Transgender/Transracial?

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The Rachel Dolezal cisracial/transracial meme isn’t doing the fight for transgender acceptance and equality any favors. While some social conservatives are warning of a slippery slope and suggesting that transracialism will allow self-identification with other races in a way that opens an entitlement floodgate, some progressives seem to be, gingerly, starting to question whether the appropriate social justice warrior position might be to defend transracial identity:

MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry entertained the notion on her show today with kind of a huge question. “Is it possible that she might actually be black?”

While not wanting to make the transgender comparison, Harris-Perry questioned whether one can be “cisblack and transblack,” and whether there’s a way to describe “the achievement of blackness despite one’s parentage.”

Alyson Hobbs, who literally wrote the book on “racial passing,” said there’s “certainly a chance that she identifies as a black woman and there could be authenticity to that.”

Here’s a wrap-up of others willing to entertain the idea that racial self-identification can be more “authentic” than one’s birth race.
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Cry Wolf

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If there are Christian tattoo artists, we may have the next wave of anti-anti-discrimination cases.

I can’t say I find Mr. Bythewood’s argument for not providing the tattoo particularly convincing (is there really a “traditional tattoo honor code?”) but that’s the point. I don’t have to.  It’s his business, and unless I’m very mistaken, he’s not the only tattoo artist in New York.

Anti-discrimination laws, including those based on gender, were most needed when discrimination was extensive, unregenerate and unlocalized.  Since the 1950s, America has switched the defaults, and marginalized the kinds of discrimination that were taken for granted: based on race, gender, and now even sexual orientation.  There will never be no discrimination unless someone has finally figured out a way to make a utopia work when its inhabitants will be human beings endowed with liberty.  The best a free society can hope for is to stand, as a whole, for individual liberty, draw clear enough lines about what is truly out-of-bounds, and leave the gray areas for people to negotiate.

Getting a tattoo, ordering a cake for your wedding, arranging for a photographer to document your happiness; these are perfectly respectable gray areas where there are choices pretty much anywhere in this country.  Those choices will not always be ideal ones everywhere, but unless the rule we are seeking is that everyone must have ideal choices everywhere, every time, we have to consider what the appropriate limits on government power must be.

I don’t want my government demanding that I can get a tattoo or a cake from anyone I want.  As an un-inked American, I could no more have gotten a tattoo from Mr. Bythewood than Jane Marie could.  Going somewhere else is one of the calamities I must live with as someone who values a free society.

Bythewood is partly right that Jane Marie trivializes the tradition of feminism with her overstated “wolf cry.”  But that kind of self-dramatizing is becoming endemic.  As true discrimination has diminished, it takes more effort to play the victim.  Histrionics are practically necessary.

This does not just trivialize the profoundly important movements that got us to today, it trivializes government itself.  There are vitally important things that we should expect of our government.  But policing an infinite number of daily commercial and personal transactions is not among them.

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The DeMaio Lie

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What some of us could see all along; the smear campaign against openly gay San Diego congressional candidate Carol DeMaio a Republican, was all a lie, and one that cost him the election (he had been leading in the polls against his Democratic opponent before the smear was unleashed; he lost by a razor-thin margin). So, in a campaign characterized by the LGBT left’s vehement opposition to DeMaio, partisan dirty tricks cost us an openly gay GOP congressman.

As I’ve said before, because it’s true, the worst nightmare of LGBT progressives is that the GOP should become less anti-gay.

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Magistrates and Marriage: They’re Not Private Citizens

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Win some: Florida Gov. Scott Signs Repeal of Gay-Adoption Ban, Despite Vocal Opposition. Lose some: North Carolina Okays Opt-Out for Officials Who Oppose Same-Sex Marriage.

Interestingly, two GOP governors tried to do the right thing (in North Carolina, the legislature overrode a veto by Gov. Pat McCrory).

The Cato Institute’s David Boaz shared this comment on his Facebook page:

Well, I’m sorry to say that the North Carolina House has NOT recognized its constitutional obligation to offer equal justice to all citizens. Instead it has joined the Senate in overriding the governor’s veto of a bill exempting magistrates (the only civil officers authorized to perform marriages) from performing same-sex marriages if they have a religious objection.

