Thanks, Obama!

Twitter recommendation

First, the son:

This makes us say:

1. "Thanks, Obama!"
2. "Consumer confidence" is the prevailing "vibe." It is odd to ask people to feel grateful for or impressed by their own attitude toward their own purchasing power. We need to compare perceptions against facts. The bank deregulation pending in Congress includes only modest "changes for consumers that ought to be a given,” according to Marcus Stanley of Americans for Financial Reform. In the longer term, consumers are likely to be hurt by the bank deregulation, which is the main legislative change in progress.
3. Regarding the hashtag at the end, are these things really what "Make America Great"? What else could be missing from the list?
4. To whom do we give thanks for this? A leader? A divine agent pulling strings? Other people who share our opinions? Can we name anyone who worked hard to make good things happen?
5. It's ill-mannered to ask a nation to direct their holiday gratitude for something you or your father supposedly did, no matter how significant or well deserved. It's called Thanksgiving, not Thanksgetting.
6. Giving thanks for statistics is dicey. We should pay attention to the real human beings in front of us. This tweet may not be welcome, productive, or sensitive Thanksgiving conversation if one of the individuals at your table doesn't have a job or is on food stamps.

A few hours later, the father:

1. Since our country is only "starting to do really well" and the military is only just now "getting really strong," what does that say about our history?
2. The Department of Veterans Affairs is always supposed to take care of veterans. That is its mission.
3. We have nine Supreme Court justices. Which one is great — the one you appointed?
4. The "highest Stock Market EVER" doesn't directly help the half of Americans who aren't invested in stocks.
5. It isn't clear exactly what "record" is being set by cutting what kind of regulations and what that is supposed to achieve.
6. The unemployment rate was under 5% in 2007 when the financial crisis began. The crisis occurred in large part because there weren't enough regulations on banks. Obama was elected in 2008 and began working on legislation to fix the problem, introducing regulations like Dodd-Frank. Unemployment (which takes months, if not years, to begin to correct) spiked to 10% in late 2009 and then it dropped during the last seven years of Obama's presidency. It was 4.6% when you were elected in Nov. 2016, 4.8% when you were inaugurated in January, and 4.2% in Sept. 2017. You have aimed to eliminate Dodd-Frank via the Financial CHOICE Act. Without adequate regulations, over the very long term, the country may set itself up for another financial crisis.
7. Indeed, the last time unemployment was any lower (3.9%) was in the final month of the Clinton administration (Dec 2000). Bill Clinton's administration is the benchmark to beat. Since we are at the "lowest unemployment in 17 years," it sounds as if jobs already came back so you can stop taking credit for them "coming back."
8. "We will build the WALL" is not even an accomplishment. It is imaginary and ideological. It is aspirational — if you are a fascist.

Better recommendation

Published in early 2017, Stephen Cataldo's Cognitive Politics helps left-leaning folks work through strategies for meaningful conversations with people with whom they have political disagreements.

On reading: Quotes

"Rather than reading a book in order to criticize it, I would rather criticize it because I have read it, thus paying attention to the subtle yet profound distinction Schopenhauer made between those who think in order to write and those who write because they have thought."
- Miguel de Unamuno, Ensayos, Vol. 2, p. 1013. Quoted in Clive James' Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 767.

"Unstudied, our books are parchment and ink, no more; learned, they live in us."
- Leonard Fein, Where Are We?: The Inner Life of America's Jews (1988) New York: Harper and Row, 1988. p. 32.

"...I'm not one of those arrogant fools who form their opinions as oysters form their pearls, and then shut them away where nothing can touch them. I have my own ideas and beliefs, but I can hear the rest of the world breathing."
- Amin Maalouf, Balthasar's Odyssey (2000) Translated from the French by Barbara Bray. New York: Arcade, 2002. p. 10.

"The hallway is washed in the smell of library: melancholy scholarship, paper and dust mites. There’s no trace of the shut-in old lady smell, the powder and outmoded perfume. Instead, there’s a hint of beeswax from the furniture, damp oil paint and turpentine, but above all the autodidact scent of knowledge. It is almost too much, too selfconscious, like a stage set built to house Leonardo da Vinci or Albert Einstein. This person is bookish. Neith glances down a hallway and sees, yes, more books."
- Nick Harkaway, Gnomon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. p. 35.

