The moment when we stop
An exchange on Twitter has got me thinking about belief in the trans ideology, and whether I ever had any. I don’t think I did. From what I can remember, I didn’t believe in it, but I tried to prevent myself from really grasping how thoroughly I didn’t believe it. But maybe that’s not quite right – maybe I did grasp it but just pretended I didn’t. Basically, I lied about it, but what I’m not sure of is how aware of the lying I was.
The exchange:
My reply to that was “I didn’t so much accept it as do my best to steer around it. Until that day when it had grown too big to steer around.” Which I think is accurate as far as it goes, but what I’m not sure about now is how far I admitted to myself I was steering around it.
I do remember a few incidents of inner eye-rolling, of wanting to say something in dissent but not doing it, but what I don’t remember is how much that bothered me. I don’t remember if I thought I should challenge this bullshit because it is such bullshit, or repressed that thought instead.
That’s not interesting in itself (except maybe to me), but it is interesting in relation to the whole question of how do people who seem otherwise rational swallow this blatant fantasy-mongering? The fact that I steered around it for several years means I have some idea why other people don’t go all gender critical, but at the same time, the fact that there came a point where the steering terminally broke down makes me wonder who the hell engineered these people’s steering.
What broke my steering was whichever pharyngulite goon it was who told me to stop talking about abortion as a women’s issue. I remember the smoke coming out of my ears. I remember the crunch-snap when the steering mechanism broke right off. I said no and a mob of goons yelled at me and I sort of partly backed down, cowardly idiot that I was, but the “do you believe, yes or no?” followed swiftly (in hours? days? I don’t remember) and that was the end.
But the end should have been earlier. I should have stopped steering around it sooner. I don’t really remember the mental state that prevented me.
I followed the thread down, and ran into this bit of inanity:
https://twitter.com/jwhittak_physio/status/1551573788201865216
Totally agree Hayden, physiological outcomes are associated with sex. With that said tendon injuries maybe about more than physiology (access to strength & conditioning, sport facilities, short condensed competition seasons that might differ between gender). So both are important.
She was trying to backpedal from the fact that she did an presentation about tendon injuries in female athletes, highlighting how they often differed from those in male athletes and required different treatments.
I accepted it due to halo effect, and the “verification method = definition” fallacy, and “kindness”. I started reading more, and was absolutely flabbergasted by how emotional the response was even to asking questions. The shoddy treatment of you, Ophelia, coupled with the absolutely bonkers behavior of people I had formerly admired, ushered me off of that particular mental train.
In some ways it reminds me about my attitudes regarding (other!) religion. I used to think religion was benign, even benevolent, “live and let live”; then I read more about the problems of religion, and I shifted to being anti-theist along with atheist. (Although I was never actually a believer. so that’s a bit different.)
And really, this is how I came out of the pro-TRA position overall (and this mirrors much of my overall conversion to full-on support of feminism, after having grown up with the views you’d expect of a suburban white boy in Reagan’s America): I was convinced, not so much by GCFs, but rather by the absurdity of the arguments put forward by the TRAs–they were just so facile and inherently self-contradictory that I started to question it, reflexively. And then they started in on non-binary, which not only was silly on its own part, but also absolutely undercut the notion of Trans identity in particular, that I broke clear.
Sackbut @ 2 –
The “kindness” thing never worked on me, not because I think kindness is bad, but because that’s not how any of this works. If you know what I mean. It’s not the language of equality struggles, human rights struggles, struggles for justice. The Civil Rights movement didn’t whine about “kindness” it talked of injustice. Feminism didn’t whine about “kindness” it talked of sexism. It just rubbed me the wrong way from the outset. I continue to think it was a mistake but in a sense I’m completely wrong, because it certainly seems to have worked for them.
To the best of my recollection my first encounter with trans/ gender ideology was at either an atheist or skeptic convention (probably the first.) One of the speakers was a TIM and nothing set off any alarm bells. Given the venue I just accepted that the dissent was coming only from the religious right. I no longer remember anything about the speech other than the speaker encouraging everyone to ask questions, any questions they wanted about trans people, even embarrassing ones. They were there to explain.
What I do remember is sitting next to them later at lunch or dinner. Two things happened. First, I assured the speaker that of course I considered them a woman. Who wouldn’t? They said “oh, you’d be surprised.” Later, I pointed to their necklace and asked about it. The response was that yes, these breasts were real they’d had a “boob job.” When I said “no, the necklace “ I remember feeling a warm glow of charity. See, I was treating them just like any other woman.
