Ostentatious moralizing
Julie Bindel also interviewed Doc Stock today, but they’re friends, so it’s different. (I thought Emma Barnett was ok though. I expected her to be a little disapproving, but I don’t think she did.)
I have known Kathleen since 2018, when I discovered her research on gender identity and women’s sex-based rights. We have remained close since then, and I have looked on with horror at the abhorrent treatment she has been forced to endure in recent months.
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[T]o implement self-identification without question is to ignore a key safeguarding problem. As Kathleen puts it, “Self ID policies trade on a fantasy that suddenly putting on a dress or saying ‘I’m a woman’ will change your basic nature. But, in fact, what was there before will be there after. Humans are humans, and if you make it the case that you can self identify into a better situation than you were in — i.e. a woman’s prison as opposed to a male prison, which are usually less intense, aggressive places — then some people will do it, whether they’re trans or not.” And as both Kathleen and I keep saying, this isn’t about every trans person. It’s a safeguarding policy.
She used the f word – fantasy. I keep saying that. It’s a fantasy. Fantasy can be good and healthy if you don’t let it out of the box. Trans ideology lets it out of the box and then uses the box to light a fire.
“These academics were not attending to the obvious consequences for women,” she says. “Yet on the other hand, there were plenty of academics who were cheerleading self-ID, ostentatiously moralising about it, and talking about Terfs and transphobia.”
Ostentatiously moralising about it – that’s another one. The ostentation is very important. If you don’t ostentate somebody might suspect you’re a secret doubter. WIIIIIIIIIIIIITCH
But also the ostentation is a little present to the self. Look at the good I do. Look at my tender concern for the Most Vulnerable (the men in lipstick) and my scorching fury at dissenters (women who know that men are men).
Kathleen continues: “Gender identity theory is egregiously false. It is a terrible, pseudo philosophy and would fail a first-year essay. As a philosopher who cares about logic and truth at a basic level, I couldn’t believe that all these academics were just waving it through.”
But lived experience. Inclusion. Most vulnerable. Case closed.
‘She used the f word – fantasy.’
Her pre-genderism research is about imagination and ‘immersive games’–giving her a unique expertise in what’s going on with genderism.
I’ve recently purchased John McWhorter’s new offering, Woke Racism, which effectively argues that “anti-racism” in its current incarnation is a religion in fact rather than simply in analogy. It is written quite accessibly for such an academic (especially accessibly to Americans of a general education), so it can likely be dismissed as insufficiently sophisticated, but then again religious people always dismiss critiques of their religions as insufficiently sophisticated.
I would posit an extension of his thesis, in that anti-racism is one religious order in the theology of wokeness, and transgenderism is another. The tactics of mob justice via social shaming are the same, often by the same people; the metaphysics are similar, positing as they do in-born and unchangeable identity characteristics as supreme in every aspect of one’s life and personality; and there is an underlying transcendental ideology to the whole thing, insisting on a thing itself being more than the sum of its parts.
All unsupported by and actively hostile to any shred of evidence or reason or simply an alternative point of view which is not explicitly riven with the same theology. At best, you will get people throwing around highly-motivated and poorly-done studies of tiny numbers of people, whose results either say something orthogonal or completely opposed to the activists’ reading of them, and this is supposed to impress the heathen into conversion or bully the heretic into silence.
It is an Abrahamic religion — without the God of Abraham, certainly, but then again many religions do not have a single creator god, and some indeed have no gods at all. And it has its priests, very much including the famously no-priests-in-my-atheism PZ Myers. These religious fanatics are currently attempting to convert everyone to their faith, or amass enough power to force the non-believers into hiding. This must be resisted, firmly and even politely as far as it goes, and the fanatics must come to understand that we live in a secular democracy in which their view is welcome but cannot dominate to the detriment of others.
Such is McWhorter’s prescription for maintaining and extending a healthy society host to a plague of “anti-racists”, and I think it is the same task gender-sketical folks are charged with.
Except when it is sophisticated; then they dismiss it as ignoring people’s lived experiences, and how they actually practice religion. Such is “lived experience” which is the exact opposite of a sophisticated argument.
Slight O/T but I listened to Women’s Hour today, where they had a good interview with Amanda Knox – like the one with Prof Stock she was given a lot of time to make her case, that of how she had been turned into a tabloid hate figure of the Femme Fatale plus Wicked Witch (she didn’t use those terms, my paraphrase). Emma Barnett probed but was respectful and Knox came across as shrewd, thoughtful and principled. There was also a piece about HPV vaccine and the extremely heartening results it has had for preventing cervical cancer. They used the terms “women” and “girls” throughout. Ditto the piece about the menopause – all about women. And a lively contribution from Stockard Channing, who is engaging as well as talented. No-one said “problematic” or “empowering” or “diverse” once.
I think the comparison is very much on topic, to be honest. Amanda Knox was hideously misserved by the Italian justice system, and the American and world press largely played right along, believing such outrageous things as the principal prosecutor arguing that she must have been involved “only a woman would cover a body with a bedsheet”. Similarly, Prof. Stock was slurred innumerable times by falsehoods and vague accusations of “transphobia” without giving her a decent chance to defend her points of view. Was, and in many ways still is, just as many people are still convinced that Knox is some kind of psychopathic sex-crazed killer like the press and prosecutors made her out to be.