Fox News is mad at me for (sort of) agreeing with them about gender identity
If you’d told me a few days ago that I was going to get called out in an Ashley Rindsberg article in Fox News, I would have had no trouble believing you. My first guess for the cause of the callout would not have been a fairly tame Wikipedia article I wrote that just lists some works that depict Jesus as queer—not even my edgiest article on that topic—but I wouldn’t have been surprised either. I would have also readily believed that Mr. Rindsberg would put scare-quotes around “trans” and “nonbinary” while also not volunteering any alternative label. I have been, I must confess, a regular reader of FoxNews.com for over a decade, in which time I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the chaotic dynamic between normal journalistic practice and frothing propaganda that plays out in their coverage, sometimes in the span of a single sentence, which often leads to this comical refusal to either affirm or reject trans people’s genders.
¶What’s more surprising is the way Mr. Rindsberg continued that sentence, noting that I “reject[ ] the notion of gender identity”. One friend, who wisely does not spend much of her time reading FoxNews.com or its comments section, had a charmingly charitable interpretation as this being an accusation of hypocrisy on my part. But I am pretty confident that, even if Ashley Rindsberg actually took the time to parse my words, he well enough knows the readership of Christian-outrage-bait schlock to not expect them to understand that. (Scroll down to the comments and you can see, among other things, people complaining that Wikipedia is scared to say anything negative about Muhammad, who at press time we describe as having had sex with a nine-year-old.) No, I think Mr. Rindsberg’s point is much simpler: “Tranny says woke thing.”
¶Which is funny because I don’t think most woke people would consider rejecting the concept of gender identity to be woke. I also don’t think Fox News’s editors, who routinely give “gender identity” the scare-quote treatment too, would consider it to be woke. So there is a certain hilarity of being criticized by a journalist who’s deep in the tank for Donald Trump for agreeing with Mr. Trump that gender identity isn’t real.
So let’s talk about that. What do I mean by rejecting gender identity? Why do I, someone who left the U.S. because of its increasingly hostile treatment of trans people, at the end of the day agree with at least one part of the reasoning used to justify that discrimination: that gender identity is a fundamentally flawed concept?
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