Josh Hawley vs. Berkeley Law Prof. Khiara Bridges; or: Men Get Pregnant, Bigot

Ten years ago, if you'd have recounted this event, liberals and Democrats would have laughed you out of the room--justifiably. They'd insist--again, justifiably--that it was a preposterous straw man only Rick Santorum could believe.

   But here we are.

   Bridges does manage to state one true thing...that has never been in question: not all women can get pregnant. So...there's that, I guess... But after that, she slips the surly bounds of reality...to touch the face of...Cthulhu...or something.

   Of course progressive Newspeak is crucial to her sophistry. Specifically the transparently ridiculous term 'transman'/'trans man.' Which of course means: woman who wants to be / thinks she is / represents herself as a man. But they also think that "trans men" are men. Which, of course, they are not. Thus "trans man" functions mainly as a mechanism for equivocation between man and (roughly) woman-pretending-to-be-a-man. Hawley's response was good, but he might also have asked: So, do you mean that men--actual men--adult male humans--can get pregnant? Or do you mean that women representing themselves as men can get pregnant? Because the former is astonishing...but false...and the latter is an irrelevant distraction.

   Lefties across the interwebs are apparently REEEEing gleefully and claiming that Bridges pWoNz0rEd Hawley--which is clearly ridiculous. Some conservatives are saying the reverse, which is certainly truer, but not really right. Hawley asked the right questions, but he was playing by old rules, according to which one could at least hope that one's interlocutor might not be willing to outright assert contradictions...and call you a bigot for refusing to accept them. Bridges proudly, condescendingly asserted the left's tribal falsehoods on this issue. Hawley asked the right questions to prompt her to do so. But if he was hoping for some hint of a sign of cognitive dissonance to attend her insistence that night is day, well, he had to have been disappointed. 

   I'll give Bridges this much: she stated the left's case flawlessly. The form of that case is, roughly: stage contradiction--e.g. night is day--as if it were the most obvious and uncontroversial truth in the world. Do not acknowledge that your faction has simply adopted an idiosyncratic redefinition of a word to mean its opposite. I.e. pretend you aren't engaged in mere semantic fuckwittery. Call your interlocutor a racist* (in this case "transphobe") for refusing to accept your patently absurd, sophomoric, witless neologism-pretending-to-be-a-substantive-claim. The whole case, such as it is, of course, comes down to that last bit there.

   And don't forget: Bridges is faculty at Cal Law.