Dreher: "Obsessed With Decadent Crap"

If you've been on Internet for any length of time, you might be familiar with the hyperventilating blogging technique of linking to an article in which someone highlights an issue of importance to some people and then being outraged that some amorphous group of "people" (usually consisting of one's ideological foes) are stupid/elite/out-of-touch for caring about that issue when this other issue is what "people" should actually care about.

We've all seen it, right?  .

Well, that's the gist of a recent Rod Dreher obsesso-hate-fest, where he's super pissed that The Atlantic ran an article about the plight of transmen feeding their infants when flooding has happened in Louisiana.

He writes (content note: anti-trans bigotry)

"I am not interested in understanding the bodies or experiences of women who think they’re men who are bitching because nobody understands what it’s like to want to suckle your child at the breast you had cut off.

What I am interested in is trying to get inside the head of a coastal elite media that is obsessed with decadent crap like this. I think we can safely say that the people in J.D. Vance’s book aren’t readers of The Atlantic.com (one of my favorite websites, by the way), nor are most people in my part of the world who are out there mucking houses, feeding flood victims and doing their laundry. I get that. No magazine or web publication can be all things to all people all the time, nor should it try to be. 

But if you read The Atlantic, The New York Times, and other publications edited by coastal elites, you would think that the travails of transgenders was the worst social problem facing America today. The bizarre degree of coverage and interest says little about transgenders and everything about the priorities of the media gatekeepers."

That Rod Dreher isn't "interested" in understanding trans people is abundantly clear by his own rantings about trans people, in which he contextualizes their plight primarily in terms of how they threaten a preferred Christian-supremacist social order. That Dreher both lacks interest in understanding trans people and yet writes/rants about them on the weekly, however, might offer some insight into why others in the media cover the plight of said trans people.

Just a thought!