Two years ago, Matt Walsh was still near the beginning of his What Is A Woman? campaign. He wasn’t yet widely regarded as a vanguard combatant in the conflict over transgenderism. Today his name is closely associated with that conflict, and for good reason: he’s absolutely forthright about his position:
Note the shocked faces on the gender-crossers and their ideological allies. Walsh didn’t call them lunatics; rather, he implied that they have aligned themselves against the truth. How? By their assertion that “Transwomen are women.”
Transwomen are not women. They’re men who’ve chosen to strive for a female presentation, however successfully. Whether it’s through extensive surgical alterations or merely through clothes and cosmetics, that is the beating heart of the conflict: whether we will honor truth in our discourse about this phenomenon.
The general attitude toward truth – that is, whether it’s a matter of objective facts or merely someone’s opinion – is a critical front in the culture wars.
A few years ago, I wrote that in my investigation of the transgenderism phenomenon, I’d found these patterns:
- A large majority (perhaps as many as 90%, though the statistics are incomplete) of transgender transitions are from male to female.
- Among male-to-female transgenders – transwomen – the self-perception of inadequacy as a man was prevalent, and was often reinforced by factors in their surroundings.
- Transwomen almost uniformly pursue traditional ideals of femininity, often extreme femininity, in appearance, dress, and deportment.
- A surprising number of men, including some extremely masculine men, have found transwomen to be more attractive and sexually appealing than biological women of their acquaintance.
Please pay special attention to items 3 and 4 above. As regards romantic and sexual attraction, what matters most is presentation. Apparently, the decline in the willingness of biological women to embrace the feminine norms that American men find attractive has caused the attention of some to “swerve” to an alternative that few would have embraced a century ago.
Recently I revisited my sources for those searches, and the trend has grown even stronger. A growing number of men – even some very masculine men – have elected to pursue transwomen by preference to biological women. In effect, they’ve deemed the ongoing embrace of femininity by transwomen as more trustworthy than that of biological women – and femininity, rather than functional female genitals, is what they value most.
Are such men somehow supporting the transgenderist ideology? I think not. Rather, they’re making personal choices to which the ideological component of transgenderism is irrelevant. As regards the cultural battle, those men are better aligned with Matt Walsh than with his opponents and detractors. They know full well that their partners are not women.
As I mentioned the day before yesterday, the soon-to-debut PlayStation 5 game Stellar Blade is making big waves among video gamers, videogame critics, and videogame development houses. Preorders for the game have smashed all previous records. Some gamers have even said that before the promos for Stellar Blade, they’d had no interest in the PlayStation 5 but will now be purchasing one. It’s definitely the game of the hour, even though it won’t be released for another two weeks.
Stellar Blade’s playable protagonist character Eve was designed to “pinup” specifications. She’s also clothed in form-fitting costumes, complete with high heels. While Eve is the typical badass you’d expect from the protagonist of an action platformer, she exemplifies femininity, especially feminine beauty, in all other ways. Gamers in the Western world are agog over her, for that reason among others.
But Western game development houses, which have all but unanimously been colonized and conquered by the “woke,” are furious. Stellar Blade is making it plain to them that what they’ve been selling as female characters doesn’t please the gaming audience. They’ve deliberately made their women unattractive, even mannish. And the sales of games featuring those unattractive women are way down.
Even if this stroke in the culture wars is being struck by a South Korean gaming house (Shift Up), it’s a telling blow against the “woke” incursions on prior norms. Anything that elicits this magnitude of enthusiasm – and resistance to the “woke” flood – must be counted as a major stroke. This is emphasized by the weeping and gnashing of teeth among “woke” game critics and developers. All of them are incandescent with hatred of Stellar Blade.
Are we winning the culture war? Unclear. Perhaps it’s safer to say that we haven’t yet been defeated. If my perception of trends in the entertainment industry can be trusted, we’ve gained significant ground. Therefore, celebrate! We haven’t had much to celebrate in this connection for quite some time.
