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:
Innovators
Early Adopters
Early Majority
Late Majority
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.
I’m not an innovator, but I do tend to be an early adopter. I’ll often decide – apparently spontaneously – that I like a particular piece of clothing, or a piece of decor, only to read a few months later that this is an up and coming trend. When I was younger, and had a lot more time on my hands, I used to spend hours and hours sewing my own clothes or trawling through charity shops in order to cheaply create a particular look that I’d decided was cool. Perhaps I’d seen a really hot woman wearing something similar in central London and subconsciously bookmarked this as a style to experiment with. I honestly don’t remember ever deliberately imitating the innovators, but I suppose I must have been influenced by them, because I’d then watch as “my” cool new thing moved from cool, to mainstream, to dated, and finally to uncool over the course of several years. Such is the way with memes.
Political trends are exactly the same. Which is why the news that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has removed her pronouns from her Twitter bio is worth paying attention to.
Newsweek is treating it like a breaking news story, leading with the headline “AOC Removes Pronouns From X Bio: What We Know.” It seems that she quietly changed her bio back in May of this year, but the change has only recently attracted interest because some Democrats are starting to acknowledge that their commitment to transgenderism may have hurt them at the polls (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you” was a fantastic slogan, after all).
AOC isn’t a political innovator, or even an early adopter. But I think she’s instinctively in the ‘early majority’ category, and – by virtue of being a hot woman – her influence over the fashion cascade is particularly powerful. If she is sensing a change in the political winds, that means that a lot of other people are about to sense the same thing. Not – crucially! – because transgenderism is true or false, harmful or benign, but because it is a political trend that is now reaching the end of its lifecycle. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It has never mattered if it’s true. Expressing allegiance to this bizarre ideology has always been about social status, which is why it will be disastrous when the hot women abandon it once and for all.
The lifecycle of the trans meme went something like this. It originated in universities, with Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble typically credited as the foundational text. For decades it was a niche preoccupation among a few academics and activists. But by the time I started my undergraduate degree in 2013, transgender ideology was being taught as fact in gender studies departments. This was the equivalent of cerulean being featured in collections by Oscar de la Renta and Yves Saint Laurent. The elite innovators within academia had determined that this was high status, and their students had become early adopters. (Not me, for the record – I thought it was bogus from the off!)
Transgenderism hit the early mainstream in 2014, when Time magazine announced the “transgender tipping point.” 2014 to 2019 saw the most intense period of anti-TERF persecution, particularly within academia and the media. People who are mostly oblivious to the preoccupations of political activists slowly became aware that this was something they were supposed to care about. After 2020, it became common to see the progress pride flag in provincial bookshops or outside suburban churches. Civil servants and police officers began to include their pronouns in their email signatures. ”It filtered down through the department stores” as Miranda Priestly would say, “and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.” Transgenderism became uncool.
When The New York Times published this sympathetic piece about the Cass Review in May of this year – roughly the same time that AOC changed her Twitter bio – it became clear to me, and to many other people, that the progressive elites were starting the process of disassociating themselves from a movement that had become a political liability.
Their embrace of transgenderism was never going to last. The ideology always leant too heavily on obviously false ideas, demanding that adherents reject the truth of their own eyes. And the movement itself was made up of a combination of fetishists and the mentally ill, which doesn’t make for a happy political coalition. In the early days, it was edgy and cool, and seemed to fit with some bigger political ideas about freedom and anti-traditionalism, which made it appealing to progressives. But, in the end, it was the equivalent of a brief and embarrassing fashion trend – the sort that makes early adopters cringe at old photos of ourselves.
Except that, unlike a silly fashion trend, the trans movement inflicted a terrible human cost. The people who medically transitioned – many of them very vulnerable young women – will be permanently disfigured, and will probably not make old bones. Right now, most of them are completely unaware that they’re about to be abandoned by their progressive allies. It could take years for the news of the movement’s demise to filter out to the late mainstream and to the laggards, by which time hot women like AOC will have moved on to some other trend, and there will be no apology forthcoming. The victims of transgenderism will never be healed, they’ll just be forgotten.
