This was painful to write because I was a huge Jon Stewart fan in college: Then there was the sneering superficiality of Stewart’s treatment of a medical scandal I’ve studied closely, which he framed as the brave “new dawn of gender and sex complexity, where those who don’t fit into a simple binary are meant to be seen with humanity”. Stewart studiously avoided asking any of the obvious questions about the sudden profusion of (often objectively laughable) gender identities — despite his usual commitment to asking the obvious questions — and then mocked a caricature of that which he had not bothered to understand. The more I watched, the more the laughter in the studio sounded canned. Or maybe it was just hard to imagine anyone responding so enthusiastically to what Stewart had to offer.
Like you, I was also a big fan of Stewart in his Daily Show days, except that I was already in my 50s. Also, like you, since then I have found him just as you have. I can't stomach him anymore.
I am 60 and have found time and again this in my own life. Additionally it is very hard, in my opinion, to listen to a generalist when one possesses a deep understanding of a particular subject.
I have a pile of books that stand as reminders of some of the nonsense I was convinced by 35 years ago. They help me remain patient with my kids and the young people I work with.
To me I think of this case of John Stewart just having a particular tool that is ill suited to this sort of issue. Thinking of health care for 9/11 responders he has a pretty good tool to get more attention. But when it comes to something like sex/gender you need the Bill Burr types who are prepared to challenge not what they know but rather how they think
Hello! Agreed with the premise of this post. Random but possibly related other item: I had subscribed here on Substack to a writer named Anne Helen Peterson because I think I heard on Dinner, A Love Story that her culture studies were ‘amazing’. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when her last post (here on Substack yesterday) was about how she had played “TransSanta” and had crowd funded $17,000 to deliver “lovely and needed” things to “trans” people. I don’t get it. Why is there a need for a TransSanta?
Yes, I was acquainted with Petersen and read her regularly for years (she was a former academic from my program). I was tiring of the identitarian slant of many of her posts. Then she published an interview with an academic making crazy claims about sexuality and racism. I wrote her that the interview was unhinged (in more diplomatic language). She replied, you have a problem with intersectional feminism??
That’s one of my peaking moments. If that was intersectional feminism, I wanted nothing to do with it.
I used to love Anne Helen Peterson. She wrote compelling reads about gossip and gossip mags (her bespoke major in grad school). Once she branched out to more general topics, her stances were a lot less original and just not that interesting; trans-santa isn't surprising.
Then again, maybe I wouldn't care for her earlier work if I re-read it now.
I also really loved her Hollywood gossip stories. There's a long list of writers and outlets who got a lot less interesting c. 2015, and some particular disappointments like Mallory Ortberg (RIP The Toast), who was hilarious and now just seems manic and mentally ill; Jessa Crispin, who I would have predicted would terf out but I was wrong... Anne Helen Peterson, too.
To be fair this remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever read and I think about it all the time tho you have to have played Untitled Goose Game (it at least have watched others play.)
More and more, I get the impression that these otherwise smart and cynical folks roll over and go with it because they personally know someone who has declared a trans ID, or whose kid has done this. And so they have to seen to be supportive.
Sarah Silverman, Jeet Heer (he went after Jesse Singal on X) are two that I wonder about.
And Will Ferrell, right? Have you all heard about this movie he’s peddling about his trans-ID’ed best friend? So now I can never watch Elf again.
"it because they personally know someone who has declared a trans ID, or whose kid has done this. And so they have to seen to be supportive."
Absolutely! The proselytizer trans people--and most especially the parents who have children in this identity. They are a force to be reckoned with. And they won't STFU. Meanwhile, there is a multitude of silently suffering parents.
I spoke recently with an acquaintance who works in public health. In my polite attempt to express my concerns with medical transition for kids, she told me that there were several people she works with who have trans identified kids and they all have complete confidence in the recommendations of their kids’ mental health providers. These providers who pushed back against the parents’ concerns and told them they must allow their kid to do this. I offered to send her articles/links/ information etc, she declined. Once the Believers are dug in, I don’t think the average person can do much.
curious--most of us, I think, are here because we watched loved ones be consumed by this ideology. I'm curious, for everyone that comes out as trans, how many movement supporters are made and how many detractors?
