Culture & Identity

Jenner, Republicans, and the Rest of Us

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The Washington Post observes:

In the four days since Bruce Jenner came out as a woman named Caitlyn, many Americans have celebrated her transformation as a courageous and even heroic act. But among the social conservatives who are a powerful force within the Republican Party, there is a far darker view. To them, the widespread acceptance of Jenner’s evolution from an Olympic gold medalist whose masculinity was enshrined on a Wheaties box to a shapely woman posing suggestively on the cover of Vanity Fair was a reminder that they are losing the culture wars.

As indeed they are. And it matters not that Jenner herself has said she’s a Republican and, on many issues, a conservative.

Here’s the rub:

Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to Obama, argued that the electorate has evolved so quickly on gay rights in particular that Republicans risk sounding out of touch whenever they talk about these issues.

“Republican reticence and at times intolerance on LGBT issues is a problem for them because they have become a litmus test for young people,” Pfeiffer said. “Even if they’re conservative on other issues, if you break with them on gay or transgender rights, you look like a candidate of the past.”

But Republicans are in a bind: seem backward and intolerant to most younger (and a growing number of older) Americans, or alienate the religious right that votes heavily in GOP primaries, particularly in the South, and dominates the Iowa caucuses. They’re caught in a vice of their own making.

On the subject of Jenner’s transition, noted economist Deirdre McCloskey, herself a transwoman, makes an important point countering the lazy if perhaps politically expedient view that LGB and T are some sort of continuum (they’re not), writing:

How to stay calm? Stop thinking of gender change as being about sex, sex, sex. Stop believing the locker-room theory that gender changers are gay, and gays want to be women. Whom you love is not same thing as who you are. …

Believe me, I would much rather have realized at age 53 that I was gay…than to go through a dozen operations and a lot of funny and terrifying embarrassments.

Bisexuality is on the Kinsey scale from straight to gay/lesbian, but gender identity is distinct from sexual orientation, and we shouldn’t confuse matters further than they already are by the simplistic idea of an LGBT identity.

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Secret Lives

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According to the Raw Story website, former House speaker Dennis Hastert “would be only the latest conservative Christian political figure to be revealed as engaging in a homosexual lifestyle he demonized as a lawmaker.”

I think “engaging in a homosexual lifestyle” may be overstated based on what we know (unattributed allegations of improper sexual misconduct with a student wrestler). Still, the sad litany of socially conservative, gay-marriage opposing GOP (mostly) politicians who have sex with men (or boys) continues.

We don’t know what percentage of men who tell survey takers they’re straight because they’re married to a woman and have children are secretly men who have sex with men. But in the better world to come—with legal equality, same-sex marriage commonplace, and social acceptance the cultural norm—hopefully so many lives won’t be tragically distorted.

More. Right-wing screeds against gay scoutmasters miss the point that it’s the closet cases (often married to women, with kids) who are the danger. The openly gay scoutmaster—or wrestling coach—with a husband is much less likely to abuse teenage boys.

Furthermore. At the Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr blogs:

If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.

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Ireland: Economic Liberalization Yields Gay Equality

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James Peron, writing at the Huffington Post, explains The Seismic Shift in Irish Values, and One Reason It Happened. He writes:

Historically, the more market-oriented the economy, the more the well-being of LGBT people increases. Politicized markets require political power, something sexual minorities rarely have, but depoliticized economies only need an entrepreneur willing to cater to a minority. …

It was the Financial Times that noted the role of material wealth on social liberalism. They wrote, “Ireland’s apparent willingness to embrace gay marriage is therefore as much a product of the Celtic Tiger years as it is a reflection of the decline of the Church’s influence.” With rising prosperity, Irish voters started embracing socially liberal reforms, matching the economically liberal reforms of a few years earlier: deregulation and more individual choice.

Peron comments, “Similar seismic shifts in cultural values occurred in other nations following periods of economic boom. The relative prosperity of the 1950s in America gave way to the social turbulence of the ’60s, which saw the culmination of not only the civil rights movement but the movements for women’s liberation and, of course, gay liberation.”

He concludes:

With the rise of individualism, it becomes harder and harder to damn those “not like us.” There is no “us” anymore, just many individuals, each with different values and priorities. Depoliticized markets ought to terrify [social] conservatives, for in them social change is born.

