the internet (who doesn’t live in that town and has no interaction or special credibility with the town’s schools) to condemn the teacher is just “whataboutism”.
Oh, sure, Kelly was bad, but did you condemn this other thing?
Nope. We didn’t condemn the other thing. Whoops, sorry/not sorry. There are also a lot of other things we didn’t condemn today, and I promise to get right on that immediately after you condemn literally every thing that anyone has ever done that’s not a good thing and was posted to the internet.
LMK when you’ve got that handled and then I’ll take my turn. But if you choose not to condemn every damn thing on the internet that’s bad in some way, then your argument boils down to this: David and the commenters here don’t get to criticize any bad behaviour ever, because if they do they would have to spend the rest of their lives writing up specific criticisms of ALL the bad behaviour.
yeah, that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works.
@Margaret Pless:
@Chase: can you please explain why not permitting this woman to wear distracting and huge breasts to class amounts to:
“our basic human rights will continue to be withheld and violence against us will be ignored?”
Because some people have humongous breasts. Some people “wear”—and isn’t that an interesting way of putting it—the humongous breasts they grew without medical assistance. The underlying message is, “Your body is offensive and unprofessional”—it’s like office dress codes that require Black people to straighten their hair.
I think that really the heart of these arguments (as in, what @Lard has been going on about) why it’s so hard to make such distinctions in a coherent or reasonable manner because it’s not really about why any particular things are different, so much as it is who gets priority in defining other people’s social boundaries and obligations.
Basically “you know, it’s *really* important to some people that specific social roles where people are sorted into based on physical traits exist and are fundamentally baked into society, can everyone please conform for those people’s comfort?” But what about people who aren’t comfortable with those roles? “But it’s like really important to them, can’t everyone else just sacrifice a little?” But it’s usually a lot more than a little. Why don’t those people sacrifice instead? “They shouldn’t have to!”
This is the sort of thing you see on a more personal level as well: “Why aren’t you letting Auntie hug you?” Because physical touch is unpleasant and the way she grabs me gives me panic attacks. “But she’s a hugger. That’s just the way she is.” And I’m not. And that’s just the way I am. “But it’s like really important for her to hug everyone. Can’t you just put up with it for a little bit?” Why does her desires take priority over my mental health? “Why are you being so rude? Are you trying to hurt Auntie?” [Note: I’m using an impersonal “I” here, I don’t personally hate being touched]
And for good measure something which I have mentioned a few times before: “I have the right to raise my children according to my beliefs and values without other people existing as highly visible counterexamples to those beliefs and values!” But what about people with different beliefs and values? Don’t they also have rights?
@Lard:
Good. It wasn’t meant to be “nice”. It was meant to be an accurate and thorough takedown of a bullshit non-answer to serious questions about how you justify treating an individual’s authority over their own body differently in different contexts.
You haven’t articulated a single principle that can be used to systematically identify when we should permit and when we should disallow a person to control their own body, its looks, and its shape.
Unless you have such a principle, then by definition your objection to trans folk seeking to control our own bodies is, let me check my dictionary here, hang on…
…oh yeah, your objection is UNPRINCIPLED.
With all the negativity and not-very-niceness that implies.
Pffffftttt!
And now my tea is all over my computer. In bad faith? Do you even know what that means? It means that either
1. I am saying that I am arguing for something when, in fact, I don’t believe in that thing
or
2. What I’m saying or how I’m saying it breaks a promise to you. Since I haven’t promised you anything, that can’t be true.
or
3. I’m literally lying about something contained within my argument. It would have to be a conscious lie, of course. To be “in bad faith” requires subjective knowledge, otherwise I would just be wrong, not arguing in bad faith. And unless you can point to a single statement that constitutes a knowing lie on my part, this interpretation is also bullshit.
Look at that, there is no possible way that my reply was in bad faith.
Look, Lard, I hate to break it to you but I’m not bad at arguing things and I don’t have to lie to argue my points. I just don’t like you and I’m not bending over backward to make you feel happy while you attack the legitimacy of trans folks’ bodily autonomy.
Well that’s not exactly true. You may not be arguing that medical transition assistance **should** be banned, but you are arguing that it **can** ethically be banned even by people who support bodily autonomy in other contexts.
My original response to you was, at essence, a challenge to provide **ANY** ethical basis for justifying such a ban on the part of someone who supports bodily autonomy in the context of, say, tattoos or birthmark removal.
I’ve lived a lot of years — not many less than four thousand seven hundred and seven years at this point — and I’ve never yet heard a single argument articulating a principle of distinction that would justify removing bodily autonomy from trans people with which I remotely agree. To the extent that any exist, they rely on either disgust for trans people and our bodies, religious codes of behaviour (which, if applied to or by non-adherents amounts to the denial of religious freedom, which is its own ball of wax), an argument that trans lives are inherently deceptive and that each individual has a social duty to somehow announce the shape and function of their own genitalia, or a duty to reproduce.
Those are all bullshit.
So when you were saying that MTA allows you to retire earlier, you were lying. Instead what you’re saying is that a legal classification allows early retirement.
Your problem, then, is not with MTA and changing bodies. Your argument is with changing letters in a computer. You should go argue with the computers.
Or you could just argue to change the stupid law. Your choice. Either way that’s no argument to change or forbid change to trans bodies.
