I've just discovered this essay:
The New Gatekeepers: How the major institutions of American society all came to sing in the woke chorus, and what can be done about it. Michael Lind, Tablet, October 25, 2022
His first sentence is: "Between 2010 and 2012, American culture changed." During those years, he alleges, "obscure concepts in politicized university departments...became orthodoxy" everywhere, including in for-profit companies and medical associations.
The second paragraph begins:
"In 2010, if you had said that unisex bathrooms in public schools were necessary to accommodate nonbinary students, hardly anyone, even among progressives, would have known what you were talking about."
Immediately followed by:
"Then in 2016 the Obama Education Department suddenly threatened to cut off federal funding to K-12 schools that did not allow students suffering from gender dysphoria to use bathrooms reserved for the opposite sex. The Obama Justice Department threatened to sue North Carolina for passing a law requiring people to use bathrooms corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates."
Just look at how the first sentence isn't logically connected to what follows. Redesignating a men's or women's bathroom as gender-neutral is not the same as continuing to offer the choice of "men's" or "women's" and deciding for themselves which to enter. Those are two different scenarios, and not having heard of the former in 2010 doesn't form a coherent narrative with "then in 2016" the latter happened.
He then refers to "the transgender controversy" as something that "might have been viewed as a strange aftershock of the gay rights movement, which achieved its much more moderate goals of civil and marriage equality for gay men and lesbian women by the first decade of the 21st century." Of course, he leaves out that (a) trans people have sought rights throughout the 20th century, and did not newly begin doing so "after" gay rights victories (b) many demands for gay rights have not been considerated "moderate" by everyone and have in themselves often been considered "strange," so trans rights are not necessarily stranger in comparison.
He also refers to "the imposition of transgender ideology through economic compulsion by the federal government and major private sector institutions."
He complains that "large corporations and banks, universities and major foundations, and the Democratic Party" were serially promoting "social justice cause[s]" one at a time: "Black Lives Matter, climate change, gender radicalism."
Then, he makes this complex statement:
"Ironically, the rainbow flag of the gay rights movement became the logo of U.S. corporations and U.S. embassies, even as gay men and lesbians who questioned the new orthodoxy were hounded out of the T- and Q-dominated LGBTQ+ acronym alliance for the sin of 'transphobia.'"
My observations:
- He says the rainbow flag belongs to "the gay rights movement." The rainbow stands for diversity. He incorrectly assumes it didn't also represent bisexual, trans, and other sorts of queer people. This assumption is made plain by the word "ironically": He's saying that gay people are being pressured to stand under the same umbrella with trans people, while "ironically" institutions are promoting a flag that stands specifically for gay pride.
- While many queer radicals have complained about pride turning corporate, that doesn't seem to be Lind's complaint here. He may grudgingly tolerate corporate pride statements as long as they remain "moderate" and gay-only. It's hard to tell.
- It isn't true that trans/queer inclusion is a "new orthodoxy" — certainly not within Pride, as trans/queer people have always existed.
- It doesn't make sense to say that transphobic "gay men and lesbians...were hounded out of the...LGBTQ+...alliance." If they are trans-exclusive or trans-hostile, they aren't allies of trans people, so they were never part of an LGBTQ+ alliance to begin with. See how Lind accomplishes this by a shift in his own language: the rainbow flag belongs to "the gay rights movement" (no trans people there, on his reading!), and simultaneously trans-exclusive gay people are being shoved out of a trans-inclusive "alliance" (that supposedly didn't historically exist!) Playing along for a moment to expose the illogic: If the LGBTQ+ acronym were new, some gay people might simply refuse to join under that umbrella, but they couldn't be "hounded out" of a community they'd never belonged to.
I've written about this "new homophobia" nonsense (i.e., against the idea that it's homophobic to expect gay people to be respectful toward trans people) regarding Gareth Roberts (short and long), Andrew Sullivan, Jonathan Rauch, and Blake Smith who is, like Lind, published in Tablet (here and here).
