This is one area where society could use a little Halloween or “SF Convention Cosplay” or Burning Man therapy. After a few experiences where you find that your auto mechanic is dressed like a Klingon or your checkout store guy has a beard and a tutu, you will get used to it and realize it just doesn’t matter. Naked people too, which is where Burning Man is useful.

Society won’t dissolve. The people who told you that, told you the same would happen with gay marriage and adoption. They were slaves of what is actually fashion.

I’m actually bothered a bit more by subtle Stalinist historical revisionism, where we pretend that the past was not how it was, but how it should have been. That’s fine where anachronism is obvious, or when fantasy is part of the schtick, like a Renaissance Pleasure Faire or SCA gathering. I just don’t like it pushing a subliminal propaganda.

I was in a Wells Fargo bank the other day admiring a wall photo recreation of a Wells, Fargo stage coach with four horses, driver on the right, with reins and right foot on the wheel brake, and an armed “special messenger” on the LEFT indicating the stage had a strong box (passengers hated this sign that the stage was hence a target for highwaymen), and so on. In the Old West they never called this “riding shotgun” though the shotgun messenger invariably had a short double barrel weapon (we get the term from Gunsmoke). But is was all fine in the picture and very romantic.

Closeup is a new photo. “Shotgun messenger” in Stetson and vest is seen in this one to be a black man, which is only slightly less believable than a woman in the same job and costume. Politically correct now. But he’s not armed with anything (his entire reason for existence), because Guns Are Bad.

Rather than than that leftist “recreation” I’d rather have had the bank official I dealt with cross-dressed as a green Orion animal slave woman. There is a difference between fantasy and lies.

Are there jobs where clothing and uniform is like BFOQ and part of the job? Yes. Your helmet or boots or rank insignia in the field in the military. But society is ever full of assholes who want to run your life, so that in the military in formal uniform a woman’s skirt must be not below the knee or above it. And indoors she may NOT wear a skirt with boots. Men may not wear a skirt at all (in the US, not Scotland). Society would apparently dissolve.

In an organization whose prime purpose is killing and destruction if necessary, such minor nitpicking is beyond redemption, and simply represents the hazing and psychological damage the military is designed to do to its members. Common sense is not as common as generally thought. As Einstein remarked, most of common sense is just crap you happened to be taught at home before age five. Some of it makes no real sense at all.

A nuanced yet extremely important issue in our time.

Sure hope common sense, which seems to be in short supply, wins out!