Guest post: They simply memorized a rule
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Oh look a sharp rise in referrals.
Wouldn’t you think that would alarm the people in charge? Wouldn’t you think they would pause to try to figure out why referrals skyrocketed like that? Wouldn’t you think they would not just assume it’s because a real need is at long last being met? Wouldn’t you think they would want to make sure they hadn’t simply created a market just as advertisers create markets for particular movies or shoes or cars? If you build it they will come along to get their bits cut off.
It never ceases to amaze me the rationalizing people do. People want moral certainty and simplicity, and that means they can’t bear to be seen to be challenging anything with a rainbow sticker stuck on it, because in a simple model of the world, only Bad People do Bad Things to the Rainbow People. The walls of fear and caution and panic I have had to dig around to get people to acknowledge — even in private, just one on one — some basic, obvious problems with pediatric “transition”…
It has made me realize that gay rights wasn’t primarily achieved through analysis and understanding, much of it happened through rote learning. Society didn’t come together and think the issue through and conclude that there’s no harm in homosexuality among consenting adults; rather, society was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to associate challenging the Rainbow with future social punishment and shame. They simply memorized a rule: if you don’t get on board with the Rainbow’s demands, you risk finding yourself on the wrong side of history, sullied and shamed.
I can see it clear as day, that this is the calculus everyone’s doing. Not one fucking drop of critical thinking applied to the question of gay people’s well being, even as adolescent gay people’s bodies are being carved up. They’re hung up on the only question that matters to them: will I come out looking ok in this social shift? and they conclude that the safest bet is to just go with the flow and give the Rainbow whatever it wants. There’s an added rationalization, too, that this is “inside-the-rainbow” business — the Rainbow lobby is demanding this, and transition is being done to Rainbow people (set aside the circular logic there, that once you assign a child a trans identity you rationalize away your own responsibility because now they’re “one of them”), so the responsibility will ultimately land on the rainbow people themselves. Sort of like how many white Americans treat so-called Black-on-Black crime like it’s not their concern.
And that calculus has become so apparent to others — it’s become so obvious that a rainbow sticker is a license to do whatever the fuck you want — that people with malevolent intentions, or secret agendas or desires, or mental problems they’re running from, or just a yen to gain an edge or some social cred, have come flooding in, so much so that the Rainbow has swollen to ten times what it’s supposed to be. (Science says only about 2 to 3 percent of people are LGB, but upwards of a third of young people are now calling themselves “2SLGBTQQIA+”.)
I love this. At the same time I think some initial rote learning can play a useful role in the expansion of the circle of rights. I think it’s ok at the beginning to just tell people “There is no reason for this particular set of people to be despised or persecuted or exploited or otherwise maltreated. It’s all bullshit. Just take our word for it and stop.”
Isn’t it fair to say that the reason gay rights was a matter of rote learning was because there was no substance to the prejudice in the first place? That’s how I remember it anyway, and I’m older than Mount Rushmore. It was just a squick thing, so it was pretty easy to argue that it made no fucking sense.
That doesn’t apply to racism or misogyny, but I think homophobia was always held up by pure faith and nothing else.
Mmm yes. I think Nullius in Verba made a number of excellent points along similar lines.
You’re correctly pointing out that there’s a missing piece in the puzzle.
The rote-learning-versus-deeply-synthesizing thing is a big part of the picture: it’s a necessary step in the process of disseminating new ideas through a social “trust matrix”, with intellectual “synthesizers” instigating change, and propagating it to the slower-adopters through social pressure and rote learning. I think we should look more at the nature of social progress from that angle.
The homosexuality-is-a-particularly-irrational-kind-of-bigotry angle is also ripe for much more examination. The “ick factor” has such a strong pull on people’s emotions, and at the same time it has such weak power over people’s critical faculties when they can be coaxed to listen to their minds instead of their guts.
But these two things put together somehow don’t tell the whole story, do they.
The question of why people are so quick to turn their minds off and just say yes to trans nonsense for kids isn’t quite addressed completely.
Maybe it’s something like this:
If accepting gay rights means telling yourself you’ve learned to overcome a “gut feeling” of ick through intellectual reasoning, then when faced with a “gut” common-sense feeling that something’s amiss with transgender ideology, the “rote lesson” they’ve absorbed is to distrust their own “gut” sense that something’s wrong because there must be some kind of higher, intellectual, rational justification out there somewhere that they fear they just haven’t worked out yet.
Kind of like, All these other important people have figured it out already; why haven’t I?
I see something like that in (my poor, pet subjects) the Scientologists. They’ve been trained that Scientology is so complicated that it’s always “more right” than your gut feelings, and if you don’t immediately react positively in your gut to one of its teachings, it’s because you have a weakness inside you: you’re just missing something. This prompts people to turn off their own ability to challenge the received wisdom of the church, because they’ve learned by rote that the very act of doubting is a sign of moral weakness.
