A Tale of 2 Trans
between transgenderism and transracialism
Ever since discussing the “transracial” phenomenon with
(Default Friend) on the pod, I’ve been fascinated by those who grant that identity is self-determined when it comes to gender, but not when it comes to race/ethnicity. Several people who have come out at transracial have been “cancelled” for appropriating others’ cultures.Among this group is Oli London, a caucasian British male who transitioned both his race and gender, and then detransitioned, and then lived to tell the tale in his book Gender Madness, which I reviewed in RealClear. Read excerpts from the review below, and look out for my podcast interview with London next month.
In our age, it has become a widely accepted truism that identity is self-determined. And yet, few have been willing to tread into the menacing waters of transracialism. While the gender transitions of Caitlyn Jenner and Elliot Paige are celebrated with praise for their courage, transracials like Rachel Dolezal and Raquel Evita Sarawati are publicly flagellated for the cardinal sin of cultural appropriation. In Gender Madness–part memoir, part tirade against trans ideology–Oli London takes on our society’s complicated relationship with “self ID.”
…
London’s story is disarmingly reminiscent of Camille Paglia’s 1994 essay “No Law in the Arena.” In it, the feminist provocateuse offers a “speculative scenario” in which “a sensitive boy” who is “shy and dreamy from the start” is alienated from his aggressive father and male family members. “But he is his mother’s special favorite, almost from the moment he is born.” Uncomfortable with rough play, “he is drawn to his mother’s and sisters’ quietness and delicacy.” More drawn to beauty and the arts, “he is fascinated by his mother's rituals of the boudoir, her hypnotic focus on the mirror as she applies magic unguents from vials of vivid color, like paints and palette.”
Paglia here makes a key distinction: the boy is attracted to his mother’s clothes and makeup not necessarily because he wishes he were a girl, but because her clothes “are made of gorgeous, sensuous fabrics, patterns, and hues denied men in this post-aristocratic age.” Paglia goes on throughout Vamps and Tramps (the collection in which “No Law in the Arena” appears) to laud the rich and imaginative aesthetic and spiritual landscape of Mediterranean, Afrodiasporic, East Asian, and Latin American cultures–which have spawned geniuses like Michelangelo and Da Vinci–and juxtaposes them with the drab cultural landscape of Anglo-Saxon and puritanical Protestant (better known as WASP) societies. In such cultures, men who created artistic masterpieces are celebrated for their accomplishments and contributions to society.
Paglia, and other “pro-ethnic” pundits like Michael Novak, lament the ways that Anglo cultures have propagated the globalization of “sanitized, uprooted, and disembodied” Enlightenment ideals. Said ideals have fomented a sensation of spiritual disenchantment and cultural deracination, leaving people confused as to how to construe their relationship with reality and their own identities–especially when it comes to gender and sexuality.
Reactionaries are quick to use the cognitive dissonance of pro-transgender progressives who condemn transracialism as a form of cultural appropriation as proof of the inconsistencies of moral relativism. Surely many conservatives will (and already have) praised London’s bold challenges to conventional identitarian discourse. But such un-nuanced readings of London’s book will miss out on what is most interesting about transition narratives—both gender and racial ones. London speaks of a collective sense of cultural “Alzheimer’s”—of a people who have lost sight of their roots–and thus cannot help but attempt to replant their roots in something new and (at least seemingly) more promising.
It goes without saying that Oli London is decidedly not a Korean woman. His gender dysphoria was transient, and his ethnic identity is incontrovertibly a caucasian Brit. But given his upbringing in the bowels of an atomized post-Enlightenment environs, London’s story adds up. Stifled by a drab aesthetic imagination–devoid of a strong sense of ethnic identity or a spiritual legacy–London was left without any meaningful cultural markers upon which to hang his identity.
Thus it shouldn’t be of any shock that boys like him–who are unmoored from their roots, disconnected from their bodies (in part due to mass automation and lack of access to meaningful labor), and who are drawn to seeking higher ideals of beauty, truth, and purpose–choose to disassociate themselves from social norms whose flatness they can’t help but see through and rebel against. In our disenchanted age, boys like him who ask questions and defy the status quo are painted not as courageous or intelligent, but as weak and “girly.”
Continue reading at RealClear.
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