Simple and wrong
A pusher of the dogma tells us how to push the dogma, which is to say, Helen Webberley says
Saving trans lives is simple:
Believe them.
Yes, that is simple, but it can’t be a general rule, for reasons that ought to be obvious if you think about it at all.
It can’t be a general rule that you must believe X brand of people, because people can be mistaken and people can lie.
Webberley is using the fact that, socially speaking, we generally do believe what people tell us if there’s no obvious reason not to. If we ask a stranger where the nearest grocery store is, we assume she’ll tell us the truth, because why wouldn’t she? If friends tell us something we believe them, because they’re friends. There’s a lot of ground between those two types of default belief. There is also a lot of ground where we’re on high skepticism alert – like the claims of advertisers for instance, or Trump saying anything at all.
So no, we don’t have to believe trans people when they tell us the very thing we don’t and can’t believe because it’s physically impossible. Even if it will make them happy, we still can’t do it. Some of us may be willing to pretend to do it (which is how we got into this mess), but most of us can’t actually do it. We also shouldn’t do it, because the sooner this ideology finds itself on the scrapheap alongside Scientology and Heaven’s Gate the better.
There’s also the key distinction between ‘believing you believe this’ , ‘believing you feel this way’, and ‘believing you are correct about what this all means’.
If someone survives a dangerous situation through a bit of random luck, I have no reason to disbelieve them when they say the events happened; I even believe readily when they say that this turn of events makes them feel as if they have received divine intention of some sort. I don’t believe they actually WERE given some sort of imperative from their invisible sky-daddy, however.
In the case of trans, I’m willing to believe that most of them genuinely are experiencing some level of dysphoria, because gender roles in our society suck, even for those of us lucky enough to be at the beneficiary end. I even believe that a smaller contingent actually experience some sort of bodily dysphoria, where they simply cannot accept their body’s sexual characteristics. And yes, for many of them, I believe some degree of transition leads to happier lives. I don’t believe that these experiences actually make them the opposite sex, entitle them to impinge on women-only spaces, or otherwise eliminate their actual biology.
I can believe all that too. I also get at least some of it, in the sense of knowing how it feels. I would feel something very close to dysphoria if I were forced to wear a skirt or dress for some reason (or high heels or makeup or flouncy hair). I wouldn’t just dislike it, I would feel acutely uncomfortable, in a NOT ME kind of way. I can extrapolate from that to the thought that everything wrong-gender-based feels like that to [some] trans people.
It’s the move from that to “trans people are the sex they say they are” that I can’t take and don’t think I should take.
There is a foundational problem with this, beyond the trans debate. It is a problem of general principles.
We don’t just believe people, and we cannot expect people to just believe us. To put it crudely, the world doesn’t exist to suck my cock.
If someone is so delicate in disposition that they’ll off themselves if you don’t believe them, then honestly, is this someone we really want to keep around?
And that is not advocating for trans suicides, because it is not really about trans – it is about whether we are willing to sacrifice our critical capabilities for the sake of what are complete assholes.
If applied beyond the trans debate, outright scammers would be happier people if we just believed them, should we be doing so?
This is an insidious disease of an idea that cripples our intellectual immune systems. We should be skeptical about claims, we shouldn’t have faith like children, we should question like adults.
My emotional wellbeing isn’t your problem, and shouldn’t really factor into claims of fact. If not believing somebody causes them to commit suicide, that’s not my problem, and frankly I’m not against that outcome because it is a disgusting imposition on others to demand belief that way.
We should predicate belief on evidence, not emotional blackmail.
Exactly. That’s why I keep hammer hammer hammering away at it like a demented woodpecker.