More susceptible
We’re not the conspiracy theorists, you’re the conspiracy theorists! Aaron Rabinowitz in (ironically) The Skeptic:
As conspiracy communities continue to interconnect and produce complex conspiracism ecosystems, it’s worth keeping track of the common themes that facilitate the slide from one conspiracy to another. This month, I want to look at conspiracies centered around creeping transhumanism, a theme with a rich history that unsurprisingly involves accusations of malevolent Jewish influence, and seems to be gaining market share in conspiracism communities.
You’ll never guess whose conspiracism is in his sights. Never. It’s all been covered up too carefully.
This month though I want to focus on the way that anti-transhumanism conspiracies with clear antisemitic roots have been laundered and mainstreamed in Gender Critical and Radical Feminist communities.
There it is! It’s the filthy feminists! It’s the malign scary women who refuse to agree that men are women if they say they are.
First, I want to reiterate that being a member of these communities does not immediately make someone either antisemitic or a conspiracy theorist.
It takes at least half an hour to make members of these “communities” antisemitic conspiracy theorists.
And having brought out the scare quotes let me expand on that a little: I do not see myself as a “member” of “these communities”; I do not see gender critical feminism as a “community” at all; it’s a political stance and a form of activism and a set of ideas, just as feminism is. “Community” is the wrong word for that. The political and intellectual are just that, and calling them “communities” is sentimental and infantilizing. I reject the label.
My concern is, much like with #SaveTheChildren, gender critical portrayals of the trans agenda and its funding are making members of that community more susceptible to onboarding laundered far right conspiracies.
Crap writer, isn’t he. Anyway, you see how this works – it’s oddly conspiratorial-looking itself, in fact. It’s not that he’s saying we’re all conspirators, he’s just saying that “members” of that “community” are more “susceptible” to believing “laundered” conspiracies. That’s a lot of levels of distancing if you look at them carefully. What purpose does all that distancing serve? It lets him off the hook. It draws a frilly curtain over the fact that he has no evidence of any conspiracies and is just bullshitting. “The Skeptic” in a pig’s eye.
The rest of the article is Jennifer Bilek blah blah blah Jennifer Bilek. It’s embarrassing.
He’s worse than a dog with a bone. He just won’t let this idea go, despite having been disabused of its veracity to the extent that he now has to insert so many caveats in his writing that the accusation is essentially meaningless – it’s just an extended slur.
At least a dog will give up its ‘bone’ upon being shown that it’s actually a rock.
I would go further, and say that a “gender-critical” stance isn’t necessarily a system of ideas as such, but rather a rejection of a grab-bag of extraordinary claims that other people are putting forward, often without even ordinary evidence. It is the refusal to give in to bullying or to be overawed by grandiose pronouncements from once-reliable sources which go against one’s own intuition and experience with the world. And it is advocacy against instituting a regime that compels one to say what one does not believe on pain of joblessness, homelessness, or even imprisonment.
It is, in effect, skepticism as applied to a new religious movement. Given this religious movement’s track record of infesting institutions and having them more-or-less explicitly inveigh against their very founding ideals, it is not terribly surprising that The Skeptic has hosted such a thoroughgoing rejection of people’s reasonable skepticism.
(In Aaron’s case, the rock is a coprolite).
I watched the whole of his disgraceful performance in that video with Helen Staniland, Arty Morty, and Graham Linehan. He kept coming back to the idea that not wanting children to be unnecessarily surgically mutilated was anti-semitism, but that he wasn’t accusing anyone he was talking with of holding anti-semitic views, just of innocently supporting anti-semitic views by not being wholly in favour of transing kids, or by refusing to accept the (absolutely nonsensical) view that humans can change sex by wishing it so.
It was an extended straw man argument which, were he honest, he could have expressed in one sentence:
“I’m going to say that no-one should pay any attention to the arguments being put forward by the gender-critical, radfem side in this debate, because one person on that side once liked a tweet by someone who later made a comment which could, by some, be interpreted as possibly anti-semitic, therefore their whole argument is informed by anti-semitism, which is wrong.”
tigger_the_wing,
There is a certain kind of religious Jew who takes opposition to the circumcision of male infants, which observant Jews hold as integral to the ceremony they call the brit milah or bris, as a dogwhistle for antisemitism. The bris is something like a Catholic baptism (or, rather, the Catholic baptism was one of many things the Catholics bastardised from Judaism), designed to bring male Jewish infants into the covenant that God supposedly made with the Jewish people, and from a certain theological perspective, it would be impossible for a man to be a Jew at all without having been circumcised.
Thus calling male circumcision “genital mutilation” and advocating for its prohibition is, to a certain class of Jewish thinker, tantamount to advocating for the destruction of the Jewish people (or at least for Jewishness to be relegated only to women, which for such a thinker might well be one in the same). Now, speaking as a circumcised Gentile, I am not sure I’d go so far as calling circumcision a “mutilation” as much as an unnecessary cosmetic procedure that causes infants a bit of quickly-forgotten pain at a time when they experience a lot of pain that they will never remember. The theoretical arguments that it dampens sexual pleasure are about as persuasive as those that it prevents penile infections, and even if both are true, I believe they’re somewhat of a wash.
In any case, I am sympathetic to Jewish communities continuing the practice as long as it is performed in a sterile manner. This would preclude, for instance, the Mohel removing the child’s freshly-fileted foreskin with his mouth, for what I should hope are obvious reasons. (That is not a theoretical concern; some Jewish sects hold this as a sacred part of the ritual, and more than one Jewish infant has died from acute herpes hyperinfection as a result of the practice.)
In that light, it is easy to see why someone might elide opposition to surgical interventions on children’s genitalia with antisemitism, because there is a well-established tension between some Jewish circles and anti-circumcision advocates expressed in these terms already. Given the multifaceted nature of Jewish theology and the innumerable sects within each of the overarching traditions, it is also not surprising to see some Jews amenable to the overarching claims of the transgender movement.
Put these two together, and hey presto, an anti-anti-semitic conspiracy theory.
So since when did Lefty types of his ilk stop having problems with transhumanism (of the non-gender type)?
It’s more than this, though. Dr. Jane Clare Jones has pointed out that one of the early, influencial figures in transgenderist/transhumanist political thought and activism was Martine Rothblatt. He happens to be rich, and Jewish, but, as Jones points out, highlighting his input and influence in the genderist movement is not anti-Semitic.
https://mobile.twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1497514334037098497
The charges of “anti-Semitism” are an attempt at well poisoning. Rabinowitz has no argument, so smearing the motives and legitimacy of his opponents is his way of defeating their position without having to rebut any of their actual points. He can then dismiss them and declare himself the winner.
So to recap:
1) Simply stating the immutible facts of material reality is inherently transphobic and constitutes Actual Violence.
2) Defending the rights, health, safety and dignity of girls and women is first and foremost anti-trans, not pro-woman.
3) Critiquing the goals and methods of gender ideology is at its base driven by anti-Semitism, and can be disregarded as evil bigotry.
4) Do what we tell you to or these kids will kill themselves.
5) We are marginalized and powerless, and if you are a woman and oppose us in any way whatsoever, we will wield our powerless marginalization to threaten and hound you out of job, house and home, with the assistance of organizations and institutions who know the Right Side of History when they see it.
… and into prison, if we can.