”...she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart...”
- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (Originally J. B. Lippincott Co., 1965). New York: Perennial, 1999. p. 134.

”Throughout all the ages, men have been trying to fathom the meaning of life. They realize that if some direction or some meaning could be given to the whole thing, to our actions, then great human forces would be unleashed.”
- Richard P. Feynman. Lecture: "The Uncertainty of Values" presented at the University of Washington (Seattle) in 1963. Printed in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist. Reading, Mass.: Helix Books, 1998. p. 32.

"We must not be willing to suffer through quiet lives of discontent."
- Stephen Butler Murray, "Deliverance Where the Streets Have No Name." Printed in Get Up Off Your Knees: Preaching the U2 Catalog. Edited by Raewynne J. Whiteley and Beth Maynard. Cambridge, Mass.: Cowley Publications, 2003. p. 47.

”Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.”
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2004. p. 1.

"The way out of the dehumanizing effects of modern capitalism and industrialism is not to change the system but to read good books."
- Thomas Moore. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000. p. 143.

"I never feel I have a duty to read something. I read because I love it like I love chocolate. I don't read a book because everyone else likes it."
- Isabel Allende. "Isabel Allende: Starts fresh writing, reading every Jan." Interviewed by BOOKS (Amy Sutherland). The Boston Sunday Globe, Jan. 19, 2014. p. N16.

"Wenn ein Buch und ein Kopf zusammenstoßen und es klingt hohl, ist das allemal im Buche?"
When a book and a head collide and there is a hollow thud, is it always in the book?
- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

"Your employer [the queen] has been giving my employer [the prime minister] a hard time." "Yes?" "Yes. Lending him books to read. That’s out of order." "Her Majesty likes reading." "I like having my dick sucked. I don’t make the prime minister do it."
- Alan Bennett. The Uncommon Reader. New York: Picador, 2007. p. 86.

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone. That's why I read so much, John Snow. And you? What's your story, bastard?"
- The character Tyrion Lannister, played by Peter Dinklage, in Game of Thrones, Season 1, Episode 2

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Photo of Archivo Histórico del Atlántico (Barranquilla, Colombia) by Wbohorquezm - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link to photo

Quotes: We need to be space age 'crew' who 'think like an ecosystem'

"Today we are living in a 'space age' and, strangely enough, even though our culture is a pioneer in space navigation and space exploration, we really don't understand the value of space at all."
- Alan Watts

"There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew."
- Marshall McLuhan

VIDEO for homeowners: Jeff Davis tells you how to make your house energy-independent (DIY system)

"Each civilization has its own kind of wastes and its own ways of being negligent. The tendency remains much the same, even though we now sweep it all into the scientific term pollution. Like the tendency to kill, the tendency to waste and to foul the nest seems to be inscribed in the genetic code of the species."
- Rene Dubos

"To halt the decline of an ecosystem, it is necessary to think like an ecosystem."
- Douglas P. Wheeler

Sources

Alan Watts. What is Zen? Novato, CA: New World Library, 2000. p 64.

Marshall McLuhan, quoted in United Press International, quoted in The Week, April 22, 2011, p. 21.

Rene Dubos, Beast or Angel? Choices That Make Us Human. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. p 44.

Douglas P. Wheeler. Quoted in "Sunbeams," The Sun. January 2010. p. 48.

Quotes: On the rise of militarism and the need for compromise

Sara Paretsky:

"When Congress passed the USA Patriot Act in the weeks following 9/11, the name of the act itself seemed to me to be Orwellian, the kind of title Stalin or Hitler or Franco might have chosen, one that tried to force people to choose sides. “You are either with us or against us,” Mr. Bush famously told the world, but he was delivering the same message at home. “You’re a patriot or a terrorist,” the Patriot Act screams in its very title. Indeed, in the run-up to the now-famous elections of 2006, when the Republicans lost control of Congress, Mr. Bush toured the country, proclaiming that a vote for Democrats meant, “The terrorists win and America loses.”

The Economist:

"The attempts of his [Obama's] secretary of homeland security to replace the word "terrorism" with "man-caused disasters" attracted much ridicule."