I hesitated just now over the word “charity.” Was I feeling charitable or was I feeling virtuous, like getting something right as opposed to just being kind? I suspect that way back then (a decade or more) the two had more or less merged in my mind and the fact that I wasn’t applying it to the truth claims of the religious hadn’t occurred to me. I’m also pretty sure I considered it a tiny minority of nonconformists we were talking about. How interesting to meet one.
My skepticism started emerging on Freethought Blogs. For some reason I came late to Ophelia getting kicked off and assumed it must be some fundamental misunderstanding rather than a real disagreement. Ophelia was thoughtful reason personified. As I recall I’d even lobbied to get her in. So lay low and listen. This must be a confusing topic. And I suspected it wasn’t Ophelia who was confused. Someone else must have misinterpreted something.
But the more I listened to trans ppl and their advocates the more skeptical I became. I started asking hypothetical questions like “if you’d been raised in a culture where the gender stereotypes were the exact opposite— would you still have been trans?” These queries were met with polite, hesitant criticism along the lines of “now, Sastra, I know you don’t mean to sound bigoted but …” and eventually an admission that no, they wouldn’t but that’s not the world we’re in. Hypothetical questions had limited application. This, despite the fact that we were constantly throwing hypotheticals at theists and sneering when they said that’s not the real world where God exists. We’re exploring concepts. If the concepts don’t hold up the practical application is besides the point.
Something was wrong. And the “experts” in the field of gender identity were throwing me links to dense academic papers as opposed to explaining things simply in their own words. They’d tried the simple explanations; I was obviously incapable of following them, you see. I did and still respect these people too much to accuse them of pseudoscience without reading those papers. I tried; I stumbled. The essays on the gender critical side, however, were clear and understandable. I sometimes still wonder if the difference was like gender ideology = science and gender critical = simplistic creationism, or GI = theology and GC = scientific clarity. The latter, I think, but can’t say for sure.
One tiny correction: I didn’t get kicked off. I certainly would have if I’d stayed, but I jumped before I was pushed. After days and days of one former friend after another writing a long angry post about how evil I am. That was fun!
I was at a couple of atheo-skeptic conventions where a trans woman was also a speaker – Natalie Reed at one and Zinnia Jones at the other. I didn’t seek out either one of them for friendly chat, which tells me that I did know I hadn’t bought into the ideology.
Again I think cognitive dissonance and justification spirals are a major part of it: You make some concessions that may not seem like such a big deal at the time through some combination of tribal loyalty, peer pressure, fear of making yourself unpopular, a genuine desire to “be kind”, the need to distance yourself from the “wrong kind” of people (“The far Right are against this, so I can’t be on the same side as them!”) etc. But of course a clever and moral person like yourself, would never concede something like that unless it was the clever, moral thing to do. So you rationalize the concessions, and before you know it you’re caught in the logic of your own rationalizations and unable to resist more concessions without looking inconsistent or hypocritical even to yourself. But of course you’re not an inconsistent hypocrite, so more concessions it is! Repeat as often as required.
I also think the “it’s not so bad yet” reflex is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Again the analogy to cults can be instructive. The first encounter with the cult is usually a positive experience: These are not brainwashed fanatics trying to recruit you into a cult, they’re your awesome new friends, they’re the nicest people you have ever met, they’re idealists working to make the world a better place, they’re the people who share your ideals and values and care about the same things you do etc. You have never felt so welcome and accepted and appreciated in your life, and you don’t want to give it up lightly. So when the first red flags start turning up (usually sooner rather than later), you think “Yikes! That was weird! I hope this isn’t indicative of some sort of pattern. Ok, calm down, it’s not so bad yet. There are rotten apples in every group, I suppose. Let’s not judge the whole group based on one bad experience. Everything else so far has been good. Let’s just stick around for now and see what happens. No need to give it all up until we know there’s a real problem!” Cults (or abusive and controlling partners for that matter) are counting on you to think that way because it buys them time to work on you. As hard as it may be to walk out and leave now, you can be damn sure it’s going to be harder tomorrow, and even harder the day after that, and by the time it does get “so bad”, you’re already caught and can’t get out.
