Guest post: It’s a holy confusion
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Behold: an umbrella term.
“Breaking gender stereotypes” is the ultimate thought terminator for many.
Far too many people have been encouraged to just turn off their brains and feel the heavenly transcendence of the contradiction at the heart of gender identity ideology. It’s a holy confusion. Like the Trinity: how can three gods be one god at the very same time? That’s just it! They can’t! You can’t think your way through this; you just have to feeeeeeeel it.
Likewise with the conflation of sex and gender. How is reifying gender stereotypes breaking them down? How is obsessively promoting gender stereotypes erasing them? That’s just it! You can’t think you way though this.
The appeal is in the enigma. It’s an act of loyalty to the tribe to obstinately not sit down and think it through.
And I swear, this is precisely the psychology that I detect among so many gay people and their purported allies. Any critical inquiry conjures crippling anxiety and feral defensiveness. They’re very aware that gay people can feel both trapped by gender stereotypes and drawn to them at the same time. They’re sensitive that there’s a lot of hurt and pain among gay people to do with this confusion around gender and sex. And they’ve been lulled by gender ideology to believe that the solution to this contradiction is to make it sacred and to equate anything but turn-your-brain-off-and-give-in-to-gender-chaos as an existential threat. Anything to do with parsing the difference between sex and gender, anything to do with defining the boundaries between the sexes, any critical thought about these topics is as blasphemous to many gay people as pointing out the inherent contradiction in the Trinity is to devout Catholics.
They’ve built up a whole identity around not knowing the answers to some fundamental questions. Rather like Christians and their three-but-one-but-three-at-the-same-time god.
I see this even among some gay people who have become critical of gender identity ideology. They’ve figured out that there’s a problem with gender extremists’ views, but they still get hostile if you apply too much scientific inquiry into the connection between gender nonconformity and homosexuality. Questions like, why do so many extremely gender nonconforming children grow up to be gay in adulthood, and why are gay men so drawn to gender stereotypes in other men while we’re so averse to applying them to ourselves? These kinds of questions are held as taboo, even though from where I’m standing they look like exactly what we need to be asking in order to understand why gay people and their allies are so susceptible to gender identity ideology.
They — the science-hostile gays — are also of the mind that the topic should remain a sacred mystery; they’ve just drawn the lines around it a little differently.
I think we need to fling the doors wide open and let the sunlight in. This means that no topic is off limits to inquiry. No wonder the activists call “gender expansive” an “umbrella” term — they’re all about blocking the sunlight.
Look at the horrors hiding in the shade of that umbrella: young gay people are suffering from a mental health crisis and they’re being medically experimented on! It’s time to shut the umbrellas.
Couldn’t have said it better myself, and I’ve said it a lot.
Bravo.
Of course the fact that most of the great world religions have endured for centuries, or even millennia, is another point against the optimistic view that the trans craze is bound to pass since a falsehood can only withstand the pressure of reality for so long…
Transgender will never go away entirely, because there will always be people who want to look like the opposite sex (and there will always be men who want to have sex with “shemales”) and we can’t uninvent the hormones and surgeries on offer to facilitate it. But I’m certain that the more extreme tenets of gender identity ideology will subside quickly, because they’re just too outlandish to sustain. No culture in history has succeeded in making biological sex disappear; it’s just too fundamental to the human condition. The currently fashionable idea that progress means living in a post-biological-sex world is a false consensus. People are going along with it because they think everyone else likes it. It’s only a matter of time until everybody realizes that next to nobody likes it.
If I was placing bets:
I think sports will revert back to 100% sex-based segregation, very soon.
I think women’s prisons and changing areas will revert mostly back to sex-based segregation, but it won’t surprise me if some “passing” or “mostly-passing” post-op trans-identifying males will continue to use some women’s spaces.
I think medical cross-sex treatment for minors will be drastically curtailed in the short term, and then banned outright after we see the long-term negative effects over the course of the current youth cohort’s adult lives.
I think over time there will be much more of a focus on psychiatric therapy for people experiencing gender dysphoria and/or autogynephilia, as it becomes more apparent that activists and fetishists were coving up the motivations, the side effects, and the regret rates for body interventions.