I’d add that in the U.S., the term “liberalism” has been co-opted by advocates of statist social engineering, but in much of the world “liberalism” still connotes opposition to economic regulation. Perhaps one reason for America’s polarization between the statist left and the social right—both opposed to individual freedom from government—is the Orwellian corruption of our political language.

More. Tweeted British Prime Minister David Cameron, head of Britain’s Conservative Party: “Congratulations to the people of Ireland, after voting for same-sex marriage, making clear you are equal if you are straight or gay.”

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‘ Gay Identity’  Post-Marriage

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A rather extensive analysis over at Slate by J. Bryan Lowder, What Was Gay? provides an update on the long-running debate between unique gay identity versus gay assimilation into the mainstream. That cultural conflict has been heightened by marriage equality (we tend to forget how opposed gay liberationists were, and some “queer theorists” remain, to the idea of same-sex marriage).

Lowder looks back at the rise of “gayness” as a “quasi-ethnic group.” He argues “the price of equality shouldn’t be conformity, ” and it’s hard to argue in favor of “conformity,” although subcultures can also fall prey to their own suffocating orthodoxies.

Lowder concludes:

I still think gay is good, though making that argument in a world in which identity is becoming both more complex and more contested will be difficult. But gay is also resilient, and it has a way of thriving best when welcomed least. Future gayness will undoubtedly be different from what it was—but then, isn’t reinvention the essence of good style? I, for one, can’t wait to see what gayness will become.

Post-marriage, that will be interesting to see.

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Santorum and Jenner

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Rick Santorum seems to be getting in touch with his inner Christian.

If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman. . . My responsibility as a human being is to love and accept everybody. Not to criticize people for who they are.

That is a generous and loving statement.

But as is regrettably usual with Santorum, he then goes on…

I can criticize, and I do, for what people do, for their behavior. But as far as for who they are, you have to respect everybody, and these are obviously complex issues for businesses, for society, and I think we have to look at it in a way that is compassionate and respectful of everybody.

So here is a hard question for him.  Who, if anyone, should Jenner be allowed to marry, based on his (one has to assume sexual) “behavior?”  And why?  If he is a woman, must he marry a man?  Jenner says he is only attracted to women.  But if he’s a woman, Santorum’s religious beliefs, as expressed repeatedly about those of us who are homosexual, take that off the table, right?

So what is Santorum’s “compassionate and respectful” answer?

And again, why?

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Conversion Therapy Bans: Some Considerations

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Update. Breaking Ranks: From The Right Therapy for LGBT Youth:

[Legislative] Bans could have the unintended consequence of deterring therapists from engaging with children who have questions or even of ensnaring good therapists when they do. … Psychotherapy is inherently private and complex, and for some individuals, sexual orientation and gender identity can and do evolve in the course of legitimate treatment.

That’s not the opinion of right-wing homophobes. It’s from a May 2, 2015 Washington Post op-ed by Stewart Adelson, an assistant clinical professor at Columbia University medical school and principal author of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s practice guidelines on LGBT youth, and Kyle Knight, a researcher in the LGBT rights program at Human Rights Watch.

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The White House, in response to an online petition that cites LGBTQ+ youth suicide in calling for a federal ban on all conversion therapy, responded with a statement saying, “While a national ban would require congressional action, we are hopeful that the clarity of the evidence combined with the actions taken by these states will lead to broader action that this Administration would support.”

Over at reason.com, Scott Shackford risks opprobrium, writing:

It’s absurd to say that the transgender experience is all in somebody’s head or that it’s not real, or cling to the idea that it’s a mental illness out of hand. I have known transgender people both before and after their transitions and have seen them leading much happier lives.

But it’s also equally absurd to never push or poke at any individual’s claim to a transgender identity. A gender transition is a huge, huge deal, and therapists need to be able to make sure their clients hammer out their concepts of who they are before they make some very major decisions. A small number of those who pursue surgery to change their sex regret it. …

We should be more concerned that therapists would become afraid to challenge how their patients see themselves out of fear of running afoul of a government regulation telling them how to go about treatment.

The position of LGBT youth is different from that of adults, and there is a necessary role for the state in protecting youth against abusive parents (although this role, too, is often handled badly by government). As regards protecting LGBorT youth, there are some issues to be addressed. The petition states, for instance, “Therapists that engage in the attempt to brainwash or reverse any child’s gender identity or sexual orientation are seriously unethical and legislation is needed to end such practices that are resulting in LGBTQ+ deaths.”

