I woke up this morning to discover (among other things) a Morning Mix piece in the Washington Post "summarizing" the Jenner/Dolezal "controversy," which I will now elaborate on, and from which the majority of the essays I will cite are linked. ("Reinventing the wheel" on this would take more time than I have today and in any case on a planet of 7 billion people that's been crawling with H. sapiens sapiens for over 100,000 years "total originality" is a rare thing indeed.)
First I'll paraphrase very closely a sentence from Zeba Blay's recent essay in the Huffington Post: 'Transsexual identity is a concept that allows men to indulge in womanhood as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being a woman entails -- discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into sexual stereotypes, and perpetuates the false idea that it is possible to "feel" a sex.' Note that I am not equating biological sex with psychosocial gender: it is transsexualism that does that, by "forgetting" that it is possible to be a feminine person, and even in some societies assume a "female" social-sexual role, while having male genitals. Note also that among "the left" I am not alone in this: I haven't found, nor could I come up with, a better elucidation of this position than that put forth by the radical lesbian-feminist Janice Raymond in her book The Transsexual Empire.
Properly speaking these linked issues are not left/right matters, but rather (as "right-wingers" are quoted as saying) an issue of objective fact, of simple true/false. Bruce Jenner is in fact not a woman, and Rachel Dolezal is in fact not Black. It's unfortunate that "rightists" are the only people being quoted as agreeing with me, because such willingness to play make-believe does indeed paint those called "leftist" as fools and show how strong the tyranny of "PC" on those who stand "left-of-center" in fact is.
Don't get confused: on the vast majority of other issues involved in the "left v. right" debates the rightists are in my opinion simply wrong. And only an an idiot would deny that rightists have their own version of PC: for example for a rightist to stand with me in upholding the idea of strict separation between church and state and point out that the Consitution of the USA is a strictly secular document would today get someone who claims to be rightist called a "RINO." Republican PC declares that the USA is "a Christian country," and a Republican who "refudiates" that dogmatic assertion would be a long shot indeed.
And I must admit that Rand Paul -- with whom I disagree with on practically every other issue of his campaign -- is in fact correct when he states that among the effects of "the War on Drugs" is in fact to unjustly deprive racial-minority American citizens of the right to vote (and also to hold political and governmental offices, though I haven't yet seen him go that far), which I'm sure will cause problems for his campaign. I believe that if you push most white self-described Republicans hard enough they'll reveal that they do in fact believe "the Negro" is a born criminal, and anyway is not smart enough to be trusted to vote "rationally" (as if most Americans of any race are, which is questionable). Of course one of the right wing's pet crusades -- which to his credit Rand Paul is willing to be "flexible" about, "the Defense of Marriage" -- depends a great deal on the tendency of most Black church-goers and preachers to be heterosexist, but that's an issue for another day. Perhaps it's enough for Senator Paul to be publicly heretical on only one major Republican issue: he clearly needs the support of one of the two "major" parties, because it's a fallacious "truism" that third-party or independent candidates can't win (because nobody with any "sense" will vote for them because the media pundits they let do their thinking for them declare that third-party or independent candidates can't win because nobody will vote for them), and Rand Paul's hunger for power is too blatant to be denied. (As is Rachel Dolezal's, for that matter.)
Anyway. These recent "controversies" concerning Bruce Jennner and Rachel Dolezal baldly show that facts are simple things it's stupid to deny, and that too much of American public political debate from most "major players" consists of self-evident idiocy. And one need not be a rightist to point this out, any more than Rand Paul championing the right of black ex-felons to vote makes him a socialist. It is a good thing that not every rightist can be an idiot all the time.