This is plainly nonsense:
"Seeking historical analogies for this sudden revolution in American institutional life, some spoke of the Great Awokening, alluding to the two Great Awakenings that animated Anglo-American Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries. A case can indeed be made that wokeness is a secular religion, complete with its own ersatz rituals, like “taking the knee,” invoking the imminent apocalypse of anthropogenic climate change, and icons of George Floyd, a victim of police brutality who was elevated into a martyr."
Taking the knee is a choreographed motion done as public protest, not (as far as I know) as prayer. Similarly, images of George Floyd would be displayed at protests or in remembrance of him. Messaging something creatively, passionately, and effectively does not mean that you have a "religion." Also, it is scientists, not clergy, who say that anthropogenic climate change will make the planet uninhabitable.
Next, he says that "woke activists...camouflage radical beliefs in bureaucratic acronyms like DEI and CRT." Well, CRT isn't a bureaucratic acronym at all. It's deliberately misused by Chris Rufo, who is spreading lies about it.
He also complains that "gender-affirming health care" is "often a euphemism for castrating boys and men and sterilizing and performing irreversible mastectomies on girls and women" [emphases mine]. Here, you can see a hint of his opposition for gender transition for adults.
Then he says: "The center left of the political spectrum" has always tended to be infiltrated "by small, radical sects of zealots." Referring to acceptance of trans people, he says, "adding 'T' and 'Q' to LGB legitimated public acceptance of radical gender ideology, as though insisting that controversial and often dangerous 'gender transitions' are a natural and unobjectionable continuation of the campaign to allow same-sex couples to marry." Here, he suggests that the gay rights campaign for equal marriage, at some point of achieving or anticipating success — perhaps upon its final successes at the Supreme Court in 2013 and 2015, or perhaps earlier, as it began to anticipate success, in 2010–2012, a timeline he suggested at the beginning of this essay — tacked on trans inclusion. And this is simply not true, because trans people have existed for quite a long time and have (collectively, generally) always allied with gay people. This timeline is false.
He must, of course, answer why certain diversity concerns that have been raised since the 1960s have suddenly became (alarmingly, unacceptably) mainstream "beginning around 2010?" He does ask that. His answer is: "Today, unlike a generation ago, young Americans typically must pass through three gateways, in order to be economically successful. They must obtain college diplomas; they must join professional accrediting organizations; and they must be able to do business via platforms in the marketplace." He quoted David Samuels's article published just a few weeks earlier (October 8, 2022) as saying that "the Woke is a vanguard movement that seized control of a new technology and used it as a force multiplier to discipline and terrorize the larger institutional landscape." Lind says: "Waiting for people at each gateway, like trolls under a bridge in a fairy tale, are woke leftists, who demand that they recite the in-group passwords before they are allowed to pass through the gates." The gateways are "mostly private and unregulated."
He also says:
"Last year [2021], the AMA Board of Trustees passed a resolution demanding that sex cease to be noted in all future birth certificates, on the theory that a boy might have been born by accident in a girl’s body or vice versa, and that the individual might not realize he or she was in the wrong body until decades later. Yes, this is the American Medical Association, not the American Association of Astrologers."
Well, I just don't know that that is the AMA's reasoning. The AMA's highlights and press release says that binary sex designations fail to reflect the reality of intersex bodies as well as people who identify as transgender, nonbinary, or gender-nonconforming. As a birth certificate is an important document needed for school, employment, and to generate other important documents downstream like driver's licenses and passports, sex designation should be removed "to protect individual privacy and to prevent discrimination." The AMA Board Chair-elect added that sex designation isn't always "permanent," and having it on the birth certificate and available as a public record is used to promote a "view" (i.e., opinion or standpoint) of this permanency. That's the AMA's reasoning, as they provided it. On these two webpages, they did not cite, contrary to Lind's allegation, any specific "theory" that some people are "born by accident" with the body of the other gender and "might not realize" it "until decades later."
That's about as far as I can go with this long essay.
