Is it anything like the societal and family pressure on trans kids to remain gender-conforming?
We seem to be missing a reasonabl middle here.
Yes, pressure sucks no matter what ideology is pushing it. Which is why I think gender-noncomforming kids should neither be treated like special snowflakes deserving of special attention nor like crazy deviants deserving of punishment and scorn. Applying too much pressure in either direction has the potential to cause harm.
I can certainly agree with that.
I’m about to sound like an old fogey for a minute.
Yesterday I stumbled across a subreddit devoted to cringy TicTok videos created by young people whose primary hobbies are getting attention by talking/bragging/performing neurological disorders that they clearly do not have. Disorders like Tourette’s and autism. After watching about ten of these videos, I noticed a pattern. All of them were walking stereotypes of not just neurological atypicals, but also gender-nonconformers. Boys who look like girls, girls who look like boys. Lots of purple and blue hair. All of them drawing attention to their “quirks”. I would not be surprised if the majority of these characters identify as gender nonbinary or trans.
When I was growing up, no one wanted to be quirky. Deep, yes. Cool, yes. Nonconformist, yes. But we all wanted a normal brain. Not a special, atypical brain with “issues”. No one wanted to be a spaz or a retard.
Is this aspect of youth culture worrisome? I honestly don’t know. I’m guessing the majority of “special snowflakers” will outgrow their attention-seeking ways once they get to an age where it is no longer cute. But this aspect of youth culture is what is keeping me from jumping on the TWAW bandwagon. I don’t know why I should see a 19-year-old male who came out as a woman a month ago any differently than I would any other 19-year-old male. Seeing the two differently made sense twenty years ago, when transgenderism wasn’t something all the cool kids were doing. But now it has taken on that dimension to a certain degree.
Whew! 
I think the internet is magnifying the problem way beyond its actual prevalence for you. Certainly, none of my 15 y.o. daughter’s friends are like this. There is one whose parents are strongly pushing that she’s on the spectrum when I highly doubt she actually is, but she herself doesn’t want to be. And the rest don’t even have that. They are more nonconformist than my cohort was at that age, and that includes being accepting of nonconformism in others, including gender and sexuality.
But the rash of actual gender nonconformism I’m seeing in my circles (and I have noticed a distinct uptick in the last decade) is noticeably not just a youth phenomenon. It’s also a 30-40-something one. In fact, my younger acquaintances are much more likely to be just enby than trans. It’s my near-contemporaries who are out as trans. I mean, I know more than a handful of 30+ trans people now - unrelated to each other. And that’s not from trans activism, I’m talking about people I’ve known from way before they transitioned. But all bar one came out as trans in the last 5 years.
So if it is trendy (not saying it is, I can think of other reasons for the uptick), it’s not just kids.
I have no doubt that the internet makes everything seem worse than it is.
But I think the existence of internet culture should make us more skeptical about “identity” claims, rather than less skeptical.
Yesterday this crazy news broke out:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/03/us/jessica-krug-gwu-black-trnd/index.html
The internet enabled this woman to “blackface” since it provides so many soapboxes and bullhorns that absolutely anyone can speak through. If you are really desperate to be paid attention to and treated “nice”, you might just glom onto whatever identity you can get away with that you believe offers those benefits. And the internet will give you all the validation you’re looking for, even helping you to create an entire career. I’m actually surprised that Krug would “out” herself knowing the kind of shitstorm that would bring for her. Most people in her crazy shoes would probably keep up the performance for as long as they could.
So, yeah, identity. I’ll always be respectful of people’s expressed identities. I will never tell a person they are wrong about who they say they are. But I don’t see the point in going any further than that. Even if it were possible for me to do so, I’m not going to force myself to see a person the way they want me to. If it happens naturally over time, that’s fine. But I will always reserve the right to be skeptical when someone makes a claim.
According to what I’ve read on Twitter, colleagues had dug into her past and discovered the truth. Her confession was an attempt to get ahead of things.
OK, that makes sense.
I was fully prepared to not care about this, but then I saw a youtube of her doing a very bad imitation of a Nuyorican accent at a public meeting. My eyes have been rolling ever since.
From I’m reading about her, she is worse than Dolezal with her performance of “blacker than thou”. She attacked the scholarship of other black Latinas and even used racially tinged insults to dismiss one academic’s contributions to the field.
Jesus.
But I bet Rachel is happy the heat is off of her.
