Imbalance
Fair Play for Women has a distressing account of a hearing on gender bullshit:
If the latest inquiry into Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reform by the Women and Equalities Select Committee (WESC) is to be productive and worthwhile, it needs to be conducted in a genuine spirit of inquiry and neutrality. Our analysis of the questions asked in the first two hours of oral evidence suggests there is still work to do. Everyone was asked how to make things better for trans people, while the needs of women were not raised with trans panellists. The sympathetic tone and framing of questions to the transgender panellists was in marked contrast to the challenging approach taken with the academics asked to represent women’s concerns. The framing and tone of questions revealed an underlying stance that self-ID was necessary and any discussion to the contrary leads to the trans community being harmed and ignored.
How did this happen? How did government bodies get captured so thoroughly so quickly? Why are so many adults in government so credulous about all this?
For the first hour, MPs on the committee asked a series of gentle, empathetic, and sometimes leading, questions of the trans witnesses. They expressed sympathy with their position, and did not challenge or request evidential back-up for a single claim. That their sympathies lay with trans people and not women was clear from the start.
…
Peter Gibson’s questions were based on the premise that the needs of trans community had simply been ignored by the government rather than fairly balanced alongside all stakeholder groups in society:
“Could you outline to us what impact that being ignored in the government’s proposals will have on the trans community?” and
“if you could outline for us, your views on what the impact on the trans community would be by this being ignored as a result of the consultation.”
But they apparently didn’t ask the academics representing women’s concerns for their views on being ignored.
Somehow women have become the settled, permanent, hidebound, rich and powerful ruling class, while men who say they are women are the forlorn quivering victims of those cruel cold ruthless women.
Repeatedly the MPs asserted that there were difficulties for trans people and asked the women what should be done. They did not ask the trans academics what should be done for women.
Angela Crawley:
“What are the consensus of women’s views around what they feel would perhaps alleviate the fears and concerns but would also address some of these inequalities that are faced by trans community?”
Questions like that for the “trans community” but no questions like that for the female community.
It’s as if everyone’s hypnotized. I don’t get it.
A couple things, I think.
1) The concept of intrinsically trans people with lady- or gentleman-souls resonates with something core to most people’s theory of mind: Cartesian dualism of mind–body or soul–body. “Of course there are people whose souls(minds) are gendered, because I’m me and the gender of my soul matches my body. What? You think that when I die, I’m going to be the other sex in the afterlife? Talk about stupid!”
2) One of the most potentially dangerous aspects of religion is the suspension of disbelief in the face of apparent contradiction. More specifically, it is a dangerous tendency for people to become comfortable with offloading all responsibility of resolving contradictions to figures of perceived authority. That’s what we have here: a dearth of cognitive dissonance. Because they do not experience discomfort in the presence of contradictions, there is no impulse to resolve those contradictions.
Being pretty much a determinist I think it’s more fundamental – and more scary. We appear to have entered the Post Rational Era. It combines our basic neuroplastic vulnerability to repetition and the effectiveness of bullying with the massive message generating power of social media. Sadly, human learning models aren’t anchored in reality and modern zealots of all kinds have recognized this for a lot longer than any academicians. My basic belief is that we are well and completely fucked.
As we’ve talked about before, it doesn’t hurt at all that they hitched their cause to other causes that were successful…after generations of hard work, pain, and in many cases, actual death and suffering. They just add themselves to that, and people nod politely and say, of course.
My thinking is that it’s a combination (in no particular order) of:
1) Nullius’s point 1 above;
2) Somewhat related to 1 but more specific/focused — people really really like the idea of gender roles. Not in the completely old-fashioned sense that women can’t be doctors and astronauts and senators, but in the sense that boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails while girls are sugar and spice and everything nice. “Separate but equal” has really taken root when it comes to gender. It’s the reason why “liberated” modern professional women will paint their baby boy’s room blue and give him trucks to play with and laugh when he’s aggressive and loud, and give their baby girl a pink room and little dollies and lecture them about being well-behaved, and then comment sagely about how AMAZING it is that boys and girls are so different. (To be clear, I’m not a blank slatist — I’m sure there are biological differences. But I think there’s so much difference in how we socialize boys and girls even in our “modern” society that we’ll never know how much is truly biology.) As has been discussed here before, it wasn’t that long ago that they divided toy stores into “boys” and “girls” sections, with the pinkification of everything. Plus gender reveal parties, etc. Note that while the term “feminism” has come back into favor in recent years, to the extent that lots of people are trying to claim it and fight over what it means, it wasn’t THAT long ago that many women were running away from the term. And what were some of the biggest critiques of feminism in popular culture? The notion that feminists were unattractive, hairy, aggressive man-hating women who wanted all women to look and behave like men, who would get angry if a man dared to open a door for them. Trans doctrine plays right into the current zeitgeist that yes, of course, the genders should be equal, but there are definitely womanly ways to look and behave and manly ways, and not merely in the sense that there are general tendencies or correlations — rather, anyone who doesn’t fit into that mold must just be trans. We don’t need to make the box labelled “male” or “female” bigger, we can just move you to the other box!
