Guest post: The void that stared back at me
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba at Miscellany Room 4:
Screechy Monkey wrote:
Actually, following some links from that Pharyngula comments section, the asterisk is supposed to indicate that trans* covers both transsexual and transgender people.
And transfemine, transmasculine, transfemme, transcetera. Like the LGBT… alphabet soup itself, the T keeps splintering into ever more narcissistic subsets. Geek humor: it’s almost like a “recursive” acronym/initialism. Example: GNU, which stands for “GNU is not UNIX.” Ha. Funny, right? No, I’ve never understood the purported humor, either.
Sastra wrote:
I was also unaware of how trans ideology had morphed into the idea that science had done away with the two sexes by introducing a science-based gender identity — and that failure to agree was a form of murder.
That’s exactly how I found my way back here. I checked out of the online atheist/skeptic blogosphere around 2011 when drama was infecting everything. (“Sexual harassment!” “Rapey!” “Racist!” “Sexist!”) I’d mostly ignored the gender-theory stuff. Even when Bill Nye stepped in it with his show, I figured the blow-back was just from right wing religious nutjobs. It was only last year, about this time, actually, that I happened to watch a doc about the Evergreen College affair and read The Coddling of the American Mind.
That spurred research into the efficacy of trigger warnings and safe spaces, which, of course, exposed me to a whole bunch of vocabulary I’d been ignoring. There followed a bunch of youtube searching on pronouns, gender, gender identity, sexual differentiation, and gender identity disorder/dysphoria. Then a slew of hours on JSTOR searching for the same things and related psychological phenomena, etiologies, comorbidities, and treatments. And even more hours digging through philosophy journals for anything vaguely non-gobbledygook explicating the epistemological basis for treating “I feel like an X, therefore I am an X” as an authoritative statement.
The void that stared back at me was an answer all on its own.
So now I’m apparently one of those “anti-SJW bigots” or something, simply because I refuse to convert to Wokism or even recite the Wokecene Creed. On the bright side, it is, at least, a fascinating time to be alive if you’re interested in religion as a phenomenon. We get to see in real time how new religions form, take hold, spread, and gain temporal power. Wheee?
Artymorty wrote:
That’s the problem when a supposedly progressive website prioritizes being “friendly” over the hard work of critical thinking (it’s right there in the blog title): when you turn your brain off and just feel the good vibes, maaaan, it’s very easy to be misled by bad actors. That’s why all those hippie-granola California/Portlandia types keep getting sucked into cults and persuaded by superficial arguments like anti-vax which feel “nice” on the surface but are deeply unscientific and irrational upon critical inspection. There’s nothing rational about prioritizing “friendly” at all costs. It’s actually kinda cowardly, and kinda narcissistic.
If’n you look at ’em, a lot of the responses to Sastra could have been taken verbatim from skeptic-religious discussions. That nominal atheists could deploy them unironically is depressing, since it reveals the sort of lazy cognition that brought them to their atheism in the first place. Rigorous analysis of evidence and argument was not the genesis of their unbelief; following people who gave them goodfeels was.
I initially found it mildly amusing, although I guess more somewhat clever than funny. It’s related to computers, so it uses recursion, so that’s cute, and it defines itself by what it allegedly is not (in fact GNU was mostly an attempt to replicate Unix functionality without being encumbered by Unix copyrights), so that’s sort of a clever wink at GNU’s goal.
The small amount of amusement quickly dissipated, however, when I realized that every time anyone mentioned GNU they’d feel compelled to explain the “joke”. A joke explained over and over and over again is pretty much the opposite of funny.
I absolutely agree. And I would add, there were problems from the other side, too: much of the organized atheist movement I encountered wasn’t at all interested in making the world a better place. They came to their atheist/anti-theist activism not out a desire to improve the lives of disadvantaged people and advance the wellbeing of humanity, but rather to sneer at people they deemed to be stupider than themselves. It was Mensa, only snobbier and meaner. (And frankly, not as smart. Atheism by itself is a pretty low bar for distinguishing the supposed geniuses from the unlearned masses.)
I would go to these atheist-in-the-pub meetups and it would be a room full of arrogant debaters-club boys regurgitating the same arguments against theodicy or whatever, utterly uninterested in the “soft stuff” of human rights — particularly women’s rights — and only even interested in the gay rights angle insofar as it buttressed their position. (I doubt they put much thought into actual lesbians’ and gays’ lives; I doubt they cared all that much about real-gays rather than abstract-gays.)
