Culture & Identity

Getting Woke?

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Pertinent points made by Frances S. Lee, a queer designer, trans baker and cultural studies scholar. Lee writes:

As a QTPOC (queer trans person of color), I have experienced discrimination and rejection due to who I am. … And yet, I reject QTPOC supremacy, the idea that QTPOCs or any other marginalized groups deserve to dominate society. The experience of oppression does not grant supremacy, in the same way that being a powerful colonizer does not. Justice will never look like supremacy. I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination.

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LGB and T: ‘Detransitioning’ Isn’t the same as becoming ex-gay

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Katie Herzog wrote an article for The Stranger titled The Detransitioners: They Were Transgender, Until They Weren’t, about “an emerging population of people who have transitioned to a different gender and then later transitioned back.” Then all hell broke lose.

It seems like much of the ferocity behind the attacks on Herzog’s article asserts that detransitioning is akin to becoming ex-gay. But this assumes transitioning as transgender is a close parallel to coming out as gay or lesbian. The studies Herzog cites and her interviews with detransitioners indicate that this isn’t the case.

I’ll leave aside the issue of “effeminate” gay or “masculine” lesbian pre- and post-adolescents who now increasingly are pressured to view themselves as transgender. Suffice to say that solid research has shown that many who experience gender dysphoria when young will grow up gay, lesbian or bisexual and feel comfortable as the gender they were assigned at birth.

Ironically, when an effeminate gay man (or boy) transitions as a woman (or girl), “she” typically takes on a heterosexual identity. By detransitioning, “he” reclaims a gay identity, thereby enraging trans activists, our LGBT+ “allies.”

On a related note, Taylor Fogarty writes that some trans activists are now disputing the definition of being gay itself:

Shannon Keating of Buzzfeed suggests we eliminate the word lesbian altogether, arguing: “Against the increasingly colorful backdrop of gender diversity, a binary label like ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian’ starts to feel somewhat stale and stodgy. When there are so many genders out there, is it closed-minded — or worse, harmful and exclusionary — if you identify with a label that implies you’re only attracted to one?” …

Riley J. Dennis…tells lesbians their “genital preferences are discriminatory,” since they only “prefer” vaginas, and “some women have penises.”

And finally:

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LGBTQ+++ movement characterized by racism and transphobia, it seems

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The AP reports:

The recent flare-up of racial tensions comes as no surprise to Isaiah Wilson, director of external affairs for the National Black Justice Coalition, one of the few national groups focused specially on black LGBT rights. He said the broader LGBT-rights movement “has been whitewashed” — dominated to a large extent by white gay men. …

He said major LGBT-rights groups need to be frank in discussing the issue of racism, as well as recruiting and supporting nonwhite leaders.

In my experience in LGBT activism in the ’80s through the early ’90s, any person of color who walked through the door was implored to take a leadership position. As for “dominated to a large extent by white gay men,” women have dominated movement leadership from the mid-80s onward.

Diversity is vital, except when it’s not.
Jewish symbols makes some people feel unsafe, whereas Islamic symbols…oh, nevermind.

The Windy City Times reports that “Supporters added that American flags were similarly not welcome as they too are considered signs of oppression. However, flags from other nations were present.”

A bad sign.


A good sign.


Finally, Fred Litwin writes:

[Activist Tim] McCaskell claims that the issues of interest to young gay people, his so-called ‘new activists’ are “police racism, HIV criminalization, corporate power, the environment, acceptance of gender fluidity, Palestine solidarity, park sex, poverty, immigration and refugees, [and] youth empowerment.” …

Once again, McCaskell and his cohorts leave out the most important issue facing the gay community today. Our gay brothers and sisters around the globe face being tossed off of buildings in ISIS territory, being hanged in Iran and being harassed in Russia. Gay remembrances of the Pulse tragedy in Orlando rarely mention the Islamist ideology that fueled the terrorist bomber. Point that out and you’ll be called a pinkwashing homonationalist.