I really really doubt that MetroWeekly, a local DC mag focusing on LGBT issues, is under any influence by the Trump campaign.
I don’t know what to tell you except maybe reassess your assumptions? What seems simple is not simple at all.
There is a growing divide between the LGB community and the T community. If you doubt this, read the comment section under the Advocate article that @RickJay posted. Read Part 4 of the Duncan essay I posted earlier too; there is no shortage of gay and lesbians saying the same thing, often very angrily.
It cannot be denied that GOP strategists show an understanding about something that the Dems haven’t: the T’s are very different than the LGB. They are pushing for things that the gay community has never demanded, using tactics that the LGB never used. While the Dems aren’t interested in making these distinctions, the GOPs don’t have this hangup. It’s a mistake to assume this won’t help them in November. After almost a year of intently following the gender discourse, I can’t shrug off the effects these social issues might have in November.
I don’t think I’ll be reassessing my assumptions. If you are claiming that the Trump administration has infiltrated MetroWeekly, a tiny local mag, I’ll need more evidence than MetroWeekly publishing an article saying “Some on Trump’s campaign want to use trans rights as a wedge issue while others warn it could backfire.” I doubt Trump’s campaign is even aware MetroWeekly exists. It mostly runs puff pieces on local gay and lesbian celebrities (I liked their interview with Bob Mould) and articles about the scene.
Another one! D’you think this is part of the reason for it, to be able to get away with stuff like that? Or because people would think she had more insight into the things she wrote about if they believed she had personal experience?
It does seem calculated. We usually think of Trump as very far right, but in some areas he’s moved the Republicans towards the centre. LGB are pretty mainstream at this point, and there’s no reason their views on other issues have to match the Democrats’. It makes sense to reach out to them.
My hypothesis is that racial imposters often project their own insecurity onto others to divert attention from themselves. They may also do this because they think this is what “real” black people do when it actually isn’t. Racially ambiguous black-identifying folks have existed forever, and their claims are usually taken at face value. But that’s because the idea that anyone would fabricate blackness has been historically unfathomable. I guess we need to revisit this assumption.
Krug and Dolezal have got folks wondering if academia is infested with professors with fabricated identities. Krug could have gotten a job teaching history as a basic white woman, but maybe she felt like her chances of getting hired would be enhanced if she passed herself off as black She was probably right. She apparently won grants targeted at black academics too. While Krug didn’t do anything criminal as far as I know, her actions have nontheless harmed black people. So black people have every right to be pissed off and be extra skeptical when a pale-faced person starts speaking as a black “authority”.
Discontent and deep unhappiness, a weak sense of self, believing the freedom to express oneself a certain way is inaccessible unless you’re an ethnic/racial minority, extreme jealousy and resentment towards these minorities, and the subversive thrill of taking social liberties that are reserved for these minorities. Not a psychologist, but these are my guesses.
Just like Andrea Chu Long casually referring to lesbians as “dykes” when that would be forbidden pre-transition, I suspect Krug enjoyed the privilege of heaping contempt on black female rivals in ways she knew other white academics could not. Perhaps not her top motivation, but would explain why she couldn’t just be a chill black person.
Probably not even one of the twenty most misogynist things Long Chu (not Chu Long) has written.
Both these sound very plausible.
It’s interesting to compare this to a transgender person getting a grant aimed at women. The later is sincere rather than pretending, which is different. But if Krug passed as black then presumably she became subject to racism. Similarly a transwoman who passes become subject to sexism (while one who doesn’t pass suffers a different type of prejudice). Is the award based on categorically having on certain identity, or on actually suffering disadvantage based on it? On the other hand, Krug suffered no disadvantages growing up, or in most of her educational career. She adopted a different identity when she thought it would benefit her, and could drop it again if and when it proved inconvenient, unlike real black people. That makes her actions seem much more wrong.
Trans women don’t suffer any disadvantages from being brought up as a girl, but they usually are committed after transition. That makes a difference IMO. However, that may not be true of ‘gender fluid’ or ‘glitter beard’ types, or people who identify as non-binary. They can still get the advantages of being seen as a man, and want to opt in and out of womanhood. Probably why I feel it’s way more unfair to give them awards meant for women.
Oh, and this part: “Krug and Dolezal have got folks wondering if academia is infested with professors with fabricated identities.” Perhaps we need to reemphasise that although personal experience and extensive academic study of a subject are both important, professors are supposed to be valued for the latter?