New York Times redefines masculinity so that it has nothing to do with men - Andrea Widburg

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by Andrea Widburg

A New York Times article about women who identify as men is rich in modern gender gobbledygook, with a bottom line of taking masculinity away from men.

The word “masculine” is a 14th-century French word that has as its origin the Latin masculinus, a derivative of masculus which means male. It’s about deep voices, big muscles, aggression, loyalty, and all those things that connote the XY chromosome half of the human species. Naturally, the New York Times is busy trying to redefine “masculinity” into a meaningless mélange of gender bafflegab.

David Ebershoff’s article has a long title: “The Trans Actors Challenging Outmoded Ideas of Masculinity: Despite years of progress, trans male representation in film and television has remained all but nonexistent. Now, there’s a new group of rising stars.” In plain English, women who want people to believe they’re men are trying to separate masculinity from men.

This defies both logic and language. Redefining human biology and language results in a string of almost meaningless words, melded with bad grammar:

“Five years ago, the kind of roles I’m doing would have gone to cisgender actors,” says Theo Germaine, 27, of their recent parts as young trans men on Netflix’s “The Politician” and Showtime’s “Work in Progress” (Germaine identifies as nonbinary and uses both male and gender-neutral pronouns).

There’s also the insistence that the best way to define modern masculinity is to take the male out of it:

But in the last year, we’ve witnessed more trans male and nonbinary actors onscreen than ever before. Even more important is what the actors and their roles represent. They are reflecting back the reality of trans male and nonbinary lives while mainstreaming long-marginalized characters and narratives. They are introducing multidimensional characters whose gender intersects with other facets of identity — race, class, sexual orientation, disability. Through their performances and social media, the actors are updating and expanding the very idea of the leading man.

The effort to recreate core human biology from the ground up, we’re told, isn’t just a vanity thing for the 0.6% of the population struggling with gender dysphoria. It’s a political act of resistance against mean conservatives:

Why is this vital? Let me start with the most basic reason: survival. The actors are creating characters that audiences have never seen before at a time when right-wing politicians are trying to strip trans people of not only their rights (the military’s recent restrictions surrounding transgender troops and recruits, for example) but their humanity (think of all the so-called bathroom bills). A paradox of America 2020: There’s been a swift advancement of trans visibility and equality, even as anti-trans violence has become what both the Human Rights Campaign and the American Medical Association call an epidemic, and an unprecedented acceptance of trans folks, even as the Supreme Court considers whether someone’s gender identity is grounds for termination from employment. More than half of trans male adolescents have attempted suicide, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Pediatrics. “There’s a reason for that,” says Scott Turner Schofield, who stars in Amazon’s new “Studio City.” “We’re raised to believe there’s something wrong with us. We’re raised to believe we’re the only one.”

What Ebershoff ignores is that suicide always dogs people with body dysphoria because those people, sadly, suffer from a mental illness. (We all recognize that illness when people are anorexic. Nobody says the way to treat anorexia is with diet pills.) In Sweden, the most accepting society in the world, the “transgender” is also significantly higher than the Swedish national average.

Because we are a free and civilized country, people who have body dysmorphia [dysphoria] should be allowed to live their lives without fear of violence, molestation, or hate-based discrimination. However, in a free country, a microscopic minority cannot recalibrate how society works and reset the laws of biology. That, though, is what Ebershoff wants to do:

This, then, is what comes next: shifting from a past where gender was handed to us by society’s cues and prompts to a future of expressing who we are in terms we control. “Masculinity stems from gender, which is socially constructed,” says Man. “Anyone has the potential to unlearn social constructs and/or redefine what they may mean to them.” Collectively, the actors are engaged in this conversation about gender and identity, leading us to a day when those conversations are no longer necessary.

The article goes on and on . . . and on. Once upon a time, the New York Times boasted that it had “all the news that’s fit to print.” It was the paper of record, the one that at least pretended to report on the world as it is, not as a minority wishes it would be.

Those days are gone. The Times is now the paper of fantasy and projection, a magical dream world in which all the fixed points in the human realm have been turned inside out and upside down. The problem, of course, is the reality is relentless and there is no magic that will turn these unhappy women into men.

Andrea Widburg

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/new_york_times_redefines_masculinity_so_that_it_has_nothing_to_do_with_men.html

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