EVEN BEYOND RUSH LIMBAUGH'S ABILITY TO PARODY.

He came up with the idea of "male lesbians" somewhere late in the 1990s.  I forget the details.  As early as the beginning of this century, something akin to that concept was still confined to the loopier parts of the victim studies complex.  “The Phallus, a seminar in critical theory and social justice. This class examines Sigmund Freud, phallologocentrism and lesbian phallus.”  "Phallogocentrism," like "cisheteropatriarchal," is a sesquipedalian pejorative for Normal. Heck, "phallogocentrism," "cisheteropatriarchal," and "sesquipedalian" are all longer than any lesbian phallus, but this post should be rated no more than R, dear reader.  

These days, though, is the greater phobia that of normal women who would just have soon not have unclipped crossers in their restrooms or locker rooms, or that of women who love women preferring to have women so born as their lovers?  Rush was on the locker rooms seven years ago.

Greetings, welcome back, Rush Limbaugh, Open Line Friday, half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair.  Charlotte Observer in an editorial.  Girls and women just need to get over their fear of the male genitalia in their locker rooms.  All of this is silly, they say. This is crazy.  Women have this inordinate fear of male genitalia and they ought get past it, ought to get over it in bathrooms and locker rooms.

No doubt the Anointed thought it was Rush being Rush, particularly when he got to a slippery slope argument later in the segment.

Everybody knows this is just yet another vehicle that extreme liberals are using to undermine and overthrow and transform the founding culture of the United States. That’s what this is. It’s not civil rights. People aren’t going to bat for one-tenth of 1% of the population here from a civil rights standpoint. This is called blowing up centuries of tradition. The same thing with gay marriage.

Yes, the motte-and-bailey. We're only interested in all loving couples having the same contractual rights. Until the correlation of forces is more favorable.

“Yes, the thought of male genitalia in girls’ locker rooms — and vice versa — might be distressing to some. But the battle for equality has always been in part about overcoming discomfort — with blacks sharing facilities, with gays sharing marriage — then realizing that it was not nearly so awful as some people imagined.”

So you young women — you girls and adult women — who are being told every day by people like the Charlotte Observer that you are likely to be raped on any American college campus you choose, are now being told, “Get over your fear of the male genitalia if you happen to spot it in a bathroom. Yes, it might provide some discomfort, but just like African-Americans had to deal with being segregated, you can get over it, too.”

Only a few years ago, the biggest secular sin was calling your male lesbian rapist a male rapist. "Julia Beck, a lesbian activist and former member of the LGBTQ Commission for the mayor of Baltimore, got in a ‘little trouble’ after she called a male rapist ‘he’ when ‘he’ actually considered himself a transgendered woman."  That's right, she got tossed off a Baltimore civil rights commission for a thoughtcrime.  There are people within the Weimar coalition who might find her behavior more offensive than that.

Is a lesbian transphobic if she does not want to have sex with trans women? Some lesbians say they are increasingly being pressured and coerced into accepting trans women as partners - then shunned and even threatened for speaking out. Several have spoken to the BBC, along with trans women who are concerned about the issue too.

Maybe I think too simply: if there's a principled argument for letting people present themselves as they would like, going to the extent of cosmetic surgery, is that not the same principled argument for letting people date and mate with whoever they want? If there's some right to sexual congress for crossers, does that not establish a similar right for the socially awkward, the "incels" if you will as well?

Jennie is a lesbian woman. She says she is only sexually attracted to women who are biologically female and have vaginas. She therefore only has sex and relationships with women who are biologically female.

Jennie doesn't think this should be controversial, but not everyone agrees. She has been described as transphobic, a genital fetishist, a pervert and a "terf" - a trans exclusionary radical feminist.

That's an elastic concept of perversion, isn't it?

There have to be opportunities for research here, don't there? "New Research Shows a Vast Majority of Cis People Won't Date Trans People."  That's information that potential crossers might want to know, and it's something that pre-adolescent crossers will have no basis for understanding.

