Light That Bitch Up

things got a little out of hand, jenny

Suddenly I feel very confident that gender dysphoria, in its current form, is something else entirely, and something very different from what actual gender dysphoria has ever been.

The swimmer Riley Gaines, a former competitor with a transgendered college athlete, spoke at San Francisco State University this week, and she was attacked — punched, twice, by a “trans woman,” which means she was punched by a man. Police were present. No arrests were made.

Now, generally speaking, men who beat women are, let’s put this gently, disfavored. They’re not at the top of the societal pyramid. But the brave trans woman who fought for tolerance by tuning up Riley Gaines with a couple of well-placed fists, well. That poor trans woman was a hero and a victim, a bit like the seventh victim of the school shooting in Tennessee, the brave transgendered shooter.

Look around: Transgendered identity is becoming a license for sociopathy, a catch basin for people who like hurting people and being cruel. I can’t embed tweets, right now, because Twitter and Substack are apparently having beef, but click on this link and watch a single minute of videotaped behavior. Under the normal social rules, this is aggressive and demeaning behavior; for “trans women,” it’s brave and strong. You get to scream abuse in another human being’s face and have the abuse coded as kindness and decency. We had a very similar historical moment recently in which brave, caring men could follow women around in public and scream PUT ON A FUCKING MASK YOU BITCH, because of their kindness and wanting everyone to be safe. It feels so good to call a woman demeaning names, and to scream at her and to hit her. You know, to make the world a better place.

Remember the five-minute commencement address the economist Thomas Sargent delivered at UC Berkeley in 2007, and the very basic advice he gave about human behavior: People respond to incentives. If you incentivize people to identify as transgendered with a widely offered promise, now barely tacit, that ordinary rules will no longer apply to you, then people are going to take that offer.

Transgendered identity is becoming a social carve-out, a place to run to when you’re weak and angry, when you want to lash out and not be harmed for lashing out. It’s becoming an Etsy cudgel, with a leaded center and a soft rainbow sleeve.