The desire to make certain views unchallengeable
Helen Dale reviews Helen Joyce’s Trans:
Trans people are, after all, a small proportion of the population, whose individual cases are riddled with complexities. And yet we’re currently being offered striking and simplistic narratives that must be upheld if one is to be considered among the morally meritorious. It’s why I don’t want to write about trans issues with the same enthusiasm I did about Brexit. If you’re interested in intellectual history, constitutional law, and parliamentary procedure, then Brexit was like Christmas morning. Apart from certain Continuity Remain conspiracists and Leaverish swear-bears – both easily avoided – the arguments for and against were finely balanced.
Trans isn’t like that. One ‘side’ is clearly right; the other ‘side’ is clearly wrong. Yet it’s the side that punches through wrong and comes out near Young Earth Creationism that, until recently, held the upper hand in local controversies and still does in the United States.
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Like Douglas Murray’s The Madness of Crowds, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, and Kathleen Stock’s Material Girls, Trans brings out what happens when people gain social approbation by endorsing ‘high status’ narratives. Much of this status enhancement turns on believing a mental illness requiring treatment (gender dysphoria) and the behaviour attaching to it (gender non-conformity and bodily discomfort) amount to a human rights claim requiring public and legal affirmation.
Affirmation and, more intensely, validation. We have to “validate” the delusion, on pain of shunning and punishment.
The desire to make certain views unchallengeable means disagreements – especially those covered widely in the press – must be pathologised. Misrepresentation is rife, with criticism and debate offered by dissentients given implications that weren’t there and weren’t intended. This moves to catastrophising, whereby expressing any doubt is characterised in ways that invoke extinction. Stop Trans Genocide MMA fighter McLaughlan’s shirt read last Saturday. The classic catastrophising in trans activism is ‘you are erasing my/our/their existence’.
Helen notes that the four books have different appeals, which she spells out for us so that we can pick just one. Murray and Stock both have a dry wit, she tells us.
If, however, you look to grasp the extent to which gender identity ideology, both academic and popular, bears comparison with the worst sort of pseudoscience, then Joyce is your pick. I suspect Richard Dawkins endorsed Trans because, as is his wont, he spotted a quasi-religious movement whose ultimate target is not Labour’s all-women shortlists or women’s sports or even feminism as a political ideology, but Charles Darwin and evolutionary biology and beyond that the scientific method itself.
I think it’s simpler and more basic than that. I think Dawkins, like so many of us, does not like being ordered to “validate” a lie. I’ve always liked this about him, though the liking was a bit occluded during the Elevatorgate era. I think it’s not limited to evolution or even science but to the much broader category of bullshit. We (those of us who do) think it’s bullshit, and shouting won’t make us stop thinking so.
And just as perverse, the belief that gender non-conformity is all the evidence needed to be trans, and if you are gender non-conforming, you need to be transed in a hurry. This is undoing so much of what feminism has done, and is unsettling for those of us who recognize that, yes, we are non-binary, in the same sense that all of us are. We are non-binary in terms of gender expectations, not neatly falling into one stereotype box or the other with our behaviors. We don’t demand special pronouns, special attention, focus on me, or any of that. We just fought for the right to be who we were without having to wear dresses, corsets, hoop skirts, or whatever, and the right to move into the vocational sectors that most suited our tastes and abilities.
Now even our history is being stolen, with wonderful trail-blazing women being posthumously transed just because they took the only route available to them to thrive in a world created and dominated by men.
Picking nits….
I believe the [s] in “amount[s]” is wrong. The subject of “amount” is “a mental illness… and the behaviour…”, ¿no?. Two separate things, so plural.
Except now that I’m re-reading the full sentence, I’m having trouble parsing it. On the one hand, it doesn’t make sense to say that “a mental illness… and the behaviour… amount to a human right claim.” On the other hand, if it’s supposed to be “…enhancement turns on believing… amounts to a human rights claim,” there’s something missing. I think it’s just poorly written.
“Oh, but what about feminine, frilly-dress wearing transmen, and transwomen who are butch lesbians with beards??? They’re not gender-nonconforming the way YOU think of it, they’re gender-nonconforming according to the gender they know they are!! Your simplistic understanding of trans folx lacks nuance, sophistication, and state-of-the-art information.”
Gender-conforming-nonconforming-genderists (aka gender -nonconforming-gender-conformists) are the intersex people of gender.
