Exhausted

or just exhausting

Thinking about ICE raids and riots, and about rescission bills, I keep drawing comparisons to surgical neovaginas. This will make sense in a minute or two.

We’ve been driving for almost a week, now, and just came out of North Cascades National Park, where I was completely cut off from cell service and wifi while we sat by a lake. I have no complaints about this. Driving across the country, the rural space is persistently marked with Trump signs, and the urban space, even the smaller pieces of it, is aggressively marked with pride flags. The country through the windshield goes Trump Trump Trump Trump gay gay Trump Trump Trump Trump gay gay gay. Walla Walla, Washington is a little burst of AND HERE’S SOME MORE PRIDE FLAGS in the middle of a lot of Trump Trump Trump, as is the town of Twisp and the incredibly beautiful Methow Valley. If you see a pride flag in Trump country, or a Trump sign in pride flag country, send word. You’ve either seen a unicorn or the exact transitional point between spaces. The only place I’ve ever seen the two symbols really intermix is on the Lost Coast, which is famous for being culturally strange.

So this is the rhetorical division, somehow, even as Scott Bessent and Richard Grenell are important figures in the Trump administration: gay is the thing on the other side of Trump, two symbols standing in for a range of implied specifics. The striking thing about all the Trump signs is the absence of extra rhetoric, displayed slogans that fill out the meaning. They just say Trump, or Make America Great Again, and you can figure out the rest. We’ve coded a whole country’s worth of physical space in two symbols, in ways that don’t consistently make sense, but that suggest a bunch of cultural exclusion, one from the other. Oh, you say, behind the wheel, we just crossed into pride flag.

But throughout that week or so of travel, passing through four states, dwelling in blue and red space, I heard discussions about ICE raids and big city riots precisely once, from an business owner I like to talk to on the road every year who is clearly a bit of an old hippie, and hates Trump in all the expected ways. Mostly, none of it seems to be happening outside CNN and the 101 freeway through Downtown LA. The country that I’m seeing doesn’t seem to be rapt with current events. Our campground neighbors were Blue Zone families in Patagonia gear and REI tents mixing with groups of young men in cotton sweatshirts who smoked cigarettes and drank beer for breakfast — I kept hearing the pull-tabs — and everybody was at least polite. Again, I start with the sense that social division is largely a media product — but then I’m stuck with the way people mark their communities, Trump Trump Trump gay gay Trump Trump gay. People don’t act at all like the country is divided, I don’t hear anyone talking about politics in public space, and everything is marked with symbols of division. Maybe that’ll make sense to me at some point.

So.

Three days ago, while I was sitting by that lake, a congressional committee discussed a bill that would criminalize transgender medical procedures when they’re performed on minors. The argument against medically and surgically transitioning children is that it’s an act of great cruelty, a psychologically inappropriate response to adolescent confusion and crisis, and an unnecessary infliction of permanent physical harm on otherwise healthy bodies. The argument against transgender medical procedures for minors is that it hurts them. It hurts children. Jazz Jennings, the trans child fountainhead for the current cultural moment, has never felt sexual pleasure, and has surgically grafted sexual organs that keep rupturing.

There are many ways to get at an understanding of this harm. See, for example, the testimony of Dr. Eithan Haim, the surgeon who told the public that Texas Children’s Hospital kept doing trans procedures on minors after a public announcement that they had stopped. A biological male receiving a “vagina” as a transgender patient gets that “vagina” from various sources, but one is his own colon, a sexy chunk of which is then sewn into a surgical wound. As Dr. Haim said, that “vagina” can then develop “fistulas, where stool from the rectum can pour into the wound that they call the neovagina.” Don’t do that to children, is the argument.

The point is the protection of children, the end, particularly given the frequency of culturally clustered “trans kids,” like the enormous number of celebrities who have not just trans kids but several trans kids. Children are susceptible to pressure and social messaging, especially from parents who find transgender signaling to be high-status behavior; then comes the permanent alteration of their bodies, in ways they can’t fix, long before they were adults and could decide for themselves outside the pressure behaviors of lunatic Cluster B moms who push push push.

At that recent congressional hearing, though, Rep. Pramila Prayapal — a Seattle leftist who, prepare to be shocked, has a transgender child — lashed into Republicans for their cowardice and their cruelty. You are, she explained, trying to hurt trans kids by ripping away their medical care, because you’re terrified of them, which is crazy, because they aren’t harming you.

So her response to an argument about protecting children isn’t to engage the premise, but to just invert it: If you’re preventing minors from receiving their good healthy castrations and their elective mastectomies for healthy breasts and their chunks of sewn-in surgical colon-vagina, you’re being cruel. You’re lashing out because you’re threatened!

We’ve all seen this calculated rhetorical inversion a million times, now, in which arguing for X is arguing against X, or arguing for X is arguing for Not-X. The arguments from the thing we’re calling the “left,” the institutionally-aligned status signalers, are invariably advanced in bad faith. They’re never a response; they’re always a distortion and a manipulation. Bad Cattitude, recently: “it’s a playbook.”

My sense is that we all know about it, we’ve all seen it so many times that it’s just tiresome, and it isn’t working anymore. House Republicans, hearing that rescission would MURDER CHILDREN, shrugged and passed the rescission bill. That’s where we are. There are hysterical threats and dire pronunciations of harm, and no one notices them. This is what I think is happening on the road, this week, as no one I hear is talking about any of the Big Events.

Eugyppius, earlier this week:

Correct. People just want some basic level of peace and order, a desire that’s fed back to them through media as a yearning for authoritarianism.

1. Please stop burning our cities

2. OHHH YOU’RE SAYING YOU WANT TO TURN INTO ADOLF HITLER!?!?

I think the end is here. I don’t know what comes after the end — what the new beginning is. But I think the “babies will die” playbook has become so outrageously old and tedious that no one cares, and a kind of social silence is descending around a manipulative politics.

This is all semi-coherent, and I apologize, but I’m catching up around time on the road. More soon. And now we’re about to go watch a light show on a dam, so.