Cultural (and legal) "vibe shifts"

And what the heck is up with Maine?

April 15, 2025

On Saturday, Saturday Night Live aired a segment titled, simply, “New Parents.” It’s worth a watch. In it, a gay male couple, Randy and Trevor, joins two straight couples for an evening of drinks and snacks in a New York apartment. Just a few seconds in, Randy and Trevor appear with a baby, to the surprise of their friends. Just the previous day, Randy and Trevor did not have a baby. The entire segment consists primarily of people basically asking, “how do two men make a baby???” (because of course two men cannot make a baby). The segment appears to be criticizing surrogacy (and poking fun at “preferred pronouns,” sex stereotypes, and all of the various “months of visibility” in the process).

“The transphobia is real,” one of the gay men says, for no apparent reason, while talking about the eight languages he allegedly speaks.

His partner says, “God! They should come up with a word for when people have a phobia towards homos!” The straight couples in the room clearly have no fear of or hatred toward gay people. They just can’t get their heads around how two men suddenly have a baby.

Helen Joyce said about the segment, “the vibe shift is real.” She’s right. It is. It has been going on for a while, ever so slowly.

In just 2020, the extremely unfunny Pete Davidson criticized J.K. Rowling for her alleged “transphobia” (seriously, don’t watch that clip because it’s really not funny; it’s just dumb). He was referring to Rowling’s 2020 essay explaining why she decided to talk about sex and gender, following on her 2019 tweet:

Dress however you please.

Call yourself whatever you like.

Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.

Live your best life in peace and security.

But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?

#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill

Davidson also referred to Rowling as a “national treasure,” which is pretty stupid. I’m extremely happy that J.K. Rowling exists and that she has said what she has said, but I don’t think we Americans get to claim her as our own.

Later in 2020, Kate McKinnon appeared in a SNL sketch called “Madame Vivelda.” The sketch was set in 2019, and the Madame Vivelda character was a psychic who predicted the events that would occur over the course of 2020. At the end of the sketch, McKinnon (playing Vivelda) says, “If you see J.K. Rowling, please tell her, ‘Stick to the books.’” It was obviously a message to Rowling: “Knock it off with your transphobia and just stick to writing novels.”

The recent “New Parents” episode reminded me that in 2021, SNL aired a sketch titled “Audacity in Advertising Awards,” and that I posted a thread about it on X. It was a fun sketch mocking bad advertising.

This image appeared in a bit giving an award for the “most egregious ad of the year”:

“The Sacklers” is a reference to the Sackler family, which owned the Purdue pharmaceutical company. Purdue created and heavily marketed OxyContin, fueling the opioid public health crisis in the U.S. My read of that SNL skit was that SNL was comparing “trans” to the opioid crisis. It was calling “trans” a public health emergency that was being fueled by pharma. It was bold, in my view. Nothing came of it, of course, but I thought it was a signal that times were changing, culturally.

And here we still are. Keep fighting, TERFs. We’ll get there. We are getting there, one SNL sketch at a time.

In the meantime, Maine has no present intention of adhering to the February 5 Executive Order on “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” The state Attorney General’s office said so in an April 11 letter that read:

Nothing in Title IX or its implementing regulations prohibits schools from allowing transgender girls and women to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams. Your letters to date do not cite a single case that so holds. To the contrary, various federal courts have held that Title IX and/or the Equal Protection Clause require schools to allow such participation.

The letter went on to cite various federal court rulings to support the state’s position.

Yesterday, an X user posted: “@KDansky If you have time, I would love to see your breakdown of the cases he mentions.”

I’ll provide such a breakdown (and more) in this post. I maintain that the “vibe shift” is not only cultural, but legal. Read on to learn more.

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