Arjun Appadurai:

"...the war unleashed on 9/11 was above all a war between two kinds of systems, both global in scope. The first may be described as vertebrate, the second as cellular. Modern nation-states recognize their common belonging to the vertebrate world and, like the last dinosaurs, see that they are in a desperate struggle for survival as a global formation."

Arjun Appadurai. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. p. 21.

Susan Bordo:

"I once heard a speaker at an elite university sharply criticize the hierarchical, "binary" thinking of the (then) Republican administration, its good guys/bad guys, we-are-the-saviors-of-the-Western-world mentality. Without missing a beat, the speaker went on to congratulate the assembled audience for "of course" being "beyond such hierarchical, dualistic thinking." Pardon me, but I think the notion that there are those who are unimpeachably "beyond" and those that are hopelessly stuck in the muck is just a bit "binary." (Note, too, the presumption that one can tell the good guys from the bad guys on the basis of neighborhood.)"

Appadurai again (p. 3):

"No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius.

Andrew J. Bacevich in 2008:

”In consonance with this "military ascendancy," these American hawks are inclined to see the United States as already beset by acutely dangerous threats, with even greater perils lurking just around the corner. With a low tolerance for uncertainty, they are highly attuned to the putative risks of waiting on events, while discounting the hazards posed by precipitate action. This perspective found classic expression in September 2002, when Condoleeza Rice rejected a lack of detailed intelligence about Iraq's nuclear program as a reason to postpone a planned invasion of that country since "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." For his part, Vice President Cheney was even more explicit. Even a remotely suspected threat could provide a sufficient rationale for action. "If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon," Cheney once remarked, "we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response."”

Bacevich again, in 2011:

In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills, a professor of sociology at Columbia, dubbed this perspective "military metaphysics," which he characterized as "the cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military." Those embracing this mind-set no longer considered genuine, lasting peace to be plausible. Rather, peace was at best a transitory condition, "a prelude to war or an interlude between wars."

Amos Oz:

"I think peace is possible because there is fatigue and exhaustion on both sides. I am a great believer in fatigue and exhaustion. Most human conflicts — not only international conflicts but even individual conflicts — don't solve through a magic formula. They die down through fatigue and exhaustion. And finally I see syndromes of blessed fatigue and exhaustion both on the Israeli side and on the Palestinian side. Not on the side of the fanatics; they never tire. But the majority is tired and ready for a sad compromise. And compromises are sad by definition. There is no such thing as a happy compromise."

Or, as a proverb has it: “The perfect compromise is the one nobody likes.”

Sources

Sara Paretsky. Writing in an Age of Silence. Verso, 2007. p. xvii.

"Two cheers and a jeer." The Economist. April 11-17, 2009. p. 26.

Arjun Appadurai. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. p. 21, 3.

Susan Bordo. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997. pp. 18-19.

Andrew J. Bacevich. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008. p. 83.

"The Tyranny of Defense, Inc." Andrew J. Bacevich. The Atlantic. Jan/Feb 2011. p. 76.

Amos Oz, interviewed by Tom Ashbrook on the On Point radio program, Oct. 31, 2011. http://onpoint.wbur.org/2011/10/31/amos-oz-on-israeli-life?autostart=true

Quotes: On why societies and groups trend away from democracy

Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet:

Nor did men any longer dare to divide humanity into two races, the one fated to rule, the other to obey, the one to deceive, the other to be deceived. They had to recognize that all men have an equal right to be informed on all that concerns them, and that none of the authorities established by men over themselves has the right to hide from them one single truth.”




Benjamin Franklin:

"It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”




Wendy Brown:

"Democracy requires that citizens be modestly oriented toward self-rule, not simply value enhancement, and that we understand our freedom as resting in such self-rule, not simply in market conduct. When this dimension of being human [homo politicus] is extinguished [in favor of homo economicus], it takes with it the necessary energies, practices, and culture of democracy, as well as its very intelligibility.

