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Chris Bodenner
8:00 PM / June 28, 2016
Is the Transgender Movement a Spiritual One?
This week at the Aspen Ideas Festival (which The Atlantic is covering at length), Caitlyn Jenner made an appearance with her memoirist, Buzz Bissinger, who asked her the question, "What has it been like to finally reach your soul?" Jenner's response:
From a subsequent segment, here's a quote that Julie captured:
"This is how I explain myself," [Jenner] said. "God's looking down and he's making little Bruce. He said, 'What are we gonna do with this one? Let's give him good looks, make him intelligent, make him athletic, that's kind of cool. Let's make him really athletic—that's even cooler.' He gets to the end and goes, 'Look at all these wonderful qualities we've given this one. But everybody's got their stuff, what are we going to give this one to deal with?' He sits back, chuckles, and says, 'Let's give this one the soul of a female and see what happens.'"
A reader responds to that personal parable:
This discussion is so weird for the left to be having. On the one hand, they can't explain transgenderism biologically. Someone who is physically male, with male chromosomes, and male sex organs is, by definition, "male." Yet they also proclaim that "nothing is 'wrong' or 'abnormal'" with transgenderism. To them it cannot be a mental health issue. So if it can't be a biological issue, nor a mental health issue, then it's a "spiritual issue."
And, hot damn, that's a really odd position for the left to take. What the left is essentially arguing, unbeknownst to them, is that a person's "soul" doesn't fit their biological state. Not a "mental soul" or a "brain state" but a true "spiritual self." The left is arguing in favor of religion, they don't even realize they are doing it.
(For Jenner's part, she is not exactly of the left; she's outspoken as a Republican and has said better things about Trump and Cruz than Hillary Clinton.) Another reader also sees a religious parallel in the rhetoric:
No one is able to define the word "woman" in this context without resorting to metaphysical jargon ("female soul") or a circular definition ("a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman"). People can and should do whatever they want to be happy, but I do not support crafting legislation and public policy around such an irrational concept and forcing the general public to accept it as truth (see the Obama administration's recent guidelines regarding the definition of the term "sex" as it applies to Title IX). It is nonsense, no different from those who base their political ideology on religion.
Disagree? Drop us a note and we'll post. To bring some science into the discussion, here's a piece in Scientific American that highlights research into the question "Is There Something Unique about the Transgender Brain?" Money quote:
"Trans people have brains that are different from males and females, a unique kind of brain," [Antonio Guillamon of the National Distance Education University in Madrid] says. "It is simplistic to say that a female-to-male transgender person is a female trapped in a male body. It's not because they have a male brain but a transsexual brain."
And here's a Wall Street Journal item looking through more brain science, concluding that "sometimes people are born with bodies whose gender is different from what they actually are."
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Donald Down the Shore
John Hendrickson
The president refuses to believe that even New Jersey, a solidly blue Northeast state, is beyond his electoral grasp in 2020.
WILDWOOD, N.J.—President Donald Trump casually referred to his reelection campaign as "probably the greatest movement in history" last night. He told the several thousand rally-goers inside the Wildwoods Convention Center—and the scores more partying outside and watching a simulcast—that this country "has tremendous potential if we don't blow it." At one point, Trump warned that Democrats want to "close your factories" and "get rid of your cows." He conceded that there aren't many cows in this particular beach town.
Why did the president descend on the Jersey Shore in the dead of winter?
The waterslides of Morey's Piers loomed over the boardwalk, bone-dry. It was too early in the season for 18 holes of mini-golf. No enticing aromas wafted out of the Fudge Factory (though someone did hand out free samples outside the Fudge Kitchen). Why Jersey at all? Democrats have won the state in the past seven consecutive presidential contests. But Trump, the former Atlantic City casino boss, owed a guy a favor.
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American Law Does Not Take Rape Seriously
Barbara Bradley Hagerty
Permeating every moment of Harvey Weinstein's trial is the disturbing history of sexual-assault prosecution in America.
When Harvey Weinstein arrives at the New York State Supreme Court each day, frail, aged, sometimes hobbling on a walker, he settles into a courtroom crowded with spectators and freighted with a legacy of distrust.* On the prosecutor's side sit two women alleging that the Hollywood producer sexually assaulted them; four others who would buttress their claims that he is a sexual predator; and, in spirit if not in fact, dozens of other accusers and legions of people who see in Weinstein the original villain of the #MeToo movement. Across the aisle, supporting Weinstein and his attorneys, are the skeptics of this and other rape prosecutions, those who cite the false allegations against the lacrosse players at Duke and the fraternity brothers at the University of Virginia. And permeating every moment of the proceedings, every motion and witness testimony, every cross-examination and jury instruction, is the disturbing history of rape prosecution in America.
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The Easiest Reform for College Admissions
Natasha Warikoo
Many admissions issues are complicated, but preferences for the children of alumni are indefensible.
In the world of college admissions, few choices about how to weigh applicants are simple. How much weight should schools give to applicants' athletic performance, to standardized-test scores, to the need for a diverse student body, to the donations of wealthy benefactors? These are all complicated questions. But Johns Hopkins University just presented the higher-education world with at least one easy decision: Legacy admissions need to go.
Johns Hopkins recently made public a decision, reached in 2014 but kept secret until recently, to stop giving an admissions boost to applicants who have a parent who attended Johns Hopkins. Giving weight to legacy status takes attention away from consideration of an applicant's accomplishments, raw talent, leadership ability, academic achievement, and athletic skills. And it does that without offering much in return: It doesn't measure the obstacles that a student has overcome, or her potential to contribute to peers' learning, or any other characteristics that colleges sometimes consider. Nor does a broad legacy-admissions preference guarantee that alumni will donate to an institution in any meaningful way—despite the widespread and often-unquestioned assumption that it will. (The students who might have been admitted if not for legacy preferences are potential donors, too.)
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