Saturday, August 27, 2016

"What It's Like to Chestfeed" ~ the problems of the transgendered

Rod Dreher, "Problems That The Other America Has" (American Conservative, August 24, 2016):
... I am not interested in understanding the bodies or experiences of women who think they’re men who are bitching because nobody understands what it’s like to want to suckle your child at the breast you had cut off.

What I am interested in is trying to get inside the head of a coastal elite media that is obsessed with decadent crap like this. I think we can safely say that the people in J.D. Vance’s book aren’t readers of The Atlantic.com (one of my favorite websites, by the way), nor are most people in my part of the world who are out there mucking houses, feeding flood victims and doing their laundry. I get that. No magazine or web publication can be all things to all people all the time, nor should it try to be.

[I]f you read The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other publications edited by coastal elites, you would think that the travails of transgenders was the worst social problem facing America today. The bizarre degree of coverage and interest says little about transgenders and everything about the priorities of the media gatekeepers.

... I submit to you that most people in the elite media are far more concerned about the difficulties of a breastfeeding transman than they are with the struggles of a single mom in Appalachia trying to keep her kids from falling into opioid addiction, or the flood victims from Livingston Parish who tear up when you give them a package of toilet paper (this really happened), because they have nothing, not even that. I believe that our colleges are turning out graduates who are trained in the obsessions of the professoriat, such that they cannot even see their own country anymore.

As I keep saying, I am not for Donald Trump, and think he does not have what it takes to be president. And I’m certainly not for Hillary Clinton, who is the epitome of what’s wrong with our Establishment. But this kind of thing — showcasing the woes of the chestfeeding freakshow — is what makes me glad that the Trump people are throwing a brick through the Establishment’s window. Elites in Washington, New York, Boston, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood spend more time worrying about whether or not a transman can get his (“his”) baby to suckle at his absent breast, and society’s shameful indifference to that, than they do worrying about most any struggle in the daily lives of poor dumb rednecks and coonasses in Jesus Land.
Wow!

[Hat tip to JM]

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