I don’t know what’s going to happen with pronouns in the media. I don’t think it will revert back to strictly sex-based for a long time, but I do think they’ll be more upfront about identifying male criminals.
I think there will be some significant events that create tipping points which will shock some sobriety into people and force politicians to address the issue. We’ll then see lots of repeals of the terrible legislation that was hastily implemented around the world.
Idiots like PZ Myers will quietly retire and try to pretend it never happened.
Then there’ll be the 20-hour Ken Burns style documentaries and the endless books about the phenomenon. It’ll be a chapter in the history books.
Here’s a little exercise in mental gymnastics, Doublethink, and “holy confusion.”
Arty’s reply here, when “trans”lated through the Secret Trans Decoder Ring, offers some alarming pull-quotes that highlight the hell world we have in mind for trans people (and some idea of how such statements could be reported by captured media):
You’re looking forward to Trans Genocide, maybe even planning it! YOU WANT TO KILL ALL OF US!
You want a total ban on gender-affirming care! YOU WANT A TOTAL ON BAN HEALTH CARE FOR TRANS PEOPLE!
Lots of co-conspirators for Trans Genocide. YOU ALL HATE US!
YOU WANT TOTAL BANS ON TRANS PEOPLE IN SPORTS!
Gatekeeping with genital inspections! YOU WANT TO BAR US FROM PUBLIC LIFE!
YOU WANT TO HURT TRANS KIDS! YOU WANT ALL OF THEM TO KILL THEMSELVES!
YOU WANT TO PUT US THROUGH CONVERSION THERAPY!
YOU WANT TO VIOLENTLY MISGENDER US! YOU WANT TO DENY OUR EXISTENCE!
ANTI-TRANS BACKLASH! YOU WANT TO TAKE AWAY TRANS RIGHTS!
YOU’RE GLEEFULLY PREPARING FOR THE POST-TRANS WORLD THAT FOLLOWS TRANS GENOCIDE!
Speaking of hellish plans…
“I’m sorry Arty, it’s off to re-education camp for you. It’s for your own good of course. Now, repeat after me: TWAW (clap); TWAW (clap); TWAW (clap); TWAW…”
The idea that we do, or can, live in a ‘post-biology’ world is as ridiculous as any I’ve heard. We might as well say we’re going to be in a ‘post-sunlight’ world or a ‘post-water’ world. Biology is what we are. The only way to live in a post-biology world is to be AI in a world where nothing else is living.
I cringed and whined (ok, maybe more like screamed) about the idea that we are now post-racist or post-sexist. At least those are possible, even if not realized. Post-biology world will occur when the sun goes supernova.
Tiny edit: The only way to
liveexist in a post-biology world is to be AI in a world where nothingelseis living.Ophelia: this is the dream/goal for some of the Silicon Valley types supporting trans ideology. Even if it is nonsense.
Their dream goal is for AI to replace humans altogether?
Thanks for the edit! Appreciated, as always.
Welcome! I felt it was worth it because some people think AI really is living.
Their dream is to achieve “immortality” by storing their consciousnesses in digital form, existing eternally as ghosts in the machine. Whether this sort of extreme transhumanism motivates any significant portion of Genderism’s supporters notwithstanding, a fundamental mind-body disconnect is shared between them.
Godalmighty. What do they think would be the point without a body? I can’t imagine anything more horrendous.
If you haven’t yet read Lena by qntm (pen name of Sam Hughes), I highly recommend it.
Tell us more?
The link is to a (very) short story about uploading human minds to a computer. It is in the form of a report about the program to do such things, and the results of the efforts. “Horrendous” describes it well. (The page also links to information about his book, a collection of short stories, which I read and enjoyed; dystopian SF, roughly.)
Immortality. Life without disease. Bodies are sources of pain and suffering and embarrassment. We humans have always dreamed of transcending them.
(Alejandro Amenábar co-wrote and directed a movie, Abre Los Ojos, exploring the idea of eternal life in a solipsistic dream. I highly recommend it.)
I once tried to argue with an earnest young man who insisted that if we downloaded somebody’s brain, and then uploaded it to a computer, or something, the result would “be” the person. The discussion came about in the course of a discussion of transgenderism.