It was probably because of that that it took me longer than it should have to see the toxicity at FTB. Because many of FTB’s critics, many within atheism, genuinely were hostile to any meaningful discussion of women’s rights, or social progressivism in general. For me, even still, my atheism is about critical thinking and believing in the truth, and it’s also very much about human rights and — these words sound tainted now, isn’t that a shame? — social justice.
So really, both sides within the New Atheism spun apart into separate ridiculous extremist positions — radical quasi-Vulcan libertarian snobs, and radical SJW bleeding-heart zombies. God help us!
Ah, it’s over here now. I just posted a response in the room, which I’ll move over here and tweak a bit.
Nullius in Verba wrote:
I agree with the first part, to an extent, but as I see it a lot of atheists there (and elsewhere) became atheists because they were furious at religion. Partly because of the dogma and irrationality, but in good part because of what they see as the judgement and control, the hypocrisy and greed, the narrow-mindedness and bigotry, and, above all, the way it hurts people. They clearly associate the gender critical position with religion. And they associate religion with fascism, bullying, violence, and forcing other people to do what you want. It’s all of a piece.
I commonly hear that, if only Christians were kind, loving, and tolerant, they’d have no problem with Christianity. If that’s the case, then “rigorous analysis of evidence and argument” isn’t going to take place because the Christians aren’t arguing with anyone. That’s all they ask for.
Ophelia’s phrase — “Truth matters” — indicates a different approach.
They clearly associate the gender critical position with religion? I’m not seeing that. What I see is that they see it as no better than religion, as allied with people who are fanatically religious, but not as like religion itself. I think they see the gender critical position (as opposed to opposition to trans people and LGBT rights more broadly) as belonging to treasonous splitters and wrong-thinkers. It’s “TERFs” they hate, not believers. “TERFs” are radical feminists, so religion is unlikely to be at the core (though I guess there are some goddy radical feminists).
Artymorty # 2 wrote:
I see a lot of that in both positions ( the philosophical and social justice.) Only, instead of just sneering at people they deem stupider than themselves, they sneer at people they consider less tolerant and enlightened than themselves.
The universal antidote I think is to adopt Spinoza’s approach: “I have made a ceaseless effort not to ridicule, not to bewail, not to scorn human actions, but to understand them.” Equal measures needed of both heart and head.
Yeah, I get that, too. I have a lot of truly nice, truly empathetic friends who are Christians, and don’t think about their doctrine other than to tell me “it has nothing to do with the Old Testament god” and “Jesus only actually said the nice stuff”.
In other words, again, about the good feels, and often I hear the same thing from some of the atheist community. Yeah, it’s nice if they’re nice, but…truth really does matter. There are ways to address truth with my liberal god-drunk friends, and not be a jerk, but they do still have a knee-jerk reaction to any attempt at critical thinking…though they are good at that everywhere else!
It’s the same thing in the woke community…what can it hurt if someone wants to believe? Let’s be nice. Which then morphs gradually into don’t you dare disagree with what they believe, because it hurts their feelings. Which eventually can morph into anyone who does disagree becomes some sort of monster and Nazi. And the nice, skeptical, atheistic folks who just wanted to be nice morph into quasi-religious apologists for an ideology as unsound and dogmatic as all the ones they reject.
Ophelia wrote :
I am. Particularly on FA, which regularly posts on religious opposition to transgender rights, which is ideologically grounded in divine doctrine and disgust. They think gender critical atheists must be in cahoots with fundamentalists. They’re making many of the same arguments, after all.
What they don’t realize is that the Religious Right has coopted many of their talking points from gender critical TRA critics, in order to appeal to a larger audience.
Sounds like a great pitch for a new SYFY series.
Ah, right, I was thinking of the Freethought blogs crowd.
Hi all,
Just a note.that I’ve been blocked from this site by my carrier, comcast, for about six weeks. Just came back on last two days. Wondered if certain folks had been sabotaging B&W?
I’ve previously lost access to academic accounts at prestigious European universities, so probably some algorithm used by damn comcast, having nothing to do with trans stuff..
Let’s see if I can get people’s names right this time. Les sigh.
lkr: Have you tried accessing it through a VPN?
