Guest post: The kids don’t know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Validate or else.
That’s Kathleen Stock’s insight: that people who call themselves trans are immersed in a dangerous fiction. Immersion in fiction can be a fine thing, and it can be a harmless thing, but if it gets hooked into a fad for “validating” the fiction as rock-solid truth…not so much.
What’s worse, is that the kids don’t know what kind of fiction they’re getting immersed into. The adults playing along with this fiction have their own agenda, and the kids aren’t being let in on it.
To many adult men, transgender is a special kind of immersive fiction, distinct from the nerdy hobby of live-action role-playing (LARPing).
Larpers get together in groups, and enact their roleplaying personas while they’re among the group, and revert to their real selves when interacting with people outside the group, or when they’re not actively “in session.”
But trans is more akin to kayfabe, a word that came into use at the turn of the last century as “professional” wrestling emerged among the travelling carnivals and sideshows that roved the American frontier. (Its etymology is unclear, but it’s probably derived from pig latin for “be fake.”) Kayfabe is like the reverse of Larping: you can let your guard down and be your true self only when you’re alone with your in-group peers; in the presence of outsiders you must always maintain the illusion that your roleplaying persona is real.
Wrestlers depended on elaborate fictional backstories and soap opera-like rivalries to generate excitement and draw crowds to thier (rigged, performative) bouts. Their livelihoods came to depend on keeping up the illusion that these personas were real; if word got out that they were faking it, the whole profession could collapse for loss of viewership.
“Pro” wrestling continues to this day, and the omertà of kayfabe was strictly maintained until as recently as 1989, when executives from the World Wrestling Federation, facing athletic regulation laws, testified to the New Jersey state senate and for the first time publicly admitted that wrestling superstars like Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were, in fact, paid entertainers and not professional athletes. Up until then, many of wrestlers’ own relatives were kept in the dark about how fake the whole thing was.
Fetishistic trans-identifying men are just like pro wrestlers in this regard. When they’re alone with each other they’re completely open about being fetishistic men, and they make and share pornographic videos with each other, etc. But in the presence of outsiders, ma’am’s the word. The lie must be maintained or the whole enterprise could collapse: no more unfettered access to women’s spaces and no more power to force everyone else to play along with their fantasy.
A clear example of a trans person’s private reality vs. public kayfabe is Lia Thomas’s social media: his public Instagram account is the usual guff about protecting trans kids and trans women are women blablabla… But he has a second, private Instagram account, which he uses to interact with his private circle of fellow fetishists and to allegedly share content about fetishistic transvestism and porn.
All of this is to say that these fetishists aren’t upfront that it’s all kayfabe to the children and their famililes they’re targeting, or with the institutions that are backing them. They’re not being let in on the scheme. This can and will be devastating to a lot of kids when they grow up and realize that most of the people leading the “trans community” are conspiring together in a lie to serve their personal, private sexual fantasies.
AHAHAHAHA the picture! I’m stealing that! I’m gonna make a slightly modified version of this post at my Substack; hope you don’t mind.
Of course I don’t mind! It’s yours after all!
And I too was pleased to find the picture. snerk
You’ve given us another possible answer for the ubiquitous question: my pronouns are “kay” and “fabe.”
snerk
I’ve been reading the autobiography of Harvey Fierstein (I don’t like Hollywood biographies, but it was a gift). He talks about Casa Susanna, which was a weekend retreat for cross-dressers back in the 1960s. To me, his description of it sounds like LARPing, but he is presenting it as trans. He is all too sympathetic to that point of view anyway. I checked on Google and it was listed as a weekend retreat for cross-dressing men and trans women. I wonder if that “and trans women” would have been part of the description then. No, I don’t wonder. Of course it wasn’t. These were men who liked to wear dresses, and even if they were saying things like they were letting the little girl inside them out, they were still men, and they knew it. And, of course, like today’s transwomen, they identified female with wearing dresses, high heels, and make up. Women are such shallow creatures, aren’t we?
