California Governor Gavin Newsom may be an empty suit and Corporate Liberalism personified, but those trying to recall him are much worse. A prospective Republican challenger is Caitlin Jenner, the Olympic decathlon champ formerly known as Bruce before a well-publicized medical “transition.” After Jenner pitched her candidacy to Sean Hannity on Fox News, San Francisco sportswriter Anne Killion expressed J’accuse-level outrage that Jenner “wants to ban transgender girls from playing sports in the state of California.”
In an essay that ran above the banner of the Chronicle’s Sporting Green, Killion wrote, ”The most famous transgender woman in the world staked out her bid to represent the very political party that is working to demonize and marginalize her and other transgender people... She went after the lowest hanging fruit: a tiny group of young people who want only to fit in and who can’t represent themselves. Jenner’s stance against transgender athletes spreads the kind of misinformation that will only further hurt kids who already have a far higher rate of suicide and depression than their peers and who need a ton of support and understanding...”
Killion said she was writing about a major issue of our time. “Jenner has jumped onto a bandwagon sweeping the nation. Anti-transgender-athlete bills are popping up in state after state, the result of focus groups that have identified a wedge issue that can help rally a base that already lost on some other wedge issues like the fight over same-sex marriage. The most compelling testimony against these bills has been from parents who understand that their children may not be who they predicted at birth — whose are? — but who love and accept their children and want the best for them.”
Anne Killion and her many fans should bear in mind that it was the PC “left” that made the rights of transgender youth a major issue in US political life. (Who can ever forget the heroic struggle for access in public school bathrooms?) Now they’re blaming the Repugs for making a mountain out of a molehill! That is chutzpah.
By fortunate coincidence a book on political correctness came my way last week thanks to a reference on Counterpunch to Different, a book by Corinna Fales written with friends she’d grown up with in the predominantly Black community of Lincoln University. Ordering it I saw that Fales had written another book, a critique of PCness called This Book is not a Safe Space. I ordered it, too.
Corinna Fales was one of the women two or three women who did almost all the work in Chicago for which Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis got credit as the ‘60s fissioned out. She was as kind, smart and beautiful as she was diligent, calm and efficient. She married a big, smart, calm, handsome carpenter named Buzz and moved to NYC. That was 50 years ago and our paths never crossed again.
Not a Safe Space belongs on the Psychology shelf. (Different was Sociology.) A lot of it is Fales looking inward. The self-confident woman I knew in Chicago was not, not at all. Although her whole point is anti-PC, Fales sometimes seems slightly constrained by PCness herself. She is at her most incisive questioning the elevated status of transgender people.
Discussing The Rachel Divide, a Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who pretended to be Black and became president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, Fales writes:
“Why is transgender embraced and trans-race forbidden? In the Rachel Divide a transsexual black woman is asked how transsexual is different from trans-racial. She said it is ‘completely different’ because [Dolziel’s] blackness is a performance. Our transness is our identity.’
“What I don’t understand is why we seem to be leading our children in some states and places to question their gender identity. We’re not waiting for them to say something or to grow up. We talk and teach transgender in school, where our kids often don’t even learn correct English or sufficient science. It’s the PC thing to do.
But why is it the PC thing to do? I spent months trying to understand why we regard transgender and trans-racial-identity as different. The answer was not self-evident to me when I began to really think about it…
Transgender is the code for a woke left wing Liberal. The former Bruce Jenner jumping on the bandwagon and trashing his own, the beginning of the end of this fad. Someone like him/her had to call this out, he/she did.