So Much of Our Never-Ending Culture War Comes Down to Gender Roles
At its core, so much of our never-ending culture war boils down to an intense, unresolvable conflict between Conservatives who believe deeply in the necessity and importance of adhering to conventional gender roles and Liberals and Progressives who think those traditional gender roles are outdated and irrelevant and should be challenged and/or purposefully discarded.
It goes back to the very beginning, as far as Judeo-Christianity is concerned. In the beginning there was a dude, and only a dude, kicking it in the Garden of Eden, and everything was perfect.
But then the first man felt lonely and sad and God took pity on him and made him a partner out of his rib. I’m surprised that the rabidly anti-trans crowd did not object to the original woman being created out of the original man but God apparently has a pass with them, being the supreme being and all.
In this telling, man’s downfall came from his willingness to listen to a woman. That’s the original sin. In the minds of a shockingly high percentage of the public, every horror that followed was a result of women ruining paradise.
Fashions may change with time but the substance of the conflict remains the same. Conservatives have always seen, in androgyny and gender-bending, a threat to civilization that must be fought at all costs.
The reactionary outrage endures, that awful conviction that anything that deviates from a biblical norm is evil and wrong and the devil’s doing. It doesn’t matter whether it’s male hippies with long hair or Harry Styles in a dress: the idea that men would act or dress or behave in ways that are traditionally considered feminine represents a threat to the Conservative way of life.
Within this context, the incoherent, frothing at the mouth rage directed towards the idea of pronouns makes more sense. To these people there is only male and female, he OR she, never anything in between.
It also helps explain the rage directed towards drag queens in general and drag queens reading stories to children in particular. A deep, visceral revulsion towards the mixing and mingling of male and female powers much of this outrage, combined with a hysterical, self-aggrandizing concern for children they see as the innocent prey of the LGTBQ+ Mafia.
That’s why so much rage towards the trans community is rooted in aesthetics, in the nasty notion that trans women are actually con artists, sex criminals and opportunists looking for an opportunity to sneak into sacred women’s spaces for the sake of their own deranged sexual satisfaction and enjoyment.
To be trans is a major sin in their minds; to be unattractive or awkward just makes the sin more unforgivable.
It doesn’t matter how much progress we make as a culture in terms of LGTBQ issues. There is always going to be an unfortunately massive percentage of the public that is never going to accept that men shouldn’t behave in conventionally masculine ways and women shouldn’t embody traditional femininity.
This way of thinking may grow less common with time but it’s never going to go away entirely. That’s why we’re battling our way through a ferocious backlash to progress and, as with abortion, things might actually get worse before they get better.
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