As I said previously, this seems clearly wrong. Private citizens — florists, photographers, caterers — should not be forced to participate in ceremonies that offend them. Marrying couples can find another florist or baker who wants their business. But the government represents all citizens. Officers of the court must serve all citizens. By the way, the mission statement of the NC Magistrates Association is “The mission of the Magistrate is to protect and preserve the rights and liberties of all of the people, as guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States and North Carolina, by providing a fair, independent and accessible forum [for] the just, timely and economical resolution of their legal affairs.” Under the new law they will insert “except the gay ones” after “all of the people.”

I made a similar point in an April post:

There is a key difference between private, self-employed citizens who don’t want to provide creative services to same-sex weddings, and servants of the state.

While some of my friends on the left seem to think everyone is essentially (or should be) treated as a servant of the state, that’s actually not the American way, and shouldn’t be.

But, on the other hand, if government officials can’t perform their duty to treat all citizens equally, citing their own religious convictions, then they should step aside. Separation of church and state is also the American way.

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Make It So

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Patrick Stewart believes in freedom, especially expressive freedom. In defending a baker’s right not to bake a cake with a pro-gay-marriage message, he explained:

In my view, this particular matter was not about discrimination, but rather personal freedoms and what constitutes them, including the freedom to object. Both equality and freedom of speech are fundamental rights—and this case underscores how we need to ensure one isn’t compromised in the pursuit of the other.

The arguments of progressive LGBT activists that it’s not ok for a religiously conservative baker to refuse to make a cake with a pro-gay-marriage message, but it is ok for a gay baker to refuse to bake a cake with an anti-gay-marriage message, is all too typical of the strained logic that amounts to whatever progressives want, the state should make sure they receive. And if this limits the expressive rights of their opponents, it’s a bonus!

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Feminists vs. Transwomen

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In the New York Times, feminist Elinor Burkett writes What Makes a Woman?:

For me and many women, feminist and otherwise, one of the difficult parts of witnessing and wanting to rally behind the movement for transgender rights is the language that a growing number of trans individuals insist on, the notions of femininity that they’re articulating….

Many transwomen and transmen embrace psychological distinctions between men and women that some feminist claim are purely cultural and represent patriarchal oppression. I believe there are, speaking generally, innate psychological tendencies between (most) men and (most) women that these feminist reject, although there are also exceptions, which may be more likely (although not exclusively) to be seen among gay men and lesbians (and even here, to be sure, not all gay men are more feminine than straight men, and some are hypermasculine leathermen; likewise, there are “lipstick” and “butch” lesbians), so it gets messy.

More. Like Caitlyn Jenner, women are far more likely than men to prefer frilly underwear. That’s not meant to be flippant; the fact that Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in sexy lingerie was one of the transgressions, so to speak, that provoked Burkett’s column. To claim that women don’t generally prefer stereotypically feminine underwear, or if they do to claim it’s because of cultural norms imposed by the patriarchy, is, I think, silly.

That said, despite the general trend, some women don’t prefer frilly underwear and some men do.

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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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Pataki’s Run

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It will be interesting to see if former New York Gov. George Pataki’s (very) long shot bid for the GOP presidential nomination gets any traction in New Hampshire or elsewhere. As governor, he was a fiscal conservative who believed in limiting the growth of government and holding taxes in check. He is also probably the most pro-gay inclusion of the serious candidates, at least in terms of his support for anti-discrimination statutes (he has said he opposes gay marriage).

Pataki is staking out a position as a fiscal conservative and social liberal. As the Wall Street Journal reported, as governor he supported “some of the strictest gun-control laws in the U.S. at the time.” He also is moderately pro choice on abortion, and serious about extending business regulation to combat climate change.

Those are all positions that can be debated, but it would be good to see a candidate who was pro gay marriage and pro Second Amendment, and reasonably pro life (at least as concerns late-term partial birth terminations, as, in fact, Pataki seems to be) and skeptical about our ability to effectively regulate climate change and the value of attempting to do so versus the impact on economic vitality. Such as candidate might have brighter prospects among Republicans than Pataki will.

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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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