* * *

Democracy is always incomplete, always short of its promise, but the conditions for cultivating it can be better or worse. My point was that democracy is really reduced to a whisper in the Euro-Atlantic nations today. Even Alan Greenspan says that elections don’t much matter much because, “thanks to globalization . . . the world is governed by market forces,” not elected representatives. Voting has been declining for decades everywhere in the Western world; politicians are generally mistrusted if not reviled (except for Varoufakis, of course!); and everything to do with political life or government is widely considered either captured by capital, corrupt or burdensome—this hostility to the political itself is generated by neoliberal reason. Thus, today, the meaning of democracy is pretty much reduced to personal liberty. Such liberty is not nothing, but could not be further from the idea of rule by and for the people.”




Virginia Woolf had a character say in her first novel in 1915:

"...we'd better talk about life for a change. Questions that really matter to people's lives, the White Slave Traffic, Women Suffrage, the Insurance Bill, and so on. And when we've made up our mind what we want to do we could form ourselves into a society for doing it..."

* * *

...she professed herself certain that if once twenty people — no, ten would be enough if they were keen — set about doing things instead of talking about doing them, they could abolish almost every evil that exists. It was brains that were needed. If only people with brains — of course they would want a room, a nice room, in Bloomsbury preferably, where they could meet once a week...




Tom Carson:

“If you wonder who made [liberal] hauteur respectable, try Adlai Stevenson. The most celebrated exchange of his two campaigns against Dwight D. Eisenhower went like this: ‘Governor, every thinking person will be voting for you,’ cried a woman at a rally. Ever humorous, the Democratic nominee twinkled. ‘Madam, that’s not enough,’ he said. ‘I need a majority.’ That quip was one of the most appalling things ever said in public by anyone running for president, because either you believe in democracy or you don’t.”

Jamelle Bouie ("Defeating Trump Is Just a Start," NYT, Dec. 15, 2023):

"Unfortunately, as the law professor Aziz Rana observes in a recent essay on political freedom in Boston Review, there are scarcely any spaces in the contemporary United States where ordinary Americans practice the habits of democracy and inhabit a more reciprocal, participatory and solidaristic vision of freedom. Decades after Ronald Reagan led a sweeping attack on the idea of the commons in American life, Rana writes, 'there are vanishingly few sites in American life — at work or in politics — where these experiences actually exist.'"

Yuval Noah Harari:

"In the economic sphere too the ability to hold a hammer or press a button is becoming less valuable than before, which endangers the critical alliance between liberalism and capitalism. In the twentieth century liberals explained that we don’t have to choose between ethics and economics. Protecting human rights and liberties was both a moral imperative and the key to economic growth. Britain, France and the United States allegedly prospered because they liberalized their economies and societies, and if Turkey, Brazil or China wanted to become equally prosperous, they had to do the same. In many if not most cases it was the economic rather than the moral argument that convinced tyrants and juntas to liberalise.

In the twenty-first century liberalism will have a much harder time selling itself. As the masses lose their economic importance, will the moral argument alone be enough to protect human rights and liberties? Will elites and governments go on valuing every human being even when it pays no economic dividends?"

Richard Flanagan:

"In the end, politics is not about focus groups and numbers; it is about the power of stories to galvanize and forge the thinking of societies."

Jeff Schmidt argues that people who have studied and who adhere to standards in this-or-that field, those who consider themselves or are considered "professionals" in the field and who adjust their worldviews and live their lives accordingly, may tend toward authoritarianism when it is related to upholding the standards or the overall vision of their field since the masses cannot be expected or trusted to uphold it.

"...although professionals may be liberal on this or that question of the day, they tend to be very conservative on a long-standing issue of much greater importance to society: democracy. Discuss politics with a liberal professional and you will not hear a word in favor of a more democratic distribution of power in society, perhaps because in the professional’s view ignorant nonprofessionals make up the large majority of the population. Even the most liberal professionals tend toward authoritarianism in their social visions.

* * *

And the liberal doctor who offers a cocktail party opinion against authoritarian police practices? Go to that doctor’s office with a medical problem and see her lean toward the traditional authoritarian doctor-patient relationship. Professionals are liberal on distant social issues, issues over which they have no authority at work and no influence outside of work."

To allow for willing participation in democracy, we have to find the facts and principles that we can agree upon and use those as a starting point for a connection that allows us to work together.

