On Jonas Hole's Salutatory Address

Jonas Hole in his Junior ROTC uniform

Three of Curmie’s last four blog posts touched on issues related to the trans community—what can be taught in university classrooms, the fact that a trans actor was cast in a major motion picture, and that a piece of instrumental music honors a trans activist from decades ago.  The fourth essay was about graduation ceremonies.  And now… <drum roll>… both topics at once.  Curmie promises he’ll find a different kind of topic soon.

Actually, the graduation speech by Jonas Hole, the salutatorian at D’Iberville High School in Biloxi, isn’t the whole story, although it’s how Curmie found out about the case.  Jonas, who identifies as transmasculine, was introduced by the school’s principal, Cheryl Broadus.  Broadus used Jonas’s deadname and described him as an “outstanding young lady.”  Unsurprisingly, Broadus has not responded to multiple requests for comment. 

What is particularly disturbing here is that this is obviously an attempt, not merely to be a bigoted asshole, but to strut about it.  It would certainly be easy enough to avoid gendered descriptions: “Our next speaker is the class salutatorian, who has accomplished a great deal both in the classroom and elsewhere.  Our records show the name as Makayla Hole, but many of you will no doubt recognize this outstanding young scholar as Jonas Hole.” 

See how easy that was?  It notes the reality that students—and that who this event ought to be all about, after all—will know this person as Jonas, without either endorsing or condemning the name change.  Reality is a thing, after all.  Curmie would have been more affirmative, but no one asked him, and it’s only fair to admit that Broadus has to deal with what might reasonably be assumed to be a less than entirely liberal community, and alienating those folks might be contra-indicated.  

She (Curmie uses the feminine pronoun because that’s how she presents herself; he hasn’t checked her genitalia) didn’t have to join with the neanderthals, however, and in Curmie’s mind that makes her unfit for her position, which above all else ought to be to prioritize respect for her students.

The speech itself was recorded by a mom in the audience who posted it as a reel on Facebook.  It’s not exactly the highest fidelity in history, and there’s more than a little background noise, but it’s what we’ve got, and it isn’t horrible.  Jonas differs from the Kinks’ Lola, who walks like a woman and talks like a man.  Jonas talks like a woman; whether he walks like a man isn’t clear from the video, but he certainly looks like one (see the photo above).

The speech is a little rushed.  Whether this is a function of nerves (reasonable enough under the circumstances) or perhaps a time limit isn’t clear.  What is absolutely evident, however, is that there’s actual content here.  Enjoy it while you can, Gentle Reader, as election season is heating up, and we’re not likely to hear much of anything in our news feeds but slogans and misrepresentations for the next few months.

The video doesn’t show the very opening of the speech, but according to the article in Mississippi Today linked above he “first introduced himself with his former name, then added, ‘a lot of you know me as Jonas.’”  Nice little knife twist, that.  The speech starts with the recollection of “trying to blend in” and “wanting people to like me” as a freshman. Curmie doesn’t remember a lot about that time in his life, but he does remember that.  “Whether you know it or not, you probably did, too,” says Hole.  Yep.  And it didn’t work for Curmie, either.  (Different circumstances; same phenomenon.)

After a couple of shoutouts, we get to the real stuff:

Throughout high school, I eventually gathered the courage to advocate self-expression for myself and others.  Despite my own self-acceptance, others judged me without understanding me.  I became my labels, and it felt as if my achievements, hardships, personality, all became irrelevant for the sole fact that I present myself differently. 

However, I hold no grudge against those who were so quick to criticize me….  As I’ve matured to accept myself for who I am, I want to encourage all of you to do the same. Express yourself as individuals and resist the temptation to just be a follower. We as a community can be so much stronger by living our lives truthfully and without fear of what someone else may or may not think.  

(Note: the quote in The Advocate renders that last word as “be.”  It’s unclear in the recording; both words work in context.)

He even slipped in a Bible verse, Romans 15:7 (NIL) “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.”  Touché, kid!

OK, yeah, the whole thing was a little self-centered, and the homily wasn’t actually the most original advice Curmie has ever heard.  That said, the speech was polite and gracious, and Hole is in an ideal position to connect his own lived history with wider issues.  It’s not the “mic drop” that some LGBTQ+ advocates claim it is, but it’s honest and articulate: not bad for a three-and-a-half-minute speech by a teenager.

