This evening, I came upon an unexpected bit of mild entertainment; it seems that someone on Facebook was whining about pre-operative transsexual women on OKCupid listing themselves as “female” (one can only imagine what prompted this little outburst on his part). With prompting, he revealed that he wasn’t especially partial to post-operative transpeople either; they, he claimed, were really just gays in denial about themselves. “Learning to accept the cards you are dealt,” he explained, “is part of learning self-love.”
I found myself as unimpressed as ever by this hoary old canard (among other things, it completely fails to account for the existence of transsexual people who are also non-heterosexual), and I told him so. I must confess, though, that I’m rather ashamed of how I went about doing so: did I rebut his argument in a detailed counterpoint? Grind him to meal between the wheels of unimpeachable logic?
No: I made a crude masturbation joke at his expense. Witty, yes, but when you think about it: intellectually lazy in the extreme. But upon reflection, it occurs to me that, with very few exceptions, this is all that wit really is.
Anyway, this prompted me to formulate the following flowchart:
When two or more people follow this rubric, you get to watch a prolonged and yet oddly hilarious exchangce in which absolutely nothing is said, culminating in an epic battle of wills.