It’s Dualism 2.0, tech version. Young people are alienated from their bodies like never before.
And if someone was an asshole in life, then they’ll be an asshole forever. Or at least until the machine in which they’re a ghost gets unplugged by some janitor.
.
Yeah, what’s the point? The elevation and privileging of mental and intellectual pleasures, whenever and wherever it is indulged, is almost always done in conjunction with the denegration and disparagement of “mere” bodily pleasures. There’s no evidence that any kind of pleasure is possible without a body; bodily pleasures are a part of the package, so why not enjoy them? You need a body to do that, or anything; why is that a bad thing? Metaphysical sour grapes if we have no choice, but if we do, what makes us think that having the choice is necessarily good? A longer life is no guarantee of a better one. It’s not necessarily any one person’s choice either, as we shall see.
The belief that one’s personality and conciousness has an existence independent of the body, and that it can be removed and transferred to some material substrate other than the body in which it arose, is a technological version of the belief in a soul that lives on after death. Transhumanists might fool themselves into thinking they’ve changed things by describing this entity as a “pattern of information,” or somesuch, but it’s still much more a religious convinction than anything one might call “scientific.” They don’t want to know that conciousness might simply be an emergent property of a particular arrangement of matter, and that that property cannot be abstracted from that arrangement and “installed” in another one, that conciousness, personality, whatever, is something that is a product of biology, and that it must be evolved and grown, rather than designed and built. I know it smacks of vitalism, but what if conciousness is actually dependent upon biology, and that the messiness of bodies, and blood & guts existence, is the only way you can get it?
The whole idea of that you can download or upload your conciousness into a machine (or anything else) feels like a category error, like believing the journal you into which you write your thoughts and feelings not only thinks your thoughts and feels your feelings, but that it will continue to think thoughts and have feelings just like you, in perpetuity. Sure, it’s a pattern of information, but it’s an inert one, a dead end; it can’t write out its (or should I say your) thoughts and feelings in turn. But if someone else picks it up and reads it, then some of those thoughts and feelings, in a way, are repeated, preserved and perpetuated. But the journal can’t read itself, it can’t pick up and continue the story beyond the point where you set down your pen and closed the book.
I’m a materialist; I don’t think there is any other existence than a material one, that there is no “afterlife” or “immortal soul” that continues after we die. The only afterlife in which we can partake is the recycling of our atoms briefly borrowed atoms back into the grand dance of biophysical processes from which they and we sprang in the first place. I’ve come to think of “religion” or “spirituality” as the “narrativization” we devise that sets out the way in which (we believe) we are connected to the rest of the universe. That connection does not require any supernatural agents whatsoever; it doesn’t need any overarching “pln” or “direction,” no overarching principle, personification or embodyment of Good or Evil. Maybe I’m being naive or hypocritical in my “belief” that biology is necessary for conciousness. But there’s just something desperately sad and pathological about the desire to dispose of biological embodiment altogether. Now there might come some time, with the enevitable decline of health (assuming I avoid all other, earlier manners of death) that I might feel more interested in finding some way to escape my own personal “best before” date. But I hope not. I enjoy life, but once I’ve had my turn, it’s time to go, and if that’s what my physical, biological, animality decrees, than so be it. Death will be just another non-negotiable force to which I will have to yield, like gravitation and the need to metabolize. It’s just the way things are. There’s no fault or blame for its occurence; there’s no shame in the inevitable. It just is. And then, we just aren’t. And that’s fine. I’m under no illusion that the world needs any more of me than it’s going to get: a little goes a long way. And just as I’ve come to think that the last people you should be handing power to are the ones actively seeking it, and I’m not inclined to believe that the world would benefit from the immortality of those seeking immortality. Sure, everyone is unique, but nobody is indispensible. Anyone chasing immortality is labouring under the narcissistic delusion that they’re both needed and wanted, that their desire to continue should prevail over, and that they rest of the world should be obliged to accomodate that continuation, as if they are owed it.
I especially love “I’m under no illusion that the world needs any more of me than it’s going to get: a little goes a long way.” Also “until the machine in which they’re a ghost gets unplugged by some janitor.”
Thanks!
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