Author of this gobbledygook
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Posted on 04/10/2026 2:06:02 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The post-transphobia commonwealth
What is the difference between an audacious and a mediocre dead-horse take?
Frankly, I don’t know anymore. Some people may read what I have to say as the musings of a neoliberal bubble-inhabiting princess, and others may see them as a call from the Kremlin to stir workers of the world and unite against the master. Whatever you make of my positionality, I have an observation to share with my UC Berkeley compatriots in the Red Army: We may be deluding ourselves into thinking our particular tract of society is an egalitarian wet dream.
Oftentimes, when I talk doomsday anxieties with my campus peers about human rights backsliding and the rise of right-wing populism in the United States, I am met with a peculiar hopecore countervailance.
“At least we’re in California”; “At least we’re in Berkeley;” “Things could be much worse,” they’ll say.
This process of pitting a good state against a bad state is exactly what California needs for securing legitimacy. California exceptionalism — as opposed to provincial Midwesternness, gaudy Southernness and geriatric New Englandness — has become a familiar paradigm across the UCs, California State Universities, California Community Colleges and every other hotspot for highbrows in the Golden State. Many even extol the virtues of possible secession from the union.
Whom will we shine our merits against if we secede? California needs an impoverished and unenlightened United States in order to show off its development and the way it seamlessly blends liberal democracy and neoliberal technocracy. It is both the home of sanctuary cities and the headquarters of Meta, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google.
California’s recent proclivity for “illiberal means to a liberal end,” such as Gavin Newsom’s Prop 50, reminds me of Britain in the 20th and 21st centuries. The racist and populist UK Independence Party, founded on working toward the U.K. quitting the EU, leveraged British disaffection through the new millennium and helped realize Brexit in 2016. The lead-up to this can be traced to the Whig myth of the exceptional British Isles, which operated as a tool for self-definition against continental Europe, contributing to an inflated ego that was punctured through the decolonial process and establishment of the Commonwealth.
The Commonwealth system was intended to redress the dehumanization of “overseas subjects of the British crown” and revamp the British economy. They dismantled borders in hopes of attracting cheap labor and sanitizing reputation.
However, Britain was not ready for the extension of constitutional sameness to Black and Brown postcolonial migrants. The government plunged headfirst into colorblind utopia, overestimating how evolved its populace really was.
The expedition of democratic liberalization for public relations rather than as a natural product of meaningful and sustainable social policy is a recipe for right-wing populist backlash. We’ve seen this across Europe, South Asia and our own United States.
I am doubtful of the perpetual blueness of California. After all, this state has the darkest history in the ledgers of Indigenous people, for example. A state can transition from “wokeism” to ethnopopulism in a very short span.
UC Berkeley boasts bringing together the sharpest minds and most passionate, woke people. This fantastical combination manipulates prospective students into an oblivious self-contortion in the direction of progressive and technocratic excellence — the paradoxical and delusional project of the century.
Recently, one of my friends described this essay she came across on straight women performing “resistive lesbianism” as a subversion of the patriarchy. The theory of resistive queer existence, or “resistentialism,” is seductive, even if outrageous. It is something that a performatively woke state would endorse, a state that has not done the work necessary to enable justice but wishes to appear protective of minority rights — a federalist requisite.
Some UC Berkeley visionaries, after having read Judith Butler and Jean-Paul Sartre, may even adopt a gender-transcendent stance — rejecting all categories and unbridling their own subjectivity. This is more than fine and well. While gender is largely a social construction, some gender elements stick with people for long enough to become essential, yet flexible, parts of themselves. More importantly, some people ostensibly belong to demonized queer groups while others can bobble back and forth based on physiological and personality ambiguities — a significant political advantage that helps navigate a space and time of intense polarization.
What does not sit right with me is collapsing all gender-diverse people under the umbrella of “transgender” without acknowledgment of acute versus not-so-acute marginalizations on the political stage.
It’s like the color-, gender-, class- and caste-blind aspects of the Commonwealth: counterproductive mostly, useless completely. If it is only words and not substance, there is nothing.
Oftentimes, campus acts like a post-transphobia commonwealth — everyone is pronoun-ed in an effort to normalize transgender identities without the transformative uplifting of transgender individuals. Everyone agrees gender is a construct, and still it is the “clockable” people who get shamed for non- or improper conformity, who are instrumentalized as part of Turning Point USA campaigns. There are palpable differences in lived experiences across the spectrum.
So are we willing and ready to take on the system? Or are we biting off more than we can chew? If yes to the latter, then it is misleading to represent ourselves as the pinnacle of wokeness.
It is time to prioritize substance over appearance, radical change over radical normalization — not just to ward off false allegations of liberalism against UC Berkeley but also to effectively disable right-wing populism. We cannot extend sameness to one another without inspiring mistrust and backlash.
Aahana Manglani writes the Thursday column on experiencing “transition” across gender, terrestrial and cultural lines.
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WTH?????
My dad would have called this article “A bunch of gobbledygook.”
I much dumber for reading about 1/2 of that.
Can’t imagine how I’d even be able to write this if I’d read the whole damn thing.
WTF was all of that blather about? Is she trying to say that woke Leftists should double down on their insanity?
Is there a degree in “navel gazing” I have not heard about? No...could not read more than a couple paragraphs.
You made it a lot farther than I did. What gibberish.
How does one get to be this detached from reality?
And if that is all it is, then why do people need to alter pronouns, alter their appearance, mutilate their bodies, etc. to "affirm" it? Their own arguments contradict themselves.
Well...OK...
🚨🚨🚨⚠️⚠️⚠️ "TRANSGENDER" ALERT ⚠️⚠️⚠️🚨🚨🚨
STAY BACK 300 FEET
AI Overview:
Aahana Manglani is an opinion columnist for The Daily Californian, the independent student newspaper at UC Berkeley. She HE IS A TRANS WOMAN who often writes about her personal experiences, identity, and social issues through her HIS column titled "Cis To Sis". 
We ARE NOT the same
It’s a bunch of drivel by somebody trying very hard to convince everyone of their intellectual superiority, not realizing that all they’re accomplishing is proving to everyone how big of a self-righteous, arrogant, cretin they are.
That Old Serpent 🐍 Called the Devil and Satan
keeps trying to sell his OLD LIES
(from Sodom and Gomorrah)
to the General Public via the Goats 🐐🐐🐐
They will Destroy Normal Society with LIES
After 5-6 words you may feel nauseous
🤢🤢🤢 🤮🤮🤮
I think I stopped at 5 words
Right? The only I got out of the article is that the pagan commie degenerates are glad to live in their Berkley bubble as I am glad to ;ive in paradise in SC. Woe to the republic if our energy fields touch.
It is absolutely an affront to natural law, e.g. God, while claiming some sort of enlightenment, purely to spite God with a smile. It’s their inner demon.
They are fools thinking they are wise.
Yeah, it was a tough read through the mind of deplorables.
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