Unfortunately, misgendering Jonas at graduation appears to be the tip of the iceberg.  He was not only deadnamed in a post on the school’s Facebook page, but there is at least speculation that his image was digitally altered to make him appear more feminine.  The incipient mustache on Jonas’s upper lip is certainly more evident in the photo you see at the top of the page than in the school’s photo, but that wasn’t necessarily intentional.  And Curmie does admit to being a little confused by the suggestion that Jonas was “outed” by that post—surely virtually everyone knew the story. 

Erasure, of course, is a different thing.  Curmie doesn’t understand the phenomenon as viscerally as he would if he himself were trans, but he has seen the expression on the faces of trans friends and family who were deadnamed by people who knew better. 

Perhaps even more significantly, a half dozen students at the school found out their pictures had been excised from the yearbook only when the books were distributed.  Is that “dehumanizing,” as Jensen Luke Matar, the director of the statewide Transgender Resources, Advocacy, Networking and Services (TRANS) Program, would have it?  Perhaps not, but cruelty and stupidity are in a death struggle to be the defining characteristic of that little ploy.  In a just universe, whoever made that decision would be pilloried (literally).

The transition from adolescence to post-adolescence isn’t easy for anyone, let alone someone whose gender identity isn’t what some people think is “normal.”  Throw in the end of high school, where you got to see your friends every day, and things get tougher still.  Now you’re a lot more on your own than you’ve ever been.  That’s great in some ways, but it’s also damned scary.  And now some so-called educator wants to deny your reality.  Bloody fucking hell.

"Lola" and the Week's Headlines

Curmie was 14 when the Kinks released their classic song, “Lola.”  It was the perfect age at which to revel in the delicious naughtiness, certainly for the time, of a title character who “walked like a woman and talked like a man.”  The most quoted lyric from the song, no doubt, is “Well, I’m not the world's most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola.”  There’s a hint of ambiguity there: is Lola a man, or is Lola also glad that the narrator is a man?  Not that those ideas are mutually exclusive, of course.  Any way you look at it, that sequence had a considerable impact on a rather sheltered lad in the throes of puberty.

The sequence that sticks in Curmie’s mind the most, though, comes a little earlier in the song: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”  That word “except” has continued to intrigue for well over a half century.  Lola, whatever terms of sexual identity might be used to describe her, becomes the narrator’s bulwark against the confusions of the world.  There’s a lot to unpack there.

Curmie has always liked the song, and he’s pretty sure he owned it on 45 back in the day, but it has seldom crossed his mind for decades except when it comes around on Spotify or the local classic rock radio station.  But it has risen to the top of his consciousness of late when encountering two Facebook posts.

The first was this one, by Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression.  His excoriation of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boast that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”  is impressive:

The Attorney General is just flat wrong here…. She’s not the first politician to say that hate speech isn’t free speech, but this is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.  She really should know better, and this is the type of thing that’s going to chill public debate.  It’s going to make people afraid to say things that the current administration might consider hateful, lest they actually be prosecuted for it.

Curmie notes that a representative of FIRE (accurately) calls Bondi a politician rather than a lawyer and makes the obvious point that the Attorney General, of all people, ought to know the freaking laws she’s supposedly upholding.  Bondi is either profoundly ignorant or too big of a political hack to care that she’s advocating the evisceration of Constitutional protections.  Or both, of course.

But it’s what Terr says next that intrigues Curmie:

What’s also incredible about this video is that usually the argument that hate speech isn’t protected speech is something that you would hear from the left side of the political aisle.  But now we hear a top Republican official saying it.  And I think that just goes to show that censorship rationales, once they’re on the table, they’re a loaded gun just waiting to be used by any political party that takes power.

Terr is right about this, too.  Curmie has made the point repeatedly (most explicitly here and to a lesser extent here) that neither of the two principal political parties in this country are much interested in upholding First Amendment protections.  But whereas the right was more likely to engage in political censorship (books in libraries or in school curricula, for example), it was generally the left that sought to deny constitutional protections to hate speech.

Now, we’re living in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, with the GOP, and especially the MAGA wing thereof, bellowing from the proverbial rooftops about how hate speech should be prosecuted.  Bondi is worse than most—hardly surprising, that—but even she isn’t the most insane right-winger out there.  Remember this guy, an actual Congresscritter Curmie mentioned a few days ago?

Right now, the same people who cheerfully described moderate Democrats as “communists” for arguing that someone who works a 40-hour week ought to be able to afford to pay for essentials, or that programs that help the general population (FEMA, Medicaid, the CDC, the FAA, etc.) ought not to be sacrificed so those poor destitute billionaires can get a tax cut that balloons the national debt—these people are getting righteously indignant that anyone would dare call a racist, sexist, jackass like Charlie Kirk, well, a racist, sexist, jackass.  And they want people fired or even arrested for speaking their truth.  Most of what they’re objecting to isn’t even hate speech by any reasonable definition, but we’ll antiphrastically let that pass for now.

