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Notes -
At the moment, I work at a supermarket. Early today, a customer got pissed off about something at checkout - I don't know what - and started manically shouting a vulgar schizo quasipolitical rant, pacing around, targeting and physically intimidating my customers and coworkers, trying to start a fight, before he wandered back into the store. I'm not sure, in the end, if he left the store of his own accord or because security forced him to; I didn't care to ask around. He was a large, fit, middle-aged white man; exactly the kind of guy you'd stereotypically expect to see in the profile picture of a really deranged MAGA boomer Twitter account. We probably get several problem customers a day, but this was definitely the worst one I've seen in quite a while. It was mortifying to watch a walking hateful strawman of the Red Tribe, especially as I hail from the Red Tribe myself and used to be extremely invested in its success in the culture war.
(As of 2020 or so, I'm trending more centrist, because of exactly this kind of thing. I voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020, but I do not intend to vote this year; I have become disillusioned with democracy, politics, and the culture war. I feel that the mentally ill and generally unpleasant have become too dominant among the right wing. Of course, I always saw the mentally ill and generally unpleasant as dominant among the left wing; I feel that that's inherent to what the left wing is and represents, from its origins around the French Revolution to the ideology of Marx and on to the present progressive-stack day. But anyway, tangent over.)
The main content of the man's rant was that life in the modern US is shitty because [God presumably cursed the country because] President Obama was secretly "a faggot" and his wife was secretly male.
Now, I tend to have a pretty conspiratorial worldview myself. It's pretty obvious that the world does in fact run on conspiracies, and that much of the conventional wisdom suggesting otherwise is desperate copium, often pushed by the people in power. But, of course, we don't know all that much about what the conspiracies in charge are actually doing - that's the whole point of a conspiracy - and most of the "conspiracy theories" you see going around are deeply stupid, and you would need to be stupid to believe them. (The man at my workplace this morning threatened a woman in line for "calling [him] stupid"; she actually said no such thing, but I'm saying it now. I'm not a mind-reader, but I'm pretty sure that that man was stupid.)
Among these stupid conspiracy theories, the so-called "transvestigations" have always been the most striking to me personally, for many reasons. I'm sure ugly rumors about famous men secretly being women and famous women secretly being men have gone around for a long time, as ordinary bottom-feeding gossipy trash talk. But they seem to have emerged as a distinct, legible "type" of conspiracy theory relatively recently, starting in my adolescence, around the late 2000s and early 2010s. Noteworthy early individual targets included Lady Gaga (this was a "Marilyn-Manson-had-his-ribs-removed-so-he-could-do-autofellatio" tier schoolyard rumor for my generation) and, of course, Michelle Obama. However, over the course of the 2010s and on into the 2020s, as transgender people became central to the culture war, transvestigation metastasized into a more omnidirectional tendency to delusionally believe that any arbitrary public figure is secretly trans.
There are several key points here, in a natural order. The first is that the transvestigation phenomenon is nakedly psychological, in a way that feels like an exaggeration of the pattern of other stupid conspiracy theories. Transvestigators are obsessive in searching for rationalizations for their beliefs. They start with a single point that they want to believe - it would be convenient for their worldview if some specific person they hate, like Michelle Obama, were secretly transgender - and they start collecting and glomming onto "evidence" to reinforce the idea, ignoring any counterevidence. Confirmation bias. They strain to develop a suspicion, and that implausible suspicion quickly becomes ludicrous certainty. And that broken thinking winds up leaking out into and contaminating the entire rest of their worldview as they obsessively think back to it over and over again, fixating on their imagined secrets about their enemies' genitals, until eventually they wind up completely convinced that the entire ruling class is secretly transgender, and/or they wind up screaming to a crowded supermarket that the most popular First Lady of my lifetime is actually a man in a dress.
The next point is that the pathology of transvestigation very directly parallels and acts as a foil to various pathologies associated with the transgender movement itself. People can go crazy over both sides of the "we can always tell" coin. Transgender people often try to build confidence through denial of it; they convince themselves that it's much easier to pass than it actually is. From there, they can convince themselves that any given person around them could plausibly be of either sex, and that transgender people are arbitrarily common. Transvestigation has the opposite general motive, but follows a similar path to a similar endpoint. They want to convince themselves that they're always able to identify transgender people, and so any note of ambiguity in their minds, however disingenuous, starts throwing up panic signals and fostering conspiracy thought, which feeds itself in a vicious cycle until they've ironically destroyed their own ability to reasonably perceive/intuit people's sexes.
