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The eureka moment dawned slowly, and once the realization sank in, it was like someone launched a thousand missiles at the Hoover Dam and my whole, authentic self broke free! My journey began benignly enough – in the form of an apricot, eyelet lace, empire waisted summer top my neighbor brought over along with some clothes for my six year old. It’s darling, don’t you think?
I noted that it was a medium, a size that tends to be roomy on me, but it looked to be a smallish medium, so I thought I would give it a try. Eyelet lace, for those who don’t know, is 100% cotton, and does not stretch at all. I got it over my head easily enough but once I tried to get my …ahem… bosoms arranged, I got trapped! I was stuck in the shirt! I couldn’t get it up or down! I had to jump up and down tearing at the cloth to extricate myself and it was completely mortifying!
I can’t fit into a medium?
OMG I CAN’T FIT INTO A MEDIUM!
The feeling washed over me in heavy waves. The weight of reality struck me with full magnitude.
I’m fat.
I grabbed the shirt and angrily yanked it open to check the label once again, and that’s when I noticed it was from the Children’ Place and I was attempting to heave my adult bosoms into a child’s medium.
Oops.
Okay, so I’m not fat. But dammit, for that one moment in time, I felt fat. And that’s when I realized that while the literal minded may prefer to consult charts and weights and numbers and indices and other “objective” or “empirical” datasets to determine human conditions like “weight”, in actual fact, weight is just another social construction, like gender or race or height or eye color.
And I am fat.
My actual weight:height ratio or any other patriarchal, oppressive construct you care to evoke does not determine if I am fat. How I feel determines that, and since my feelings are as authentic as anyone else’s, they count as evidence, and only the most anti-intellectual, poorly educated troll would deny that. This morning, trying to fit into a shirt intended for a 10 year old, I experienced all the mortification and humiliation fat women go through in their quest to find cute, affordable clothes. I share their pain, because I experienced it this morning. I understand the daily shame and degradation facing fat people, because I might have tried to put that shirt on in a grocery store or something and then I would have been judged for buying Ben & Jerry’s and who is to say my imagined experiences are less legitimate than real experiences when the facts of fatness have been established?
Now, now haters, and lovers of reason and logic, simmer down. You are on the wrong side of history, here. There are lots of people who experience identifies they do not superficially appear to possess, and it is only because you are superficial that you can’t see or appreciate that reality. If you practiced a little depth, you might find the world a much more interesting place!
Just sayin’….
Milo Yianoppolous is trans-race, for example. He is actually a Black man. Caitlyn Jenner, anyone? Rachel Dolezal is also trans-race.
She was born a white girl from the Midwest, but is in fact a Black woman, and lives that life so thoroughly, she is President of the NAACP chapter in Spokane and a Professor of Africana Education at Eastern Washington University. Sigh….. I wish I could be that committed to living as a fat person….
My regular readers will know, of course, that I am joking, although I did get stuck in that stupid shirt this morning. I think apricot eye-let lace should come back for adult women, because it’s really cute!
It’s been rather hilarious watching commenters at Jezebel and Gawker and even Breitbart try to figure out how they are supposed to react to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who alters both her hair and skin to pass as a Black woman. If race and gender are social constructs, why is Rachel a problem? Why can’t she pretend to be a Black woman? Why can’t she be a Black woman? The feminists in particular trip over themselves rushing to defend Caitlyn Jenner as an authentic woman, but condemning Rachel for being a “pretend” Black woman. It’s different because …. well, they can’t quite figure that out, it just is, okay?
I’ll give you a hint. Jezebel: it’s because neither gender nor race are social constructs. Caitlyn Jenner is a woman because she has the neurology of a woman’s brain, which is distinct from a man’s brain. Rachel Dolezal is a “pretend” Black woman because she inherited her DNA from her German, Swedish and Czech ancestors. This is why her skin and eyes and hair are light in color.
Gender isn’t something you can put on for show. Well, you can dress in drag for sure and pretend to be the other gender, which we’re all pretty cool with. You can also dress up and pretend to be another race or ethnicity, but the Thought Police have now deemed that offensive (as long as it’s non-white culture you are appropriating – pretending to be Irish every March 19th or German every October is perfectly fine).
A lot of people are suggesting that Rachel is mentally ill based on the extent of her deception. Of course, none of them would accept a diagnoses of mental illness for Bruce Jenner. SJWs and feminists have a hard time in particular understanding why anyone would do such a thing. It’s actually not that difficult for those of us outside the SJW mindset to figure out: she’s an academic, and in that particular realm, Black women have a lot of privilege. Most women with PhDs follow the patterns of their less educated sisters and acquire degrees in bullshit like Africana Studies. Ooh, sounds rigorous! Who stands the best chance of landing a cushy, tenured job in academia in Africana Studies? A lily-white woman from the Midwest, or a spunky Black woman subjected to multiple episodes of race-based threats, stalking and terrorism?