The other Facebook post Curmie wants to mention was this one, which Curmie reposted on his page a couple days ago.  It reads, “Reminder: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said homeless people should be put to death by lethal injection and they didn’t even take away his morning donut.”  The obvious context was the propinquity of Kilmeade’s comment and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for his on-air comments about the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What Kimmel actually said, of course, wouldn’t as much as raise an eyebrow on a reasonable observer.  There were some jabs at both President Trump and Vice President Vance, but the killer, apparently was this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  That, Gentle Reader, is simply a statement of fact.  Trump blamed “radical left political violence” long before there was any evidence either way, and there remains little if any evidence from a credible source that Tyler Robinson was indeed influenced by leftist politics.

Was Robinson a leftie ideologue?  We still don’t know, and for these purposes it doesn’t matter.  There was, at the time Kimmel was on the air, some evidence emerging that perhaps Robinson was a Groyper, and the fact that his grandmother says his politics were shifting to the left could simply be deflection (“we’re a Trump-loving family, so the assassin in our midst obviously wasn’t like us”).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might even suggest the possibility that Robinson was pretty much a Nancy Reagan Republican: dismissing the concerns of others until, in his case, he entered into a same-sex relationship, and Kirk’s homophobia was placed in a different perspective.

The point is that for these purposes, none of this matters.  (Nor does it matter that Curmie has never found Kimmel even moderately amusing.)  Did the MAGA world make a concerted effort to place the blame on someone other than themselves?  Of course, they did!  It doesn’t matter if they were “right” about Robinson’s motivations; they just didn’t want him to be one of theirs.  (To be fair, the left was spinning just as hard in the other direction, but that doesn’t change the fact that Kimmel was absolutely accurate.)

It’s also worth mentioning that Kimmel, like a host of leading Democrats, expressed shock and horror at the news of Kirk’s death, calling it a “senseless murder” and condemning those who seemed to be celebrating it.  Contrast that with the deafening silence (well, there was that one bit of sneering from Mike Lee) of every Republican you can name about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing nut job.

Note: the key words here are “nut job,” not “right-wing.”  What MAGA in general is attempting to do is to define the entire group—liberals—as guilty in Kirk’s murder because Robinson might have been a leftist with respect to one particular aspect of his politics.  This is the scam JD Vance is trying to pull off, with outright lies about the relative frequency of political violence perpetrated by the left and the right.  C’mon, JD, only the stupidest MAGA believes that “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left.”  Even the report of the hard-right Cato Institute calls that claim bullshit.  Well, that’s not exactly a direct quote, but you see the point, Gentle Reader.

But Curmie reverts to his inner Confucian.  Even if there is some correlation between affiliation X and action Y, we can’t assume that one implies the other.  Curmie quotes himself from a post in 2013 about that gunman in Aurora, Co, at the opening of the new Batman movie.  Just substitute “Robinson” for “Holmes” in the following:

The fact is, Gentle Reader, this guy Holmes doesn’t represent me even if we’d vote for the same person or worship at the same church. If he turns out to be an atheist, that doesn’t mean that atheists are the problem, any more (or less) than Baptists are the problem if that’s what he is. His politics can be from the left, right, or center, and he doesn’t represent any of the good people some of whose views he shares. Even if he had help, he’s a lone wolf. Our society lives on, saddened but intrepid.

OK, one more point, since Curmie knows there are people out there ready to rant about how corporations have a right to hire and fire whomever they choose.  Yes, that’s true, even when Nexstar and Sinclair, the two distributors who refused to air Kimmel’s show in the future, are notoriously and rather proudly right-wing.  It’s the intervention of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr that’s the real problem.  Carr, appointed in the first Trump administration, has apparently now gone full sycophant, as anyone who wants to stay employed in that administration is likely to do.  Oh, and an administration so openly venal is going to be a lot more amenable to proposed mergers and such-like if you, ABC, suck up appropriately.  Not all bribes are monetary; some just censor alternative voices.  As the singer in “Lola” says, “I got down on my knees…”

Anyway, Bobby Schroeder, a valued longtime reader of Curmie’s page (and a conservative, by the way), responded to Curmie’s post of the meme about Kilmeade, with this: “ABC comedy is more conservative than Fox News?  What in the hell is happening in this world?”

And that prompted Curmie to respond with the line about the “mixed up, muddled up,  shook up world.”  And here we are, Gentle Reader.