I follow some talk shows where religion is discussed. The topic of belief comes up a lot. There are people professing belief, and analyzing belief, and questioning belief, and sometimes suffering over belief.
These discussions rarely seem to get anywhere, and it has occurred to me that unless you have a decision to make; a real operation decision, something with consequences–cross street now? have sex with this person?–unless you have a decision like that in front of you, then what a human “believes” is perhaps not an entirely well defined concept.
More pointedly, unless you have a decision to make, then belief claims are not falsifiable, even for the person who makes them.
I thought the shit show started in earnest over the Caitlyn Jenner Time(?) Magazine cover, but it’s been… god, seven years? Anyways it was definitely Ophelia’s crucifixion that started me on my “these guys are liars and assholes” journey…
Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different types of “belief”:
1. You can believe in the actual descriptive content of a proposition, e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning (as seen from my frame of reference).
2. You can believe in whatever a proposition happens to mean, e.g. I believe that E = mc².
The first kind of belief requires you to actually understand the proposition in question (you cannot believe in the content without knowing what the content is), whereas the latter does not*. I have a vague, general notion what “E = mc²” means, but nothing that merits the label “understanding”. I simply trust that physicists know what they’re talking about. Dennett made the point that most religious “beliefs” seem to be of the latter kind, i.e. even the believers themselves don’t have any clear idea of what it actually is they believe in except that “whatever it happens to be” is called “God” etc. I think the same goes for the “beliefs” required by gender ideology which is why even asking TRAs to define what they mean by words like “woman”, “gender”, “trans”, “cis”, “(non-)binary” etc. is now considered a “transphobic dog-whistle” etc.
* In fact there doesn’t even have to be anything to understand. E.g. it’s perfectly possible to “believe” that “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe” even if there is no content to believe in.
I was just a FtB reader, so I don’t know all the conversations that took place, but what I mostly remember was Ophelia discussing the Vanity Fair cover story of Caitlyn Jenner’s transition to, well, a female stereotype, which led to demands for her to SAY THE WORDS (“yes or no, are transwomen women? YES OR NO?”). PZ and his minions acted like lunatics.
I just came across a Slate article about the whole thing:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/08/ophelia-benson-is-the-blogger-transphobic-or-a-trans-ally-who-decides.html
It’s pretty interesting in light of Ophelia’s ruminations of when her stance changed (at that point she was still saying she was a trans ally).
The article also claims she is combative and prickly, which is of course obviously not true.
BK @ 10 – Vanity Fair cover. There was also a think piece by a feminist woman in the NY Times that I wrote a post about, cautiously agreeing, which earned a lot of “how dare you” shouting from a then-friend. I suspect those two items around the same time were a jumping-off point for a lot of people.
lol Skeletor.
That Slate article – hoo-boy. The writer was the then Vanessa Urquhart, now Evan of that ilk. Back then she wrote what I thought were excellent, probing, thoughtful pieces for Slate, asking many of the same questions I had about the trans trend. That’s why I consented to talk to her, and she came back with a hit-piece, with some outright lies. I can’t begin to express how furious it made me – combative and prickly are a picnic in comparison. Fortunately her wife told her it was a shitty backstabbing piece and she should tone it way down, so she did somewhat. Only somewhat.
Heh, Skeletor @ 12, that Slate piece. I was facebook friends with Vanessa “Evan” Urquhuart when she published that piece, because she used to publish a funny cartoon about life as a “bull-dyke lesbian” (as she put it). It was funny, self-aggrandizing, and entirely cognizant of the contradictions and the social minefield surrounding being such a person, and I thought her cartoon was (at times painfully) introspective and soul-searching and people who do that sort of thing are interesting to me. So I FB-friend-requested her, and we had some interesting DM conversations. My opinion that she was a thoughtful person was reinforced.
Then she published that article. Hoo boy. She sent me a message asking “why is Ophelia mad about my article? Do you think she’ll talk to me again?” Over the next few weeks she started writing more and more about transitioning–no longer a lesbian, it seemed, she had decided that she was actually male. Lots of public posts about how excited she was for her upcoming surgeries, mixed in with the occasional one about how distressed her (lesbian) wife was about it. I finally had enough when she posted a gleeful article about the “ten inch cock!!!” that she was going to have after they flayed the skin off her arm and sew it onto her crotch. I don’t know how her life progressed after that, because I blocked her. Gone was the self-aware person I thought I knew–replaced by this self-absorbed madwoman who seemed to be completely unaware of the depth of pain she was causing to her wife, or of the former friends that she’d driven away.
