Changing Sex–The Used Car Market Of The Gender Spectrum

Blanton de Williams was a blue-blooded Boston Brahmin with a storied lineage that went back to the kings of England, and whose American history was one of Revolutionary patriotism, enterprise, and culture.  The de Williams family had played a major role in New Bedford shipbuilding, the Newport three-cornered trade, mercantile banking, and early industrial development. 

Fairchild de Williams was the eldest of three children, two boys and a girl, all of whom married well.  The combined de Williams, Leverett, Grafton, and Ponsonby families accounted for a significant proportion of early 19th century Boston wealth, and were the veritable icons of high culture, breeding, and education.

Their wealth and social status were conferred on successive generations, and their names were inscribed on plaques, monuments, lintels, and friezes throughout New England.  The Alton B. Grafton School, the Thomas A. Ponsonby Park, and the Lenten R. Leverett Library were parts of an institutional legacy admired by all.

There was no more of a rock-ribbed, traditional, conservative group of families than the de Williams group.  They took their heritage seriously.  They were proud of their Dukes of Shropshire, Hereford, and York, their English manorial estates, their membership in the Royal Colleges of the Arts and Sciences, their patronage of Wordsworth and Blake, their diplomats and emissaries, their furniture, appointments, and good taste.  They were Anglican first and high Episcopalian second, burghers, attorneys, and landowners in the colonies.  They had no shame in admitting their royalist allegiances, for they did so with respect and honor for tradition and history, not allegiance.

So there was perhaps no better canary in the coal mine than the de Williams family.  They were the first to notice signs of social travesty, insult and injury to established tradition, and the tremors of cultural insurrection.  They were among the first to oppose the radicalism of the Sixties, sensing the cultural anarchy within the movement and the threat not only to the American commonwealth but to the polity of their English past.

They denied the assaults on wealth, capitalism, received religion, and social manners;  shored up church and state with political and financial support, and fought what they called The Second Battle of Bunker Hill.

The Sixties came and went, were folded into capitalism’s absorbing ectoplasm, and by the end of the Twentieth Century they believed or at least dared to believe that the world had come to the end of history.  Communism was dead, socialism was in retreat, and American exceptionalism was ascendant.  They breathed a collective sigh of relief and once again enjoyed their garden parties, philanthropy, and social prestige.

The inhabitants of this redoubt of American historical conservatism was unprepared for the next wave of assault.  Progressivism, and its woke extremism, was far more corrosive to American values than any simplistic re-adjustment of civil rights or economic redistribution.  At its most radical, it aimed not only at socio-political institutions but at the nature of family organization.  Men and women, the hearth and home, the procreative unit, the mirror of the Trinity, the focal point of culture and civilization were now dismissed.  The assumption that sexual identity was not heterosexual but omni-sexual, and that the new sexual normal had no prescriptions or historical standards was upsetting to say the least.

However to Blanton de Williams the idea was as maladjusted as they come, a circus side show, a comic fantasy, a hilarious comedic riff.  How could ‘agender, androgyne, demigender, gender queer, gender fluid, man, transgender man, non-transgender man, questioning or unsure, woman, transgender woman, non-transgender woman’ be anything but caricature?  The stuff of bearded ladies.

Although many if not most Americans were nonplussed at the gay theatre of the Castro, Bay-to-Breakers, and especially the Folsom Street Fair, San Francisco’s most dramatic display of whips, leather, and chains – they could only wonder at the notion of sexual choice.  

Yet it was the de Williams cadre, with conservative traditions, ideas, and principles deeply rooted and nourished for centuries that instinctively understood the patent unreality of the idea of the gender spectrum and the even more impossible notion of transgenderism which was was part of the new American burlesque, a musical review, an attempt to push La Cage aux Folles into the mainstream.

It is one thing for an ordinary American, used to the comings and goings of popular culture, the exaggerations, hysteria, and true belief of American cultural diversity to wonder at this Baroque, overdone, exaggerated fancy of ‘reformed’ sexuality; another entirely for the de Williams, Ponsonby, Grafton, and Leverett families.  They were the closest thing to a European aristocracy in which was embodied the whole of historical culture.  

When de Gaulle said, ‘Je suis la France’, he was not just talking about French nationalism, patriotism, and defiance; but about the thousand years of French civilization, La Fille Ainee de l’Eglise, the nation that beat back the Saracens and saved Europe from Muslim rule. 

To Blanton de Williams, the gender spectrum was less burlesque, comedy, and side show than a used car market.  One of the most absurd ideas proposed by the sexual Left was the notion of fungibility.  If you chose one spot on the spectrum, tried it out and found that it wasn’t for you, you could trade it in for another model.  Since there was no such thing as heterosexuality, then any option was a valid one; and by logical extension, it could be exchanged for any other.

Which was why he was surprised at the lionization of transgenderism.  The physical reordering of biological birth sex was permanent.  You could not re-attach discarded equipment.  There was no retrofitting of sexual parts.  It was the end all of sexual choice, the one, final step along the way. 

It was the ironic illogic of the argument that made it even more implausible. If there was such a thing as a gender spectrum, where sexual identities could be bought and sold, exchanged on a gender eBay, why would anyone opt for a no-return policy?  Besides with a little spit and polish, a few nips and tucks, and some dramatic coaching men could act the part of women without physical compromise.  Better keep the option of putting up your frilly things and returning to trousers and suspenders than chopping and channeling.

American popular culture is nothing but the greatest show on earth, a spectacle to be amazed at. The whole gender spectrum, transgender folly will soon go by the boards as quickly as hula hoops.  Blanton de Williams and his family will still reside on Beacon Hill with homes on Nantucket, use Paul Revere silver and sit on Chippendale chairs, more and more isolated perhaps, but solidly American nonetheless.