Fact, Etiquette, and a Twitter Spat

A Republican politician recently got in trouble with Twitter for tweeting that Rachel Levine who was given a four star admiral’s rank (not in the navy but in a civilian health care bureau) was not the first female to hold that rank as had been claimed, since Levine is a man.  One politician more or less on that silly platform does not matter much, but it is worthwhile to consider some issues involved in  the dust up.

The first step should be to look at the facts. With the  exception of rare abnormal cases, every human being has either two X chromosomes, making her female, or one X and one Y, making him male.  That genetic determination of sex is as definitive and unchangeable as the genetic determination that a person is a homo sapiens and not a horse or a bird. That is simple biological science. A cross dressing, surgically altered man who takes female hormones and wishes to be seen as a woman is not a woman. He is a cross dressing, surgically altered man who takes female hormones and wishes to be seen as a woman. The genes cannot be changed.

Then one can move on to questions of manners and etiquette. In America anyone can pretend to be, convince himself he is, or represent himself as anything he wants. It’s a free country, and if someone wants to say he is  Jesus, Mohammed, the lost heir to the Russian throne, the inventor of a perpetual motion machine, or a person of the opposite sex, he has the right to do so.  But he has no right to demand that others believe him or to have them punished for their disbelief.

However there is often no good reason to go up to a person and tell him that no, he didn’t really build a perpetual motion machine. Polite, self confident people will generally find it more appropriate to leave another’s delusions to him and avoid rudeness or unnecessary disputes.  One may be quite sure that a man cannot become a woman and still be civil to those who claim they have done it. Most of us know and like people who believe outrageous stuff of one sort or another.

What the Republican said was true. Saying it would have been rude and unnecessary in normal times. In present conditions, it is justified not because of anything about Levine but as a well deserved  put down of the Dems’ fatuous bragging about delivering some sort of  first for women with this. Twitter should have left the guy alone.