The more nuanced truth about passing, which both sides of the coin are missing, is that it's fundamentally a modern problem. Back in the olden days, it was much easier for men to pass themselves off as women and vice versa, because people weren't thinking about that possibility in the back of their minds at all times. The more relevant that transgender issues become to the zeitgeist, the harder it is for transgender people to pass, as normies start to consider the sex of those around them with more skepticism; a predator/prey-population-style cycle leading towards equilibrium. But, as transvestigators demonstrate, we might be hitting the limits of that process now; the appearances of the sexes are in many ways distributions with overlapping tails. Plenty of ugly people look remarkably like ugly people of the opposite sex, and you don't even really need that kind of natural androgynous ambiguity to get confused, if you're flooding your brain's training algorithm with images of attractive transgender models while contemptfully scoffing and trying to convince yourself that you can Still Definitely Tell.
We are a confused and spiraling people.
Finally, I think transvestigation is plausibly a baptists-and-bootleggers situation. For transvestigators themselves and their close extremist-right allies, it's a simple and effective way to stoke hatred and fanaticism; they perversely make themselves more and more paranoid while comforting themselves that they're able to see through the great veil. They develop the assuredness and the sense of grievance necessary to shout threats at strangers in a supermarket. For the left, transvestigation-adjacent rhetoric lowers the sanity waterline and encourages their enemies to beclown themselves.
And here's the thing: when I was a kid circa 2009, and transvestigation was just getting started? I got sexually harassed a lot, like, a lot a lot, by the LGBT kids (and their allies) at school. It wasn't a sexually-driven thing; it was political activist shitflinging. I'll admit I was an open bigot about those issues at that age, and that painted something of a target on my back. They saw the trope of outspoken bigots turning out to be repressed queers as a strategy and a goal, and they sought to confuse their enemies' sexualities. I keep seeing people in the modern culture war say that transgender people entered the discourse after the gays had fully won, because the activist structure needed something to move onto. There might be some truth to that, but I think it largely gets the order of cause and effect completely wrong. (Many people seem to be under the impression that transgender was invented from whole cloth in the mid 2010s. Full strain copium.)
In my experience of that era, transgender people entered the discourse as a tactic for advancing gay issues; they were ubiquitous rhetorical objects long before they were an actual notable demographic. The 2009-era LGBT activist kids talked a lot about transgender people, far out of proportion to their actual prevalence in the movement at the time; hell, "LGBT" was already a common and very recognizable term and I'm not sure that any of them were actually transgender, though they would often tell me that they were, at an ambiguous irony level. It was a foot in the door for forcefully making people question their sexuality, like a more politically pointed, though equally crude, meatspace analogue to old 4chan's trap culture (back when the term "trap" was new!). Oh, so you're not gay at all, right? You're not attracted to dudes even a little bit? Just girls? No penises, just veejays? Okay, what about this girl? She's hot, right? You wanna fuck her? Well, she's got a penis. How about that? You wanna suck her cock? Or do you think she's a man? Do you think that would make you a faggot? Maybe it would, if you think so. Or maybe you'd prefer Buck Angel? Early prototransvestigation rhetoric was spread around by a mix of bigots mocking their enemies and activist perverts fantasizing. Whenever I found out at that age that a classmate professed that Lady Gaga was born male, I could not have reasonably guessed, just from that, their view of the matter, ideologically speaking.
(Out-of-touch right-wing nightmares of teachers grooming children to become queer through sterile corporate-board-room-esque gay lesson plans are largely ignorant of how children interact with their peers already.)
