The obsessiveness

Mostly Cloudy alerted us to a piece by “a clickbait-spewing hack called Katherine Alejandra Cross” who disapproves of Jesse Singal. There’s this one bit in the piece…

Your average New York Times subscriber is not Extremely Online but is increasingly being fed opinions and ‘analysis’ from writers who are, and who find themselves increasingly angry at all the annoying people who spoonerise their names and troll them on platforms.

Trans people are a good example of this. Some small group of angry trans people harangues a journalist—rightly or wrongly—for being a bigot, and then this feeds a resentment that others like Jonathan Chait or Matt Yglesias give shape and form with plausible, lib-pleasing moderate language that, in turn, those Extremely Online journalists transcribe into the pages of respectable publications. 

There are few ways of explaining the obsessiveness with which the mainstream press has published stories “critical” or “skeptical” of trans people without recourse to social media and how it makes us loom large in the minds of the terminally online, nor how that overemphasis has been adroitly exploited by provocateurs who’ve long dripped poison in the ears of epistemic movers and shakers. It’s not unreasonable to suspect that Twitter played a leading role in radicalising J.K. Rowling or Elon Musk against trans rights, for instance.

Makes us loom large? So this is a trans woman then? Yes.

Also the obligatory Trans Laydee Pout photo. Push those lips out, babe, they make you look SO womany.

So, of course he goes on to explain what trans rights are, yes? Hahaha no of course not. As always, they go unspecified, because if one spells them out, it becomes too obvious that they’re not rights at all.

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