Quoting Ned Resnikoff — "When political actors can’t agree on basic facts and procedures, compromise and rule-bound argumentation are basically impossible; politics reverts back to its natural state as a raw power struggle in which the weak are dominated by the strong,” — Brooke Gladstone commented:

"Even if each of our realities is unique, our common cultures and environments ensure that we share some fundamental principles. That is what enables consensus, and that is what is under attack. By degrading the very notion of shared reality, Trump has disabled the engine of democracy."

"The right is a coalition of people who have never been on the wrong side of power’s arrangements. It is a coalition organized around the preservation of those arrangements." (Brennan Kenneth Brown, Right-wing Conservatives Cannot Make Good Art. Why?, Medium, April 21, 2026)

Sources

Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet. Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. (1794) Translated by June Barraclough. Westport, Conn.: Hyperion Press, Inc. 1955. p 129-130.

Benjamin Franklin, quoted in the Montreal Gazette. The Week, Oct. 11, 2013, p. 19.

Booked #3: "What Exactly is Neoliberalism?" Wendy Brown, interviewed by Timothy Shenk. April 2, 2015.

Virginia Woolf. The Voyage Out (1915).

Tom Carson in The American Prospect, quoted in The Week, Dec. 23, 2011. p. 14.

Yuval Noah Harari. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York: Harper, 2017. p. 313.

Richard Flanagan. The Sunday Age (Australia) September 2, 2001. Quoted in Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 463.

Jeff Schmidt, Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes Their Lives. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2000) Kindle Edition.

Brooke Gladstone. The Trouble with Reality: A Rumination on Moral Panic in Our Time. New York: Workman Publishing, 2017.

A response to 'Why vegetarians should be prepared to bend their own rules'

In a short article "Why vegetarians should be prepared to bend their own rules," Alberto Giubilini claims: "If people perceive vegetarianism as a position that allows for no exception, they are probably less likely to become vegetarian. A flexible moral position is more appealing than a rigid one that allows for no exceptions."

The word "probably" raises questions. Can't we find psycho-social data about whether "flexible" positions are indeed more appealing than "rigid" ones overall and also specifically in regards to choosing a personal diet to support animal welfare? The result could also vary based on the relevant knowledge base, cultural context, and personality of the individual being exposed to the new moral idea. Many people appreciate flexibility to support an abstract goal like "reduce the consumer demand placed on the meat industry" which could allow for eating meat in certain circumstances, but others are more attracted to moral commitments that are simple, concrete, and inflexible like "never eat an animal for any reason." Cultural context is important here because it drives assumptions. Some people are more familiar with vegetarianism as a result of religious commitment, family tradition, or poverty, while others know it mainly as a lifestyle choice prompted by modern concerns about environment and health, and still others know it as a more universal, timeless ethical issue. Dietary flexibility isn't clearly always the approach that will be most readily understandable to others. (Exactly what is a "flexible" religious commitment or a "flexible" moral imperative, after all?) Nor is it obvious that dietary flexibility, even if understood, is the diet that is most likely to be imitated.

Giubilini makes a good point that more animals overall may be helped if a larger number of humans reduce their meat intake rather than a smaller number of humans completely eliminating their meat intake. Indeed, if three chickens have their heads on the chopping block, the chickens care not whether they are to be eaten by a single human or three humans. Therefore, convincing three people to eat one fewer chicken each is surely the same (to the chickens) as convincing one person to eat three fewer chickens. On that point, Giubilini has got it right.

However, as there are different kinds of existing vegetarians and they will convert different kinds of new vegetarians, it isn't necessary to make an "either/or" choice about how everyone should eat. Different behaviors and justification will appeal to different people. Some individuals will reduce their own meat consumption and some will completely eliminate it. A "numbers game" of animals spared suffering is quite valid from a consequentialist point of view, but we still need to see those numbers so we can accurately predict the consequences. If I care about this consequentialist approach, then what I need to know is the precise likelihood that my willingness to eat chicken publicly will inspire a greater increase in other people's future vegetarian meal choices than if I had refused to eat it. Saying "probably" doesn't cut it. Data is needed.

A couple further objections:

If non-vegetarians are most inspired to reduce their meat intake when they see a self-identified "vegetarian" eating meat because they perceive that person as "flexible," isn't the logical consequence that all self-identified "vegetarians" will always eat meat when they are being watched? And wouldn't that ultimately result in a large number of animals being eaten?

