Guest post: What kind of “experts”?
Originally a comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room 8.
Experts said that young people increasingly have the language and social acceptance to explore their gender identities
This drives me crazy. What kind of “experts”? The journalistic principle in play should be to weigh the testimony of “experts” against the possibility of influence by a religious belief system that’s applying pressure on the debate.
If you’re talking about any other religious belief — say, Scientology — it becomes very clear that there’s two kinds of “experts” about it: believers themselves, and those who look at the belief system from the outside. Everyone on the inside will of course have nothing but good things to say about it because they have to. It’s people on the outside, who at least ostensibly have more freedom to look at it critically, who journalists should seek out for comment.
Of course with trans ideology you could still be under pressure to keep quiet and/or play along with their beliefs even if you don’t personally identify as one — far more so than with Scientologists. Obviously you won’t get an objective take on Scientology from Tom Cruise or Elisabeth Moss, but nor will you from anyone whose line of work could one day put them on the set of The Handmaid’s Tale or a Mission: Impossible movie. For the rest of us trapped in Gender La La Land, disagreeing with trans ideology is the same, and possibly worse: we could even find ourselves in trouble with the law.
So the press really has to take the social pressure aspect into account any time they cite “experts.”
But journalists don’t see it that way because journalists (a) don’t recognize that trans ideology is a quasi-religious belief system, based on ideas that are not backed by science, rooted in feelings that can’t be quantified scientifically; and (b) journalists don’t recognize the extent of the pressure people are under to affirm these religious beliefs. They conflate nonbelief in gender ideology with fringe characters who lack expertise in gender “science” and are motivated by an ideological hostility to progress.
Of course they got this idea in the first place by treating gender ideology believers as “experts” at the outset, and from the very moment journalists took the gender gurus at their word that they knew what they were talking about and that anyone looking in from the outside who disagreed was not to be trusted, this bias just became self-reinforcing.
So we really need to push hard on the fact that gender ideology is a new religion rather than a new science, and one that’s using manipulative tricks to push its agenda. It should be so obvious that this is true! But —by Xenu — look how well their strategy is working: half the atheist movement has fallen for it.
L. Ron Hubbard, crazy as he was, had shrewd insights into how to spread his cult, one of them being to glom his beliefs onto the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, because that’s what had the most appeal to Americans at the time. It wasn’t just a new science, it was a new science that made you glamourous and successful! In just the same way, the pseudoscience of trans ideology has been yoked to the virtues of progressive politics: gay and lesbian rights; identity politics; the civil rights movement. In a way that’s even more fiendishly clever, because its appeal is deeper than aspirations to fame and fortune: it’s morally righteous. Righteousness is stubborn as an ox, and prone to blindness. Blind righteousness is dangerous.
Must share on Facebook. I’ve been arguing over there with a typical gang of idjits, and if any of them check me out I want them to see this on my wall.
I think this is the big one. We already have models for how to respond to nutty religions and purveyors of such. We also have models for how to respond to scientific discoveries. The problem is that Genderism is viewed as the latter despite belonging to the former. (It reminds me of that time Bill O’Reilly said Christianity isn’t a religion.) For the “elite”, a category to which journalists all believe they belong, there is social pressure to affirm scientific knowledge. I don’t think there’s similar pressure to conform to newfangled religions.
Part of the problem is that gender ideology has captured some medical doctors and organizations, and there are flawed or misinterpreted studies or policies or statements that give the impression that gender ideology is in fact supported by science. (One of the GC pages I follow has a set of memes about when doctors were wrong about something, comparing these errors to gender ideology.) It’s quite easy for normally skeptical pro-science people to feel they are on the “right side” of science (and that GC people are on the “wrong side”) by pointing to these studies and failing to look at them closely.
I’d love to see that. Link?
I read this article initially wondering if they would ask anyone what the underlying cause might be, and cannot say I am surprised. It either doesn’t occur to anyone to ask why there is a surge of kids thinking that their sex is wrong (or that gender is completely unmoored from physical reality as in enbies.) The fear of the transphobia reaction has worked so well in steering away questioners that it doesn’t even occur to journalists to do a Root Cause Analysis. Nor to look back at themselves to see if they might be contributing to the phenomenon. Mirrors are the scariest implements of skeptical inquiry. Journalists who just accept that it’s a real thing allow readers and the public to go along with it as an assumed reality, and only the most deluded and hateful right-wing jerks would dispute it (along with those deluded white feminists who are pulling up the ladder now that they’ve achieved sex equity.)
