One should hope that each of us aspires to learn more about the world and people different from ourselves, but the key to finding strength in your uniqueness is accepting it, not clamoring for meaningless representation and false promises.
Last week, a transgender woman, Rikkie Valeria Kolle, was crowned Miss Netherlands, the first to win the honor in the 93 year history of the event. Ms. Kolle will be only the second to compete in the Miss Universe contest later this year. Not surprisingly, the win was met with skepticism or outright outrage on the right and broad support bordering on the pathological on the left. The criticism from conservatives was relatively straightforward, claiming this was yet another instance where a high profile honor was taken from a biological woman and given to a man. Karen Townsend, writing for HotAir.com, summed this viewpoint up succinctly. “Until and unless women stand up and speak up, this garbage will continue. The transgender agenda seeks to eliminate all spaces for women. Where are all the feminists? Is there anything more misogynist than a male winning a country’s Miss Universe title? What happens when a transgender competitor wins the full Miss Universe title? It will happen because leftists have been complicit in this war on women. A panel of judges will choose a transgender to win, and I think it will happen in the Miss Universe competition, an international competition before it happens in the Miss America competition.” This is a point of view I tend to agree with. As I have previously noted, these situations only run one way: Biological women are not invading men’s sports, winning bodybuilding competitions, or taking away jobs from models and other athletes. You can choose to agree or disagree as is your right, but your opinion on the matter should not make at least some of the support coming from progressives any less insidious.
If Emma Flint, writing for The Independent, is any indication, all they have to offer is the false, completely unachievable promise of normalcy. Let “me tell you what I think this award does do,” she proclaimed, “it increases the visibility of trans people. It champions their successes. It places a small amount of hope on the scale that is so heavily weighed down on the other side. And in that way, it’s massive.” This is the theory of representation, which she alludes to specifically later: If only the average person sees more trans people, they will ultimately be considered normal. “To those of us who live outside of the gender conforming narrative, the future of our community can feel dishearteningly bleak. And that’s because across the lives of the trans and non-binary community there is one constant element: that of struggle. It’s rare you see successes discussed, let alone celebrated.” This is undoubtedly true, but when you consider what underlies the proposition, the proposition itself promptly falls apart. The problem for the trans community is simple: The “gender conforming narrative” Ms. Flint refers to is not a conspiracy that someone dreamt up in a cultural writer’s lab. It is instead the reality that the vast, vast majority of people are not LGBTQ and never will be. This is not an excuse to treat trans people unfairly, to deny their dignity, or not respect their life choices, but there is a limit to how mainstream one can be when their lifestyle is far, far removed from the mainstream. How far removed? Reuters reported on a study of transgender people in the United States last year, estimating that 1.64 million people over the age of 13 are either trans or non-binary in a country of over 340 million, less than half a percent.
Therefore, no one should be surprised when Ms, Flint notes the inevitable, as if it were some kind of intentional plot to keep trans people down. “Pageants like this have long been dominated by cis-gendered women.” How can it be otherwise when more than 99% of women are cis-gendered to use her phrase of choice? Who else would be competing in these pageants? You might as well suggest that because over 99% of drivers are not visually impaired, driving is biased against the blind. There are limits to that analogy, I know, but consider the follow up statement. Miss Flint suggests the reason that the vast, vast majority of pageant contestants are biological women is “perhaps as a result of the misapprehension that trans women aren’t – or can’t possibly be – beautiful.” The reality of course is two fold. First, there simply aren’t enough transgender women to compete in these events to win more frequently, whatever you might wish otherwise. Second, beauty, as the old saying goes, is always in the eye of the beholder and it should not be surprising that, when 99% of those eyes are “cisgender,” the ideal of beauty is also cisgender. Once again, it could not possibly be otherwise. Why would largely straight, almost entirely cis people subscribe to an ideal of beauty other than the unattainable versions of themselves? What mechanism could possibly exist that would make a straight male find a trans person beautiful in the same way as a biological woman?
Beauty implies attraction. Attraction, for the most part, requires sexual preference. How could anyone believe that straight men will suddenly find non biological women beautiful, any more than we can expect gay men to suddenly be attracted to women? The mechanism for a woman’s evaluation of the beauty of another woman is different, but the same principle applies. Beauty is the unattainable ideal of what you are. It’s like Plato’s analogy of the cave. We are the shadows on the wall, but outside of our immediate sphere there are individuals that achieve an ideal denied to almost everyone on the planet. What average looking woman is going to wish they looked like a biological male? It makes no difference that, as Ms. Flint noted, “now there is an official award saying otherwise.” People do not believe something is beautiful because some panel of judges says so. They believe it’s beautiful because of the feeling the person or object inspires in our hearts and minds, even if we cannot fully explain it. You do not have to be a music theorist to immerse yourself in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or an expert in art history to marvel at the Mona Lisa. The beauty of both calls out to all – or at least most of us – on a level above our understanding. Denying that is like denying the sky is blue, and it can even be counterproductive. For example, there is not a straight male on the planet who looked at Miss Kolle next to the runner up, and said to themselves, these results make sense. Instead, they said to themselves the contest was rigged, and went woke. Most women, if they were being honest with themselves, would probably say the same thing.
Of course, different people have different ideals of beauty. The ideal of beauty can be seen as something of a marketplace, where the sum total of all the individual decisions defines the collective belief. The ideal is neither right, wrong, or indifferent, and – within a measurable range – it changes with time, but it simply is. If a large enough percentage of people believe a model or actress or anyone else is beautiful, he or she is beautiful. Crowning a transgender person Miss Universe can do nothing to change this. Music and art work the same way. Not everyone loves Bruce Springsteen like I do, for example, but enough do that he is the premiere singer and songwriter of the age, and one of the most famous people on the planet. The definition of “normalcy” works the same way. Normal is not a narrative created somewhere with the intention of excluding anyone. It is rather what the majority of people choose to do with their lives, from the mundane like the clothes they wear to the sublime like what they aspire to. If you choose to live outside these collective choices, you are abnormal. To use the music analogy once more, death metal is never going to be a hugely popular genre, but that doesn’t mean it has no diehard fans. There is nothing inherently wrong with being abnormal – no one has ever called your humble author normal for that matter – but it is a reality that an individual making different choices for whatever reason simply has to deal with, akin to dealing with the weather. None of this should be construed as a justification for discrimination, bias, or unfair treatment of anyone, or to suggest that trans people are not worthy of love, respect, and beauty. One should hope that each of us aspires to learn more about the world and people different from ourselves, but it does imply that the abnormal will never be normal, and the key to finding strength in your uniqueness is accepting it, not clamoring for meaningless representation and false promises.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 