The assumption that meatless meals should be consumed in secret so that the effort that goes into making them is kept secret, while meat should be consumed in public so that eating meat-free seems easy, needs to be unpacked. Growing or buying food, cooking it, and serving it always requires effort. As long as meatless options are available, they are easier to prepare because they generally require less cooking and refrigeration for food safety. They are sometimes also cheaper. Eating meat publicly is not a demonstration of simple lifestyle or accessible ethics any more than eating meatless food publicly.

Giubilini may have intended to restrict his argument to the scenario in which a self-identified vegetarian is offered meat in someone else's home, but this restriction is not made clear within the article, as the wide-ranging justifications could easily apply to other scenarios.

See also

"Big Meat is lying about sustainability. These media outlets are helping." Can newsrooms really expect people to trust their reporting if they fund it by spreading misinformation? Emily Atkin and Arielle Samuelson, March 6, 2024

You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local: “Eat local” is a common recommendation to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet. How does the impact of what you eat compare to where it's come from?, Hannah Ritchie, Our World in Data, January 24, 2020

Tracking Meat’s Environmental Hoofprint, by Matt Davenport, Stewards Magazine, UMich, Fall 2025

Of course you can feel like a girl: Reflections on a recent anti-transgender essay

Update, February 2025

The internet is reporting that Elisa Rae Shupe has died.

Sue Kerr wrote: I Knew Elisa Rae Shupe (1963–2025) and She Deserved Better — Pittsburgh Lesbian Correspondents.

Additional reflections, 2023–2024

In April 2024, right-wing social media influencer Morgonn McMichael posted a video rant about the bathrooms at Kansas City International Airport. The airport hallway had three bathrooms: men's, women's, and gender-neutral, which McMichael did not mention. She complained about the existence of the gender-neutral bathroom as if it were the only option. "I have never seen an all-gender bathroom. I am not going in here," she said.

The "chair of the commission who helped craft this policy in Kansas City" responded that it was a "single-stall bathroom." (Which she might have discovered, had she gone in.) She responded, making a more specific argument: "I won’t apologize. ‘All gender’ multi stall bathrooms shouldn’t exist."

Someone else responded to suggest that McMichael has indeed seen a gender-neutral bathroom before: "Morgonn, real quick, the bathrooms on the plane you flew on to get there, what gender were those?"

You can feel like cis or trans or binary or nonbinary or none of those.

See here:

"'I’ve never felt like a woman, to be honest with you. I’ve never felt desirable. I’ve never felt feminine. I have to convince myself that I’m, like, a pretty girl,' Eilish explained. 'I identify as ‘she/her’ and things like that, but I’ve never really felt like a girl.'”
Billie Eilish is ‘physically attracted’ to women, but also ‘so intimidated’ by them | Lisa Respers France, CNN Entertainment, November 14, 2023

Eilish doesn't say (at least, the article doesn't quote her as saying) that there is something it feels like to feel like a girl — only that she personally doesn't feel it.

A poem, reflecting the words of "our fierce Zenobian / activist auntie mother of nine / in the serious blue abaya and / sensible shoes with a baby / in her lap":

"And
what is a woman? Certainly
not me. I have never felt like
a woman nor will I
ever be."
— "asushunamir," Banah el Ghadbanah, La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space, Ann Arbor, Michigan: Dzanc, 2022. p. 152.

The site with Shupe's essay has been made private, so you can't read it.

Also, relevantly: There was a 2023 email leak.

2017

Jamie Shupe made history in June 2016 in becoming the first person in the United States to have a legally designated "non-binary" gender identity, represented on an identity card issued by the Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles.

Shupe was born male and today prefers not to be classified as either male or female and wants to be referred to with the pronoun "they" rather than "he" or "she." They don't see eye-to-eye with people who choose to transition from one gender to another, although Shupe personally attempted a male-to-female transition for several years before settling on a non-binary identity.

In a nearly 11,000-word essay "You Can't Feel Like a Girl," posted July 22, 2017 to a blog called "First, Do No Harm: Youth Gender Professionals" with the tagline "Professionals Thinking Critically about the Youth Transgender Narrative," Shupe tears into transgender people and their care providers. It's a rant with no typical essay structure and many typos.