Cross-dressers knew they were men. For a drag queen like Fierstein, he had to know he was a man, and the audience had to know, or the gimmick didn’t work. They think you’re really a woman, and suddenly you’re just another woman, and you have to do more than put on a dress and high heels to make audiences love you. Insisting your audience believe you are a woman is a deal-killer for the gig. They are invited to play let’s pretend with you, and they may be fooled, or fool themselves, long enough to be surprised when the wig comes off. But in the end, it works because they are men, not because they are women.
@Iknklast
That’s an interesting point. Back before “transgender” there was lots of debate over the boundary between transvestite/crossdresser/drag queen, and transsexual. Generally, a transsexual had surgeries and a transvestite or a drag queen didn’t. But that rule of thumb never quite worked. Because some transvestites and drag queens did indeed get surgeries. (Boob jobs were and still are fairly common among professional drag queens, especially the ones who are also prostitutes.) And some of the transsexuals I worked with (at a trans bar back in my rowdy, street-involved youth in the ’90s) declared themselves transsexuals long before they had any medical work done (if they ever did). So the distinction was something more like a state of mind.
Now that you mention it, the distinction between larping and kayfabe seems to fit the bill: to be a transvestite or a drag queen was to step into a roleplaying mode when among one’s friends; to be a transsexual was to take on the roleplay in a wider, outward sense, in the presence of outsiders, and to actually only confide among friends that it’s roleplay.
Of course these days, it’s all been subsumed under the “transgender umbrella”, and everything is kayfabe now. How will tomorrow’s kids even know the difference between reality and illusion, the rate this insanity is going?
And yet something of the drag queen world view remains. So many transwoman want us to know they are women, have always been women, and yet they are better women than actual women because of all the work they’ve put into becoming. . . well something. They want complete acceptance (which implies invisibility as a class) and they want recognition. If they were to gain complete acceptance they would probably have to break everything and start again.
The first rule of the game is “this is not a game”
Re: roleplaying
There is a short story “The Saturn Game” by Poul Anderson
In it there is an expedition to Saturn on a ship large enough to carry many people to explore the moons of Saturn. I takes several years to get from Earth to Saturn and some of the people on the ship engage in fantasy role playing games to pass their off shift time. Some of them get *too much* into the game and carry on with it while actually exploring one of the moons. This causes problems.
Well it would, wouldn’t it.
As a kid, my rudimentary understanding of physics (which I’m sure most people have) told me that “professional wrestling” was choreographed and staged. I could tell that the punches were pulled (or thrown in parallel to the opponent’s body, rather than perpendicularly to it), and that the (over)reactions to those punches were voluntary, and in the wrong direction, not the result of real physical contact of the required magnitude. I could see that the throws and jumps and ropework were not an assault but a duet, that without prior planning, performing any of these moves would have resulted in actual, serious injury or death. Two men really fighting it out with those techniques would not look or sound like that at all, and the results would be maiming and or fatal. I was not captured at all by the spectacle or theatricality. I couldn’t be bothered with the characters or backstories. It was all just tawdry bullshit.
My knowledge of physics, as basic as it was, was gleaned through simple observation of how things moved, fell, reacted, and responded to force, and the ways human bodies did too. Much of this was from play. Learning the consequences of interactions with the physical environment, and fellow organisms, is an important phase in the maturation of any young animal. Without understanding the limits of your own body and the objects with which it comes into contact, you can die. This understanding told me that what was happening on my TV screen when I watched professional wrestling was staged, not “real.” AS an adult, I could not even enjoy it in any kind of ironic way, as some kind of performance art. A little physics goes a long way.
An understanding of biology similarly undoes trans ideology, but this is harder to come by. This is where genderism has an advantage over wrestling. While we all share the innate, evolutionarily-honed skill to automatically sex our conspecifics almost effortlessly, the other basic truths of human sex are not quite as obvious as the easily observed physics of falling bodies in the ring. Close, but not quite. While the fundamentals are universally known, and have been since forever, some took a little poking around to discover the truth and determine the details.
In humans, there are only two sexes, each evolved to produce one, and only one, of two gametes. The gamete part is relatively recent information. While knowledge of the existence and some aspects of the role of semen has been know for millenia, sperm were not observed until the development of the microscope. The human ovum was unseen until the late 1820s, once and for all destroying the idea that women were mere vessels in which semen worked its magic. Knowledge of the chromosomal and hormonal aspects of sex, both in reproduction and individual growth and development came later still. While the two sexes are themselves obvious (barring deliberate concealment or deception), these tiny squidgy bits that are their underpinning are invisible to the naked eye, and not observable in day to day life.