There is no way to know. I don't think there are any reliable polls. We have all seen parents of trans-identifying teens or YAs do a sudden conversion to Believer.
The Believers want everyone to know about how great their beliefs are. The Unbelievers (if they are parents), feel compelled to stay silent.
Safe is relative, isn’t it? I can’t go on to PITT too often as it breaks my heart. We’re in a holding pattern here, but my girl is a legal adult now and we don’t know what choices she will make in the future. The uncertainty is a special kind of hell.
It takes time. For some of us (especially us trans widows) we know right away how odious and false the presumptions are. For others, they have to work like dogs and experience the arrogance and disrespect of a brother who "borrowed" her panties or anyone in the family who inappropriately starts preaching to little children on how to "change sex." In exhaustion, they discover and research detransition, regret and irreversible damage and become just as gender critical as those of us who knew in our first exposure.
The statement "the brave 'new dawn of gender and sex complexity, where those who don’t fit into a simple binary are meant to be seen with humanity' " merits the title of The Trans Ally's Creed.
The hosts of the ex-Evangelical podcast "Straight White American Jesus" [1] (SWAJ) have taken that creed to heart. I've wondered whether this is because of the similarities between theology and gender identity ideology and between religion and the trans movement. It isn't a stretch to characterize trans talking points, a combination of falsehoods, half-truths and bad-faith arguments, as a form of received knowledge. The aggression that trans rights activists and their allies direct at critics at times resembles religious fervor.
Now, as a gay man, I welcome any and all apostates who repudiate Christianity's scriptural slander of same-sex relations and the institutionalized anti-gay discrimination some faiths believe it demands. SWAJ, however, has gone beyond what's required to demonstrate genuine acceptance of gay people into unquestioning acceptance of gender ideology.
Discussions of MAGA politics on the podcast often include a denunciation of the harm right-wing political figures and Republican legislation are doing to "trans people." However, there's no recognition, for example, of the harm than transwomen are doing to real female athletes, the significant role that social contagion plays in the trans phenomenon today, the risks associated with unproven gender medicine and the lack of any protocol for evaluating the soundness of minors' claims to a trans identity. While I have great respect for the hosts' theological erudition and their well reasoned critiques of American Evangelical religion, I am not at all confident that they would look upon this comment or the larger corpus of gender critical thought with charity.
The doctrinaire way in which the hosts use the term "queer" suggests they've had exposure to the academic foundations of trans ideology. In the podcast's lexicon "queer" is not just a synonym for gay, lesbian, bisexual and the others but a replacement. "Queer," in other words, is having the same hegemonic effect there as it is anywhere queer believers are found. Gays, lesbians and bisexuals have been disappeared. Sure, "LGBTQ" finds its way into the podcast, but references to gay people, and gay youth in particular, are as rare as hen's teeth there. It's "queer" this and "queer" that in almost every episode.
On the whole, the good work that "Straight White American Jesus" is doing in exposing the inner workings of White Christian Nationalism and other pernicious sects; showing how they're linked to one another and to elected officials such as Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson; and keeping listeners informed on the latest developments on the religious right offsets the hosts' incidental trans evangelizing. Nobody should be faulted for treating others with humanity, but it is disappointing to encounter situations where open-mindedness has hijacked critical thinking.
Note: there are movies I once loved and a book I read that I loved which I went back to and absolutely loathe since I woke up to the male gaze and everything bad that stems from it, this could be another one of those..
I missed that... that would have turned me off, too. She was one of those women whose names I heard demonized a dozen times before I read a word she said and then it was, like, oh, yeah, she's right.
Aayan Hirsi Ali is often tone-deaf (or is it uninformed?) when it comes to American politics and the values and beliefs that underlie our liberal constitutional democracy.