Anyway, bit of a swerve, but - has anything like the scenario transvestigation points at ever happened? That is to say, has anyone ever become a major celebrity presenting themselves as one gender and later turned out to have secretly been the opposite sex the whole time? The closest examples I can think of aren't very close, and/or they're much closer to microcelebrity status than someone a normie might have heard of; very niche YouTubers. Famous transgender people I can think of are usually either famous specifically for being transgender (the proverbial dancing bears; Laverne Cox; Jazz Jennings), they decide to transition after they've already become public figures for other reasons (the celebrities' public crises; Elliot Page; Maddy Thorson), or both (the Caitlyn Jenners; Caitlyn Jenner). I guess the closest thing to an example I can think of after a few minutes of thought is Brianna Wu; I never followed Gamergate all that closely, but I get the general impression that she publicly presented herself as an at-least-implicitly cisgender woman but was eventually outed by her enemies. But there's a pretty big gulf in fame level between Brianna Wu, twice-failed primary candidate for Massachusetts' eighth congressional district, and, like. Michelle Obama.
(Naively, one would assume that some devious conspiratorial plan to normalize transgenderism through an influx of secretly-transgender celebrities would involve those celebrities publicly revealing themselves eventually. You know. To normalize it. But this part never seems to actually happen, which moves the hypothetical conspiracy more to "taunting you by sneaking triangles into the media, because the devil wants there to be secret triangles there" territory.)
There wasn't really any investigation or outing needed, Wu was on MSNBC very early on and people watching recognized Wu was transgender immediately. You can actually go back and read an archive of the GG thread at the time:
Incidentally while looking up that thread I also found the original /gg/ thread regarding Wu. It shows most of the ultra-compressed process of how Wu became a media-recognized "Gamergate harassment victim", in case you're curious about the details of how that sort of thing went down from the perspective of those involved.
September 18, Wu creates a "sock puppet" parody pro-GG twitter account named brololz. There is a small KIA thread about it but it doesn't attract much attention.
October 9th, Wu creates the "Oppressed Gamergater" image macro on MemeGenerator.net and tweets about it. GG notices the image macro and makes a lot of meme/shitpost ones, flooding the memegenerator page in the process.
October 10th, Wu cherrypicks a few of the more hostile ones (assuming Wu didn't create them) and tweets that "8chan/#gamergate generated 60 pages of this today attacking me. I'm going on a Twitter break until I feel more safe."
Someone makes the aforementioned /gg/ thread about the above tweet, the first GG thread about Wu other than the KIA thread about brololz. Some people mock the tweet, and someone finds Wu's game Revolution 60 and people mock it as well.
Someone posts Wu's phone number and address to the /gg/ thread. Every single response condemns it, with most assuming it is a false-flag, especially because of nobody in GG giving a shit about Wu. (It is deleted when a mod comes online 45 minutes later.)
14 minutes after the post, Wu tweets that "8chan/gamergate just doxxed me".
7 minutes after that, a new twitter account named chatterwhiteman tweets the same address and begins tweeting threats at Wu.
45 minutes after chatterwhiteman begins tweeting, Wu posts a screencap of it and tweets "The police just came by. Husband and I are going somewhere safe. Remember, #gamergate isn't about attacking women."
40 minutes later, an article on Gameranx by Ian Miles Cheong reports that "Game Developer Brianna Wu Driven From Home After Death Threats and Doxxing". (This is before Cheong flipped from anti-GG to pro-GG and from left-wing to right-wing.) Other coverage from game journalists follows.
October 13th, 3 days later, Wu appears on MSNBC to talk about being a gamergate harassment victim.
And for those who weren't around back then, we know that Brianna Wu manufactured at least some of the "hate", because GG caught Wu forgetting to switch to a sockpuppet on the Steam forums.
I don't think that particular case is proof of anything, I would interpret it as Wu being snarky while making a containment thread. I think the intended meaning was "I'm telling GG to restrict personal criticism to this thread without flooding the rest of the forum". And then I think the other accounts that made the same thread after that one was deleted were people trolling, rather than even the original copy being a Wu sockpuppet.