The rant includes a lot of personal information, including Shupe's declaration that they have "Complex PTSD" and probably "Asperger's". They said they'd taken four years of female hormones but still hadn't achieved the body transformation results they'd hoped for. Claiming to be happy about never having had genital surgery, Shupe refers to people who have transitioned from male to female as "surgery queens," as here — "The surgery queens aren’t proper role models for these trans children. They’re what they get to see at the circus" — and as "monsters," as here — "Trans women are like the beast Cerberus, the monstrous multi-headed dog that guards the gates of the Underworld to prevent the dead from leaving."

Here's where their information comes from:

"due to my narrow interests and the fact that I have nothing better to do as a retired person, I’ve spent every day of the last four years studying transgenderism through the lens of media articles. I don’t have much use for academia or it’s [sic] articles. I like to see what institutions like the Daily Mail have to say about people like me. It’s not uncommon for me to get 100 Google email alerts per day for keywords like transgender or gender dysphoria. That’s how I spend my days."

Shupe says several times that transgender women are not "real" women because they don't have the same reproductive biology. The final paragraph says: "This is my coming out as a TERF and a SWERF," i.e., Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist and Sex-Worker-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Shupe's position here is consistent with the title of their blog post: They believe a boy can't coherently say that they "feel like" a girl. A boy can feel feminine, but the boy remains a boy or perhaps third-gender and is not, and will never be, a girl. A key theme of this essay is that, since gender transition is invalid (in Shupe's estimation) for people of all ages, children shouldn't be allowed to transition either. Shupe says that "these charlatans deserve to be fired at best and jailed at worst" and twice names a particularly well-respected children's endocrinologist as a "monster."

Shupe claims to be a better role model for gender-variant children than a gender-transitioned person can be, given that all the emotional difficulty they've experienced in life has been caused by external sources (discrimination, shaming, etc.) and that they have never been suicidal, whereas people who go through gender transition have emotional difficulties that arise from the inside and they tend to be suicidal. I disagree with this on the following points:

1. Everyone has an inside and an outside, and our feelings arise from complex interactions in our inner and outer worlds. It isn't possible that all of someone's negative emotions have been solely the result of others dumping those feelings nonconsensually into them. If you discover yourself to have become a reservoir for other people's toxins, you are still responsible for processing it and overcoming it, and whether and how you do it affects whether you are a good emotional role model for others. You can't say: There's toxic crap inside me but I didn't put it there so I'm not responsible for it. Nor can you point at others and say: They put their own toxic crap inside themselves and they must assume full responsibility for it.
2. It isn't obvious that never having been suicidal in the first place makes one a better role model than having suffered with suicidal thoughts and still being alive — especially not for people who are suicidal and would like a role model who has dealt with that.
3. And since Shupe says that transition promotes self-hate in transgender people, it isn't clear how Shupe managed to personally avoid this pitfall when they attempted transition.

Shupe goes on to say that the idea of "feeling like a girl" is incoherent, given that girl is simply a fact about one's biology; there can only be "feeling feminine." This is where the title of the essay comes from. Unfortunately, it overlooks that there are multiple ways of being feminine (some of them culturally specific) and that they can overlap with ways of being masculine. For example, nurturing can be interpreted as both feminine and masculine. Femininity and masculinity are not always polar opposites, so they are subject to interpretation. I believe that Shupe's thesis makes an incorrect claim here. It is possible to feel like a man or a woman. What that means is that you want to be seen as a man or a woman, no matter what gin joint you walk into, no matter if you're feeling a bit more or less feminine or masculine than usual. You may feel very feminine and want to express your femininity and be perceived as feminine, yet you still want to be seen as a man. You may feel very masculine and want to express your masculinity and be perceived as masculine, yet you still want to be seen as a woman. The gender is a convenient box that you don't mind fitting into on a regular or at least semi-regular basis. You accept it because it feels accurate or useful. That's what it means to feel like a man or woman. It's entirely reasonable to feel that way. Many people have that feeling about the sex with which they were born, and they are generally known as cisgender; a relatively smaller number of people have that feeling about the other sex, and they are known as transgender, and they are entitled to have that feeling, too.