More. James Kirchick brings it home:

Jews are not only being made to feel unwelcome in left-leaning spaces, but anti-Semitism—masked as anti-Zionism—is becoming a marker of virtue. These episodes of ostracism are almost always undertaken to appease Muslims, which makes no sense under any circumstances, least of all for the LGBT community, which is welcomed and celebrated in the world’s only Jewish country and subject to state-sponsored harassment, imprisonment, and murder in nearly every Muslim-majority one.

It’s also cruelly ironic that Jews, of all people, would be subject to this sort of discrimination, given the disproportionate role they have played in LGBT politics and culture.

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The Rainbow Flag Isn’t Racist

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Point:


Counterpoint:

Meanwhile, the Washington Blade reports that at the Equality March:

Javier Cifuentes, HRC’s Youth Ambassador, and Thomas Tonatiuh Lopez Jr. of the Indigenous Youth Council gave rousing speeches that captured the theme and tone of what leaders of the Equality March said was one of their key messages—that the LGBT rights movement must work in solidarity with the nation’s other progressive movements and social causes such as immigrant rights, racial justice, transgender rights, the rights of indigenous peoples, and women’s and reproductive rights.

Left-progressives only, please. So much for “unity.”

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A World Apart

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The New Yorker a few weeks back had an insightful profile of columnist and blogger Rod Dreher, a religious traditionalist who urges his fellow traditionalists to form their own communities of faith within but apart from the greater secular society.


Excerpt:

In the main, however, Christians have sought to make America itself one big Christian community. Dreher thinks that this effort, most recently associated with the religious right, has been a disastrous mistake—it has led Christians to worship the idol of politics instead of strengthening their own faith.

“I believe that politics in the Benedict Option should be localist,” he said. The idea was not to enter a monastery, exactly. But Christians should consider living in tight-knit, faith-centered communities, in the manner of Modern Orthodox Jews. They should follow rules and take vows. They should admit that the culture wars had been lost—same-sex marriage was the law of the land—and focus on their own spiritual lives. They should strive to make Christian life meaningfully different from life under high-tech, secular capitalism; they should take inspiration from Catholic dissidents under Communism, such as the Czech activist Václav Benda, who advocated the creation of a “parallel polis”—a society within a society. They should pray more often. Start their own schools. Move near their church. St. Benedict, Dreher said, didn’t try to “make Rome great again.” He tended his own garden, finding a way to live that served as “a sign of contradiction” to the declining world around him.

The article continues:

The writer Andrew Sullivan, who is gay and Catholic, is one of Dreher’s good friends. … Sullivan has a long-standing disagreement with Dreher over same-sex marriage, but he believes that the religiously devout should be permitted their dissent.

“There is simply no way for an orthodox Catholic to embrace same-sex marriage,” he said. “The attempt to conflate that with homophobia is a sign of the unthinking nature of some liberal responses to religion. I really don’t think that florists who don’t want to contaminate themselves with a gay wedding should in any way be compelled to do so. I think any gay person that wants them to do that is being an asshole, to be honest—an intolerant asshole. Rod forces you to understand what real pluralism is: actually accepting people with completely different world views than your own.”

The profile’s writer, Joshua Rothman, notes that Dreher:

…argues that “the question is not really ‘What are you conservative Christians prepared to tolerate?’ but actually ‘What are LGBTs and progressive allies prepared to tolerate?’ ” He wants them to be magnanimous in victory; to refrain from pressing their advantage. Essentially, he says to progressives: You’ve won. You wouldn’t sue Orthodox Jews or observant Muslims. Please don’t sue us, either.

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That’s Not Funny!

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LGBTQ hypersensitivities have played a major role, after race and gender, in the intersectional hysteria that has gripped college campuses and, indeed, much of the left. Does growing mockery signal that sanity may be returning? If so, is there a path toward equality and supportive community that doesn’t invoke authoritarian-like thought control and the demonizing of white, heterosexual, cisgender males?

—


Really not so funny:

More. Via Heterodox Academy: “In the wake of the violence at Middlebury and Berkeley…many commentators have begun analyzing the new campus culture of intersectionality as a form of fundamentalist religion including public rituals with more than a passing resemblance to witch-hunts.”

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