Compare and contrast

[aadler]

Given how much is in the news these days, I’m offering my unsolicited opinion of three very high-profile ‘trans’ personalities.

First of all, I strongly suspect that Dylan Mulvaney doesn’t actually believe he’s a woman. I think he’s simply a fame whore, and this is his latest scam (and the most successful, as long as you don’t consider how insulting his camp parodies are to actual women).

Then we come to Will (“Lia”) Thomas. I am absolutely convinced that he does not for any part of a moment believe he’s a woman. I think he’s just an asshole who decided it would be fun and entertaining to steal swimming trophies from women who really are women.

Finally, Bruce Jenner. Okay, I looked it up and he had his name legally changed to Caitlyn, so his name actually is Caitlyn now … but it’s still his name, because he isn’t a woman. This is a deeply sad case, because every indication is that he truly, desperately wanted to be a woman, and committed himself fully to the process. I feel enormous sympathy and pity for him; he was a great Olympian, and now he’s a mentally ill elderly man who had himself surgically mutilated to more closely resemble what he will never in fact be. No amount of desire, no amount of ‘transitioning’, will turn him into what he isn’t, and he isn’t a woman. He has successfully transformed himself into someone who (mostly) looks like a woman, and that’s as far as it goes. His skeletal structure is still male, his chromosomal structure is still male, and his memories are those of a man who really wanted to be a woman and now perhaps believes he is. But he isn’t. His beliefs, however sincere, are contradicted by verifiable physical reality. And reality isn’t what you choose to believe (or browbeat other people into pretending they believe); no, reality is what’s there whether you believe it or not.

One of my wife’s nieces declared herself to be trans a couple of years ago. Her family chose to go along with this. During gatherings, I don’t make a point of disagreeing, but if the subject ever came up — if I couldn’t avoid it, and had to choose between open dissent and knuckling under — I would make it clear that I regard all this stuff as silly bullshit … except, as is so frequently the case, when it is rampantly destructive bullshit.

Because that’s the reality.