I think we are not being served well by the skeptical community who really should be raising the loudest stink about this mess. If so many of them have been captivated by this, saying that the science is behind it, then who is going to be left to question it but us “haters?” The idea that even Helen Joyce wanting to find a reason and counter the idea that someone who doesn’t “fit” in their gender, and I’m not going to even include the AGP who just think they can be better women than women, is advocating genocide is not being countered by serious skeptics. They should easily see through this, but either remain silent or advocate for bullshit. I probably harp on this too much, but I am honestly baffled by the continued hornswoggle of the proud thinkers.
Or politically homeless and lost. I agree with my local Democratic party on nearly everything, but during our central committee meetings, everyone introduces themselves with their pronouns not even thinking about it. I pass by it, but there was a business meeting for the City Party, and election of officers. The secretary sent out a ballot for those of us who couldn’t make it to the meeting and each one of the candidates had pronouns in their bios. So, while objecting doesn’t put me in trouble with the law, it would certainly destroy any effectiveness I might have in the local party apparatus if I am known as a transphobic bigot. At this point, without live and in person meetings, I don’t even know how to find other GC people who I can stand with. So, not in trouble with the law, but politically in a tenuous position. I know the right thing to do would be to come out and say that pronouns are wrong if they aren’t sex based and we can’t dictate our pronous, but then I would find myself with no influence at all in the matters that drive me to be an activist, such as climate change, abortion rights for women, and education funding. I don’t know how to do it without numbers standing together and I can’t find anyone at the moment to stand with me. Those who are leaving the Democratic party because of this have an understandable reason for it, I think, but I don’t think I can since the alternative to me is very bad with all that fascism and anti-democratic lying from the right.
If we continue with this idiotic idea that “the children know who they are, they just never had the words before” idea behind transgenderism, then without the big-name skeptics waking from their slumber to quell the nonsense, then we are going to see kids continue to get harmed by this. Someone needs to shake this generation out of it, teach them what gender really is, and that gender ID is just a mask that people wear as if they were in a Greek play. It’s not their defining characteristic.
GW, here is a link to one such post from the page Advocates Protecting Children. Check out the page (and web site), their meme game is strong.
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=170799242068476&id=101246682357066
Really, what’s the difference?
The difference is that the believers in gender ideology have so completely captured the media elite that, though a reporter may question whether children have “souls,” none may question whether children have “gender identity.”
A reporter who went on NPR or wrote in the Times about how today’s children had to guard their souls against the devil would be seen as religious, and the media organization would fence them in with a counterpoint. No counterpoint is allowed for the hundreds of times a week they assert that all children have a “gender identity.” Nobody comes on after to say “not everybody believes that people have gender identities.” It’s presented as revealed truth.
If a kid came home from a public school saying that their health teacher was telling them about their souls, few parents would hesitate angry to call the school. When kids come home from public school saying their health teachers are telling them about their gender identities, parents have to weigh whether they will be labeled a bigot for protesting.
What do young people really have, that’s different from yesteryear? Proselytized from every newspaper, radio, and school, they have the reified “gender identity.” At the top of the cultural menu of explanations for psychological distress, they have “gender dysphoria.” In previous generations, a different thing would have been at the top of that menu: the work of the Devil, multiple personalities, possession, repressed trauma. In this sense, “I’m really a boy” is the new “I saw Goody Osburn cavorting with the Devil.”
Most of the kids who identify that they are suffering from “gender dysphoria” have an interpersonal conflict with their same-sex parent. As did innumerable adolescents of generations past, they don’t want to grow up to be their dad, or to be their mom. The difference is that today, instead of being told they can grow up to be a different sort of man, or a different sort of woman, they are told right away that they can grow up not to be a man at all, or not to be a woman at all. That’s what a firmly implanted belief in gender identity promises them. That’s what teaching kids from Kindergarten that all people choose their genders and their pronouns teaches them.
