Guest post: The fundamental divide
Originally a comment by Sastra on Part of a network.
It is important to say these things at the outset of this report because society regularly tells LGBTQ+ people that they are not normal
And right here is the fundamental divide, the problem with coupling homosexuality and gender nonconformity with transgender. The society that regularly tells people who don’t abide by the conventions associated with their sex that they’re perverted, wicked, or sick is not the same part of society which views sex as a biological category we can’t choose to follow or not. The reasoning is completely different. The issue is completely different.
We do not believe that psychics are not normal. We question the existence of psychic powers.
We do not believe that reincarnated people are not normal. We question the existence of reincarnation.
We don’t come up with elaborate excuses for why prophets aren’t really prophesying because we don’t like how they’re different than the rest of us, and so we are disgusted or fearful.
I’ve talked to many people who believe in the paranormal and abilities associated with the paranormal. When I ask them what they think motivates skepticism, they seldom bring up anything having to do with evidence or science. They almost all talk about how skeptics are afraid of what is different. They frame skeptics not accepting ESP the way the SPLC frames critics of gender ideology: through ethics rather than reason. A form of Argumentum ad Hominem.
Brilliant observation.
The thing is: from a numerical perspective, the majority of people are heterosexual, and thus heterosexuality is the norm; i.e., normal. Homosexuality and bisexuality are minority orientations and thus not normal. The rest of the alphabet is even less common (assuming that they actually exist in some meaningful way), so they’re even further from normal. Telling “LGBTQ+ people that they are not normal” is simply reporting an objective fact.
Confusing the normal with the good is just a variation on the naturalistic fallacy. Being normal is neither intrinsically good nor inherently bad. Geniuses and virtuosos and literally every exceptional person there has ever been and ever will be is by definition abnormal. By the same token, history’s greatest criminals were also out of the ordinary. Frequency alone tells us hardly anything.
It’s enough to make me tear my hair out.
It’s not that simple. There are shades of meaning, and normal doesn’t mean “minority” and nothing more. (Neither does “minority,” for that matter.) “Abnormal” implies wrong, diseased, bad, etc. Its meaning is far from simply numerical.
What irritates me the most about transgenderism is that the promoters are trying to drag us back beyond John Locke to the essentialist dualism of Decartes. The feeling of being of the opposite sex is not a function of your mythological soul, but of your existing body and history. In America, gender non-conforming people are free to marry and to act in any gender non-conforming way that they choose (provided that Trump doesn’t get elected). The alliance of self-promoting therapists and performative virtue signalers is creating an atmosphere that may actually get Trump elected. Where is Elizabeth Loftus now tha we need her again?
The same could be said of “inclusion” and “discriminate”, but we (here) recognize that those words can be value neutral. Of course, “normal” has a normative sense, but the existence of a normative sense doesn’t erase the descriptive sense. It just introduces a layer of uncertainty, which gives sophists a degree of plausible deniability and an opportunity to play the equivocation game.