Does the internet need yet another post about the transgender debate? Probably not, but humor me. This one has an angle that you might not have heard.
Last week the Scottish Supreme Court ruled that biological men presenting as women (aka trans women) are not biological women. Womanhood, the court declared, is based in biological reality and is not a mere social construct.
British author J.K. Rowling celebrated on X. The Harry Potter author took a photo of herself sipping a glass of wine and smoking a stogie. The post’s caption was: “I love it when a plan comes together.”
J.K Rowling was born in 1965. She’s a few years older than me, but we’re both Gen Xers. (Had Rowling been an American, we could have both been in high school at the same time.)
Before she became involved in the transgender debate, Rowling was generally regarded as a progressive. She was critical of British and American conservatives, and held a scathing assessment of Donald Trump during his first term.
Then came the western, English-speaking world’s obsession with transgenderism and gender fluidity. Rowling picked a side, and became a pariah in the left-leaning publishing and filmmaking worlds.
The problem was: J.K. Rowling proved too big, and too powerful, to “cancel”. That pantywaist of an actor, Daniel Radcliffe, personally tried to separate Rowling from her own book franchise. People ignored him. Radcliffe, not Rowling, is the expendable one, insofar as Harry Potter is concerned.
Like Rowling, I’m a Gen Xer, and like Rowling, I don’t get what all the fuss is about. For approximately a decade now, we have all spent far too much time debating the question of what a woman is. No one gave this debate any oxygen at all until the spring of 2015, when a former Olympic athlete named Bruce (aka Caitlyn) Jenner underwent a very public gender transformation. That opened the floodgates, and we have not stopped talking about this since.
But as an MSNBC columnist pointed out, the world has always had people who are trans, gender-fluid, etc. This is true. Study ancient history: gender-bending religious cults existed in Roman times. The Galli, followers of the deity Cybele, were female-identifying men who subjected themselves to the gender-affirming care of castration.
So…no…the twenty-first century did not “invent” transgenderism. But the twenty-first century did invent an unhealthy obsession with it. The twenty-first century did invent unnecessary pronoun rules, and silly neologisms like “pregnant persons”. The twenty-first century did invent the idea of pushing gender transitions on children who barely understand the concepts of sex and gender at all.
We Gen Xers, though, have long been aware of gender fluidity, even if we weren’t aware of the Galli. In 1982, we all saw the female-presenting Boy George on MTV. For a long time, I assumed that Boy George actually was a woman. (Hey, I was fourteen years old.)
Then in 1987, Aerosmith came out with that song and video: “Dude Looks Like a Lady”. It was the height of the Reagan era, and one of the most testosterone-soaked rock bands was performing a song about the male narrator’s brief and inadvertent attraction to a gender-fluid man.
None of this was a big deal at the time, nor even very controversial. I don’t remember anyone getting in a high dudgeon about Boy George. “Dude Looks Like a Lady”, meanwhile, was chosen for the soundtrack of Mrs. Doubtfire, a movie my Boomer parents and my World War II-generation grandparents all loved.
No self-respecting Gen Xer has ever had a problem with a man who wants to present as a woman. Most of us, moreover, are willing to humor people on pronoun rules. I remember Bruce Jenner as the very male athlete on my box of Wheaties in the 1970s. But if [she] now wants me to call [her] Caitlyn…sure, why not? Live and let live.
For most Gen Xers, all of this went a bridge too far when we were told that simple live-and-let-live tolerance was not enough. One day, we were told that we must now believe that biological males like Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Levine, and Lia Thomas are truly women, no different from actual, biological females. We were also told that we must affirm these new beliefs in public.
That has wide implications, including—but not limited to—women’s sports and Title IX. Gen X women were the first generation of American women to fully benefit from Title IX, and many of them have understandably strong feelings about it.
Most Gen Xers also have bullshit meters with very sensitive settings. We don’t like to be told what to think, especially when we know that you’re spouting nonsense. We rolled our eyes at the smarmy, finger-wagging televangelists of the 1980s, and most of us roll our eyes at the smarmy, finger-wagging social engineers of today.
Back to Rowling’s tweet. The phrase, “I love it when a plan comes together,” was popularized by the A-Team, a TV series of the 1980s. The aloof, cynical, wine-sipping pose, meanwhile, seems borrowed from some Gen X memes that have proliferated throughout the Internet in recent years.
We Gen Xers are a tolerant lot. But we aren’t going to deny reality just to make you happy.
We didn’t blindly listen to the older generations when we were kids. And now that we’re older ourselves, we aren’t going to obediently nod our heads at moppets who tell us that gender is just a social construct.
-ET