Sastra, that’s so right on the nose. It makes me think of Christians whenever someone tries to deal with their belief system. If you deal with the theology and so forth, they will tell you “But that has very little to do with everyday faith! That isn’t what most people are believing.” If you deal with everyday faith, then they say “Oh, but you ignored the sophisticated theology!” The expectation that anyone questioning anything deal with every aspect of the situation, including the ones they just now changed while you were talking, is so very, very similar again to the religious apologies.
A very good & cogent review.
I wonder, What a Maroon, if this might not be a difference between writing that ieans more towards more British than American writing (I am supposing that Dale, whom I hadn’t heard of before, is the Australian writer). In the former manner of writing, a collective noun like ‘the government’ is often given a plural verb-form (‘The government are thinking of that this, that and the other.’), whereas in American writing, because ‘government’ is a singular noun, it seems it must take a singular form of the verb. Here, it seems to me that Dale is doing the opposite sort of thing – there are two nouns ‘mental illness’ and the ‘behaviour’ associated with it, but because they are so closely associated they are being lumped together as forming a single thing. Whether Dale is, strictly speaking, incorrect or not, her sentence seems absolutely natural and lucid to me.
Tim Harris,
The original was plural; Ophelia added the “[s]”. Either way, it doesn’t quite hold up.
Hmm, I take your point, I’ll correct my hypercorrection.
See, this is why I like this place. Well, not just this, but it’s nice to be able to be pedantic about such things and be taken seriously.
I’m very pedantic about editing (including being edited). I just got this one wrong – I somehow missed that there were two subjects instead of one. Bracket crime – not as bad as the ACLU’s but still bad.
Ah! It was Ophelia! I certainly agree that the original way it doesn’t hold up – it seems odd because one is not sure which noun is supposed to be the subject.
Somehow the Douglas Murray book completely escaped my notice, possibly because I confused it with the Charles Mackay book of similar title that has also been recommended here. Adding it to my increasingly long to-read list.
I just finished Material Girls, so two so far out of the four mentioned in the review.
I admire Helen Dale’s succinct and pithy writing.
On the offending paragraph – the gist is clear enough though I agree the wording is clumsy.
“Much of this status enhancement turns on believing a mental illness requiring treatment (gender dysphoria) and the behaviour attaching to it (gender non-conformity and bodily discomfort) amount[s] to a human rights claim requiring public and legal affirmation.”
I have tried re-phrasing:-
“Much of this status enhancement turns on holding a belief – the belief that someone inflicted with a mental illness requiring treatment (gender dysphoria) and who behaves accordingly (gender non-conformity and bodily discomfort) must have their illness and behaviour celebrated publicly and legally affirmed, with failure to do so being a violation of their human rights.”
That’s a bit wordy but I think that’s what she means.
“The current fashion for depicting equal male and female contact-fighting capacity in films is the work of creators who don’t understand why boxing has weight divisions.”
I’ve read this before – that one reason that many young women seem to be quite happy to have men invade their spaces is that they take the “girls kick ass” meme literally. They seem to think that there is no great difference in the physical strength of the sexes, whereas any woman who has ever been punched, or held down by a man, even a small, unathletic one, knows that there is.
English is obviously not my native language, but for what it’s worth. I’d say the “s” is correct. My first education was in (German) syntax, and in this case the subject of the embedded clause is not one or both of the noun phrases (“a mental illness […] and the behaviour…), but the whole infinitive clause that begins with “believing…”. Speaking of which, we say “seeing is believing”, not “seeing are believing”. Adding objects to the infinitive clause (“seeing x and y”) doesn’t change that.
Bjarte,
If “believing” were the subject, then yes, it would take a singular form. But then the sentence falls apart: “Much of this status enhancement turns on believing… amounts to a human rights claim requiring public and legal affirmation.” Perhaps “the notion (or idea or claim) that believing… amounts…”.
I think as it’s written it’s missing something. KBPlayer’s rephrasing works better, if it captures her meaning.
Anyway, sorry for getting stuck on this point. Much of my day job involves reading and writing dense texts about arcane subjects, and all too often I find myself bogged down in such morasses.
What a Maroon #14
You’re right, I really need to learn to stop commenting after working nightshifts.
The fact that I understand this sentence almost frightens me.
Your Name’s not Sir Humphrey Appleby, either?