There’s one other person who flipped 180º like that, in terms of his personality, and we all know who he is.
Did I know you were friends with Urqhuart? If so I forgot all about it. That change was so drastic and so awful.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The moment when we […]
Yeah, you did know (I think we chatted about it once), but I think you purged all consideration for Urqhuart out of your mind after the article. Persona non grata, not gonna think about her no more no more no more no more.
Ophelia @ 13
I’ve been wracking my brain trying to remember what article I had read about that time, and I strongly suspect you are referring to the same article.
I shared the article on FB, thinking it made lots of sense to me. A friend (I’ll call her F1), who has called herself a “trans ally” on occasion, also shared it, commenting, approximately, “Actually pretty sensible for a TERF”. I was only vaguely aware of what TERF was, the term hadn’t blossomed in general use at that point. I may have shared one or two other articles, always with the idea that these are interesting and thought-provoking and so on, but it may have been just this one that started the exodus. Another friend (F2) complained about one post, pretty strongly. I challenged him on grounds including: “Can you give me a definition of ‘woman’ that does not rely on stereotypes and is not circular?” I never heard back.
In the discussion, F1 thought it important to impress on F1, someone she had never met and had no connection to other than as a friend of mine, that she was a “trans ally”. I never understood that, and I never asked. I might hazard a guess that people find it important to show off the label “trans ally” and have it acknowledged, even by strangers. She was aware enough of the issue to know that “TERF” was a bad thing to call someone.
Sometime after that, I posted another article, and F2 blocked me. He was the first of several; I don’t have a lot of friends on FB, so there aren’t all that many to hemorrhage. F1 has not touched on trans issues more than occasionally and then only vaguely, so I don’t bring it up, and she doesn’t comment on my occasional posts on the topic.
Hot damn, this post got me writing a comment that ended up so long I decided to create my very own Substack, and make it my introductory newsletter. Behold!
Keeping the Faith, from Arty Morty’s Substack
Bjarte @ 11
Biblical literalists (or ‘Bible-believing Christians’, as they sometimes call themselves) believe that every word of the Bible is the literal Word of God, who cannot lie. It is bonkers, but it is quite specific.
Sackbut – If it is the same article, here you go:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/what-makes-a-woman.html?_r=1
I just found the post where I talk about it and all hell breaks loose.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2015/06/nail-polish/
Reading comments on the nail polish post, it’s funny strange surprising to see how cautious many of us were, how orthodox on some questions, how…scared. It sort of answers my questions in this post. I didn’t really “steer around it” at all, I obediently uttered many of the mantras. It kind of makes me want to smack myself.
Our loss Arty! Excellent piece.
Yes, that must be the article, thank you.
Artymorty, great artlcle; added your substack to my RSS reader.
I’m not sure if I ever bought in; it wasn’t much of a thing in central Nebraska, but I had seen/met a few TiMs in my life. I did feel uncomfortable about it, because I couldn’t wholeheartedly support the reality of their position the way I could with lesbian and gay. I have always supported their rights not to be discriminated against in housing, jobs, etc, but then…
I was away for a few days at a conference for work. I came back, and Ophelia was in the middle of the “yes or no?” controversy. I had no idea what it was about, so I read backwards. I jumped ship at FtB about a year later, but did follow Ophelia over here immediately. The only blogger on FtB I was reading at that time was PZ, and his hatchet jobs on gender critical feminists did me in, coupled with the fact he was becoming just plain boring.
So was I bought in? No, I don’t think so. When bathroom issues came up at work, I almost blurted out that women needed their own bathroom, and it was horrifying to think we were going to have to share our bathroom with men. Almost…but when another person was fired over a “transphobic” remark a few months later, I realized why I didn’t blurt it. I had seen the FtB mob assault on Ophelia, and knew things were shifting, even in a school where they try to persuade me to keep my environmental science class to subjects and levels that would be comfortable for our Trumpista students. (I ignored that…)
Regarding belief in a nonsense phrase, that concept was explored in a 1930 science fiction story where somebody winds up in a world that is headed into a world war over the belief and disbelief in the slogan “The gostak distims the doshes”.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Avon_Fantasy_Reader/Issue_10/The_Gostak_and_the_Doshes
Decades ago, as a baby feminist, I read some of the early discussion about what were was then called transsexualism, and took the position that the whole thing was driven by sexist stereotypes.
