Guest post: You’re not paying the price
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Read the room.
Would Ferrell have been as enthusiastic if his friend had come out as a bear, or a lawn mower? Would he have been as keen to travel across America if Harper had decided he was a toddler rather than a woman? Would he have changed his friend’s diapers? Would he have been willing to pay that price, to carry that burden, to put up with the imposition? (Quite apart from the hit to his reputation that passing a grown man off as an infant would have inflicted. That would have been fetish too far.) I doubt it. Well, by accepting him as a women, and encouraging (insisting?) that others do so, he’s expecting women to accept him in places he doesn’t belong. He’s pushing the price, the burden, and imposition of his friend’s delusion onto women who might not be as willing to put up with them. Yet they’re the ones with a problem. Supposedly. Ferrell is essentially getting them to “change the diaper” he’ll never have to.
Loyalty and friendship are good things, but when they cloud your judgement about what is best for your friend, and what your friend is asking/expecting/demanding of others, it papers over things that may not be healthy. You can’t assume that your personal experience with your nice, loving, harmless friend mirrors others’ experience of him, because it may not be the same. You’re never going to be the women in the restroom he enters, but you’re going to use your celebrity, friendship, and loyalty to bully women to accept this man’s presence in women’s spaces. You’re not paying the price in fear and uncertainty that the women upon whom he’s intruding will. Your friend is not harmless. Even if he never assaults a women, his presence in women’s spaces is an unwanted intrusion of someone who refuses to accept women’s boundaries. Nor can you apply your experience of him to everyone else who shares his delusion, yet your advocacy for trans “rights” will help other men who are not as seemingly benign and harmless as your friend to violate those same boundaries that your friend does.
The world actually ended in 2004 at the dawn of The Age Of Unreason, when Ron Suskind reported about a Bush White House aide who accused him of being part of the ‘reality-based community’ – believers in objective truth and the use of facts to create solutions to problems. The fact that such people were not dragged into the streets and pummeled emboldened them further. Bigger and bolder lies followed until we reached our current situation where a large majority of voters simply cannot be bothered to think or consider the costs of having pathological liars as leaders. Comments like Ferrel’s are a natural extension of those tactics. (FYI: he was the only weak element in Barbie…)
I think they’re asking us to accept the plight of the poor misunderstood “transwomen.” Live and let live I say, or as JKR more eloquently put it, “Dress however you please. Call yourself whatever you like. Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you. Live your best life in peace and security”. But why are they asking us to confer special status on these people? Why celebrate them? Ferrell has obviously been caught up in the seductive trans cult garbage, and his friend wanted him to ‘do the right thing’ and celebrate his fantastic (and I mean rooted in fantasy) “journey.” Why a movie though? Is it merely proselytizing? My guess is that Ferrell is overcompensating for some lack of acceptance on his part, and is (insultingly) projecting his own garbage on the rest of us. Make a movie, play on people’s sympathies.
Fine Will, do what you please. Kiss this guy’s ass all you want, but don’t expect people to accept how women and girl’s rights have been eroded by the trans cult (not to mention the hijacking and delegitimization of LGB rights), and more importantly, the misery it has caused for many children who have been mutilated and had their lives ruined by this ideology, or the portrayal of mentally ill people as the victims (!) of mentally healthy people, the stifling of reasonable concerns, and the outright rejection of biological reality.
Of course Will has the luxury and financial means to do whatever he wants without thinking of the repercussions — like most of the people who live in La La Land, he doesn’t have a clue how the real
world works. But hey, if you can get the idiots who watch the adolescent garbage that Ferrell has been a part of to be sympathetic to these poor misunderstood “transwomen” then why not? It’s just more low quality (what passes for) “entertainment” that contributes to the continued dumbing down of society these days, and passes for modern culture. It’s garbage. Reduce us all to the lowest possible common denominator, and market garbage to us. That’s what consumers want. Eff off, Will.
At this point, I consider that too much to ask. I haven’t seen any real evidence of the plight of the transwomen. While I have little doubt they do suffer some level of harassment from those who believe men should be manly and women should be girly, it doesn’t appear to be anything like the harassment women and girls suffer every day for the crime of being women. The murder rates are lower, the homeless rates they cite appear to be mostly gay, not trans, and an exceptionally high number of them appear to be middle class or better in their lifestyle. They get to have more days of trans this or trans that than any other group gets days, and if they keep going, they will have so many days, weeks, and months there won’t be enough time in a given year to put them all. They have captured quite a few institutions, especially academia, and are allowed to punch women in the face and call it ‘sport’ – and win medals for it.
For the most part, I think I can file this in the category of ‘too bad, so sad. Get a life.’
Which reminds me, a bit of a tangent, but: these days “gender critical” is often taken to mean opposition to trans ideology, but my understanding is that it was originally intended to refer to criticism of gender itself, the social expectations forced on people because of their sex. (This view necessarily extended to opposition to trans ideology.) Thus, I don’t think conservative people who speak out, however eloquently and accurately, against trans ideology should be considered “gender critical”, so long as they do also expect men to be manly and women should be girly.