I figure I owe the world an essay this evening but I’m not sure what I should be writing about. The big topics de jour include all of the various human interest stories surrounding the Olympics. Of course we couldn’t go a whole week without another tempest in a teapot regarding trans issues. Last week it was transvestites in a tableau that may or may not have been inspired by DaVinci. This week its an Algerian boxer, phenotypically and culturally female and without a particularly distinguished career in the ring, of some years, who was called a man by a corrupt Russian sports organization and that was enough for the usual anti-trans brigade to bang the drums and create a pig-pile of epic dimensions with all sorts of people who should no better leaping to completely unfounded conclusions and half the interwebs pivoting from expertise in Graeco-Roman mythology to chromosomal biology before you could say ‘Drag Queen’.
What’s fueling the anti-trans fire? They are a very small and politically powerless community who have no more ability to recruit or seduce children than any other disparate group of human beings. I have pointed out for years that parents generally need not worry about their LGBTQ acquaintances and the safety of their children. Pretty much everyone I’ve ever met in a sexual minority community is keenly aware of the aspersions society casts on them and therefore they comport themselves with scrupulous care around other people’s children. It’s been a long standing rule in my home of many decades that minor children are not allowed without the knowledge/presence of their adults. We all know that even a vague rumor of misbehavior can destroy our lives. We’re not all that removed from ‘The Children’s Hour’. When those children become young adults, if they figure out that we are their tribe, they come looking for us. There’s no need for us to look for them.
Drag used to be considered a bit of oddball fringe humor and has been around as long as there have been cultural gender differences in clothing, appearance, and behavior. Milton Berle did drag on national TV in the 50s. Flip Wilson had his Geraldine in the 60s. Tom Hanks got his major break doing drag on Bosom Buddies for several years. Films like The Birdcage and To Wong Foo… entered the national zeitgeist without causing an uproar. RuPaul has been hosting Drag Race since 2009. None of these has caused the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it. The ‘drag is evil’ and ‘drag queens are groomers’ and ‘transsexuals should be punished’ messaging appeared suddenly starting in the spring of 2022. I am always suspicious of ‘grass roots’ movements that are everywhere at once. That usually means there’s big money and meticulous planning afoot somewhere.
Now what else was going on in the spring of 2022 in terms of the various culture wars about which we all like to tie each other up in knots? The Supreme Court heard arguments in case now known as Dobbs in December of 2021 and a draft of the opinion in that case was leaked to the media in May of 2022 before being released in final form in June of 2022. The Dobbs case, overturning Roe v Wade and flying in the face of stare decisis and fifty years of settled law, presented a problem for right wing culture war politics. For decades, the antiabortion position was the plank that kept their culture warriors together and pulling in unison (and kept the funds flowing). All of sudden, that’s no longer the bludgeon it once was. There needed to be a quick pivot to another equally visceral culture war issue. (I’m sure drag and trans issues were identified years ago and kept in arrears for the time when Roe fell so, when it did fall, it was an easy roll out).
There are cultural and societal conversations that need to be held regarding trans issues in particular. Sex and gender do not exist in nature on the binary that people are taught in elementary school science (and anyone who has taken the most basic of college biology courses will know this). Knee jerk legal definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ based on overly simplified concepts are going to create enormous headaches for the courts to ultimately have to sort out. There’s a lot of bleating about ‘common sense’ but that’s not how the law works. The law says what the law says. The right wing culture warriors, of course, will not stop with the trans community or drag queen story hours. They’ve seen a wedge into the oppression of all sexual minority groups – and that includes 62 year old twice widowed professors of clinical geriatrics. I’ve come to the conclusion that you stand for the worth and dignity of every person, or you become a star bellied Sneetch.
Well, I guess that answers the question regarding what I’m going to write about this evening. Before I sign off, I figure we better look at what’s going on in Covidland. We are definitely in a summer wave. How high it is currently or is likely to get is unclear as we no longer collect standardized data nationwide but wastewater studies suggest that it is continuing to spread in the Deep South, New England, and the Pacific Northwest. The number of cases in the month of July nationwide was likely somewhere in the mid six figures but, again, nobody really knows. Hospitalizations and deaths remain relatively low due to natural and vaccine mediated immunity.
The biggest issue is that the currently spreading strains, KP.2, KP.3 and LB.1 are all descendants of strain JN.1 which emerged last winter. JN.1 has a number of mutations that make it more efficient at evading vaccine mediated immunity and its daughter strains have inherited this propensity. This is likely why, in part, we’re seeing this summer bump. It’s getting around our previous vaccine defenses. I have heard through the grapevine that the new formulation of covid booster set to be released this fall should assist with this so it’s not a bad idea if everyone put the idea of a covid booster together with their flu shot on their radar screen for the fall. I have no idea when it’s going to be available. I usually find out answers to questions like that the same way everyone else does, by reading the news.
Going to check my notes for tomorrow’s Merry Wives of Windsor rehearsal before kicking back with a bad movie for the benefit of MNM.
Wash your hands.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 