I too was once a Daily Show fan - and loved Stewart and his offspring Steven Colbert and John Oliver. Then a strange thing happened. The Orange One was elected president and these edgy 'progressive' comedians suddenly morphed into the biggest establishment shills one could ever hope to find. All of them have remorselessly shilled every "official State narrative" - from Russiagate, to covid, to the Ukraine war to gender-ideology. It was in part watching these comedians whom I had once considered "progressive" turn into absolutely brain dead authoritarians that finally broke the hold of any remaining "left vs right paradigm" thinking I might have clung too. It has been truly amazing to see seemingly otherwise intelligent people proudly pledge their undying loyalty to newly "resurrected from the dead" notions of "gender" - and to gender-ideology's newly minted quasi-religious, child-sacrifice and scarification cult.
Yeah, the pain is real. I remember every time I would watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart it would light my brain on fire and I'd be filled with this sense of gratitude that we lived in these times - where such an intelligent and fiercely funny voice was available to us and even just streamed into our homes. He said and shaped what we thought. Someone was watching and holding those in charge accountable. I did find The Problem with John Stewart to be still engaging and funny, although often towing the company line. I now cynically and maybe somewhat conspiratorially think that he's been coopted by the borg, and is at this time being brought out by the party in power in the lead in to an election cycle as a mouthpiece and rallying force against the inevitable oranging of America.
Anyone have his address? I'd like to send him a copy of my trans widow memoir. He glibly ignores the infidelities and defamatory antics of these dudes towards their traumatized wives. I'm about to record a video about a traumatized younger sister, whose AGP brother stole her panties and other clothes from her when she was 15. What would Stewart say about a teenage girl finding her things balled up in the corner of some closet, covered in ejaculate?
Like you, I was also a big fan of Stewart in his Daily Show days, except that I was already in my 50s. Also, like you, since then I have found him just as you have. I can't stomach him anymore.
I am 60 and have found time and again this in my own life. Additionally it is very hard, in my opinion, to listen to a generalist when one possesses a deep understanding of a particular subject.
I have a pile of books that stand as reminders of some of the nonsense I was convinced by 35 years ago. They help me remain patient with my kids and the young people I work with.
To me I think of this case of John Stewart just having a particular tool that is ill suited to this sort of issue. Thinking of health care for 9/11 responders he has a pretty good tool to get more attention. But when it comes to something like sex/gender you need the Bill Burr types who are prepared to challenge not what they know but rather how they think
Poignant and excellent point (off to Google Bill Burr now)
Hello! Agreed with the premise of this post. Random but possibly related other item: I had subscribed here on Substack to a writer named Anne Helen Peterson because I think I heard on Dinner, A Love Story that her culture studies were ‘amazing’. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes when her last post (here on Substack yesterday) was about how she had played “TransSanta” and had crowd funded $17,000 to deliver “lovely and needed” things to “trans” people. I don’t get it. Why is there a need for a TransSanta?
Yes, I was acquainted with Petersen and read her regularly for years (she was a former academic from my program). I was tiring of the identitarian slant of many of her posts. Then she published an interview with an academic making crazy claims about sexuality and racism. I wrote her that the interview was unhinged (in more diplomatic language). She replied, you have a problem with intersectional feminism??
That’s one of my peaking moments. If that was intersectional feminism, I wanted nothing to do with it.
I used to love Anne Helen Peterson. She wrote compelling reads about gossip and gossip mags (her bespoke major in grad school). Once she branched out to more general topics, her stances were a lot less original and just not that interesting; trans-santa isn't surprising.
Then again, maybe I wouldn't care for her earlier work if I re-read it now.
I also really loved her Hollywood gossip stories. There's a long list of writers and outlets who got a lot less interesting c. 2015, and some particular disappointments like Mallory Ortberg (RIP The Toast), who was hilarious and now just seems manic and mentally ill; Jessa Crispin, who I would have predicted would terf out but I was wrong... Anne Helen Peterson, too.
To be fair this remains one of the funniest things I’ve ever read and I think about it all the time tho you have to have played Untitled Goose Game (it at least have watched others play.)
https://www.thechatner.com/p/i-am-the-horrible-goose-that-lives
I wasn't going to mention Danny nee Mallory, but wow what a crappy advice column Slate's turned into once they turned it over to her.
