Turns Out It's a Lot Harder to Support Gender Diversity than I'd Thought
Back to cheergate...in the Boston Globe
Two sexes, infinite genders.
Sex is real, people are weird.
There’s no one right way to be a boy or a girl.
These have been my North Star phrases, and philosophies that I thought many in the gender resistance shared. But, as I will write about in coming weeks, I’ve come to see more and more people in the gender rabbit hole shift from wanting to create wiggle room to becoming increasingly rigid.
They have their reasons, I know. But the reality is that it’s very, very difficult to create a world with adumbrated boundaries, especially when we are deeply polarized and connecting via the fundamentally destabilizing technology of social media.
I wrote more about this for the Boston Globe. As always, I thank them for the opportunity. (Here’s an archived version, too.)
There are still second wave feminists, in their '70s now, who continue to insist that a lesbian with a masculine presentation, i.e. a butch lesbian, is performing a role that is oppressive to women because to dress like a man is a bid for male power. That the necktie is a phallic symbol. That a woman who puts on make-up, high heels and a too short skirt is submitting to control by the patriarchy. Those edicts pretty much ended feminism for the next generation. Let that be a warning to those wanting to demarcate gender presentation in increasingly rigid ways.
Yeah, when that first surfaced on X, I thought: "Leave those guys alone! They're certainly able to handle the choreography, and it's high time we stopped relegating feminine men to being either clowns or an underclass." But then the video showing them gyrating with two of their female team members in a ladies restroom came out, and I lost any enthusiasm for paying any further attention. I'm generally depressed by all these new fissures that seem to be forming in "the movement" to reject trans woo.