I do think Wu engaged in false-flagging, particularly in the incident I described, but fundamentally it's based on circumstantial evidence. Certainly it's incredibly unlikely that anyone sincerely pro-GG did it, both because GG condemned dox and considered it firmly counterproductive and because nobody cared about Wu. The previous discussion about Wu consisted of a small thread about a fucking Memegenerator template, an amusingly shitty-looking game, and a tweet playing the victim over GG people using the memegenerator template. What's harder to confidently rule out is that it was a third-party troll trying to stir up trouble. But stuff like the fact that Wu was actively reading the 8chan thread at the time and posted about it within minutes, how quickly Wu took advantage to get media attention, and Wu's other lies (like the webcam interview about "I've had to flee my home again due to GG threats" that, based on background details, was conducted from within the home in question) I am inclined to think Wu made the post and the Twitter account, even if I can't be sure. At the end of the day making a 8chan post and a Twitter account is easy and there's every incentive to do it if you want to play the victim.
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Olympic gold medalist Stella Walsh was intersex and lacked female genitalia.
Military surgeon James Barry.
Jazz musician Billy Tipton.
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I can't help but see that the crux of your opinion and argument is largely based off your personal experiences and it sounds you live in a red-coded area doing a job that will involve you with a lot of poor red coded individuals. This is nothing new for a lot of people and I suggest that it doesn't significantly impact your personal political identity. A lot of people I met who left conservative bastions to the big bright blue cities have their political opinions informed by the people they met. They hate the same schitzo red tribe that you just met, and because they don't want to associate with them, they feel like it's necessary to take every opposite political opinion to socially and intellectually disengage from the people they so disparage.
This is why it's important to realize your bubble. I currently live in an area that is HEAVILY dominated by Democrats and I see the same schitzo squealing as you do, but just blue coded. Fat feminists rioting for women's rights, endless signs of the "liberal's creed (we believe in science, etc.)". Pro-abortion and acceptance flags in every business window, while at the same time dozens of people begging and pan handling in the streets, accosting people on the street. There's a lot of low intelligence people in every region that are absolutely bat-shit, and while our brains are very good at recognizing problematic individuals as a safety precaution, it's also important to realize that these people are largely the statistical outliers and do not represent the political tribal spectrum.
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Arguably JK Rowling? The initials were deliberately chosen to hide her female name and appeal to the target market of young boys. She never actually lied about it, but the early books were certainly presented in that sort of boy fantasy way.
I agree with Folamh3 that that seems to be a different phenomenon. Along those lines, though, author George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans Cross) is an older but more blatant example.
Edit: Of course, going the other direction, there’s Evelyn Waugh, who once made it onto a list of top female authors, even though he never pretended to be a woman. Joyce Kilmer is similarly often thought to be a woman.
Yeah, historically, a pretty sizable number of authors write under gender-ambiguous or male-sounding names, especially in history or scifi. Andre Norton's my favorite example, as she changed her name legally, but afaik was not trans or trans-adjacent.
It's fallen out of popularity in recent eras, at least outside of romance (where mainstream het and f/f works are almost always published under female names, and m/m under male names). There's a few cases where that's turned into someone coming out trans or nonbinary, but they're pretty rare.
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And George Sand.
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Not an author, but I’m always tickled that Kim Crawford is a bloke.
It’s a very popular brand of New Zealand white wine, and all the marketing heavily implies the owner / winemaker is a woman because the wines prime demographic is middle aged women. You see big billboards with a blonde kiwi woman, or cutouts in WineStore with that same woman in a green dress.
But Kim Crawford is like a bald, middle aged white kiwi guy.
Kim Crawford also doesn't have anything to do with Kim Crawford wines and hasn't since 2003 when he sold the company and his name. (Still, their Sauvignon Blanc is pretty good).
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DUDES🤘ROCK🤘
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Yeah I thought of George Eliot too. It seems like something that was easier in the past, and becomes more and more difficult as you get more modern technology. Hard to hide your gender when everyone expects you to be doing live video interviews constantly.
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That seems like a reach. Lots of writers use pen names. JK Rowling wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex, she just chose a gender-neutral pen name mandated by her publisher for fear that young boys would refuse to read a book by a female writer. I've never heard anyone suggest that Mary Ann Evans, Charlotte Brontë, K.A. Applegate or S. E. Hinton were trans men, despite all of them having published books under male pen names (or using their initials to mask their sex, as Rowling did).
The suggestion that the act of writing a book whose primary target demographic is members of the opposite sex makes that writer transgender is quite the hot take. Surely this would imply that literally all male romance novelists are trans women, which I'm sure would come as quite a surprise to Nicholas Sparks.
