Between the decision not to endorse Kamala Harris and CEO Jeff Bezos’s move to restrict the opinion page to only columns that support free markets and personal liberties, there has been a heavy amount of weeping and gnashing of teeth among liberals over the fate of the Washington Post and how Bezos has sold out to Donald Trump. Such claims are hysteria, as evidenced by a Wednesday op-ed entitled What is a trans woman, really? That the article was written by PEN America President Jennifer Finney Boylan, a transgender individual, tells the reader all they need to know about just how Trumpy the Post is, or, more accurately, isn’t.
After spending several paragraphs alluding to various fictional characters who had alter egos or disguises or real people who had alternative names, Boylan appropriated womanhood:
These questions matter to me, as a transgender woman, because the Trump administration’s attacks on us are, in some ways, founded on the supposition that women like me are ‘really’ men. Whenever I hear, for instance, the simplistic edict that there should be ‘no men in women’s sports,’ my first instinct is to agree. Because transgender women are not ‘really’ men. We are women. We may have different histories than other women, but then, every woman has her own history.
Boylan continued by lamenting:
Donald Trump’s election has released a tide of vitriol against transgender people (and women in particular; most of our nemeses seem oblivious to the existence of trans men). The silence of our alleged allies this last month has been stunning to me, and some of our allies have even volunteered to throw us under the bus in hopes of rebranding themselves as mainstream. Does Gavin Newsom — who came out against trans women in sports last week — really think that the MAGA base will embrace him now? Or is it possible that conservatives will see him as ‘really’ a liberal? Hmm, let’s think.
Logic has never been a strong suit for the transgender movement and Boylan was no exception, “It is worth observing that many of the people scolding me about God not making mistakes are wearing glasses. Or hearing aids. Or have pacemakers. So far as I know, no one accuses someone wearing glasses or hearing aids of fraudulence, or sees the existence of someone saved by a heart-monitoring implant as an affront to divine intentions.”
Because God never decried medical advancement. While some people may come to view their conditions as God’s plan for their individual life, nobody would ever argue that God’s plan for humanity is bad vision. If it were, He wouldn’t have given us eyes. Boylan isn’t arguing for the gender equivalent of glasses, but rather eye gouging.
Boylan concludes by writing:
The greatest obstacle for us is a lack of imagination.
By which I mean, only a person without imagination could think that Superman is ‘really’ Clark Kent. Only a person without imagination could think that a butterfly is “really” a caterpillar. Or that a trans woman is ‘really’ a man.
Without imagination, it is easy to believe in things that are simple, and superficial, and wrong.
With it, we can begin to understand the lives of those who are different from ourselves — and respond to their struggles with compassion, and kindness and grace.
The human mind constantly battles between logic and imagination. Logic without imagination is a lunatic asylum where conspiracy theorists are convinced of their correctness because people contradicting them is proof that the conspiracy is real, but what Boylan is arguing—imagination without logic—is believing that there is no such thing as truth or that Superman is a real being.