Virtually all heterosexuals excluded trans folks from their dating pool: only 1.8% of straight women and 3.3% of straight men chose a trans person of either binary gender. But most non-heterosexuals weren’t down for dating a trans person either, with only 11.5% of gay men and 29% of lesbians being trans-inclusive in their dating preferences. Bisexual/queer/nonbinary participants (these were all combined into one group) were most open to having a trans partner, but even among them, almost half (48%) did not select either ‘trans man’ or ‘trans woman.’

But in the weird world of culture studies, it is wrong to note that the crossers have agency; rather it's a failing of the people comfortable with their own bodies for exercising agency.

Romantic relationships are one of the most important sources of social support for adults. The fact that most cis people would not consider trans people as potential dating partners is yet another serious risk factor for increased psychological and physical health problems among the trans population.

Surprisingly, among the 127 participants open to dating a trans person, almost half selected a trans person of a gender incongruent with their stated sexual orientation. For example, 50% of the trans-inclusive straight women and 28% of the trans-inclusive gay men were willing to date a trans woman, even though one wouldn’t expect either straight women or gay men to be attracted to women. Similarly, 50% of trans-inclusive straight men and 69% of trans-inclusive lesbians said they’d date a trans man, even though both groups are presumably only attracted to women. And 33% of the trans-inclusive bisexual/queer participants said they would only date a trans person of one gender but not the other, even though one may expect this group to be attracted to multiple genders.

Never mind, there's plenty of culture-studies wordnoise to disguise those simple truths.

The high rates of trans exclusion from potential dating pools are undoubtedly due in part to cisnormativity, cissexism, and transphobia — all of which lead to lack of knowledge about transgender people and their bodies, discomfort with these unknowns, and fear of being discriminated against by proxy of one’s romantic partner. It is also possible that at least some of the trans exclusion is due to the fact that for some people, sexual orientation might be not (just) about a partner’s gender identity, but attraction to specific body types and/or judgment of reproductive capabilities.

Ya think? If we didn't have sexual attraction of men to women and women to men, there wouldn't be any people.  Perhaps pre-adolescents who think they are born in the wrong body haven't matured enough yet to understand how that works, and how crossing might take them out of the dating market for life.  Moreover, the Tragic Vision might also be the Realistic Vision.

While any human suffering is terrible, the social remedy in recent years for the transgender community has more or less been for enablers in culture and medicine to assure these individuals they are validated for believing they were born into the wrong body.

At the same time, people who resist such an affront on biology, morality and social mores are essentially smeared as being bigoted.

Attempts to convince society that a man wearing makeup is not a man have failed, even if that man has surgically altered genitalia.

The left’s strategy of convincing transgender persons that any mental illness they might have is validated — and that the broader society is wrong if they don’t agree with that validation — appears to be furthering the misery.

The culture warriors are in their predictable corners. Two Slate contributors weighed in, eight years ago, with "Can Cis Lesbians and Trans Women Learn to Get Along?"  Their article demonstrates, more than anything else, how empty "theory" is among the culture studies types.

In theory, our multifaceted, multilettered queer community is all about alliance, solidarity, and mutual support. Though we’ve seen advances in areas like marriage equality and nondiscrimination ordinances, systematic oppression of LGBTQ individuals continues in the form of disparate treatment in health care, employment, criminal justice, and public accommodations such as bathrooms and similar sex-segregated spaces. With so much to fight against outside our coalition, divisions within it have largely gone unchecked, with destructive rifts continuing to grow. One of the widest of these rifts exists between the L’s and T’s, particularly between cisgender lesbians and trans women.

Apparently those male lesbians aren't welcome. But to the authors, it's not because of any Rursh Limbaugh cracking wise, oh no.