As Shakeford suggests, the matter isn’t always so simple, particularly concerning the need to be certain of a young person’s transgender identity before life-altering changes are made. There is some convincing evidence, for instance, of prepubescent males regarded as “effeminate,” and who then self-identify as transgender, being put on hormonal therapy to stifle male sexual development by obliging parents. There is also evidence that post puberty and into adulthood, many “effeminate”-regarded (and self-regarding) boys, including some of those who had identified as transgender, maturing into gay men who are not, it turns out, transgendered and are most happy to have their male sexuality intact.

From a conservative magazine (the Weekly Standard); and no, I don’t endorse everything here, but I do find this point worth considering:

Critics of puberty blockers, now administered in at least 37 locations in the United States according to Spack, point to the expense, the numerous side-effects associated with Lupron and its pharmaceutical relatives, and the possibility that parents and physicians might be pushing children who would otherwise grow out of their transgender identities into a lifetime of painful and costly surgery, dependence on daily doses of estrogen and other hormones, and the difficulty of finding a place for themselves in a world in which their femininity will always be questioned. On top of that, taking large doses of the hormones of the opposite biological sex almost invariably renders the taker sterile.

One of the leading critics has been Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and former colleague of Blanchard who heads the gender-identity clinic at Toronto’s Clarke Institute. “One controversy is, how low does one go in starting blockers?” Zucker told the Globe in 2011. “Should you start at 11? At 10? What if someone starts their period at 9?” Zucker prefers a therapy regimen of trying to ease transgender girls into accepting that they will be happier in the long run by accepting their genetic maleness, since most of them will grow up to be gay men anyway.

[Transgender activist] Andrea James, as might be expected, has repeatedly attacked Zucker on her website as promoting “reparative therapy for gender-variant youth”—likening him to the often religiously motivated advocates of “curing” a gay sexual orientation.

Should Zucker’s therapeutic approach be illegal?

Some forms of conversion or reparative therapy are indeed destructive when inflicted on minors. But if conversion therapy should be illegal, when does religious counseling become therapy, and at what point should the state and its social welfare network step in and override parents? Is there a risk that these practices where be driven “underground,” where they might be even more destructive?

These concerns don’t mean that states shouldn’t be scrupulous about how they license potentially harmful and abusive therapeutic practices, or that the federal government shouldn’t weigh in. Or that there are no transgendered youth. It just suggests the issues involved aren’t always so clear cut and that it will be useful to see how these state bans play out, and if they are demonstrated to be protective of at-risk youth.

More. From the comments, “Jesse” writes:

I think here, as elsewhere, the idea that T and L&G are the same issues leads to a number of problems. A very strong argument can be made that sexual orientation is inherent and thus therapeutic approaches are destructive, unscientific and should be banned. But to say that someone who hasn’t gone through puberty can be certain that they are transgender and thus should have their puberty blocked just is not the same thing. …

With so much hostility toward gay youth, I’m not surprised some find it easier to say, I’m transgendered; fix me so I fit in. And if the transgender activists say that counseling to see if maybe they are not transgendered, just gay, should be barred, that’s a problem. Fear of offending transgender activists could actually be putting gay youth at risk.

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The College-Based Anti-Free-Speech Movement

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We are witnessing the rise of a generation of authoritarian student activists who define ideas they disagree with as “violence” that must be suppressed, distorting federal civil rights statutes (with the complicitness of like-minded enforcement bureaucrats) to pressure university administrators to capitulate. Sad but not unexpected to see some college LGBT activists are part of the Zeitgeist.

Similarly, via Reason:

Also recently, the student government at The George Washington University approved a measure requiring student leaders to attend LGBT sensitivity training regarding, inter alia, “using proper gender pronouns.” A conservative student group, the Young America’s Foundation chapter at GW, declined to go along. YAF treats everyone with respect, said representative Amanda Robbins, and doesn’t need to be lectured on how to do so.

You can imagine how well that went over. The campus LGBT group, Allied in Pride, responded that YAF’s “refusal to use preferred gender pronouns should be considered an act of violence.”

More. Made up? From Allied for Pride’s facebook page:

If GW YAF refuses to participate in safe zone trainings that are aimed at increasing safety and understanding, then they should be considered a hate group, and thereby, be revoked of all funding from the Student Association at The George Washington University (SA). . . . And their refusal to use preferred gender pronouns should be considered an act of violence and a violation of the non-discrimination clause required in all GW student organizations’ Constitutions.

Furthermore Reminiscent of when Dan Savage engaged in “hate speech” at the University of Chicago.

