Once Again, I Will Have to Take a Heavier Hand with the Comments
I really should have known better than to schedule a post on a divisive cultural topic for a day when I was traveling. I had thoughtlessly assumed that you guys would be able to regulate yourselves; clearly you can't. The overall tenor of yesterday's comments were anti-LGBTQ, and I can't live with it. So I’m gonna have to go back to the drawing board again, like I did when I banned transphobia last year. How exactly that will play out, I’m not sure. I will probably disable comments on any post I think has any chance to devolve like yesterday’s did, at least for now. And I’m sorry for the people who are always thoughtful and maintain a sense of proportion, but I have to make this place consonant with my own values. The sad fact is that there’s an absolute obsession with gender issues among right-leaning people in general now, beyond any possible representation in their lives. (How many of the people complaining about drag yesterday have been within 50 miles of a drag show in the last year?) Not here. Not anymore.
Oh you don’t want to waste another post on this sort of thing? That’s funny, neither do I.
I’m a leftist. I have conventional left-wing views on almost everything. I happen to believe that the contemporary American left of center is made up of people a) in thrall to the Democratic party, b) engaged in performative “social justice” politics primarily designed to benefit them professionally and personally, c) deeply ignorant of actual left history and theory, or d) all of the above. Because I am critical of them, and because they do not have the capacity to understand politics outside of a rigid binary, many left-of-center people right-code me. But I am a leftist - in fact I’m alienated from the modern “left” largely because I’m actually a leftist - and part of those left-wing views are a commitment to progress on LGBTQ issues. I’ve organized IRL for most of my adult life, and the first effort I ever engaged in as a teenager was in support of gay rights. There is not an issue I can think of where I am not entirely in line with conventional progressive beliefs regarding queer people. Yes, a lot of media liberals say I’m anti-LGBTQ, based on literally nothing. They’re doing that because I make them insecure and they don’t actually read my stuff. If my general reputation deceived you about my positions, I’m sorry for that, but I’ve always been perfectly clear about where I stand. I don’t care what the yelling “left” on Twitter says. They’re just in it for clout and to fight boredom. I’ve been this my whole life.
To the degree that people with socially conservative views can find common cause with me through my criticism of contemporary liberalism and the Democratic party, cool. But this is a pro-LGBTQ rights newsletter. I have plenty of strategic disagreements with how the movement to protect those rights conducts itself, and you can too. And if people were able to maintain a sense of even minimal proportion around here, to keep things remotely in perspective, there could be some civil disagreement in this space. But the six hundred and twenty-eight fucking comments yesterday demonstrate to me that too many of you are not able to keep that perspective. I genuinely think some of you need to ask yourself about your obsession with gender as a matter of mental health. Seriously. It’s not healthy to be so primed to go on endless diatribes about gender issues the way you are. There are lots of hot-button issues I talk about here. Nothing else provokes anything like this behavior. I could post about laws that regulate space debris and some of you’d say “THIS MAKES ME ANGRY ABOUT GENDER!”
You can always take your ball and go home. You can stop reading or you can cancel your subscription. The instructions are here. That is a choice you have. You have to make decisions that are consistent with your values. And so do I.
And for fuck’s sake, most drag performers aren’t trans! It’s a completely basic distinction! Some of you don’t even know what it is you’re against. Which I guess is the problem with this stuff in general, isn’t it?