Although they’re referred to by some as trans-exclusionary radical feminists (or TERFs—a label that, although it describes their ideology, is rejected by many within the category), they can go far beyond simply excluding trans women from their events and organizations, and actively harass, mock, and out trans women. That such harassment is supposedly done in the name of protecting cis women from trans women makes this behavior all the more ludicrous.

TERFs are small in number, but they make up for that in visibility (and obnoxiousness). Their existence puts a strain on relations between trans women and cisgender lesbians, but it is not the only area of tension between the two communities.

Even lesbians who aren’t intentionally transphobic can still harbor fears and stereotypes based on their lack of familiarity with trans women (the same goes for trans women, who can be suspicious and fearful of cis lesbians). One persistent stereotype in the cis lesbian community is of trans women presenting a narrow, old-fashioned sort of femininity of the type that many lesbians have dedicated themselves to dismantling politically and socially.

Good grief. Compared with that, the Russian Orthodox schisms over whether it's Isus or Iisus, or whether you cross yourself with fingers extended or folded, are highly serious.  A Federalist contributor takes a position that the culture-studies types would no doubt scorn as essentialism.

In a Psychology Today article on the study, coauthor Karen Blair implies these findings demonstrate significant discrimination—or at least an unwillingness to be inclusive—in dating.

However, instead of pointing out the obvious truth that biological cues are foundational for sexual and romantic attraction, the author goes to great lengths to convey sympathy for the exclusion of transgenders in the dating field as if it’s merely a social justice issue. This is yet another avenue progressives are using to encourage others to deny biological reality and normalize abnormal behaviors.

I mean, dear reader, when a Federalist writer quotes, approvingly, an Atlantic contributor: "The point is that people’s attraction patterns, at root, largely have to do with biological sex cues. You can’t ideology your way out of that."  Nor should you impose any sort of obligation to provide sexual congress.

The extrapolations of this study are painfully obvious: The results indicate that biology-affirming people fail to be attracted, sexually or romantically, to people who have chosen to live outside biological norms. This is not only ideologically sound but biologically normal and healthy. Because of this, many people will continue to find love, and heck, even procreate.

Frankly, I’m relieved to see that romance has yet to fall prey to social justice inanity. The majority of people who are just average male or female folks do not need to start dating transgender people. Rather, transgender people need to accept that adhering to biological norms is healthy, not discriminatory. In fact, socially pressuring people to date them is far more prejudiced — against reality.

Those are predictable culture war positions of long standing. But again, as my Chicago Boyz colleague Sgt. Mom calls attention to, the schisms among the True Believers are ever more interesting.

It’s truly become amazing to me, how very vicious the trans war is getting to be; so far, it’s only words, but only words is how unspeakable atrocities begin. And all this is over what is a vanishingly small minority, but which happens to be “the fashionable hot new thing to shock the normies with” among overexposed celebrities, activist academics, and the desperate-seeking-relevancy activists battening onto a cause to give purpose to otherwise empty lives. It’s a trend amplified a hundred times by such advocacy, and then another hundred by the leviathan of social medial; a leviathan before which established corporations and businesses tremble. Candidly, one might have expected titans of commerce (like Target and the Disney company) possessing sufficient market knowledge to stay away from advocating causes which might – just might – piss off a large portion of their customer base. And one might be wrong. Never underestimate the mad urge to be a dedicated follower of fashion, I guess.

But it does seem that old-line feminists are rebelling against the activist goad, or at least, some of them are, when it comes to allowing so-called trans-women (who still have all their essential male parts, including beards and DNA) into what formerly were biological-women-only spaces. Spaces like bathrooms, locker rooms, clothing-optional spas, hospital wards, battered woman shelters, and prisons. And of course there is resistance from biological women, since it seems that a fair number of trans-women aren’t anything of the sort; they’re just perverts and predators looking for a well-stocked hunting ground.

Perhaps, after they've tried everything else, they'll try live-and-let live. If there's a principled argument for letting people present themselves as they would like, going to the extent of cosmetic surgery, is that not the same principled argument for letting people date and mate with whoever they want?