And still more. Not a joke: “UK students union passes policy banning gay white men from acting like black women.” And this lunacy is being advocated on U.S. campuses as well.

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A Politics of Purges and Forced Incantations

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James Kirchick has penned an important essay looking at the “victimology” hierarchy that now obsesses the politically correct left, in which:

The discussion of vital issues today has been reduced to a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, in which the validity of one’s argument is determined not by the strength of your reasoning but by the relative worth of the immutable qualities you bring to the table…. In the game of Race, Gender, Sexuality, black beats white, woman beats man, trans beats cisgender, and gay (or, preferably, “queer”) beats straight.

In recent years, as the liberal imagination has grown to embrace new victim groups, supplementary categorical rules have been added to this list: Trans beats gay and Muslim beats black.

And this:

Like gay men, Jews have been relegated to the bottom of the progressive victim pyramid, a low ranking that has held fast in spite of the rampant bigotry and violent attacks directed at them.

And this:

The problem with these little purges, these forced incantations of the latest auto-da-fés, however, is that they never quite end, for the tumbrils always need replenishing. Like all good left-wing revolutionaries, these latter-day cultural warriors are eating their own. There is an unholy synergy existing between the notions of identity politics and the mechanisms of social media, which fused together form a concatenation that is debasing political debate. The mob-like mentality fostered by Twitter, the easy, often anonymous (and, even if a name is attached to the account, de-personalized) insulting, fosters a social pressure that aims to close discussion, not open it.

It’s well worth reading the whole thing.

More. Liberal LGBT Democratic activist Richard Rosendall on political correctness: “We do not advance the cause of justice by censorship or by claiming to be traumatized by other people’s opinions.” Admittedly, he’s addressing viciousness among LGBT activist factions. Still, real liberals defend the open exchange and debate of ideas; progressive authoritarians, not so much.

Furthermore. Heather Mac Donald, in another but related context (discussing academic “queer theory”), notes: “The search for victimhood is a quasi-religious credo that motivates and gives meaning to individual action.” This explains quite a lot.

Yes, there are continuing and awful examples of hurtful discrimination and prejudice. And yes, there has also arisen a culture of false or wildly exaggerated claims of victimization. Both can be true, which is why facts and discernment, rather than self-righteous posturing, are necessary—and thuggish attempts to shut down discussion and debate (“no platforming“) must be resisted.

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Not a Parody?

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At Wesleyan University in Connecticut, the “Open House” residence is:

a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) communities and for people of sexually or gender dissident communities.

I am shocked that they have invisibilized and excluded Two Spirit (TS) Native Americans, as well as the entire Intersex (I) community from their acronym. (And no, adding on “gender dissident communities” as a generality does not appease us. We demand full acronym inclusion, Now!

More. No, this is not a parody. It’s a link from the official Wesleyan Program Housing page. It is conceivable that the denizens of Open House themselves are having some fun, but given the general humorlessness of LGBT political correctness that would truly mark them as outliers.

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The Bisexual Governor Story

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Democrat Kate Brown was newly sworn in as Oregon governor after the incumbent resigned in yet another green energy/government corruption scandal. As the New York Times reports, Brown:

is also bisexual, having come out in an essay on a website about elected officials who are “out,” and is being recognized by gay rights groups as the first openly bisexual governor in the nation.

Also widely noted, Brown has been married to Dan Little, who has worked for the U.S. Forest Service, since October 1997.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Ms. Brown, 54, who lives in Portland with her husband of 15 years Dan Little and two stepchildren, has been open about her sexuality throughout her long political career….

While gay rights have been expanding at the national and state level, bisexual people—the “B” in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community—have had particular challenges. Fred Sainz, vice president of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), says bisexuals may in some respects face greater challenges than gays and lesbians.

In terms of behavior, however, Brown might, in fact, seem more akin to an ex-LGBT living a heterosexual lifestyle who acknowledges same-sex attraction, unless (and this isn’t clear from the coverage, which seems adamantly not to want to go there) she has an open marriage. But if you’re going to make a celebration of bisexual identity your story, you’d think clearing up that matter would, well, matter. Whatever.

As a liberal in a very progressive state, the Times observes:

her sexual orientation is unlikely to raise much of a fuss, and in some areas, it could probably be a plus. “I just learned that she’s bisexual,” said Jared Dahle, 28, who works as a window cleaner and in a bar in Portland. “That’s cool.”

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