Opinion

How A Conservative Lesbian’s Year-Long Disguise Exposed The ‘Transsexual’ Movement

Writer Norah Vincent Died On July 6 In Switzerland By Assisted Suicide

DailyWire.com

Before the 20th century of tangled phone cords and paper jams gave way to the shiny, disconnected screens of the present age, there existed a kind of public intellectual whose words we have since labored without. These were writers who defied ideology, party, gender, and other distractions and examined the subterranean truths below the surface of identity and tribalism.

Christopher Hitchens comes to mind, but so too does Norah Vincent, who died in Switzerland in July. Vincent was more than a gifted writer – though she was that – she was a thinker who would not be boxed in, who ruled her ideas and was not ruled by them.

In her seminal 2006 work, Self Made Man, Vincent documented her experience living as what she had thought defined the winner of the genetic gender lottery. With the help of clothing and make up she spent nearly 2 years living as a man. She sought to experience the power and control that men exert over society, to live, breathe and stomp in the footsteps of the people who feminism had taught her were masters of the universe. What she found turned out to be quite different from her expectations. 

Vincent was an intellectual of the old school, who searched for answers to her questions, not questions that would prove the answers she already knew. Her book was a flower bed of surprises. And it was not just about the real difficulties that men face in society, but also, for example, about the tenderness, generosity and acceptance of male friendship that she found in a working class bowling league. Living as a man defied her expectations because she was open enough to allow it to inform her.

Although the book would be a best selling success, it took a toll on Vincent, who suffered a mental breakdown 18 months into the social experiment. Her next book would focus on her travails in and out of several mental institutions. Again she would confront contemporary mores, concluding that those with mental illness should just suck it up and get on with life.

As a feminist, Vincent was a contrarian, in 2001 the NY Times would write about her under the headline, “Conservative Gay Columnist is Under Fire.” She was pro-life, writing that “ours is a country in which you are ill-advised to be a fetus.” She was skeptical of multiculturalism, and said that gay men bore some responsibility for the spread of AIDS.

But one betrayal of orthodoxy went a bit under the radar two decades ago, perhaps because it had not yet fully become orthodoxy. Vincent did not believe that surgery could make “transsexuals,” as she called them, actually a different sex or gender. Take this cutting paragraph from a Village Voice column in 2001 in which she warns that transsexuality “is fast becoming emblematic of our age.”

“…it has taken the likes of Foucault, Derrida, and their imitators to kill something that is, arguably, far more precious. Namely, the self. And that, I submit, is what the rise of transsexuality indicates, or—to use the thoroughly fashionable term—”signifies.” It signifies the death of the self, the soul, that good old-fashioned indubitable “I” so beloved of Descartes, whose great adage “I think, therefore I am” has become an ontological joke on the order of “I tinker and there I am.””

Over the past 10 years of our societal struggle over gender, which often feels more like 100, you would be hard pressed to find the argument that transgenderism is an attack on the self as clearly and elegantly made. I tinker and there I am, indeed. But there is something else, something more at work here. This is not an argument about outcomes, the safety of women’s spaces or the suicide rates of trans kids. It’s about old truths and describing the world as it is, not as a roadmap to desirable political or social ends.

In the days since her passing there has been chatter on men’s rights via Twitter and other social media, an attempt to argue that living as a man so long ago broke Vincent, and led to her assisted suicide. This I suppose is meant to indicate how tough men really have it. But like so much of the recent clownish, hyper-masculine movement this is facile and ridiculous. Vincent had a long history of depression, and frankly, mental breakdowns are not uncommon for writers who truly plumb the depths, whether gender bending or not.

The best way to honor Vincent’s life and her passing is to do as she did and refuse to allow them to be boiled down into a tweet or a slogan. Hers was a vision and telling of the world that defies our simple answers. Hers was a life of nuance and the mind, of wonder and sadness.

A great writer has shuffled off this mortal coil, but her words have not, and in them we still find lessons that our society is in desperate need of today.

David Marcus is a Brooklyn based columnist and author of “Charade: The Covid Lies That Crushed A Nation”.

The Views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Already have an account?

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  How A Conservative Lesbian’s Year-Long Disguise Exposed The ‘Transsexual’ Movement