You're Very Weird

A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:

Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.

“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.

An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.

The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.

This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.

After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me…shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”

I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.

This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen:

Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.

The increasingly obvious descent into infertility is tangled up with the decline of shared and defensible standards in ways that I can’t untangle. A culture full of clumsy ugliness is a sexless culture that isn’t fun. Yes, a culture that leads to this car is a culture where people make fewer babies.

A refrigerator box for Mary Kay sales champions? With practical HVAC ports?

We’re awash in daily ugliness, and simultaneously awash in widespread loneliness and social anxiety. Cluster B politics is the decline of connection, of families, of baby-making, of people having fun together. OH MY GOD PETE HEGSETH DRANK WHISKEY WITH OTHER MEN DO YOU STILL THINK HE’S QUALIFIED TO LEAD THE ARMED FORCES. The political performance of relentless anxiety is the dying social world. “think about all the things that are normal now,” the cat said, not using capital letters. Very suspect, cat.

Related, M Gessen’s warning against autocracy falls off its foundation a few paragraphs after the toilet story, in a discussion about Tennessee’s ban on “gender affirming care” — genital mutilation — for children:

Tennessee also claims that science is on its side, and that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this case. Dozens of mainstream medical societies, including the leading associations of pediatricians, filed amici briefs arguing against S.B.1. Apparently trying to find their footing, conservative justices asked about new regulations in the United Kingdom and Sweden. But those regulations were written by medical — not legislative — authorities, and they come nowhere near a total ban…

The ease with which legislators overrule doctors, and the relatively small amount of attention this overreach received during the Supreme Court hearing, are symptoms of our times.

Did you see that? Societies are to be governed by experts. Behavioral norms are to be imposed by scientific diktat — and here I made fun of Foucault in grad school — while legislatures and courts are not to interfere. The complaint is about “the ease with which legislators overrule doctors.” Democracy is Lysenkoism; if your elected representatives are making decisions in an atmosphere of open debate and shared culture, we’ve descended into authoritarianism. Free men do as doctors order, full stop. Democracy is rigid obedience to credentials.

This search for other-directedness is a choice to be insane, and to feel the insanity. This observation feels right:

As, I pray, does this one:

We’ve built cultural systems in which weird, awkward, unhappy people have taken the authority to pronounce upon the behavior that is to be considered weird and bad. That…doesn’t…seem to be working. Does it?