They too believe
Susanna Rustin at the Guardian was thinking the feminism-transism standoff was starting to ease a little, but now she isn’t. The mainstream types are too close to the loonies for that to be the case.
Starmer’s recent comments on the Andrew Marr Show, along with remarks by the new Green party co-leader Carla Denyer, make it clear that they too believe that gender-critical feminists’ ideas are beyond the pale. Asked by Marr whether it is transphobic to say that only women have a cervix, a reference to a comment made by Labour MP Rosie Duffield last year, Starmer replied: “It is something that shouldn’t be said. It is not right.” Not only does Starmer disagree with Duffield’s use of the word “woman” to refer to biological sex rather than gender identity; he thinks women who hold such views should keep quiet. Denyer, meanwhile, called the gender-critical gay and lesbian rights charity LGB Alliance a “hate group”.
Quite. They’ve turned their backs on women in favor of cossetting gender-fanatics. Half the population, the half that ensures there is a population, meh, but men in lipstick taking women’s places at the Olympics, stunning and brave.
In common with others, including the philosopher Jane Clare Jones, I also see a connection with the environment. I think there are parallels between the failure to address the implications of our planet’s finite resources and our dependence upon it, and the idea that human potential is boundless. While I want people to be free to live as they choose, I also believe that human bodies have limits. And I am concerned about the influence on young people of the idea that, with the aid of medical technology, these can be transcended.
That, yes, and along with that there’s the disproportion – the urgency of our predicament on this cooking planet compared to the triviality of any one person’s idenniny. Gender dogma is intensely annoying because of this conceited “we can do anything” grandiosity, and also because of its adolescent selfishness and Look At Me-ism. I have looked at you, over and over, and all there is to see is self-centered dramatics. The longer this goes on and the more it escalates, the less possible it is to respect anything about the belief system.
” I have looked at you, over and over, and all there is to see is self-centered dramatics.”
This ties into this academic article from the BJPsych Bulletin published last year. I read it, and everything about this harmful ideology clicked into place.
“Within current debates, if gender identity becomes uncoupled from both biological sex and gendered socialisation , it develops an intangible soul-like quality or ‘essence’. As a pure subjective experience, it may be overwhelming and powerful but is also unverifiable and unfalsifiable.
If this identity is held to be a person’s innermost core concept of self, then questioning the very existence of gender identity becomes equated with questioning that person’s entire sense of being, and consequently risks being considered a threat to the right to exist, or even as a threat to kill. Behaviours such as ‘misgendering’ or ‘dead-naming’ are understood by proponents of gender theory to be destructive, debasing and dehumanising. This might explain why the prevailing discourse has become as sensitive and at times inflammatory as it has.”
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjpsych-bulletin/article/sex-gender-and-gender-identity-a-reevaluation-of-the-evidence/76A3DC54F3BD91E8D631B93397698B1A
“Human bodies have limits”. But Gender Identity is deliberately uncoupled from the Human Body, and its adherents reject the idea of limits.
Indeed. Souls are a dangerous thing to believe in.
Depends on what you define a soul as… If “souls” are indeed a thing (and they might be) they’re almost certainly not an internal true essence or anything else we’re capable of understanding. The vessel shapes its contents, not the other way around.
FYI, via Helen Joyce’s twitter here are episodes 1-10 of the Nolan Show investigation of Stonewall courtesy of Google Drive, in case you’ve tried to listen directly from the BBC and found you couldn’t. Just download and listen.
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/100DGRXY3IqMgyGrt-pS8_cxOcRcb2OkM
Thank you J.A.! Spinster has been talking about this, and I haven’t had the chance to listen to it yet.
Thanks for the article, Mostly Cloudy. It was a good read. I wonder if the TRAs have found it yet, and called for violence against the authors.
I was amused to see them bring up Cartesian dualism. Isn’t that at the root of all this transhumanism?
Considering experiments they’ve done firing electricity through pig brains you probably could test out Cartesian dualism. Bringing back a somewhat brain damaged individual in that fashion should be possible. Now bringing back a rotted brain, obviously not, but a well preserved one perhaps.
Wonder how that’d affect “gender identity”…
Thanks for the article, Mostly Cloudy. The descriptions of Sex, Gender, and Gender Identity in Box 1 are a good starting point. Clearly states that sex is dimorphic.
I was late to the party on a previous thread, so forgive my bringing it forward for comment:
I don’t get it. If sex is not an objective fact, if gender isn’t about sex organs, if lesbians can have dicks, if you are the gender you feel you are, if there are no sexes but persons with uteri and persons with phalli–then what goddamn difference does it make which puberty you go through, and why bother with “corrective” surgery?
What do they say to that?
BKiSA, I was a taxi driver throughout the nineties, based in a village a few hundred metres from a very well-established (its 200th anniversary happened while I lived there) mental hospital, where they treated people with traumatic brain injury as well as those with mental illnesses. I met people who had suffered TBI, and their families, and the latter often confided with me when I drove them on their way back to their home, the station or airport, that their loved one had gone; and been replaced by a total stranger in the same body. There are so many variables, that when a brain repairs itself it’s very unlikely to re-grow the same personality it had before the injury. I couldn’t square that fact with the idea of an immortal soul, and nor could a lot of people, hence their expressed belief that their loved one was inside there somewhere, waiting to appear once the brain had been properly healed. One upon a time so few people survived TBI that it wouldn’t have been common to see someone with a new personality. Those few that did? The change would likely have been explained away by saying the original soul had died and been replaced by a demon or some such. In any case, there has been no evidence whatsoever for a soul, and a whole heap of evidence that what I think of as ‘me’ is actually just what my brain does and cannot be found anywhere, just as ‘running’ is what my legs (used to) do.
My suggestion was more that if you revived a brain and it (mostly) resembled the deceased then that itself would be incredibly compelling evidence *against* Cartesian dualism. Anything else just gets into proper necromancy (reuniting body with soul, that sort of thing).