Do we forget that second word exists? Gender… identity. There it is. A fundamental goal of the psyche during adolescence is defining the individual’s identity. That’s what an adolescent brain is meant to do, and it does it, first and foremost, by reaction to and against his or her parents. What am I? Not like my dad… and that is when gender ideology hijacks individuation. Did anybody in the Sixties imagine that someday “tuning in, turning on, and dropping out” would seem like a more mainstream choice? Did anybody imagine that someone could convince adolescent boys to sign up to become eunuchs? And convince their parents to go along with it?
I saved my son from the gender ghouls, and these days he thanks me for it. Now I have to lay the groundwork to save my daughter. I have nerdy, non-conforming, empathetic, quirky kids, and such kids are the prime targets of the gender cult. Kids aren’t ever going to believe everything their parents tell them, and nor should they. But whenever the topic of “gender identity” comes up, I remind my daughter that not everybody believes in “gender identity,” just like not everybody believes in “souls.” I don’t have a “gender identity,” I tell her. Her mother doesn’t have one, her brother doesn’t have one. We’re just who we are, and we live the way we want to. If the way we want to express ourself comports with what someone expects of a person of our sex, then cool. If it doesn’t, then, well, that’s also cool. It’s just not terribly important. What we have are identities. “Gender” is just one tiny little blind alley in the vast cities of our identities.
The gender cult wants to make that tiny little alley the main thoroughfare of kids’ identities. That is, ultimately, spiritually impoverishing. Not only do the sacrifices of body parts and functions the cult requests of children in service to subordinating identity to gender weaken and harm them, but so do the sacrifice of their own psychological wholeness. In my state it’s illegal to provide psychological therapy to children who suffer from gender dysphoria. There is only one legal remedy: affirmation. A therapist who doesn’t do that could lose his license, and so he will commonly refuse to see such patients, thus turning away a significant proportion of the adolescents needing therapy today.
Asking what’s really causing them trauma, what’s really behind their suffering, is impermissible. The answer is gender, and you will provide that answer. Send them down the path to mutilation. Only someday later, perhaps in another state, can they start to explore the reality of their suffering. Now, with more suffering. Perhaps infertile, perhaps sick, perhaps unable ever to experience a sexual relationship. But they’ve got “gender identity,” right?
Does the belief in “gender identity” harm all children? I can’t say whether it does, no more than I can say that the belief in “souls” does. I’m content to let people believe what they want in their churches. If we’re not taking kids away from Christian Scientists, who won’t give them aspirin, then we can’t take kids away from gender ideologues. What I can say with all certainty is that the mandated belief in “gender identity” harms more children than it helps. We must do our best to push back against the reification of this belief.
I was required to fill out a form for a festival that is showing one of my plays. Preferred pronouns was on it. I left it blank, but I was tempted to put quark/charmed quark.
Theatre has probably been more thoroughly captured than any other area I walk around in. They have always been the first to sign on for all sorts of woo, so I suppose it’s not surprising.
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Yes, where are the Skeptics?
From what I can tell, only Shermer at Skeptic Society is publishing both sides of the debate, which places those on the Wrong Side among the many people who make mistakes, instead of classifying them with dark motives and bad faith. I think the rest are missing glaring problems (such as why former respected colleagues suddenly have dark motives and bad faith) by hyper-focusing on at least 2 skeptical principles.
1.) “It’s more complicated than that.”
Yes, biology is messy. No, the existence of gray cases doesn’t throw out our ability to classify.
2.) “If the Religious Right believes something because God Said So, it’s religious and it’s wrong.”
Usually, but we have to examine the claim on its own merits.
Yeah, it’s always religious, but there are a lot of things religious people, even on the right, believe that are right, and we believe them too. It isn’t okay to murder (unless you do it for God, which is where our agreement deviates). Charity for those who have less is a good thing. And so forth.
That’s where groups like FFRF get tripped up. Because it is religious, they assume that the law itself serves a religious purpose with no secular ones. The ones arguing are using religious arguments, so the law is bad. Therefore, trans must be the correct side.
I have no problem with arguing against religious arguments for doing thing A or thing B, especially when it pertains to our laws and our government. But it is too easy to dismiss things as “wrong” because the “wrong” people believe them for the “wrong” reasons. Then it becomes a fact that everyone who believes them is “wrong”. Merits? Not important. It’s religious, right? Therefore wrong.
Makes thinking simpler and easier, but…less likely to reach a good answer or a good solution to problems.