Duh.
Follow the money.
And let’s throw one more faggot on the fire – as a Black woman, Rachel is very, very light-skinned and has light eyes – the epitome of beauty in the Black community. In the Midwest she’s just meh, whatever. Another blonde chick of German and Swedish ancestry. Dime a frickin’ dozen.
Rachel is not mentally ill, she’s ambitious, canny and vain. And there are limits to what ambitious, canny and vain humans can do to achieve their goals. Rachel is about to find that out. It will be interesting to see if feminists and SJWs continue on their current trajectory and rip her to shreds, or parse her ambitions to be a net positive and come out to support her. I suspect they will eat her alive, but I’ve learned to never underestimate a feminist’s capacity for delusion.
So what the hell does this have to do with me being a Korean man? Let’s talk for a moment about the idea of “cultural appropriation”, which to me is a made up word designed to disguise a form of affirmative action for less able people who want the perks more able people earn. Let’s take gaming as an example. SJWs and feminists piss and moan about representation of minorities and women in games and demand that game designers accommodate their tantrums. The Witcher 3 is set during the Middle Ages in land-locked Europe? Where are the Black people? Uh, in Africa? Now connect the dots. A white game developer who creates a Black character is demonstrating cultural appropriation and cannot possibly understand what it is like for a Black person to plant claymores in a circle around the ferris wheel to successfully get through the incoming helicopter checkpoint on the One Shot, One Kill Mission in CoD. This is because claymores and ferris wheels and helicopters and checkpoints mean something completely different to Black gamers.
Uh, what?
Wait. No, they don’t. But that’s the logic. If SJWs and feminists can convince the creators of popular culture that they need characters representing diverse gender and race perspectives, and that only women and members of the under-represented races can accurately create/portray those characters – well, voila! Guess who gets hired?
The same thing took place with the Sad Puppies movement in nominating Hugo Award candidates. Science fiction writers put down their collective feet and spanked the hell out of the SJWs and sent them crying to their safe spaces to eat cookies and color in their gender neutral books, because science fiction writers, like game developers, filmmakers, painters, photographers, painters, singers, artists and creators of all persuasions understand that appropriation isn’t the same thing as representation.
Are you human? Do you have the capacity for empathy? Can you imagine life in someone else’s shoes? Congratulations, you may represent any human being you like. Hey, even if you don’t have the capacity for empathy and can’t readily imagine life through someone else’s eyes, you still get to represent any human you like through your creative endeavors. Pity about your psychosis and profound autism, but your neurodiversity art rocks!
I have written a book that takes place in Korea during the Korean War. I have never been to Korea, and I certainly have never been in a war. The story includes first person narration from an elderly Korean man, a young Korean woman, a small Korean boy, a mid-20s American soldier, an American woman, a Korean soldier, a displaced Korean woman refugee, a middle-aged man who is a career soldier, a young American boy, an elderly American man, a dog and a deer.
According to SJW, feminist logic, I have appropriated the culture and experiences of all these others and that is unacceptable. It would only be acceptable if I were those identities. And depending on how we want to measure it, I am each of those identifies. I have shared their feelings, and if feelings are evidence, then I am an elderly Korean man.
Except feelings are not evidence and every sane person knows that.
Indeed, those who reject Bruce Jenner as a woman are basing their logic on experience – Bruce lived his entire childhood and most of his adult life as a man and has only recently acquired some of the attributes that allow him to experience life as a woman. For many, this invalidates his claim to womanhood. It doesn’t matter how he feels – what he has experienced is what matters.
And fair enough. There is nothing “trans-phobic” or hateful about that stance. It’s merely supporting evidence and experience over feeling and intuition. Here’s a delightful irony for you: while I have no evidence (and neither does anybody else at this point), I feel, my intuition tells me that brains are gendered from birth and trans-gender is directly related to prenatal hormonal exposure. I sense that a baby is washed with hormones that create a male or a female brain and then something loopy happens and the wrong secondary sex characteristics develop, leaving a female brain trapped in a male body, or vice versa. The moment evidence appears to indicate I am dead wrong, I will abandon this hypothesis no matter how I feel at the moment, because I don’t prioritize feelings over evidence.
Twitter is already having a field day with Rachel, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out. If the SJWs triumph, I suppose I will have to come out as a Korean man in order to assert my authority to write books with male Korean narrators. I’m also going to have to come out as a child, a soldier and a refugee. And a deer. And a dog. I hope chewing bones will suffice to authenticate me as a canine (and no jokes about my looks sufficing, you bastards!).
I draw the line at sniffing butts.
For those of you who are interested, the book is free, for the next five days, on Amazon.com, and after that period, it will be $2.99 which is the lowest price Kindle would allow. If you miss the 5 day window, and would still like a copy, email me at janet@judgybitch.com, and I’ll forward one.
[Ed. note: this appeared originally at www.judgybitch.com and is re-printed here, with permission.]
