There are two different Boston Globe pieces making the rounds in my mentions at the moment.
The first is a down-the-middle opinion piece from freelancer David Mastio that challenges the assertion popular on the left that trans people face great and growing violence. The numbers don’t back that up (the piece points to a Manhattan Institute analysis showing the trans murder rate is lower than gen pop’s.)
Mastio notes that the fear-mongering about a nonexistent trans murder “epidemic” is being driven by queer activists. He doesn’t call this out for the cynical power politics and moral blackmail that it is, but he does note, “What LGBTQ rights groups are doing to these folks with this unrelenting message that death is waiting for them around every corner is not healthy. They have their constituents living in fear when the best numbers we have show that the supposed ‘epidemic,’ ‘onslaught,’ or ‘genocide’ against trans people is not as potent as they suggest and is, in fact, lessening.”
The second Globe piece is a dispatch from a western Massachusetts lesbian bar, detailing how the recent(!) relaxation of the establishment’s N95 mask mandate led to a complete meltdown among the regulars. The pleasures of the piece are many, from one patron’s accusation that management is “complicit in a mass disabling event” to another’s that the move could “kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience,” to a third’s more simple wish that the bar be “firebombed” for its policy toward the immunocompromised. Distressed by the backlash and the bar’s struggling finances, one of its founders has, I jest you not, enrolled in clown college.
What both pieces have in common is understatement and restraint as editorial strategy. They both simply take the left-wing milieus they examine seriously, present the claims these people make in their own terms, even sympathetically, and then apply only basic empirical scrutiny to them, unladen by invective or antagonism. The results are nevertheless devastating, a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a whole worldview, the way many see the HBO show Girls as in fact subtle critique of a lifestyle it superficially valorizes.
They put me in mind of another Globe piece from a few years ago, the famed “Spotlight” unit’s long investigation of the cancellation of David Sabatini. A brilliant MIT geneticist who was described by some as the one man likeliest to cure cancer, Sabatini had his lab and his career snatched from him over one of the most shabby and sordid Me Too show-trials ever held. (Partial disclosure: Though I don’t know Sabatini, I had a front-row seat to the whole awful mess for reasons to do with my day job.)
In the Globe‘s after-the-fact reappraisal of the case, they came as close as the liberal-paper-of-record of Boston could to calling the whole thing bulls***. As with the two more recent articles, the authors of the Sabatini piece were (one assumes) broadly sympathetic to the Me Too movement. Because of that, and also perhaps due to fear of certain parts of their own audience, they held back from explicating some of the obvious conclusions to be drawn from the facts they were presenting. But credit is due for presenting those facts anyway, and letting us fill in the therefores ourselves.