On Wednesday, June 26, 2024, young mother Jenna Longoria and her 16-month-old son were unceremoniously kicked off a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Austin, Texas because Longoria referred to a crossdressing male employee by male terms, including “sir” and “he.” Another male flight attendant allegedly took umbrage at this violation of social conventions invented and imposed by crossdressers.
Moments after she was kicked off the flight, Longoria recorded a video in which United Airlines manager Gabriella (Gabby) Chidom told her this:
I need you to know that because of this verbal altercation that you had with my staff, you got yourself put off this craft. … some transgender comments were made, derogatory comments.
After the incident blew up publicly, a spokesperson from United shared this deceitful statement with the press:
A party of three [the third person was Longoria’s 75-year-old mother] travelling out of San Francisco yesterday was not allowed to board following a discussion about having too many carry-on items.
Carefully note the sentence construction of this crafty statement. It doesn’t say that the discussion about carry-on items was the reason the mother and child were kicked off the flight. It says they were not allowed to board “following a discussion” about having too many carry-on items. The tricksy little airline devils hope readers will not notice the lawyerly misdirection that kinda, sorta, maybe implies without actually stating that Longoria was kicked off because she had too many carry-on items.
The monumentally miffed male flight attendant—the chivalrous one defending the honor of the crossdressing one—implied that Longoria should have known the crossdressing man was a woman by the fact that he was wearing a dress. So, leftists, while claiming that clothing styles are arbitrary, socially constructed, and imposed cultural conventions, also believe clothing choices determine a person’s sex, as opposed to, say, having a male face, male body, and male voice.
Whether Longoria referred to a crossdressing man by “sir,” “he” or “him” once or multiple times is wholly irrelevant. While the crossdressing man (and his collaborators) may not like when others refer to him as a man, his dislike does not mean sex-based terms are derogatory. Nor does using sex-based terms constitute hatred or disrespect. Rather, the use of sex-based language is a sign that the speaker remains firmly tethered to objective reality.
The small but growing “trans” demographic assert that respect for the wholly inauthentic “identities” of men and women who choose to pretend they are the sex they are not demands that the entire world participate in their socially constructed fiction. But what happens when men with preposterous female identities come into direct conflict with those whose authentic identities consist in being Christians?
Lying is prohibited for Christians who believe that the Creator of the universe foreordained their Christian identities. Surely, their feelings about their identities are no less worthy of respect and accommodation than the subjective feelings of “trans”-cultists about their immaterial identities. No cross-sex-impersonating man or woman has a legal or moral right to force others to speak words that embody false and destructive ideas.
For many Americans, referring to people by terms that communicate untruths about their sex constitutes a lie that derogates the integrity of that person. Referring to persons by language that corresponds to the sex they are not is a dishonest performative act that seeks futilely to sever that person’s sex from some Gnostic immaterial self. It’s a lie and an insult that no corporation, institution, government, or individual should try to force people to speak.
These radical efforts to enforce language diktats are also efforts to normalize a perverse body- and soul-destroying ideology.
In English, gendered language (e.g., “sir,” “he,” “him,” and “his”) does not refer to subjective, internal feelings about maleness or femaleness. Until five minutes ago, such gendered terms denoted and corresponded to objective, immutable, and meaningful biological sex.
As such, no one should try to compel people whose authentic identities prohibit lying to lie in order to travel via airplanes. Nor should people be compelled to embrace leftist beliefs about what constitutes bigotry or hatred.
Americans ought not dismiss Longoria’s experience as a singular unimportant event. These language diktats emerge from a twisted understanding of respect and compassion that will be exploited and applied to other “identities.”
As I wrote several years ago, Alexis Tsoulis-Reay, writer for New York Magazine’s The Cut, has twice written about a married man who has a “zoosexual” relationship with his horse. Her first article was “What’s it Like to Date a Horse?” In her follow-up article, “About That Interview I Did with a Zoophile,” Tsoulis-Reay described her anger when a friend characterized the man into bestiality as having a “horse fetish”:
When one of my friends, an attorney who is married and straight, asked me how my “horse fetish” reporting was going, my first thought was, STFU, you normative bitch! I was genuinely annoyed that she’d described his entire sexual identity as a kink. “It’s a sexuality, not a fetish!” I earnestly texted back to her in all caps.
Leftists invented the idea of “authentic identity,” conflating all phenomena that are affirmed by an individual as integral parts of authentic identity and beyond moral judgment.
Other disordered fetishes will also become “authentic identities.” Disapproval of fetishistic “identities” will become hate speech. Fetishistic “identities” will create political lobbies that will insist their fetishes are “sexual orientations,” and voilà, fetishes will become protected under existing anti-discrimination laws.
And then calls for compassion and respect will become tyrannical demands to refrain from publicly expressing any opinions regarding “identities,” feelings, desires, and volitional acts that leftists hate no matter how contrary to human flourishing and morality they are. Resistance is not futile. Just do it.