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Sunday, July 19, 2015

The bad female impersonator award


I watched a bit of Bruce Jenner's acceptance speech for the Arthur Ashe "courage" award. I'll comment on two of his statements:

But this transition has been harder on me than anything I could imagine. And that’s the case for so many others besides me. For that reason alone, trans people deserve something vital. They deserve your respect.

i) To begin with, the unintentional sight gag sabotages the moralistic lecture. When the speaker who demands our unconditional respect resembles a female impersonator doing a bad imitation of Marilyn Monroe or Jayne Mansfield, they deserve a fit of giggles. 

ii) I didn't ask Jenner to "transition." I'm not obliged to rubber-stamp his lifestyle choices. Play any record your please, but you can't make be dance to your tune. 

They're getting bullied, they're getting beaten up, they’re getting murdered and they’re committing suicide. The numbers that you just heard before are staggering but they are the reality of what it is like to be trans today.

Let's set the record straight:

i) There's a cottage industry of fake hate crimes. Reported hate crimes should be greeted with skepticism absent hard evidence.

ii) People like Joshua Alcorn committed suicide, not because their parents said something was wrong with them, or their church, but because the cultural elites said something was wrong with them. It was social media, the LGBT lobby, &c, which told them they were so defective that nothing short of hormone therapy and irreversible extreme makeover surgery would fix them. Those were the culprits who pushed them over the edge. 

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