Guest post: Incapable of coping
Originally a comment by Sastra on They are appalled.
I just watched the film. It’s mostly just talking heads with a few sometimes awkward special effects thrown in, but still worth seeing. It’s worth seeing even if you believe TWAW, so you understand the concerns. I’ve read enough of the other side to guess what they’d object to, and why.
… it endangers trans* people on campus and beyond, erasing their identities and encouraging the spread of hateful portrayals.
Sometimes hyperbole like this makes it harder to maintain my natural sympathy and respect for trans people because it diminishes their stature. Instead of ordinary human beings struggling with difficult problems and searching for meaning and happiness, they start to sound like emotional basket cases on the verge of a breakdown, incapable of coping with disagreement or thinking straight. They, on the other hand, seem to think this fragility ought to move our sympathy for what must surely be such a horrible situation it would break down even the strongest.
I’m reminded of a time when PZ announced he was going to desecrate a blessed communion wafer and this got picked up by some online Catholic groups. The devout started pouring into the comment section of Pharyngula in various stages of distress. One overwrought woman informed us that treating the Consecrated Host with disrespect caused her so much anguish that she’d rather her 6 year old daughter was raped, then for that to happen. That little revelation didn’t inspire pity. It inspired contempt for the system, yes — but also for her. She’d lost her perspective.
Thinking about this, I’m starting to wonder how the transgender-identified male would deal with this Sophie’s Choice. Would they rather 1) be socially thought of as men who believe they’re woman and consequently denied a right to enter at least some single-sex spaces or 2) be raped, beaten, and left for dead? If they honestly think it’s the latter, well, I think they ought to sort out their priorities, as Ron would say.
There’s also the response of violent Islamists to “desecration” of the Koran. It doesn’t inspire sympathy so much as fear. But if it gets them what they want, do they care? I see a whiff of this in transactivism. No beheadings, but certainly violence.
I downloaded a book on Skepticism by Donald Prothero because it was cheap on Kindle. It’s from 2010, so it predates much of the current poisonous attitude among skeptics and atheists over the transgender “rights” issues. Even though Prothero is a good writer, I realized quickly that it treads the same tired ground that almost all the skeptical books from that era cover. Bigfoot, chemtrails, creationism, global warming denial, etc. And I realized that the main problem with the “skeptical community” is that there are a set list of subjects that can be safely approached and elicit chuckles about weird things that other people believe. But even skeptics have our pet beliefs that lead us to be defensive and touchy when they are approached skeptically.
Diet is one of them, and I made people angry by pointing out that alkaline diets are woefully ineffective because of kidneys and livers,as well as being based on junk science. Genetic engineering and GMO’s is another, and I almost got kicked out of a bar because a guy was yelling at me for asking what the issues are with transgenic foods and hormones. I was just supposed to “accept” that since Monsanto had made Agent Orange everything that they did was evil.
So, even within the “skeptic community” there are concepts that are sacrosanct. They cannot be discussed because even to discuss them is to be hateful, and cause distress, like the statement that “transwomen are women.”
Discussion of this is either shot down outright, and called unscientific, or mocked. But it’s never defended skeptically. Harreit Hall’s review of a gender skeptical book was removed from a skeptical site, and three posts on the emotional distress of being transgender were put in its place as a response, and this by an organization that mocks those who commit to antiscientific beliefs in medicine, and cause real harm.
And we all know what that looks like, don’t we?
We’re “hurting religious feelings” here. And the defense of religious feelings is used to justify atrocious acts. This is why transactivists get by with their threats and their violence, it’s because they are in service to a “higher cause.”
The violence will escalate as long as we accept it, as long as we privilege those who are considered the “real victims here.” The women of WDI who were physically attacked in Oakland, egged, had their sign stolen and burned for protesting the idea that Dana Rivers could be put in a woman’s prison in California, can attest to how such hatred escalates. When the even the skeptical community writes it off a justified violence against “TERFs,” it emboldens the activists.
The survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre recognize this. Skeptics of religion were horrified, and they should be able to see this as more of the same thing.
If I remember correctly, I once got the same book out of the library and was disappointed to find the introduction was by Michael Shermer.
Mike Haubrich #2
Another way of putting it would be to say that there are no “skeptics”. Either that or “skeptic™” is just another brand name, a tribal Identity label, a short-hand for “whatever my kind of people happen to be”. “Thinking critically” is a verb phrase, not a noun phrase. It’s about doing, not about being a special kind of person called a “skeptic”, a “critical thinker” etc. It’s also an ideal perpetually strive towards, not a destination you ever arrive at.
As I have said many times I no longer think “skeptics” reach their conclusions in very different ways than the so-called “true believers”. It’s just that rooting for “team science” (as long as it doesn’t conflict with their sacred cows) confirms their particular tribal identity. Critical thinking might lead to non-belief in homeopathy and Bigfoot, but that doesn’t mean non-belief in homeopathy and Bigfoot leads to critical thinking. It doesn’t take critical thinking to reject ideas that don’t agree with your biases anyway, and most self-identified “skeptics” don’t have any vested interests in defending homeopathy and Bigfoot. Many of them (including some of the supposed “thought leaders”) do have a vested interest in climate change denial, which is why “skeptics” are no less likely to be climate change deniers* than anyone else in my experience.
As much as movement skeptics like to think of themselves as Spock and elevated above all that touchy-feely “value” stuff, it seems to me that true critical thinking is at least as much about attitude as it is about skills. Without the proper self-questioning attitude acquiring the tools of critical thinking only gives you more excuses for rejecting any conclusion you happen to dislike for ideological, tribalistic or purely self-serving reasons.
I still see a lot of comments to the effect that wokism killed skepticism. That’s really not how I remember it at all. Even before the trans craze, it was pretty clear that there was no baby in that bathwater. It was the MRAs and altrighters who killed skepticism (or exposed it as the rotting cadaver it had always been). If anything the wokesters just put it out of its misery.
*Or at the very least enter into false balance territory whenever the topic comes up.
This once again admirably illustrates a point I’ve been making earlier. There are no brownie points for doing the right thing as one sees it if the way one sees it is based on blind faith rather than any honest attempt* to find out what’s true. In my militant atheist days I spoke to several Ex-Christians whose parents were convinced they were going to Hell, and rightly so (!). One might be tempted to think people would require very compelling reasons to embrace a position like that, but apparently anything goes. Indeed, I don’t think the following is a particularly dishonest** representation of the mindset:
I don’t care if it makes sense for such a person to arrive at such a conclusion given what they believe about God, sin, the afterlife etc., since the real error was leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place. In other words the problem is not just wrong beliefs, but believing things for the wrong reasons (as you have to do to believe in God, since no other reasons are available). The fact that not all faith-based beliefs are equally harmful in practice is pretty much irrelevant. The same kind of wrong reasons that gave us Jainism also gave us Jihadism. As Sam Harris (yeah, I know, but he has made some valid points along with all the stupid ones) once put it, “Faith, if it’s ever right about anything, is right by accident”. Even if the wrong reasons lead you to embrace the most benign belief system imaginable, it will be absolutely no thanks to you, as long as the only thing preventing you from flying planes into buildings or supporting eternal torture of your own children is that the coin-flip of faith came up heads rather than tails.
* Rationalizing a fixed, pre-determined conclusion does not count as an “honest attempt”.
** In my experience fundie parents tended to object to me saying the quiet parts out loud, but not offer any substantial corrections. In other words: “I don’t like the way you’re saying it”, but not “Here’s why it’s wrong”.
*****
What I have noticed in all the above examples of expression of extreme faith beliefs, is that the person expressing them is patently a psychopathic narcissist.
They are perfectly content with God, or ‘gender-affirming’ surgeons, torturing other people, in particular their own children, but don’t intend, or expect, to be tortured themselves.