The hunt for transgender nuance

I am still finding it pretty incredible how, when it comes to transgender issues, there are two extreme polarised views that both really have it in for anything ever vaguely resembling nuance.   I don't  know that I can think of any other subject on which the polarisation has reached such weird extremes.  

Perhaps unwisely, for example, I currently follow on Twitter the well known (former) sitcom writer Graham Lineham, who seems to now spend every waking moment coming up with attack tweets on pro-transgender extremists, and often giving the impression he is doing so while drinking.   (Lots of pro-transgenderists love to taunt him about losing his marriage and career over this issue, and to be honest, such obsessive, single minded tweeting on one issue does not seem to indicate a healthy state of mind.)

On the other hand, he does love to tweet photos of transgender folk (older men as women, mainly) who do the very common transgender social media thing of posting selfies for which the motivation is clearly seeking endorsement or praise for their new look and identity, sometimes complete with wildly masculine themed tattoos and a general air of, well, how should I put this:  not in touch with reality if they think anyone is objectively going to think they make an attractive additional to the feminine world.  (But, of course, more than likely, no matter how weirdly anyone looks or poses in these, some other transgender person will offer a bit of "you go girl" encouragement.)    So you know, he does have a point about such self delusion, sometimes.   Rarely will a woman encounter in a female public  toilet an obvious burly man dressed as a woman with a huge penis and testicles tattoo on his chest (as one of Graham's tweets showed recently), but honestly, if it happened, who could blame her for being nervous?

On the third hand, he (Graham) can be so extreme as to (as he did recently), call Jon Stewart a "groomer" simply due to his pointing out in his recent confrontation with a Republican that it's wildly hypocritical for them to be obsessed with kids seeing a drag show as being a "danger" to them worth legislating about, when thousands are indisputably actually killed by guns each year, and the Republicans refuse to do anything substantial about that.  I think that even most of Graham's strongest defenders could see that this was a nonsense insult.

When it comes to the Australian blogosphere, you can see 100% full blown Right wing moral panic on display at the New Catallaxy blog, where old Cassie preached to the choir of other ageing Right wingers about how it's shameful and horrifying that it's mostly women who are seen in any of the video clips of drag performances with kids in the audience.  Here she is, in her standard style (like Lineham, if you assumed she a substance abuse problem, it would help explain how easily she turns the dial to "11"):

No good mother takes a child to watch drag queens perform. But what is more worrying is how our society, if it is not at the stage where it actively celebrates and applauds such deviancy, is just happy to shrug its shoulders and says, “what harm can drag queens do”.  It is this rank stupidity and apathy in the face of such obvious deviancy and degeneracy that proves that it is no longer only children and parents who are being groomed, our whole culture is being groomed, and we are willing participants in modern day child sacrifice. If this doesn’t ring alarm bells, we are doomed.

But hey, if you ask me, the fact that anyone finds drag, in this generation or previous, as an amusing performance style is something I don't get.  I've said before, as a young person I never understood why anyone would watch Danny La Rue, or go to Les Girls in Kings Cross.  That said, as for the recent clip that has been doing the rounds of a mother's show where babies - not even toddlers -  are watching (barely, when not distracted by anything else in the room, as babies are want to be) some luridly dressed drag/caberat performers:   well, I think it kind of weird that the mothers find this entertaining; but come on, be serious moral panickers:  there's no way those babies are going to have memories of this.  I reckon the performers could be completely nude and it still wouldn't be a thing that would register in, or influence, the minds of babies that age.   Get real.

So, this post is just a (no doubt) pointless attempt to ask, can't we all just agree on some simple things, all of which might be true at the same time?:

a.  some transgender folk, especially late in life transitioners, are just never going to look like attractive members of the gender they think they are.  It's a bit cringe to see transgender people to whom this is an important aspect of their transition, though.  

b.  Some transgender folk are going to engage in behaviour that is attention seeking and basically nutty.  (Obvious example - Canadian fake boob teacher.)   It's doing no service to, um, "mainstream" transgender people to pretend that using that label means any behaviour is acceptable and must be tolerated or accepted.   (Incidentally, is there still a possibility that this guy was trolling the transgender rights lobby?  It seems not - and it also seems to have been such a prolonged incident that you have to wonder about the extremism of anyone who troll for so long in such a ridiculous way.)

c.   Similarly, if you still have a penis (and, especially, a history of sexual violence against women), of course there can be a legitimate concern about being a potential threat within traditional women's only spaces.   It's just a nonsense to claim that self labelling of a person's mental space should be the be-all and end-all of assessing whether sexual danger is a risk, or not. 

d.   Drag shows are a specialised form of entertainment that some people find entertaining, and some can't see the appeal of at all.  But claiming that, say, a two year old seeing one is in moral danger, or that all drag performers are pedophile groomers, is just ludicrous.    Similarly, carrying on as if this isn't a self limiting, currently largely social media driven, obsession that will eventually find some social equilibrium (in the case of the USA, probably after litigation!), and is the same as a sacrifice of kids to Moloch, or whatever, is just nuts in its own way.

Apart from those propositions, there is a wide space for issues which should allow for nuanced argument, especially with respect to the issue of how young people who want to be the other gender should be most wisely treated.  But if you aren't going to pull back from some basic extreme hyperbole, there is zero hope of even getting to the same ballpark area to allow for any nuance debate.   It's really like  neither side wants to allow for nuance to be possible, on any aspect.