3) The success of the LGB civil rights movement. (Which I think is what iknklast is alluding to @3, although she might be referring to feminism.) I think a lot of people changed their minds about things like gay marriage pretty quickly, and are left feeling vaguely guilty that they opposed it in the first place. “This time, I’m getting in on the ground floor!” they think. It helps that there are a lot of BAD arguments out there that really are transphobic, coming from the same people for the same (largely religious) reasons — a desire to condemn other people as unnatural, their sex-related behavior as freaking and immoral, etc. — and so it FEELS like a replay of gay rights to a lot of people.
Yep, I initially fell for that bait and switch.
But in giving equal rights to gay men, I did not lose any of my rights.
And in giving equal rights to Lesbians, my significant females and other ladies I know did not have to give up any of their rights.
Allowing women to control their fertility did not cost men any of their rights.
And allowing same-sex marriage, none of us had to give up our rights to marriage. When my lesbian stepdaughter married two years ago, I did have to remind her that we had legalised same-sex marriage, but not divorce. :-)
Even in the fraught area of race, allowing racial equality does not diminish the rights of the dominant race.
Maybe I’m just too old now, but I don’t see how we advance to cause of equality for all by making women, and only women, give up their hard-won rights.
Regarding Nullius’s point 1 above, I certainly agree (having made the same point before) but feel I have to say that ‘something core to most people’s theory of mind: Cartesian dualism of mind–body or soul–body’ really should read ‘something core to most WESTERN people’s theory of mind: Cartesian dualism of mind–body or soul–body’ (with the mathematical intellect regarded as the highest part of humanity), particularly since I spent the summer and autumn translating a short story by Shiga Naoya, perhaps the most quintessentially Japanese of modern Japanese writers, in whose work you find no clear distinction between ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ and body and sensation. I have my quarrels with ‘cultural relativism’, particularly when it is used as a prop for nationalism, but people from cultures so different as East Asian ones and Western ones really do think and feel differently.
To go a little further: there is in the Western mind as it has come to be, it seems to me, an extraordinary thirst for clarity and definition, and a dislike of ambiguity: x, not y – which is demonstrated in the proliferation of definitions or designations or labels to which certain people feel constrained to subscribe and to regard themselves as coming under, since they (the labels) give the illusion of clearly and correctly describing things that are in fact ambiguous and unformed.
Following iknklst at #3, they’ve done a proper propaganda job in adopting the language and timbre of the causes they’re piggybacking on. Not just the easier conflation with LGB rights, but pretty much anything they can add a trans twist to – for example “forcing someone to undergo an unwanted puberty” is a direct echo of abortion rhetoric.
I really thought that them turning “black lives matter” into “black trans lives matter” would be a peaking point for many, given the irrelevance of gender issues to the whole institutionally-racist-murdering-cops in general and George Floyd /Breanna Taylor in specific, but the wokesters just ate it right up.
IMHO there is a functioning mind-body duality simply because the words ‘mind’ and ‘body’ refer to separate understandable entities and have meanings separate and real enough.
“It crossed my mind the other day that Donald Trump is a galah” is a valid statement regardless of my bodily disposition or location at the time my mind was crossed by that idea.The distinction as far as I am aware goes back the ancient Greeks, and for ‘mind’ they could substitute ‘soul’ or ‘personality’ and it would not change much. From there, it only required a little bit of semantics and wordplay to come up with a proof sufficient for a declaration that the soul / mind / personality carried within the body yet distinct from it is immortal, and will survive the inevitable death of the body in which it is carried, and to some extent controls.
This was taken up and further refined by theologians of various schools. The rest is history.
Accordingly, I hope to live long enough to see it included in a learned, and esteemed multi-volume work bearing an impressive title such as The Oxford History of Bullshit.
