The Emptying

transgender fetishism in a post-factual era

There’s an exchange I’ve seen a dozen times in the last few months, and it’s always more or less the same. The faces and the names change, but the structure of the discussion is consistent.¹ It happened last week between Senator John Kennedy and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas (video is time-stamped to 1:55 or so, when the discussion begins, but Substack sometimes eats the timestamp, so fast-forward if necessary):

I won’t quote from it, because it’s so casually bizarre and unsettling you should just watch it to see for yourself, but Kennedy notes that Mayorkas has recently and very publicly demanded a federal ban on assault weapons — and then he asks Mayorkas to define “assault weapons.” You want to ban X, so what is X? What is the thing you intend to ban?

Mayorkas responds with all known forms of rhetorical deflection short of diving under the table: “I defer to the experts,” do it for the children, it is no longer acceptable to do nothing as people die, the children the children the children. But he will not propose a definition for the term. He wants to ban something, but he refuses to say what he wants to ban. Kennedy keeps asking; Mayorkas keeps right on with not ever saying. The closest he ever comes to an answer is that at one point he tentatively upspeaks a firm maybe, saying that possibly assault weapons are kind of…military style? But then he won’t say what that means, either.

Not noticing himself, Mayorkas just comes right out and says one of the things that fatally undermines his own claim that he lacks the expertise to participate in the discussion, noting that he worked as both an assistant U.S. attorney and as the U.S. Attorney for the Central District of California while the last federal assault weapons ban was on the books. So he’s been a federal prosecutor, and has led federal prosecutors, during a period when federal prosecutors went to court to enforce an assault weapons ban, but he can’t possibly discuss a legal definition of the term “assault weapon,” because he’s not an expert in a question that was central to his professional identity for years. I don’t know nothin’ about all this giraffe anatomy, says local zoo veterinarian.

So this is the structure of the exchange:

Very Senior Government Official: I demand that we do X, because X is very important.

Questioner: Okay, what is X?

Very Senior Government Official: I have no idea.

Kennedy has a special gift for very simply asking the Executive Director of Widgets to just say what a widget is, and he keeps discovering that Very Important People frequently can’t begin to answer the most fundamental questions:

But Kennedy isn’t alone in mining the rich seam of the direct factual question. Here’s Montana Rep. Ryan Zinke, a former interior secretary himself, directing some duckies-and-bunnies questions on mineral extraction to Secretary of the Interior Deborah Haaland:

Just watch a minute of that — she can’t say anything about anything. Her mouth hangs open, and then it closes, and then Zinke sighs and continues.

Now, remember my recent post here about a legislative hearing in California in which proponents of a bill argued for its passage by not mentioning the actual provisions of the bill:

"Kidnapping Bill" Advances on Stealth Maneuver

It’s the display of asserting but not knowing: I feel this. Why? Dunno. What is it? Dunno. What does it do? Dunno.

Over and over and over again, prominent members of the political class argue for things by throwing their givens around the room, and that’s all they can do. I feel very strongly that we need common sense solutions, in the sense that the solutions we need are very common sense things that we can all agree are very common sense. If you try to penetrate the half-millimeter of topsoil to find out what’s underneath, you see that there isn’t anything down there. You can ask them to explain their underlying premises, or to explain by logical steps how they reached their policy conclusions, but you’re just being charitable. They don’t have any of that, and wouldn’t admit it if they did. They simply feel, senator, that we must protect the children. With bipartisan solutions. That are common sense.

Yes, this is sometimes a tactic, and they know what they mean. But the brittle crust at the top edge of the discourse increasingly seems to not be characterized by the sneaky maneuver. There’s often nothing to probe for. There’s no debate to be had by opening a space for the discussion. Remarkable numbers of “leaders” read what’s on the index card — and then look up, finished with the statement, waiting for a treat like a golden retriever.

I am for [symbol]!

Mister Secretary, what do you mean by [symbol]?

I am for [symbol], I am for [symbol]! (Long pause.) I am for [symbol!]

So it seems to me that the first fact about our political discourse is that it’s increasingly about nothing, populated by people who don’t mean anything and can’t think about anything. There’s often no possibility of an exchange that leads to a deepened understanding, because there’s nothing in there. We must fight inflation by passing the Inflation Reduction Act! The public sphere has been emptied; its where we go to pass null sets back and forth.

Now, consider the way we talk about transgender identity:

Julia 🇺🇸 @Jules31415

Transgender influencer Jeffrey Marsh demands: “You will respect us.”

“This is only going in one direction.” What it this? It. This. This is going in one direction. Don’t disrespect this, Nazi!

Now, compare that to this very important two minutes of great specificity from a young detransitioner who wakes up every day in the agony of a ruined body:

Oli London @OliLondonTV

Brave Detransitioner Luka Hein shares her story with the world about the horrors of being pushed into a medical transition @onedonebun

You can feel in your bones, in your soul, the difference between a person deploying emptied symbols and a person talking about specific reality in the embodied world. You know it without being told about it.

Claims like Marsh’s — claims about nothing, expressed with language that doesn’t say anything — can only be made in the context of a discourse that has already been emptied. You can’t do this in a political culture that regularly demands and expects coherence, logic, factual precision, and clarity. To empty the language about gender, you have to empty the language.

Here’s the new prime minister of New Zealand being asked what a woman is, to the point that a reporter brings up the complex issue of whether or not women have penises:

He can’t say. He can’t get to it. I, I, I, uh….

You can’t arrive at this moment without killing fact and discussion first. The specific madness is the general madness. What is an assault weapon? I don’t know, but we should ban them. What is a woman? I don’t know, but anyone who says they’re one is one. The implosion of language, the emptying of debate, the evaporation of precision, the disappearance of an expectation that a political position or cultural view can be explained: All of this fits together.

The boat between human islands is language, and ours is sinking.

1. It’s this: Smokey Robinson wishes you a Happy Chanukah.