Agreed 100%. I loved the guy. He seemed like a smart guy, fearless, not afraid to challenge prevailing narratives. How far the mighty have fallen.
I have followed the same trajectory. It's sad.
More and more, I get the impression that these otherwise smart and cynical folks roll over and go with it because they personally know someone who has declared a trans ID, or whose kid has done this. And so they have to seen to be supportive.
Sarah Silverman, Jeet Heer (he went after Jesse Singal on X) are two that I wonder about.
And Will Ferrell, right? Have you all heard about this movie he’s peddling about his trans-ID’ed best friend? So now I can never watch Elf again.
"it because they personally know someone who has declared a trans ID, or whose kid has done this. And so they have to seen to be supportive."
Absolutely! The proselytizer trans people--and most especially the parents who have children in this identity. They are a force to be reckoned with. And they won't STFU. Meanwhile, there is a multitude of silently suffering parents.
I spoke recently with an acquaintance who works in public health. In my polite attempt to express my concerns with medical transition for kids, she told me that there were several people she works with who have trans identified kids and they all have complete confidence in the recommendations of their kids’ mental health providers. These providers who pushed back against the parents’ concerns and told them they must allow their kid to do this. I offered to send her articles/links/ information etc, she declined. Once the Believers are dug in, I don’t think the average person can do much.
Agree, except/and I am
curious--most of us, I think, are here because we watched loved ones be consumed by this ideology. I'm curious, for everyone that comes out as trans, how many movement supporters are made and how many detractors?
There is no way to know. I don't think there are any reliable polls. We have all seen parents of trans-identifying teens or YAs do a sudden conversion to Believer.
The Believers want everyone to know about how great their beliefs are. The Unbelievers (if they are parents), feel compelled to stay silent.
Check out the Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans Substack. There's a loud chorus of parents who are speaking out.
Yes, agreed! We have those "safe places".
Thank you!
We just don't/can't have a voice in MSM--or with the Democrats.
Safe is relative, isn’t it? I can’t go on to PITT too often as it breaks my heart. We’re in a holding pattern here, but my girl is a legal adult now and we don’t know what choices she will make in the future. The uncertainty is a special kind of hell.
I’m a Democrat : )
It takes time. For some of us (especially us trans widows) we know right away how odious and false the presumptions are. For others, they have to work like dogs and experience the arrogance and disrespect of a brother who "borrowed" her panties or anyone in the family who inappropriately starts preaching to little children on how to "change sex." In exhaustion, they discover and research detransition, regret and irreversible damage and become just as gender critical as those of us who knew in our first exposure.
Oh, please say it isn’t so!!
Add Neil Degrasse Tyson. Did you notice that Ferrell and his bestie are almost identical? What's up with that?
The statement "the brave 'new dawn of gender and sex complexity, where those who don’t fit into a simple binary are meant to be seen with humanity' " merits the title of The Trans Ally's Creed.
The hosts of the ex-Evangelical podcast "Straight White American Jesus" [1] (SWAJ) have taken that creed to heart. I've wondered whether this is because of the similarities between theology and gender identity ideology and between religion and the trans movement. It isn't a stretch to characterize trans talking points, a combination of falsehoods, half-truths and bad-faith arguments, as a form of received knowledge. The aggression that trans rights activists and their allies direct at critics at times resembles religious fervor.
Now, as a gay man, I welcome any and all apostates who repudiate Christianity's scriptural slander of same-sex relations and the institutionalized anti-gay discrimination some faiths believe it demands. SWAJ, however, has gone beyond what's required to demonstrate genuine acceptance of gay people into unquestioning acceptance of gender ideology.
Discussions of MAGA politics on the podcast often include a denunciation of the harm right-wing political figures and Republican legislation are doing to "trans people." However, there's no recognition, for example, of the harm than transwomen are doing to real female athletes, the significant role that social contagion plays in the trans phenomenon today, the risks associated with unproven gender medicine and the lack of any protocol for evaluating the soundness of minors' claims to a trans identity. While I have great respect for the hosts' theological erudition and their well reasoned critiques of American Evangelical religion, I am not at all confident that they would look upon this comment or the larger corpus of gender critical thought with charity.