Omar #9
But East Asian culture, and that of other areas, too, do not derive from Greek thought and the lucubrations of Christian theologians. ‘The rest is history’ seems to assume that only the West has a history.
And, as the example of Descartes shows, it was not only Christian theologians (whose books may in many minds be happily be consigned to the flames, though I – an atheist – wonder whether they can be so peremptorily dismissed) who thought in such terms but an immensely influential philosopher, about whom the twentieth-century philosopher Bernard Williams thought it worth his while to write an extremely closely argued book – so closely argued that it was a great struggle to get through for someone like myself. The influence of Plato & Descartes has also a great bearing on epistemological thought today.
I’ll add another factor into the pile of Reasons Why Gender Ideology Is Appealing: its emphasis on the right of the individual to determine the course of their own life. When framed as choices made in defiance of a restrictive Establishment, it seems like an obvious cause for liberals to support. And in many cases — such as those involving homosexuality— it is.
I’m separating this motivation from the general umbrella of Gay Rights though because I think it transcends any particular cause. I also think it particularly applies to transgender issues when it gets to the mental characteristic of “knowing who we are” being the predecessor of knowing where we want to go. This right to subjective self-knowledge and self-determination comes into conflict with the science-based requirement that a diagnosis rests on objective criteria — and the Romantic impulse overtakes the Age of Reason all over again.
Tim @ various: You might be overestimating the difference between East and West in this case. A belief in an afterlife not of the body presumes a mind–body distinction, and neither Japan nor China is without ghost stories. One cannot have an afterlife separate from the body if there is nothing to separate from the body. I’m not disputing that there are important epistemological differences between cultures—even basic cognitive differences; e.g., visual processing—but much of folklore (or religion, or literature, or …) is incoherent and unintelligible without a mind–body conceptual distinction.
Tim Harris @#10:
There are histories out there of every aspect of life and the various nations and domains of physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual (religious and otherwise) pursuit.
I was a student of a Japanese martial art for 27 years until an unrelated health problem forced me to desist. So I apologise if I gave the impression in my comment above that I thought that it was only the West that had a history. While we are on that, I recommend Joseph Needham FRS, Science and Civilisation in China. ( https://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu01se/uu01se0u.htm ) Individual volumes in the 27-volume series are for sale online at prices ranging from $224 to around $350 AUD each, so involvement of a bank manager would seem appropriate for the keenest minds and bodies in pursuit of that. (There are condensations around. I had one, but some bastard I lent it to seems to have held onto – I won’t say pinched – it. Must chase that one up.)
Hope this helps. And you are on the right track: no book, no matter how abysmal, should ever be destroyed. It will always have possible use for someone in future.
I still think cognitive dissonance is a major part of the explanation as well. The first small concessions may have seemed both harmless and benign at the time (“That doesn’t seem quite right to me, but if it helps a marginalized group feel more welcome/respected/safe/included, then whatever, what’s the harm? Maybe I just need to ‘shut up and listen’, or ‘educate’ myself like everyone keeps saying. etc. etc.” ), but now you have a stake in defending them. The same rationalizations used to justify concessions A,B,C, make it very hard to resist concessions D,E,F without looking inconsistent or hypocritical, even to yourself (pretty much the definition of cognitive dissonance). By the same logic it’s very hard to resist concessions G,H,I etc. On the way over to the dark side you never “cross a line” where things instantly and abruptly change from “definitely ok” to “definitely not ok” and before you know it you have gone all the way to X,Y,Z and burned all the bridges behind you, and now there’s no way back without admitting to yourself and the world that you’ve been wrong all along, that your justifications were all bogus, and that you may in fact have been a bit of an A-hole.
Roj Blake #5,
It may not have cost men any “rights”, but it sure cost them a lot of power. Power is a zero-sum game. Every woman who has control over her own reproductive capacity necessarily deprives men of control over her reproductive capacity.
I contend that this is why abortion is such a flash point, and predict that it will remain so.
Here’s a thought I was mulling over this morning regarding “cancel culture”* but Bjarte@15 makes me wonder if it’s applicable here as well. (Also Roj and Sastra’s comments.)
There are lots of ideas that don’t actually command majority support, but that gain purchase in the culture because most of the people who disagree simply aren’t motivated to push back or are deterred from doing so. Most people would rather put their heads down and avoid conflict if there’s nothing at stake for them personally and no other powerful motivating force.