When PZ and other FtB bloggers and their commenters started discussing transgenderism, I reevaluated my position. It was, after all, fairly shallow. I had never thought much about the subjective experience of being transgender, and now I was hearing about it from people who were as it were part of my tribe. It interested me–human psychology, especially its extremes, interest me–and I listened.
I thought, maybe I’ve overlooked something. Maybe there is a brain mechanism at play here. “Sex is in the body, sexual orientation in the ‘heart,’ ‘gender identity’ is in the brain.” OK, that’s not an unreasonable hypothesis, at first glance. (At this point I had no idea that gender activists would go on to deny sexual dimorphism and insist that males should be housed in women’s prisons or be allowed to compete in women’s sports.)
I met a couple of TiMs, and they were nice people. And of COURSE I didn’t want these people to be treated unkindly. I even organized a local CFI talk for a trans activist (Autumn Sandeen.)
Concerns about cruelty toward trans-identified people probably predisposed me to accept a lot of claims at face value. I don’t doubt that’s what drives a lot of the unskeptical acceptance we see at large. At least initially, people want to understand, to be supportive and to stick up for the underdog. And then once you’ve committed yourself intellectually and maybe socially to a certain point of view, cognitive dissonance kicks in and it becomes hard to accept disconfirming evidence.
I remember Ophelia posted something about women’s health, and somebody in the comments said something (couched VERY politely, even tentatively,) about could-I-please-remind-everyone-that-not-only-women blah blah blah, and O responded like Bartleby. She preferred not to.
I remember cringing inwardly. I remember thinking that response was a mistake; not epistemologically, but socially: there would be blood. There was.
From there I saw the reactions to Ophelia’s skepticism toward gender identity. I remember that at first, I figured that my fellow Second-Waver O was probably coming from a place like the one behind my own original take, but the fury directed at her was so disproportionate I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The rationale for the fury was that trans people were being doxxed by some of the very evil terfs Ophelia had been guilty of consorting wi–er, following on social media.
Cathy Brennan and Elizabeth Hungerford’s names came up a lot. I found an infamous letter they had co-authored (the one about admitting TiMs to a Women’s College) and didn’t see anything at all wrong with it. I had quite a time trying to find evidence for the doxxing claim: never did find much a smoking gun. Never even found a trout in the milk.
From there I went on to questioning the foundations of gender identitarian thinking. The more transactivist argument I read, the more I began to suspect that there was indeed no there there. Before long I realized that, yup, Ophelia was right all along. Not just right to question, right to say, “I would prefer not to” go along with the crowd, despite the personal cost.
I didn’t so much “believe” in gender ideology as “go along” with it for a while. I had already jumped ship by the time Ophelia was thrown under the bus, but my apostacy was definitely hastened by witnessing the Trump-level dishonesty of TRA’s attacks on other women. As I have mentioned many times before, I got into feminism, and social justice issues in general, in the aftermath of “Elevatorgate” and the ensuing Anti Harassment Policy Wars. In my unlimited naivety I thought we were all “in it together” against the the Slyme Pit crowd and their ilk and started following every feminist, anti-racist, “LGBT” activist etc. who seemed to have something interesting to say on Twitter. When I began to hear from TRAs my first reaction was “Well, that doesn’t sound quite right to me, but maybe I just need to ‘shut up and listen’ as well as ‘educate’ myself like everyone keeps saying”. When my Twitter feed began to fill up with horror stories about the diabolical “TERFs” (supposedly at least as bad as the TRAs sending death and rape threats to Caroline Criado-Perez) I was struck by the lack of specifics: No direct quotes, no screenshots, no retweets of anything the alleged TERF had actually said, very unlike the feminists targeted by MRAs who never had a problem providing endless specific examples of obvious hate speech, bullying, and threats. It wasn’t long before I realized that the genocidal TERFs I kept hearing about included at least half the feminists I was following, and once seen the glaring contrast between these women’s actual words and the words and attitudes put into their mouths by TRAs could not be unseen. There was no going back after that.