The doctrinaire way in which the hosts use the term "queer" suggests they've had exposure to the academic foundations of trans ideology. In the podcast's lexicon "queer" is not just a synonym for gay, lesbian, bisexual and the others but a replacement. "Queer," in other words, is having the same hegemonic effect there as it is anywhere queer believers are found. Gays, lesbians and bisexuals have been disappeared. Sure, "LGBTQ" finds its way into the podcast, but references to gay people, and gay youth in particular, are as rare as hen's teeth there. It's "queer" this and "queer" that in almost every episode.
On the whole, the good work that "Straight White American Jesus" is doing in exposing the inner workings of White Christian Nationalism and other pernicious sects; showing how they're linked to one another and to elected officials such as Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson; and keeping listeners informed on the latest developments on the religious right offsets the hosts' incidental trans evangelizing. Nobody should be faulted for treating others with humanity, but it is disappointing to encounter situations where open-mindedness has hijacked critical thinking.
[1]https://www.straightwhiteamericanjesus.com/
Errm who is Jon Stewart?
Perhaps go back and watch old Jon Stewart shows to see?
Note: there are movies I once loved and a book I read that I loved which I went back to and absolutely loathe since I woke up to the male gaze and everything bad that stems from it, this could be another one of those..
I became disenchanted when he childishly mocked Aayan Hirsi Ali.
I missed that... that would have turned me off, too. She was one of those women whose names I heard demonized a dozen times before I read a word she said and then it was, like, oh, yeah, she's right.
Infidel is just a wonderful book.
Aayan Hirsi Ali is often tone-deaf (or is it uninformed?) when it comes to American politics and the values and beliefs that underlie our liberal constitutional democracy.
I don’t agree with her choice to align with the American right, but the American left—especially feminists—treated her disgracefully.
I know. For years I thought of my politics as having remained where “The Daily Show” had been. And then “The Problem with Jon Stewart” happened...
One thing which makes his myopia on gender puzzling is that he is good friends with Dave Chappelle.
I too was once a Daily Show fan - and loved Stewart and his offspring Steven Colbert and John Oliver. Then a strange thing happened. The Orange One was elected president and these edgy 'progressive' comedians suddenly morphed into the biggest establishment shills one could ever hope to find. All of them have remorselessly shilled every "official State narrative" - from Russiagate, to covid, to the Ukraine war to gender-ideology. It was in part watching these comedians whom I had once considered "progressive" turn into absolutely brain dead authoritarians that finally broke the hold of any remaining "left vs right paradigm" thinking I might have clung too. It has been truly amazing to see seemingly otherwise intelligent people proudly pledge their undying loyalty to newly "resurrected from the dead" notions of "gender" - and to gender-ideology's newly minted quasi-religious, child-sacrifice and scarification cult.
Werd.
Yeah, the pain is real. I remember every time I would watch the Daily Show with Jon Stewart it would light my brain on fire and I'd be filled with this sense of gratitude that we lived in these times - where such an intelligent and fiercely funny voice was available to us and even just streamed into our homes. He said and shaped what we thought. Someone was watching and holding those in charge accountable. I did find The Problem with John Stewart to be still engaging and funny, although often towing the company line. I now cynically and maybe somewhat conspiratorially think that he's been coopted by the borg, and is at this time being brought out by the party in power in the lead in to an election cycle as a mouthpiece and rallying force against the inevitable oranging of America.
Anyone have his address? I'd like to send him a copy of my trans widow memoir. He glibly ignores the infidelities and defamatory antics of these dudes towards their traumatized wives. I'm about to record a video about a traumatized younger sister, whose AGP brother stole her panties and other clothes from her when she was 15. What would Stewart say about a teenage girl finding her things balled up in the corner of some closet, covered in ejaculate?
Meanwhile. Alok, The Infamous:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JgdCQXo8cA&t=9s
Ugh Jon Stewart. Really not smart. Not insightful. Smug. That’s all he is.
I feel the same way. My parents still watch that crap, I can’t be in the same room.