Two major glass ceilings
Rachel Levine has shattered not one but two major glass ceilings this year. In March, she became the first openly transgender person to win confirmation in the US Senate after Joe Biden nominated her as assistant secretary of health.
Then in October she was sworn in as the first openly transgender four-star officer as an admiral and head of the US Public Health Service Commissioned Corps. At that exalted rank she gets to wear the blue uniform of the corps, which though non-military is one of eight uniformed services.
First! Glass ceiling smashed! Twice!
Until you remember – this is a man. It’s not smashing any glass ceiling to appoint a man to an important government position. It’s just one more man added to all the other men.
Levine said her starting point when thinking about trans youth was how at risk they are. “Transgender youth are very vulnerable,” she said. “They are vulnerable to being bullied, to discrimination and harassment.”
You know who else is very vulnerable? Girls. Female youth are very vulnerable to being bullied, to discrimination and harassment.
Jim Banks, a Republican congress member from Indiana, was temporarily suspended from Twitter in October for willfully misgendering Levine. In a tweet, he said: “The title of first female four-star officer gets taken by a man”
Much as I hate to agree with a Republican congress member, on this one he’s right.
In addition to such politically laden hatred, Levine thinks that fear plays a large role in driving much of the transphobic agenda. “People fear what they don’t understand and have experience of. I’m hoping that my appointment, and my being open and out and working for the nation’s public health, will lead to less fear and more acceptance. That’s my goal.”
But people also fear what they do understand and have experience of. Fear is not always a mistake. I fear the way men like Levine are stealing firsts and prizes and honors from women. I fear Levine’s complete lack of shame about doing that – I fear the way he’s wallowing in it instead of refusing it. I fear the unembarrassed way he displaces women and then accepts flattery for doing so.
I’m sure when he was a little boy, his parents always sent him messages like “Transgirls like you will never be able to be in powerful government positions.” And then in school, he surely was discouraged from going into the tracks that would lead him to study medicine and admin (I don’t know if he studied admin, but it would make sense), because he was a transgirl, and we know that girls are discouraged from such tracks and of course TGAG. But nonetheless, he was able to overcome all that, and on his own drive and initiative he was able to study medicine and rise in admin, despite all the messages telling him that he could never do it.
Oh wait. No. Boys didn’t get such messages, and there are only two sexes.
He’s not so much smashing glass ceilings so much as he is installing funhouse mirrors that are distorting reality. That companies like Twitter have joined in is appalling. Funny how correctly sexing a particular man is forbidden, yet allowing trans activists and their allies to call billions of us “cis” without permission is perfectly fine.
A man achieved things many men and few (if any) women have achieved before. But he’s the first one to call himself a woman!!1!!
Republican congressman Banks’ complaint may have had a salutary effect: the media has changed the “first woman to…” into “first transgender person to…” That’s a huge improvement.
I don’t really have much of a problem with the “breaking the glass ceiling” narrative. We’d use it for a first-ever -appointed/elected man who was gay, or a cross dresser, or a furry, or anything else a conservative establishment clearly looked askance at way back when.
What is rot is the idea that “fear of the unknown” is driving the argument against trans ideology. That’s co-opted from the gay rights movement: opposition to gay marriage fell when people realized they had gay friends and neighbors. But that’s because the concern was indeed driven by disgust. Same-sex attraction doesn’t involve redefining concepts, words, biology, feminism, or anything else. It only tweaks at some religions ( which primarily exist in order to be tweaked by The Ways of The World, so that’s okay, then.)
I recall we had a rather good discussion about this appointment when it was made in October. Why are they printing this article now? I guess it must be “year in review” time?
The “four star officer” rank comes with the appointment as assistant secretary of health. I suppose it makes for good copy, but the rank seems to mean very little except with the health department. As noted in the article, he gets to wear a pretty uniform; that seems to be the only real difference between “four star admiral” and a plain old assistant secretary of health.
But would anybody take seriously any press conference held by a government department head dressed in full furry regalia? Would anyone honour (or humour) such an individual’s demands to recognized, acknowledged and addressed as the species they identify as? (Which could involve unfortunate, unforeseen consequences to personal well-being in some jurisdictions for those who insist they are wolves.) Why then are we expected to take seriously a man who claims to be a woman?
I’m not against “cross-dressing”* or greater freedom of choice in clothing/cosmetic use for both women and men. Women may wear trousers; men may wear dresses. Neither choice has the magical side-effect of transforming the wearer of the garment in question into the opposite sex. The refusal to go along with the delusion that it does should not be illegal or punishable. Clothing is not “proof” that one is now something other, or more, than someone who happens to wear trousers or dresses when they feel like it. A uniform, or some other work clothing, can announce and denote a particular job or position; taking that uniform or clothing off may even prevent one from doing the particular job (think spacesuit, scuba gear, surgical scrubs). But the knowledge requires to do the job or hold position itself, does not reside in the clothing. We might occasionally be fooled by someone wearing a white lab coat and stethescope (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV…”), but that can only work for so long and go so far. Yet somehow we are expected to believe and repeat the claim that “womanhood” resides in female-coded clothing, that the wardrobe choice is at least partly constitutive of actually being a woman. Add the lipstick, purse and head-tilt and you’ve got the whole package. Take all of these away and we’re left with the patently ridiculous and dangerous claim that “some women have penises.” Rachel Dolezal, for all her performative “Blackness”, may have had some Black ancestry; it’s not always obvious. It’s not necessarily wrong to give someone the benefit of the doubt. It turned out she didn’t. For trans identified males, there is no chance at all they are women, frocks, lippy and head-tilt notwithstanding. In fact it is there privilege and power as men that lets them get away with it at all. If there were only trans identified females claiming to be men, and no TiMs claiming to be women, this “rights movement” would have gotten nowhere.
*If clothing was not coded for male and female, it would all just be “clothing,” with no “cross dressing” possible. Supposedly “unisex” fashions still tend to default to currently “male” coded styles and designs, at least in Western markets. As it has been noted before here and elsewhere, while this is an advance over mandatory skirts and dresses for women, there’s no corresponding permission for men to choose skirts and dresses without penalty or explanation.
I don’t think we would use “the glass ceiling” for a man cosplaying a furry or similar – I think it’s more serious than that, and I also think it’s specific to women. At any rate it’s absurd to use it for the more powerful/rewarded/respected member of a contrasting pair. “Billionaire breaks glass ceiling!!” – no I don’t think so.
Levin may be a competent administrator and very much the right person for the job, but it’s a failure for the current administration to promote his achievements as those of a woman. No longer content to be firsts in our own achievemens, men seek to be the firsts in women’s achievements.
Do they? People always say this, but is it true?
There are lots of things I don’t understand but aren’t frightened of. Macramé, for example. I don’t understand how that shit works at all, but I don’t (often) wake up screaming about it.
I suppose it might be a lazy way of saying that sometimes people have an incorrect understanding of a situation and are scared by that false impression. But it’s not true that people are scared of things because they don’t understand them, is it?
I think Ophelia’s right and people are more scared of things they do understand, if those things are scary.