Then there was the near perfect overlap between TRAs and the pro-“sex work” crowd. The people shouting about “TERFs” were for the most part the same as the people shouting about “SWERFs” (the similarity of the acronyms is, of course, hardly an accident), the people complaining about “transphobia” were also the ones complaining about “whorephobia” (euphemism for “pimp-phobia’ and ‘john-phobia’), and the people shouting “trans women are women” were also the ones shouting “sex work is real work” and “blow jobs are real jobs”. I had gotten into social justice issues in the first place specifically in reaction to male sexual entitlement and predatory behavior, so that was a major turn-off to say the least.
NightCrow #22
Yeah, but no true
ScotsmanChristian believes that.You’re right, though. I’m hardly the first militant atheist to find that I tended to get along better with fundamentalists than moderate believers, or even (especially!) non-believers of the accomodationist flavor. At least the fundamentalists give you something to argue meaningfully for or against, while the endless deepities and bad puns and infinite regresses of words pointing ot other words pointing ot other words of the “sophisticated” crowd fall in the “not even wrong” category. The “New Atheists” and fundamentalist also tend to agree that the truth matters, even if we have very different ideas of what the truth is.
* words pointing to other words pointing to other words
By “fooled” in my tweet I never meant to imply we were fooled into believing gender identity claims. I meant that we’d been fooled into believing it was somewhat benign or into going along with it to some extent.
I for one was completely unaware of how thoroughly we were all being manipulated, beginning with the counter-intuitive and deliberately confusing “trans women” and “trans men” and progressing.
That’s what I mean when I say “we admit it”. We – or at least I – admit to being fooled and manipulated in this way. I can’t say I was ever a believer but I went through some of the motions. In much the same way as I said the prayers and sang the hymns and did the kneeling when I was a child, I mouthed some of the words. But always with a caveat: “TWAW…. in some sense I don’t quite understand. This means we should treat them as women…. in some circumstances which haven’t been explained.” I think I thought we’d all agree at some point on what the boundaries were and everything would somehow settle down. I realise now how incoherent this was.
I think my motivations were simple enough: I felt part of a group of more-or-less like-minded people and didn’t want to earn the disapproval of those I admired and assumed knew a lot more than I did on the subject. This, of course, is manipulation.
It’s strange, though, because by then I’d already willingly earned the disapproval of many former peers and friends by taking certain stances on other matters. I found it harder to pick a side on the trans issue. I think it took me such an embarrassing length of time to begin to understand the consequences to women (and later children and homosexuals) because of that previous naive idea that the details could all be sorted out if we put our heads together. It seemed like a bold, progressive de-shackling and was sold as such. My first indication that there might be a rabbit away was that I wanted to take baby steps and understand what it was we were doing, whereas the seeming majority wanted to sweep their way gloriously through in a tide of unspecified reform, dragging everyone else in their wake.
So back to my original point: perhaps one of the factors involved in so many skeptics hard-lining trans ideology is that they tend to believe they’re harder to fool than most and really don’t like to admit it when they are fooled, despite claims to the contrary. Add in sunk costs and purity spirals and what not and you’re in a prison of your own making. I suspect that’s where PZ is languishing right now, for instance.
I’m happy to admit I was fooled and manipulated into participating in TWAW, even though I could never quite bring myself to believe it. I wonder whether, perhaps, some (former) skeptics are wishing they’d admitted it too.
Understood.
Skimming a few posts of mine from that time looking for the one where the “don’t say women when you talk about abortion” comment is, yesterday, showed me that I was more obedient than I’d remembered. I cringed to read my own self. I still don’t know how conscious I was of obeying rather than actually believing, but it’s repellent either way.
I can’t say I’m happy to admit that. I feel I have to admit it, but I’m not-happy about it in all directions, It makes my skin crawl to read myself trying to say what those [expletives] thought I was required to say.
So I went down that rabbit hole – still haven’t found the yes or no demand, but have found a lot of crap I’d mercifully forgotten.
There was a lot of it – I was Evil Person of the Hour for a long time there. My every comma was subject to accusation and vituperation, from a really astonishing number of people. So now what I’m wondering is how much that had to do with how I think about the trans ideology.
I guess I still think not all that much. I still think I never really believed it, while trying to conceal my non-belief.
But what it did do of course is convince me that the ideology is utterly poisonous and rots people’s brains on contact.
We learned.
That comment of mine is incoherent. I didn’t learn much except I did learn much.
