Immersion
Kathleen Stock explains to us about immersive fiction:
Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box-set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it.
I did it in all my spare time (time not at school, not around grownups or for that matter children, time not doing homework) as a child. I was always “being” someone out of a book or a tv show. My way of playing was basically just to roam the countryside while “being” Mary Lennox or whoever – there was no plot, no dialogue, no story, that I recall, there was just the “being.” Immersive fiction was my happy place.
Being trans is a form of immersive fiction. Why do non-trans people immerse themselves in trans fictions? To be “kind,” to seem kind in order to earn social capital, to avoid shunning, and…
And fourth, there’s a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.
Why does this matter?
[I’t seems to me that transactivism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead.
Kathleen gives a fascinating account of the way academics are providing “surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.”
The game for some academics is to provide convincing-looking backgrounds for predetermined fictional conclusions such as “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though it’s inevitably dressed up as something moral.
I picture them like the animators at Disney or Warner Brothers, cranking out the furniture for the immersive fictions of the day.
In the area I’m most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seek to provide complex and technical post hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer. See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid—that trans women are women and trans men are men—is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.” (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy).
I’m going to stop now, lest I quote the whole thing. It’s all that good.
What an excellent post. Not being a philosopher, I didn’t really have the language to describe why I find transactivism so offensive other than “it just isn’t true”. Stock has just given me the language that I needed.
One more bit that needs quoting (it all does) –
“And then there’s the practice of extending the entitlements and resources of women to transwomen, because transwomen are “women”, so they are imagined to share precisely those entitlements and need exactly those resources too. As we now know to women’s cost, being immersed in the fiction that transwomen are “women” leads people to think that transwomen should be in women’s changing rooms, schools, dormitories, halls of residence, prisons, social groups, sports teams, rape crisis services, swimming ponds, domestic violence shelters, shortlists, political meetings … the list goes on and on. Dedicated single-sex services and resources built painstakingly over years are now effectively dismantled, largely in the pursuit of aesthetic verisimilitude for males.”
Excellent essay. Thanks for pointing it out. She talks about the harm of this fiction “disseminated at industrial scale and coercively maintained” but I think that is the crux of harm with any fictional belief, regardless of it’s nature. There seem to be a lot of those around these days.
“Unconscious” motive?
I think it’s very conscious.
An excellent essay. Thank you for introducing it.
The bits about the abandonment of the search for truth, and the turning of conclusions into premises for which facts must be sought, is very reminiscent of the mid-aughts’ New Atheist memes. What follows are a few reflections derived from many observations, inspired by reading this post but not an indirect response to anything anyone here has said.
It is worth remembering how many people then derived their senses of self from doing rhetorical battle with creationists, and who believed that they were righteous because they had a reliable method for discovering the truth. At least half of those people are now either actively trans or trans-aligned, and derive their senses of self from deriding heretics and nonbelievers of the gender cult.
There likely wasn’t anything particularly vulnerable within New Atheist thinking (or dogma, if you’re being uncharitable); it’s just that New Atheism was a loose social movement of literate monkeys, and those tend to devolve into cults sooner or later — even the ones explicitly grounded in resisting cultish thinking. Perhaps that indeed provided the vulnerability, via the hubris of people who thought that they were somehow more resistant to the clarion call of myth-making and the social incentives of ostracism and in-grouping than those poor unfortunate theists.
We should recall, then as now, the human beings who believe nonsensical ideas are mostly just victims of the human experience, as we all are. We almost certainly also labour under delusions that we are convinced are true (or convince ourselves are true in order to avoid social death), and but for a few coincidences and a few decisions, any one of us could be on the road to TRA-dom. Indeed, some of us have seen that side of the fence, at least for awhile, until reason prevailed at least in this instance.
But we should always be a bit alert to the possibility that we are wrong or mistaken about any particular belief, and we should try to remember that other people being wrong is also a shame for them as well as for the rest of us. That doesn’t mean we should let them walk all over us, but they aren’t monsters; they’re just monkeys, scared of the dark and of the time the promised dawn fails to come for them.
Durch, these New Atheists sound tedious. I’m glad I never knew any. To an old atheist, they sound suspiciously evangelical. We old atheists feel no need to convert or convince anyone.
Fascinating to hear that these eager newcomers fell, en masse, for one of the newest religious cults. As an old atheist, I am not entirely surprised: people seem inexorably drawn to religion.
