Imagine a world where people with blue eyes are not allowed to be inside buildings. There are a lot of strategies blue-eyed people might adopt to survive in this situation. They might listen to all the reasons why blue-eyed people need to stay out of buildings and decide that’s the right approach and be OK with it. They might hate it but decide they can’t change anything so they just have to accept it. They might decide that blue-eyed people should start campaigns of awareness so that everyone else understands that blue-eyed people are just like them and do fine in buildings. They might just start forcing their way into buildings. They might decide to blow up buildings.
Let’s say that, in this thought experiment, blue-eyed people have made some gains, and while they’re not often found in the offices of buildings, you will find them crowded in the vestibules and milling in the common areas. But this took decades and generations of hard work, and even now podcast hosts and preachers and politicians talk openly about the necessity of putting blue-eyed people back outside.
In this scenario, where blue-eyed people have made some gains that improve their lives but still face pressure to give up those improvements, there is another strategy blue-eyed people could employ: actively working for the exclusion of blue-eyed people from buildings while sitting in said buildings. The strategy here is to personally enjoy all of the advances blue-eyed people have made, while ingratiating yourself with the people who hate blue-eyed people so that, when periods of oppression of blue-eyed people get really intense, you have some protection from the oppressors, because you say what they want to hear. Blue-eyed people in buildings is wrong, but you, a blue-eyed person, stand in this building enjoying all of the benefits of roofs and air conditioning in order to keep blue-eyed people out.
It’s a move we might name “The Marsha Blackburn.”
This week, Blackburn decided to mean-girl a trans TikTok star, Dylan Mulvaney, by tweeting, “Dylan Mulvaney, Joe Biden, and radical left-wing lunatics want to make this absurdity normal.” She included a video of Mulvaney doing her TikTok thing.
Y’all, before I continue, let’s take a moment to laugh about this elderly busybody watching this 25-year-old’s TikTok videos. I’m old. I’m not nearly as old as Marsha Blackburn, who is old enough to be my parent, and I have no idea who Dylan Mulvaney is. This is the luxury of getting old. You don’t have to pay attention to young folks’ stuff. If it’s really good, someone will tell me about it. But I’m not sitting around creeping on the social media accounts of people young enough to be my grandkid. The video Blackburn’s so incensed about? Mulvaney posted it in May. May! It is nearly November.
Is Blackburn so outraged about Mulvaney that she watched six months' worth of her videos? Blackburn’s like the preacher flipping through girly mags to see if each one is as sinful as the last. At some point — far before “I watched six months' worth of this kid’s Tiktok videos just to make sure she was as ‘absurd’ as I think” — the outrage becomes suspect.
But let’s talk about making absurdity normal.
Marsha Blackburn has an education. Not just the eighth-grade education the most privileged of wealthy white women could attain for most of the history of education, but a full-on college degree. She speaks in public. She holds office. She votes. She’s a business owner. She wrote a book. She wears pants. Hell, her husband is alive and she goes by “Marsha Blackburn” instead of “Mrs. Chuck Blackburn.” She has only two kids. And she exercises! A well-known way of ruining your uterus.
At any other point in the past 500 years, Marsha Blackburn (and let me be clear — also me) would be seen as having rejected her biological sex. Her way of being in the world would have been understood as her “trying to be a man.” Blackburn has benefited so much from the gains feminists have made in convincing people that women doing things like, oh, speaking in public, doesn’t make us “mannish,” and she's out here trying to draw a hard line between “real” women like her and women like Dylan Mulvaney. If we take the perspective of all of modernity (see, for instance, how Lady Macbeth changes her gender) and not just the past century-and-a-half, Marsha Blackburn may look like a woman, but she is a man inside. She is what she perceives Dylan Mulvaney as being.
It is only because of the radical changes we’ve made to our understanding of sex and gender over the past 150-ish years that we all (mostly) accept that women can “act like men” and still be women; that leading church services, holding office or having opinions of your own does not change our gender; and that, regardless of all the manly things we’re doing (like having a career or our own bank accounts), we are women because we recognize ourselves to be women. Our internal knowledge of our own gender is our gender, regardless of what “manly” things we may be doing.
I would argue that, because we women who are out here doing “mannish” things have benefited so much from these changing notions of gender, we should extend that same grace to other women who may have “mannish” traits. We who know how painful it is to have “you’re acting like a man” or “you look like a man” thrown in our faces when we’re just trying to live an authentic life should not be reproducing our trauma on others.
And listen, I don’t want this taken as me making the argument that cis women were the trans women all along. That invalidates the experiences of trans women. But what I’d like you all to understand is that most women out here are living lives that, for most people for most of modern history, would not be recognizable as the lives of women. Some people would deal with that dissonance by understanding us as being secret men, and others would deal with that by understanding that being a woman is not what they thought it was.
But we can’t solidify our position as women with culturally "manly" traits who deserve to be recognized as women by assigning ourselves as the gender police. Well, I take that back. Obviously we can. Marsha Blackburn has done so. But to go back to our original scenario, we’re all standing in a building that a lot of people don’t think we belong in. If we concede that some women really don’t belong here, it may shore up the positions of individual women who are willing to enforce such non-belonging, but it makes it acceptable to get rid of women who are “wrong” in some way.
And most of us are “wrong” in some way. Including Marsha Blackburn.