I think looking at (a small fraction of) all that stuff again rattled my brain.
Thinking about it, that’s a very different conclusion than “poisonous people with brain rot are revealed for what they are by disagreeing with this principled, moral stance (ideology.)”
It’s similar to the difference between “Christian fundamentalism can take nice, ordinary people, convince them of horrible, bizarre things, and make them do evil in good conscience” and “horrible, bizarre people seek out and remain in Christian fundamentalism because it provides an excuse and the means to do evil.” That’s a huge divide I’ve noted in both the atheist and skeptic communities — and it seems to have widened.
The first approach starts from the common ground by applying what we know of human nature and the principle of charity. “Homosexuality is an abomination” makes sense given the “facts” they start with. With the usual exceptions, the problem isn’t bad people, but ordinary people swept into bad ideas. That could apply to any of us. And then — the problem isn’t trans people, but an ideology with attractive features which lowers our normal gatekeeping and then sweeps us along. The ideology (be it religion, woo, gender identity doctrine) is like a poison rotting brains. We felt its appeal; we pondered our way out.
Contrast this with the Bigots-Will-Be-Bigots & Rotten-Brains-Spew-Out-Poison approach. Of COURSE you direct hatred at The Haters. Fundamentalists, homeopaths, and TERFS are filled with fear of what’s different. They’ll cause pain just to keep people controlled in boxes. This isn’t a matter of the head and making reasoning errors, but of cold, cruel hearts revealed under nice exteriors. It’s Good vs Evil. Vitriol and name-calling is the way to fight back.
Punch a Nazi.
Again, that’s a significant difference in approaching human error. I think it’s relevant to the unexpected pile-ons.
It’s something I think about often because it has become true, in a sense, what they claimed – I have become very hostile to the ideology, and that inevitably means I am (to put it cautiously) wary of trans activists and their “allies.” In everyday exchanges that translates to hostility to people – so I think about it. Often. But the answer I always end up at is that it’s the thinking, the claims, the ideology.
I do think all that rubs off on the people though. Many trans ActivIsts are peculiarly belligerent and unreasonable, and just nasty. Somehow being nasty has become part of being actively trans, which seems like a bad policy.
But bottom line it’s not the people, it’s the destructive crap they’re spouting, and their maddening indifference to the effects on women.
It’s like the pope. I suspect he’s quite a nice man, as himself, but he fronts for that evil sadistic self-dealing organization.
As (probably all of) you know, I fell right in, over my head. My autistic brain had no trouble accepting, at face value, this new explanation for my life-long gender nonconformity.
Seriously, on its face, the idea that we can have brains which were mis-programmed by wrong-sex hormonesin utero was compelling, especially for someone who had read the similar hypothesis for the development of autism. And for someone who had been a faithful Catholic until losing my faith a few years earlier, a new faith community was so tempting; especially as they would deny that they are any such thing!
Of course, I have Ophelia and her wonderful community here to thank for my eventual escape from the cult before any great harm was done.
Do I feel like I was an idiot? Not exactly. Am I ashamed of my embracing trans as an explanation? No. It’s recent enough that I can still occasionally access the mindset I had at the time, and long enough ago that I can observe it dispassionately. Given the information that I had at the time (almost exclusively pro-trans; there were none of the outrageous incidents in the media yet, and even the sceptics who helped me to leave religion were on board), plus the fact that I was looking for something to help me to connect with a community (something which is hard to do, as an autistic woman), I was a prime candidate to be sucked in.
I now know better, and – thanks to my GCF friends – I hope that the part of my brain which wants to ‘believe’ is withering, leaving room for the part of my brain which wants to know, with evidence.
Basically, I’m gullible. I know I’m gullible, I know I’ve always been gullible, and I hope that I can become less gullible in my old age without losing the accompanying upbeat personality and the desire to believe the best of everyone which have kept me from becoming bitter.
You do??? Have us to thank??? I had no idea. I thought you’d already deconverted (so to speak) before that time.
I hope it’s working out well for you.
Tigger, I had wondered, because I got the impression… but then the impression changed. In any event, I wish you nothing but good. If it helps, we’re all gullible in some aspect of our lives. I may once have described myself as cis in an introduction on Phyrangula. I’m sure I’ve been a damn site more gullible than that a time or two.
Every time someone describes falling into the gender cult, I feel grateful that I grew up with Free to Be You and Me.