World War T, a term coined by Steve Sailer, actually has little to do with real transsexuals, who are a minuscule minority by any count. The amount of attention paid to this new frontier in equality is wildly disproportionate to the actual incidence of transsexualism in the general population.
What the interest is more likely to be is about transsexualism as a metaphor for mass androgyny, which is part of the egalitarian, democratic experiment. The androgyny relative to historic standards is what is aberrant and significant.
The people who are most androgynous overall, namely white, urban, educated liberals, also put forth the greatest effort to show moral concern over transsexual acceptance, and are more likely to support state subsidies for genital mutilation and hormone treatment to allow a person to effect a more masculine or feminine appearance than biology would allow.
Brainier liberals will use terms like ‘gender dysphoria’ to describe an emotional experience that presents as people claiming to feel as if they have spirits with an alternative gender to the one that nature assigned to them.
In reality, we impose gender dysphoria through instruments like the school system which feminizes boys and masculinizes girls. Civil rights laws addressing gender differences attempt to ‘correct’ for the natural sexual dimorphism in the human species.
Democracy’s ideal has become to mold men with the spirits of women, and women with the spirits of men. According to the values inculcated by the education system, a good biological girl has the enterprising, adventuring spirit of a man. A good biological boy has the meek, gentle nature typical to girls. We encourage both genders to play against what biology pushes them towards, using operant conditioning and social disapproval to rectify any deviations from our attempts to realize the blank slate, to train billions of little Émiles.
World War T resonates because the power structure expects us to all be trannies now, at least on the inside. For the ideal of equality to be realized, men must be encouraged to be effeminate, and women must be encouraged to be masculine. In popular culture, the parody of this is the flamboyant homosexual and the butch lesbian in the lumberjack-plaid shirt. But part of the broader goal of the thrust towards equality is to encourage indifference regarding the social construct of sexual orientation. Rather than calling certain acts sinful, we instead manufacture alternative ‘identities’ around sinning with pride, around favorite sins, while simultaneously condemning most of the classical virtues.
Popular art reinforces the real dysphoria, the common kind that no surgery can correct for, by casting women as competent hard-boiled killers and men as sensitive, bumbling cowards. The ideals that even radical liberals rarely are able to fulfill in the real world show up in their fiction, repetitively.
The obsession about the rights of the transgendered has more to do with soothing people uncomfortable with what they have done to themselves, feeling miserable and unhealthy, having abandoned their natural roles in human society. The ‘brave’ transgender who undergoes surgery is a stand-in for the internal world of an ordinary person who has abandoned their traditional gender role. They dramatize with their flesh the internal struggle of the educated liberal, of the tension that they feel in ignoring what their own body tells them is right.
Whereas the physical transsexual receives praise for responding to emotion with surgery and drugs, the spiritual transsexual receives praise for suppressing their feelings and following the trumpet-calls to corporate ambition, achievement, and certification in place of children, home, and church. While the spiritual transsexual might present as outwardly ‘cisgendered,’ on the inside, and in terms of their behavior, they are firmly trans — no surgery needed.
Rigid gender roles remain both a social construct and a good idea. If the principle advocated by trans-rights-activists that the inner feelings of a person regarding their gender ought to be respected, than that goes even more for people trained by mass education to form a character that runs contrary to their inner feeling of what is right, based on the gender that nature assigned to them, which is unchangeable.
It is cruel to attempt to push girls to forsake femininity and womanhood and to push boys to forsake masculinity and manhood. That’s what’s going on at the scale of billions worldwide, and that’s one of the things that causes so much unhappiness and misunderstanding.
Brilliant. A great insight nobody else has come up with, as far as I know. Liberalism is but a struggle to abolish human nature. Even Rousseau didn’t go that far.
Sam Francis, in his essay “Equality as a Political Weapon” (early 90s), traced the efforts of the Left towards equality in three major phases. Unfortunately I don’t have it at hand, and my memory is a bit rough, but I think in general Phase 1 was overthrowing monarchy and the governing authorities. That having failed to bring about Equality Utopia, Phase 2 was all the social institutions: church, family, community. He predicted the next phase would be nature herself, because Phases 1 and 2 failed to bring about the Equality Utopia. And here we are.
“In what they have in common, they are equal. Where they differ, they are not comparable. A perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks, and perfection is not susceptible of more or less. In the union of the sexes each contributes equally to the common aim, but not in the same way. From this diversity arises the first assignable difference in the moral relations of the two sexes.”
-Emile
(I kld, I kid)
I wonder how much of Rousseau’s thought was attributable to his thoroughly ridiculous family situation during his youth.
I like how the right-wing Republican position on this is to the left of Rousseau.
My opinion of Rousseau is much more favorable than many, I think. Aside from the incorrect core assumptions, his work is not terrible. The insight that private property is the necessary condition for civil society. The idea that there must be a balance between animal nature and civilized decadence is straight out of Conan the Barbarian.
Actually, I think the Rousseau hate is mostly a consequence of the libertarians, who have adopted him as the persona non grata for that era in philosophy.
The Social Contract is vastly less objectionable than the fatuous social contract arguments that most people use without reading the original.
>Actually, I think the Rousseau hate is mostly a consequence of the libertarians, who have adopted him as the persona non grata for that era in philosophy.
I think more of the hate comes from the people who appropriate third hand arguments attributed to Rousseau, but are actually taken from terrible secondary sources taught in universities.
“In reality, we impose gender dysphoria through instruments like the school system which feminizes boys and masculinizes girls.”
Nail, meet hammer.
If I were still on Twitter I’d give this an “eternal retweet.”