And if we say that this thing I just defined as feeling like a man or woman, that that's what is meant by feeling masculine or feminine — well, then we're just arguing about proper labels, not about the existence of the feeling.

If Shupe's argument rests on people needing to acknowledge and accept the sex they were born as, of course Shupe is implicitly calling into question their own choice legally designate their gender as non-binary (assuming they aren't intersex).

Shupe briefly repeats the anti-trans talking point that children's gender transition is an attempt to straighten out gay kids. ("They can’t be gay, so they’re being surgically made straight instead.") This is not true. I've discussed it elsewhere.

Shupe uses language that implies that transition is something that a doctor does to a transgender person. Language of autonomy — transition is something one chooses and does for oneself — is lacking. In Shupe's essay, transition is also treated as entirely medical, whereas in real life, there is an important social aspect. Throughout history, some individuals have always managed to achieve a complete binary transition without hormones or surgery because they happened to pass very well. That remains possible today. Some people just put on the clothes of the opposite sex and immediately pass. Shupe does not acknowledge this in their essay, probably because they are primarily upset about irreversible medical intervention. Would Shupe accept other people's binary gender transition if they managed to accomplish it without medical intervention or with mild or reversible medical steps?

Transgender men (people who transition from female to male) are largely ignored in this essay, which is probably beneficial for them, although there is an incoherent paragraph that refers to them in the context of the public debate over bathroom use.

"I wish right now that the doctors who are pausing puberty would instead pause for a moment and take a look at the chaos resulting from the mess they’ve created. It’s harming women. The ones that are real women. Trans men have yet to harm men. Testosterone injections have been around for decades and there’s still no trans guy in the NFL. All it’s good for is soldiers in the bathroom war. 'See, I have facial hair, that makes me a man! Women you should be scared.' Women aren’t scared of trans men, I’ve asked them. They’re scared of penises or people that used to have penises. That’s why we don’t have a peace agreement for the bathroom war yet with the conservatives."

The meaning is hard to ascertain, but it was probably intended to be construed more like this: Some cisgender women assert fear or disgust or hypothetical transgender women and say they are reluctant to share the bathroom with them because they assume that transgender women are essentially "guys in dresses" — lecherous, creepy, possibly dangerous, and easy to spot, causing discomfort in others as soon as their faces are visible. Someone might challenge this by asking the cisgender woman: If she indeed believes that transgender women are really men, then logically doesn't she also believe that transgender men are really women? So does she feel comfortable if a transgender man — a person who presents as a man, wearing masculine clothes, who might have a beard, flat chest, deep voice — walks into a women's public bathroom? Well, Shupe has helpfully asked "them" (at least one cisgender woman) whether they believe they are afraid of "trans men," and they said no, so really it's transgender women (not transgender men) who are the primary cause of conflict here. Great. Shupe's interview question is irrelevant. In real life, in public bathrooms, trans men often aren't identifiable as such; we're identifiable as people who don't belong in a women's bathroom. It doesn't matter if some cis women believe they're unintimidated by their imaginary conception of a trans man. What matters is that lots of people (cis or trans) who use women's bathrooms would be alarmed by a real trans man, a stranger, entering it unannounced. The pragmatic conclusion at which many trans men arrive is that we should use men's bathrooms. Everyone involved is happier.

A lot of Shupe's essay is about adults who transition and don't adjust well, have botched surgeries, or other miscellaneous regrets and disappointments. Shupe says that no one (regardless of age) should transition from one side of the gender binary to the other (male-to-female or female-to-male) because that's not a valid identity, it increases internal distress, it doesn't dismantle patriarchy, and it injures women. To the contrary, it is a valid identity (given that many people successfully live it; how else would we validate it?); gender transition greatly reduces some people's distress, both internal and external; our personal gender identities as "woman," "man," or "other" do not need to dismantle patriarchy (everyone is responsible for being an ethical person and taking actions to address injustice, but our identities do not have to dismantle patriarchy while we sleep because that does not make sense); and the existence of trans people doesn't harm cis women (Shupe asserts this multiple times without providing a clue what kind of harm they are referring to).

I'm glad that Shupe helped clear the way for legal recognition of nonbinary people. People should be free to assert their identities — and to transition or not. I hope we can have inclusive politics.

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