It is a reach, but I disagree that she "wasn't trying to pass as a member of the opposite sex." I think that her publisher and marketers definitely tried to pass her off as a male author (at least in the minds of the 8-12 yr old boys who were the main sales demographic). It was a different time, when the only thing we knew about authors was the book jacket, not like today when we can whip out our phones and instantly look the author, their personal life, and their political views.
Not saying she was transgender, no one thought that. It was just a simpler time when boys wanted to read boys about boys written by men. Or at least, that's what publishers thought.
Counterpoint: several first edition copies of Philosopher's Stone clearly display the name "Joanne Rowling", either on the cover, in the front matter, or in the copyright declaration. At least one author bio on an American first edition refers to her with female pronouns, the honorific "Ms." and identifies her as a "struggling single mother".
If publishers were trying to pass her off as a male writer, they clearly weren't being especially diligent about it.
Who reads the copyright declaration?
My point is, if they were fully committed to the bit and determined to have everyone believe that JK Rowling was a man, the name "Joanne" would not have appeared anywhere in the book (and it wouldn't have been any more difficult for the copyright declaration to list "JK Rowling" rather than "Joanne"). The fact that the name does appear in the book indicates that it was not an elaborate gender-swapping obfuscation à la George Eliot, but a simple gender-neutral pen name.
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The source of the claim that "J.K." was due to publisher's influence is Rowling herself. But they probably weren't trying to actually pass her off as a male writer, just to avoid 10-year-old boys seeing "Joanne" on the cover and saying "eww, a girl". (The publisher of the German translation obviously made a different choice)
By the time it became obvious that Harry Potter was attracting readers above its target age range (which was shortly after book 2 came out in the UK and before book 1 came out in the US) "JK Rowling wrote this as a broke single mother" was part of the sales story. So I don't think there was ever a serious attempt to pass.
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In a similar vein, Carmen Mola didn't exist and was the pen name for three men and it was only revealed when they won a prize and went to claim it.
The supposed gay male JT LeRoy was a pen name of Laura Albert.
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My understanding is that the same is true of Elena Ferrante.
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It's a bit odd to me to be mortified by the encounter with a hateful Red Tribe strawman, who's nothing more than a run-of-the-mill Wallmart schizo, while dismissing concerns over hateful Blue Tribe strawmen with access to people's children. The substance of the dismissal seems completely off as well, and ignorant of how children interact with political power.
As for transvestigations, literally just use an AI. Though be careful if you're Australian, lest you end up in court.
Precisely.
No, the concern is peer pressure and activist teachers who are otherwise likable confusing children by introducing them to all these trans memes.
We know from pre-internet research that gender nonconformity and doubts were more common in kids than adults. 90+ % of nonconforming children became usually homosexual adults okay with their body. If you stuff them into the medical pipeline, the health and quality of life of the 90% is going to be impacted.
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There are obvious parallels between "transvestigation" and trans activists trying to headcanon historical figures as having secretly been trans all along.
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Reminds me of how, some time ago, I was hanging around the centre of my old neighborhood and witnessed a drunk/drugged shirtless psycho, in a very short order, first going to the booth of the local Greens who were campaigning in an election and shouting how they were commies and traitors, then wandering off to shout racist slurs to passing immigrant kids, then going to the tram stop to harass young women and make them very uncomfortable (then the tram came and he took off elsewhere). It's the kind of an anecdote one can't even tell often because it sounds so stereotypical you'd get some right-winger accusing you of inventing it to make the right look bad.
I've always seen transvestigation as at least partly an evolution of the "if you watch this shitty vid where it looks like some celebrity's eyes look weird or their skin bulges unnaturally it proves they're LIZARD PEOPLE" conspiracy theories. After all, trans people exist whereas lizard people don't.
I've never seen one transvestigator actually show examples of what they'd consider properly "male" or "female" facial shapes or body language patterns on a non-trans celebrity, presumably since other transvestigators would then rush to claim that actually such shapes and patterns present telltale signs of secret transness. Peak transvestigating I've seen was a standard transvestigational body language analysis claiming that (I think) Chelsea Manning was actually a cis woman who is only pretending to be a trans woman for some unstated nefarious deep state reason.
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