Transgenderism is over

The hot women have spoken

The audio version of this essay – read by me – is below the paywall.

There’s a famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which fashion editor Miranda Priestly (based on Anna Wintour) describes the workings of the fashion industry to her hapless PA: 

You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet, and you select… I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back, but what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean.

You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that, in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns, and then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent, wasn’t it?… who showed cerulean military jackets… And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

However, that blue represents millions of dollars of countless jobs, and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. 

I contend that political fashions operate in a very similar way to clothing fashions. The ‘cerulean sweater monologue’ forgets the role of material factors in determining fashion trends (the move towards professionals working from home, for instance, has affected the market for formal workwear). But it identifies something important: the way that trends slowly trickle down from elites to everyone else. 

Marketing experts group consumers into five categories: 

1. Innovators

2. Early Adopters

3. Early Majority

4. Late Majority

5. Laggards

Winning over the innovators is a big deal for anyone wanting to flog a product, because this group has power over the majority. It’s a subtle kind of power, and it’s disproportionately possessed by women – hot women, in particular. That’s how social media influencers make a living: not only are they good looking (which automatically confers status on women), they also possess this mysterious talent for identifying what’s in and what’s out – a kind of enhanced sensitivity to social signals.