Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of Health and Human Services, regularly espouses a menagerie of health conspiracy theories, including the idea that fluoride turns kids trans. By pushing his unfounded ideas about health and wellness, he can Trojan Horse in a variety of ideas about perfecting the human body. Such ideas have a dangerous precedent. The people who take it upon themselves to define what is innate and what is adornment are often the same ones deciding who is worthy of human rights and healthcare. In The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan recently wondered whether or not gay and trans rights have “gone too far.” This rhetoric is eerily similar to the way many mainstream outlets talk about Clavicular and his followers. Both argue that what these people are doing is too extreme. It is assumed that looksmaxxers are miserable pursuing dissociative perfection, while trans people are miserable because of the many roadblocks to their desire. Of course, it’s also true that trans medicine is often done under the care and supervision of medical professionals (though not always—some order their hormones online), while looksmaxxers are often self-adminstering untested or off-label treatments.
To the Make America Healthy Again crowd, trans medicine is just another woke virus, a distortion of the normative body. Selectively engaging science, they argue that biology is reality. They believe “nature has an ‘intended’ sex that medical scientists need merely unearth,” as Anne Fausto-Sterling put it in the Boston Review. Transphobes such as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro commonly assert that “facts don’t care about your feelings.” The MAHA right wing believes in raw food, unprocessed diets, and rigorous exercise, preferring alternative medicine to structural solutions and obsessing over “fitness.” Similarly, looksmaxxers imagine a “natural” physical ideal—they are just willing to take any path to achieve it, whether it’s fitness or drugs. Traci Brynne Voyles, PhD, has discussed the link between ableism, naturalism, and the right: “The notion of pure and unpolluted white bodies is a key part of…environmental racism.” To this alliance of skeptics, transness, too, is a kind of biohacking—just the wrong kind. RFK Jr. believes transness, like vaccines, can be linked to autism. In their eyes, we are not supposed to be agents of our own biology but, instead, succumb to it.
Whether it’s MAHA, looksmaxxing, or “Mar-a-Lago” face, right-wing men and women are not only allowed but encouraged to optimize for the body, and identity, that they want. More than ever, it is profoundly hypocritical for conservatives to attack trans autonomy. How did we get here? As researcher Joshua Malloy told E&E News earlier this year, “All of a sudden we see radical right-wing groups emerging within wellness and spirituality–type communities in opposition to vaccines and the lockdowns, and through that there was a pivot towards masculine health and nutrition.” Looksmaxxing offers the idea that one can enhance one’s biology without betraying one’s fundamental nature. It’s male-to-male instead male-to-female. The android dreams of a chiseled jaw.
Source:
www.gq.com