All humans are born into one or the other of these two sexes. There are no exceptions. (There can be problems that interfere with proper sexual development, function, and maturation, but these disorders themselves are specific to one sex or the other. Again, this took a bit of looking into to confirm.)
Humans cannot change sex. This is complretely understood. Whatever practices a culture might have around sexed gender roles, none of them are going to mistake those “bending” the rules as being the opposite sex or a third sex. The introduction of supposedly “Western” understandings of sex would not have stopped colonized cultures from thinking that males partaking in female-coded gender behaviour could give birth because they would have known this already.
The reversal or refutation of any of these basic ideas would have netted the discoverer(s) Nobel prizes. It would be world-wide front page news. Have any such prizes been handed out? Has any such story hit the news? No. Then we’re safe to assume these truths still stand.
So with a few basic rules of biology, gender ideology comes crashing down. This is why trans activists are always so desperately eager to brand these basic facts as hateful transphobia. They cannot answer them, only deny them or muddy the waters. They’re got nothing but word games and clownfish. Men can’t become women, however fiercely they “identify” as such. Gender, if it is anything at all, is an idea in the head which does not over-ride the material reality of sex. Rights, opportunities, positions, facilities, and resources segregated or set aside on the basis of sex have no need to take into account anyone’s “gender identity.” In fact, they should not. At all. Ever. Gender identity is literally immaterial to this determination, because every individual is only ever going to be the sex they were born into. Identity or performance, costume or cosmetics do not change this, and never will. If someone tries to convince you otherwise, even if they’re doctors or biologists, they’re trying to sell you the gender ideology equivalent of “professional wrestling is real.” But physics doesn’t lie. Neiher does biology.
@YNNB
Kayfabe is a strange thing, because it doesn’t need to convince everyone in order to work. In fact, it doesn’t need to convince very many people at all. It only needs to persuade a critical mass of people to believe in order to make it not worth the while for the unbelievers to say anything. Once the lie gets a little momentum going, a little emotional investment from the “laity” (as it were), it’s hard to stop it.
In that sense, kayfabe is a lot like religion.
In the ’80s it was so obvious that WWF wrestling was fake, but there was a lot of motivated reasoning and willful disbelief among its fans (even grown adults), because they enjoyed it so much.
If anything, the phenomenon of pro wrestling kayfabe has gotten even more interesting, psychologically, in the aftermath of its official “breaking” in the 1989 New Jersey Senate testimony.
Pro wrestling only got more popular afterwards — wildly so — and the “fake reality” of the wrestlers’ characters only got more elaborate, and the staged fights moved out of the rings into the backstage areas, and the actual president of WWF — Vince McMahon — himself became a kind of kayfabe persona, and even stepped into the ring in his business suit to bout from time to time. The fact that the fans were let in on the secret if anything gave them a sense of personal investment in kayfabe’s upkeep.
Nowadays, wrestling is just reality TV for man-boys — the guy-world mirror image of Real Housewives.
But this phenomenon of lay people becoming arguably more zealously protective about the roleplay once they’re let in on it, a kind of vicarious keeping of kayfabe, has parallels with trans activism, too: for every true believer who’s been sold the lie that, say, their child can truly become the opposite sex if they keep following the gender affirmation protocol that’s been sold to them at their local gender clinic, there’s a dudebro activist who knows full-well that transwomen are men but who gets a misogynistic thrill out of playing along, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt.
Indeed, it gives the trans “ally” dudebros cover for their misogyny, and the trans activists excuse this misogyny, as well as their own, (along with its attendant bullying and violence) as righteous “defence” of the “most marginalized community” which is always a hairsbreadth away from being genocided. Hurting is the point. That the dudebros probably wouldn’t fuck a TiM if their life depended on it, they’re still allies on the right side of history. They might be beyond reason’s reach, but the useful idiots who mouth the platitudes without much thought or conviction might clue in with exposure to the intrusion of men in women’s prisons and women’s sports.