Papito,
Many of us disliked the term ‘new atheist’. It was rather foisted upon us by conservative types (religious and irreligious alike) who were upset at what they considered our rude, hectoring and shrill tone. By which they meant, of course, that we were pointing out the flaws in religious thinking and the religious establishment – as atheists have always done – and were not necessarily polite about it.
Most of us thought of ourselves as just plain old old atheists but took on the label ‘new’ (or more often, jokingly, ‘gnu’) as a sort of ironic lampshading.
Over time, the atheism movement, such as it was, shifted to focus more on social justice. In general, I think that was a good move. There’s little point in getting together to say there’s no god if you’re not doing something about the harms of belief and of organised religion. And if you’re doing that, it seems only fair to come up with some alternative. (See also: the Skeptic movement)
The new social justice leaning did lead to a schism of sorts in the atheism movement, with the more social-justicey atheists tending to follow a path leading to total acceptance of trans ideology and thereby abandonment of all reason. The less social-justicey ones tended either to reveal themselves as being giant arseholes all along or kind of sat around, blinking and saying “what just happened?”
I think I’m a slight anomaly. I was on board with the social justice agenda, but ended up as one of the blinking, bewildered ones.
So anyway, “new atheism” was mostly old atheism. There was a strong contingent of people who wanted the movement to achieve some social justice goals and another component who thought atheism should be about just not believing in god. Durchy is right that the majority of the new atheists who are now firm believers in trans ideology were on the SJW side, but not all of us!
So you do know a new atheist! I was one (although I never un-ironically accepted the name). Ophelia was another (and I’m sure she’d apply the same caveat).
Thanks for the explanation, Iatsot. It makes a lot more sense now, especially if you toss in a few good dollops of social media and breathless sensationalism.
I guess that’s one of the problems inherent in trying to think of atheism as a movement, or a group, or a club of some sort. Religions have more social functions than just preaching absurd dogma. Some religions even explicitly include people who don’t believe the dogma, while still providing social functions.
What happens when you try to do this, but for atheists? Apparently, disaster.
Also, I think New Atheism has never been more than Atheism with a megaphone. There are social aspects that are important for atheism, and for atheists, too. Without the megaphone many atheists thought they were alone and had to hide their beliefs for fear of ostracism (much like gender atheists do now.) We live in a world where being religious is assumed to be the norm. Some people feel fine just going along with it, other people feel the need to be honest about not being religious and explaining why. Hosting a radio show, I often heard from people who chanced on the show and told me “I didn’t know that there was a group for atheists!” For many, it was a welcome shelter from the barrage of religious messages.
Papito, you are not required to do anything with your atheism. There is no mandate to be active in it. Some people feel the need to do so in various ways, but then others found that in order to be left alone in nonbelief we found we had to “justify” it, and this unsettled many people, including atheists who patronized other atheists for speaking out. I’ve never felt the need to evangelize, but some do because they have been actively harmed by religions. There are movements for ex-Mormons, ex-Catholics, ex-Muslims, ex-JW and all of these were given strength from an active public atheism presence. Their experience with escaping religion is something they feel the need to share with those still trapped in their faith.
But some people, yes, are irritating because they become parrots of atheist “thought leaders.” Can’t do much about that, but it serves little good to paint the entire group of Out/New Atheists with a single broad brush. There is purpose in being Out, even if it is not to everyone’s taste.
Same here. And I always protested against the “New Atheist” label, much of which led people to think atheism was something new that just came on the scene. I always argue that atheism was invented with the very first god. But after finding my roots for the first time in the atheist movement, I grew increasingly annoyed by smug righteousness, while still retaining an interest in the philosophical refutations of theism and other non-theistic religions.
Unfortunately, I am once again rootless, though finding some level of rootedness here where we are united by a love of truth (though recognizing we may not know it, either) and in my writing groups, which are united by a love of writing. These are more positive things to be united around, and hopefully stronger than being united around not believing in something.
It isn’t surprising that Kathleen Stock is a philosopher who has written a monograph on fiction, interpretation, and imagination that was published by Oxford University Press back in 2017:
https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198798347.001.0001/oso-9780198798347-chapter-1
There’s a considerable amount of ice beneath the surface of what Stock has to say about immersion. I have the book and can say that it helps to be a philosopher to read it. I’m not!
BTW is there some connection between the picture of Bugs Bunny in this post & the frequent cross dressing by Bugs in the cartoons?
No, I just felt like illustrating the bit about animators at Disney and Warner Brothers.
But then again yes, actually, because I did pick Bugs because he’s a bit camp and did drag now and then.