Artymorty wrote:
That it is. That it is, indeed. I think that’s why it’s so easy to get snobby about it. Sort of like how easy it is to look down on flat-earthers.
Speaking as an actual quasi-Vulcan snob …
Gender ideologues and religious believers certainly share a strong predilection for word magic, or the idea that you can take whatever applies to X and make it apply to Y by renaming Y as X.
• Both groups have certain propositions they want to be true (“God exist”, “Trans women are women”).
• In both cases we see attempts to prove the proposition* true in some alternative sense by renaming something else as “God” (life, the universe and everything, “whatever exists” etc.) or “women” (people with ‘feminine’ brains/personalities, “whatever biological males who prefer to be called ‘woman’/’she’ happen to be” etc.) respectively.
• In both cases we see attempts at having it both ways: Having “proven” that something called “God” exists, it’s time to smuggle all the supernatural crap, as well as Jesus, the Bible etc. back in. Having “proven” that biological males who prefer to be called ‘woman’/’she’ are something called “women”, it’s time to claim inclusion among biological females (many/most/all of whom may not fit the new definition of “women” at all).
As I keep saying it’s basically equivalent to arguing that clubs for hitting baseballs can fly because they’re called “bats”.
* Actually a different proposition that just happens to look/sound the same in that particular language and if You define the words in that particular way.
I read an excellent article this morning on Quillette.
https://quillette.com/2020/02/02/i-may-have-gender-dysphoria-but-i-still-prefer-to-base-my-life-on-biology-not-fantasy/
It’s a good run-down of the problems with gender ideology from someone who ought to know – a trans woman.
Bully for Debbie. I think she extends the analysis well. Yes, I am perfectly willing to call him “she” out of politeness, because she recognizes that she is still, biologically, male, and also recognizes the damage that transgender ideology can do to women and children. No confusion here: the person who became Debbie feels she needed to do that as treatment for gender dysphoria, but she knows she’s still a man inside. That was a hard thing for her to accept, but she does. Her limit is right where my limit is. She remains part of the reality-based community.
I could quote the whole darn article, but I’m already abusing fair use. Go read it yourself. Debbie tells it like it is.
Ikr @ 10 – not that I know of. Stupid Comcast.
Exactly. And yet we’ve been repeatedly told that the TRA idea of “women” has nothing what so ever to do with the old sexist stereotypes, and any suggestion that it does is a disgusting transphobic strawman and conclusive proof of TERFism, bigotry, hate etc.
A non-circular definition also runs the significant risk of exposing that few if any of the biological females qualify as “women” according to the new definition and that trans women and biological females are not in fact different versions of the same “kind of person” (to the exclusion of trans men and biological males) after all.
Re my comment #12, gender ideologues and religious believers (especially of the “sophisticated” kind) also share the same reluctance to define what the hell they’re talking bout. From what I have gathered the only things that can be consistently said about whatever it is that philosophically sophisticated theists call “God” are:
1. It’s called “God”
2. It has nothing to do with whatever You are arguing against, therefore everything You say can be dismissed as strawmanning.
3. It’s really vitally important that You call it “God”* (rather than, say, “Ogd”, “Dog”, “Zook”, “The Great Green Arkleseizure” etc.)
It seems pretty obvious that this vagueness is a feature rather than a bug. You cannot be accused of saying anthing wrong if You haven’t said anything at all. Other believers can easily interpret a supernatural creator of the universe into whatever sounds are coming out of Your mouth, but atheists can’t find anything specific to argue against, and any attempt at doing so can easily be dismissed as strawmanning.
Likewise, the only things that can be consistently said about whatever it is gender ideologues are talking about when they use the word “women” are:
1. It’s called “women”
2. It has nothing to do with any of the things You’re objecting to, therefore everything You say can be dismissed as strawmanning.
3. It’s really vitally important that You call it “women”** (rather than, say, “men”), so important in fact, that calling it anything else is a hatecrime and comparable to physical violence
* Because then “theism” is right and “atheism” is wrong, and from there it’s a free-for-all.
** Because that makes them the same kind of people as biological females, and from there it’s a free-for-all.
lkr #10, I have Comcast service (Xfinity) and haven’t had a problem with censorship yet (that I know of), but there are things that I know that I don’t know, and other things I don’t know that I don’t know (which I can’t verify). But I digress, no problem with B&W anyway…
Sastra #5
Well put.