That’s why the social movements that have encountered the most resistance are the ones that threaten a lot of people’s personal privileges and/or conflict with religious beliefs. It’s why you can’t get a lot of political support with overtly racist statements, but if you dress up those beliefs in a way that provokes people’s fears (they’re coming for your jobs, there’s going to be crime in your nice suburban streets, your children’s nice schools will become lousy schools) you can get a fair bit of support from people who would quite sincerely swear to you that they “don’t have a racist bone” in their bodies.
Conversely, most people just don’t feel they have much at stake in the trans debates. For them, it’s just about what name and pronoun you use for a handful of famous trans people, which they correctly ascertain is no skin off their nose. Most women aren’t competitive athletes, and therefore aren’t terribly worried about the small probability that a trans woman will join their sport in their area and take their spot or injure them. Etc. So even though I’m pretty confident that most people agree with (e.g) what JK Rowling has actually said, very few are willing to wade in to that debate and take all the flak that would be incoming.
*OT: my thought was “ok, I don’t buy into most of the hand-wringing about ‘cancel culture’ — I find the supposed examples either perfectly fine, or sufficiently rare and/or minor in importance. But supposing I bought the thesis that our culture is falling apart and liberal discourse is gravely threatened by it, is there any sense in which electing Donald Trump helped oppose it, or that re-electing him would have helped forestall it? Social problems generally require social solutions; the government usually isn’t driving the bus.”
The percentage of people who can be this guy is small. We saw a couple of them this summer when BLM protesters bullied restaurant-goers into raising their fists. A few refused, despite social pressure and verbal abuse, including one woman who had actually been marching for BLM only days prior. One interviewer couldn’t seem to understand why she didn’t submit.
See also: pluralistic ignorance, the Abilene paradox, and a spiral of silence.
If you provoke people’s fears, you can get them to support anything, even things they would otherwise vehemently oppose. It’s why we’re locked into a lesser-of-two-evils race to the bottom: each party portrays the other’s dominance as apocalyptic.
Yes that issue of allowing women to control their fertility and how it relates to men’s rights is perennially interesting. It’s a basic truism of sociobiology that eggs are expensive and sperm is cheap. That one little observation provides a lot of clues to why males might want to dominate females. We had to touch on this point when writing Does God Hate Women?
If I may step back for a second to the East versus West ways of thinking: some years ago, I read Richard Nisbett’s “The Geography of Thought”, and found it illuminating. I’d love to read further on the topic, if anyone wishes to pass along some recommendations.
Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian.
Meera Nanda: everything she’s written.
Re East (and other regions) & West (Omar & Nullius & Sackbut): in many non-Western cultures, spirit beings are simply part of this world and part of life, and not beings from some spiritual realm that is almost totally severed from this world in good Platonic fashion (Christianity is really more Greek than Judaic in provenance). And the fact that the Japanese and Chinese have ghost stories does not change this. Read the wonderful stories of Pu SongIing, with their dry Chinese humour, in which people have love affairs with fox spirits and ghosts, and even marry them on occasion and have children with them – they are entertaining, yes, but there is also something deeper there. I don’t want to sound condescending in any way, but it seems to me that a great many Westerners, since their brains have been formed by Christianity and Cartesian thought, as well as by the sense, deriving also from imperialism, that the West has freed itself from the ‘childhood’ of humanity, so that peoples and religions may be categorised as ‘primitive’ or as ‘advanced’ (the only truly advanced one, of course, being Christianity, assuming one is a Christian), find it extraordinarily difficult to grasp the fact that other cultures simply do not think in the way educated Westerners think: they see everything through the lens of the Western thought that has formed their brains (I am refraining carefully from saying ‘minds’).
Personally, I find Christianity just as ‘primitive’, if one wants to use the word, as any other religion, and perhaps even more so in the general intolerance that goes with it.
Yes, Sackbut, Nisbett’s book is an illuminating one (I read it years ago); and, Omar, I have in my library at least three volumes of Needham’s great history of Chinese science – even in the days when the volumes were first coming out, they were frighteningly expensive and I found myself having to refrain from buying them!
And speaking of ‘primitivism’, one may take Nullius’s moniker in the sense of ‘nothing in words’ (strictly speaking, it means something more like ‘take no-one’s word’) and note, in connexion with proliferation of terms that have come about with respect to trans-issues, that there seems to be a ‘primitive’ assumption that because some term has come into existence that sounds vaguely scientific there must be a reality that corresponds to it.