Snowflakes!

It is really the conservatives who are the "snowflakes" it seems like it doesn't take much to set them off on a rampage.

You all have probably heard the flap over the Bud Light commercial. There is a pickup truck commercial that has five guys in a pickup truck when the Shania Twain song “Man i Feel Like A Woman” comes up on the radio and the guys become uncomfortable when one guy sings along with the song.

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Opinion  To understand biological sex, look at the brain, not the body

The Washington Post

By Jennifer Finney Boylan*

May 1, 2023

There they are, in their Chevrolet Colorado, five dudes bouncing up and down as the truck grinds through the rugged American high country. Two guys up front, three in the back. Shania Twain is blasting. The fellow in the middle is singing along. “Oh, I want to be free, yeah, to feel the way I feel. Man, I feel like a woman!”

The other guys look deeply worried. But the person in the back just keeps happily singing away, even as the dude next to him moves his leg away. Just to be on the safe side.

This commercial aired back in 2004, and even now it’s not clear to me if it’s offensive or empowering, hilarious or infuriating. Twain says she wrote “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” after working at a resort where some drag queens were performing. “That song started with the title,” she said. “Then it kind of wrote itself.”

Smooth Radio reported…

The song was written by Shania Twain and her longtime collaborator and then-husband Robert John 'Mutt' Lange, who also produced the track.

[…]

Lyrically, the song is a female empowerment track, with Shania proudly saying that "the best thing about being a woman is the prerogative to have a little fun", as well as promising to wear a "men's shirt" with a "short skirt."

Speaking to Billboard, Shania said: "That song started with the title, then it kind of wrote itself. The whole expression is a celebration of being a woman these days, I think we're kind of spoiled in a lot of ways, with the advantages we have. Feminists may not feel that way, but I do. It's pretty darn fun to be a woman."

When chatting to LGBT magazine The Advocate, Shania added: "A lot of the stuff I do has such a feminine, female perspective, but a powerful one. It's not only girl power, it's gay power. I think that song really stands for both."

Hmm… I wonder if right-wing radio stations would ban the song if they knew the songs history?

The Post article goes on,

This term, “biological males,” is everywhere now. And it’s not used only by right-wing politicians. People of good faith are also wrestling with the way trans people complicate a world they thought was binary. They’re uncertain about when, and how, sex matters, and just how biological it is. Some want to draw a bright line in areas where maleness and femaleness might matter most — in sports, or locker rooms, or prisons. Others are trying to blur lines that used to be clearer. At Wellesley College last month, for instance, a nonbinding student referendum called for the admission of trans men to a school that traditionally has been a women’s college. The president of the college, Paula Johnson, pushed back.

So what, then, is a biological male, or female? What determines this supposedly simple truth? It’s about chromosomes, right?

Mother Nature does not like boxes, she abhors them but she loves to experiment! So much so that no two people are alike, we are all different.

Well, not entirely. Because not every person with a Y chromosome is male, and not every person with a double X is female. The world is full of people with other combinations: XXY (or Klinefelter Syndrome), XXX (or Trisomy X), XXXY, and so on. There’s even something called Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition that keeps the brains of people with a Y from absorbing the information in that chromosome. Most of these people develop as female, and may not even know about their condition until puberty — or even later.

But the conservative don’t like to think about that, it give them headaches. And they can’t fit us in their ticky tacky little boxes.

The years to come will, perhaps, continue to shed light on the mysteries of the brain, and to what degree our sense of ourselves as gendered beings has its origins there. But there’s a problem with using neurology as an argument for trans acceptance — it suggests that, on some level, there is something wrong with transgender people, that we are who we are as a result of a sickness or a biological hiccup.

When I hear right-wing wanting the proof of what make a person trans, I asked what makes a person left handed? We know that people are born left handed but we have no idea why they are left handed. There are a lot of things that we see in nature that we don’t know the “why,” Mother Nature holds her cards close to her breasts.

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*Jennifer Finney Boylan, our paths have crossed many times. First time was in South Hadley MA in 2004 at a booking signing, other times were when she talked at colleges. When she and her wife talked at Smith College in Northampton we went out to have pizza with them afterward. Our paths crossed again at Yale and also in Washington DC in 2007 when we were lobbying for ENDA.