Again changing the shape of your body isn’t what allows this. It’s a change in legal classification that allows this. If you have a problem with this **only to the extent that it promotes choice for trans people** then you don’t have a problem with this at all. You just have a problem with trans people.
And, again, that’s either just or unjust regardless of whether or not trans people can access chest reconstruction surgeries and hormones and phalloplasties, etc.
Is that law just?
If so, then you have not articulated any argument against trans autonomy.
If yes, then you still have not articulated any argument against trans autonomy, you’ve just articulated an argument against that law.
UNLESS, and I stress super loudly, UNLESS you only have a problem with that law being applied to trans people,
And again, in that case, you don’t have a problem with surgeries or hormones, you **EITHER**
have a problem with a specific law which can be changed without affecting access to MTA at all,
**OR***
you just have a problem with trans people. But your prejudice is not an argument. If the very worst case is true and at bottom you just hate trans people or think we’re icky or think we’re out to deceive the government to get ALL THE BENNIES…
…that still does not translate into an argument that has the power to ethically distinguish the bodily autonomy necessary for the freedom to get tattoos and to remove birthmarks from the bodily autonomy necessary to take a pill or undergo elective chest reconstruction.
**Make an actual argument** or the rest of us will be forced to conclude that you don’t have one. And if you don’t have an actual argument for treating trans people differently, then all you’ve got is prejudice and discrimination, and we’ll treat you accordingly.
@Margaret Pless
Absolutely. The planet is on fire and domestic terrorists target vulnerable populations, but David — and the Left in general — need to condemn this individual’s esthetics and approach to personal safety. I would expect no less from the Left should I choose to wear mismatched colors or step on a rickety ladder.
I, a cis woman, will now be going braless whenever I damn well feel like it. In a tight t-shirt, or tank top. And, if anyone objects, I’ll just point to this shop teacher.
I really, really, really, really, REALLY don’t feel like this is a matter of a legitimate attempt at gender expression.
The entire situation brings to mind nothing more so than the South Park episode where Mr Garrison was trying to get the school to fire him for being gay , with the intention of bringing a discrimination lawsuit against them. Over the course of the episode, he kept escalating his outrageous behavior in the classroom well past the bounds of anything acceptable, hoping to bait the parents of his students into a reaction.
I actually had a coworker at a former job who tried something similar- kept intentionally slacking off at work in the hopes of being fired, with the intent of suing the company for discrimination because he was the only gay employee there (… a plan that went awry when myself and my girlfriend were both hired with full knowledge that we were a couple, lol).
This really feels to me like either THAT, or like this teacher is actually a right wing shill, trying to make a point about what obscene tomfoolery people can expect if they tolerate any transgender folks around them at all.
Maybe I am wrong, and this teacher is just suffering from some really strange body dysphoria, or maybe they are staging a protest against a student being penalized for unfair dress code rules, or maybe they lost a bet and this was a one time funny bit they were doing for the lulz. But it rings very false to me. Very, very false.
You know, regardless of whether it’s actually relevant to this conversation or whether I was mistaken to think so, I just came up with a solution to the issues presented in my previous post. It’s totally impractical and possibly the worst way to deal with it in that it’s about equally unpleasant to everyone, but still. It also doesn’t help with that sort of thing when it occurs on a personal level rather than on a society level.
Basically: More restrictive social restrictions and obligations override less restrictive ones, so long as it can be reasonably proven that said limits are supported by a plurality of people. Some clear and reasonable definition of “plurality” (minimum 30% perhaps?) and “restrictive” (because people are going to argue over what that means). Similarly, general education would become as bland and inoffensive to all of the pluralities as possible, even if it means being less than accurate in some areas.
However, all this only applies to the public sphere. You can do whatever you want in private, pretty much. You can send your kids to get supplementary education (for free) to get whatever you believe they’re missing. You can still send them to drag queen story hour, it just won’t occur in public spaces like libraries (though private libraries might exist…) and won’t be openly advertised, but the information is easily and readily available if you know where to look for things like it. There are a ton of private locations, and maybe even “reserved” public spaces where certain restrictions and obligations are suspended, just not clearly visible or easily accessible to people who wouldn’t want to be there. Essentially, it’s siloing the physical world in the same way that the internet has become, except a bit worse. (And one of the more impractical aspects of this would be would that it would work far better if the physical world was also physically siloed, which is realistically not happening any time soon.)
A lot of conservatives would be chomping at the bits for this because they’re very bad at thinking through the implications – they’d be forced to live by everyone else’s restrictive standards as well. That means no bullying. No hate speech. No proselyting, at least not in public spaces or in private spaces where it’s unwanted, which severely limits it’s usefulness. It may mean that they can’t talk about their families or relationships at work. It may mean that their churches will be forced to hide themselves as generic buildings. And so on.
Of course this is ungodly stupid, as I said, it hurts everyone. There are a ton of problems and required changes to society needed before it truly hurts everyone equally – for example, poor people who have to work two jobs to survive are often in a position where they don’t choose their lifestyle, they have one thrust upon them, and this only worsens that. It also enshrines that “children are not truly individual people but property or extensions of their parents” being a valid concept to act upon, and may even force other people who don’t believe in it to act that way toward their own kids, at least in the public sphere. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, I keep coming up with new reasons why pretty much everyone would hate this. But at least it solves the social priority problem. 🙄 (Rolling eyes at myself).