Funny enough, I’m having an argument with Freddie deBoer over at Substack right this minute, over his insistence that there’s such a thing as a “trans child”, and he’s reacting very much like someon who’s been conditioned to believe that his own doubts about trans medicine are signs that he might secretly harbour some kind of hate for the “LGBTQ” somewhere deep down. He’s not replying with rebuttals about the facts at hand, he’s replying with defences of his own moral character.
That’s the tell: they keep changing the subject back to their own moral standing. Obviously, then, that’s their preoccupation and the part that they’re hung up on.
On occasion, I’ve wondered how it is that this exact kind of argument never worked with regards to religious belief. There’ve been lots of important and brilliant people who’ve held devout religious belief, yet their own faith made no dent in my lack of belief (once I’d finally come to that position in my own thoughts and feelings about the matter). The faith of those smart people did not make me rethink my perception of the impossibility and ridiculousness of the supernatural aspects of their religions. For me, the supernatural bits get in the way of those few moral and ethical bits that are actually worthwhile.
Transgenderism rests upon a set of essentially religious, supernatural beliefs. An implicit Cartesian dualism, the primacy of the “gender identity” over the sexed body, the concept of being born into the “wrong” body, the belief that sex is a spectrum rather than a binary, and that humans can change sex. Like religion, there are all sorts of subsets of belief, many of which are mutually exclusive (is gender fixed or fluid; is it innate or can it arise later; how much , if any physical transition is required; etc.), all of which still, supposedly, fall within the trans “community” or under the trans “umbrella.”
Well, this potential “hatred” may actually be partially true if he supports “trans medicine” because he’s supporting transing away the gay. Those who claim there are “trans kids” are starting with their conclusion by squeezing all disphoric children into a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of transness. “The awnswer is trans; what was the question?” Remember Dawkins invocation of the “Conservative child” or “Keynsian child” to point out the inappropriateness of talking about a “Muslim child” or a “Catholic child?” I’ve come to think that transess is more a belief than a condition. Talking about “trans children” is akin to pre-emptive recruitment into an ideology, a staking out of a political claim in the flesh and blood of children, rather than a medical diagnosis. Treatment then, is not so much an attempt at any sort of cure, but a sacrifice to faith, a pricey token of commitment. And this commitment must be made before they have a chance to desist.
(Addendum to the above comment #3)
Recasting the concept of “trans kids” into a political one adds an additional layer of meaning to the slogan “PROTECT TRANS KIDS!” (which is often accompanied by images of knives and assault rifles on T-shirts). Perhaps what is being defended is not so much the children, but their diagnosis as “trans.” Desistors are a thing; so are detransitioners. Both of these groups of people cast doubt on the concept of transness itself, and the ability of those who claim expertise in “diagnosing” it and “treating” it. Both phenomena suggest that transness is less of a thing (both in terms of its reality and the numbers of those who are trans) than trans activists would have us believe. My understanding is that the majority of dysphoric children end up desisting, and that the combination of therapy and uninterrupted puberty resolves many of the issues that arose before it. By claiming these children are all “trans,” activists have laid the groundwork for setting them on a pathway to lifelong medicalization, which supposedly allows these children to “be who they really are.” Shutting down “watchful waiting” reduces the number of children who will have a chance of growing out of a phase. Activists call watchful waiting “conversion therapy,” (another appropriation from the painful struggles of LGB people that parasitic forced teaming has enabled) and try to turn it into a crime. Funny how they want to turn talking kids out of being trans into an offence; what about talking them into it? If gender identity doesn’t exist, then convincing somebody that they have one is as much an example of “changing their gender identity” as talking them out of the belief that they’ve been “born in the wrong body.” Much of the protest that will meet bans on “treatment” of minors will be because it interferes with trans activism’s own short-circuiting of the natural progression of desistance. It halts their recruitment and undermines the validity of “gender identity” altogether. How real can transness be if a child can be talked out of it, or essentially just grow out of it?
I wonder if the “ick factor” could be turned against the drugging, mutilation, and sterilization that is the fate of the too many who are snared by gender ideology? After all, it’s much more than a matter of personal unease, disgust or distaste. Trans ideology harms the very people it claims to be helping. If trans activism really cared for children, it would encourage desistance, as it would allow the discovery of the small number of people (assuming there are any) who would truly benefit from the treatments and procedures they push on those who don’t need it and should not receive it. Every desistor is a mark against “gender affirming care.” But it really is just a numbers game; that’s what’s behind the recruitment and treatment of minors, the denunciation of talk therapy, the rush to hormones, the repudiation and vilification of detransitionioners. It’s a dangerous cult engaged in a protection racket and a turf war. And that’s even before we even mention the torching of women’s rights….
That is exactly how I thought back about 12 years ago when still reading Freethoughtblogs and swallowing all their arguments. I remember reading one of these gender-explaining guest posts on Pharyngula (by Crip Dyke) which was really densely phrased and complicated and thinking “this is more complicated than quantum field theory [something I studied at the time], perhaps I’m not smart enough to really understand this?”
From Artymorty #2:
This social aspect reminds me of the movie Catch Me If You Can (2002), in this movie clip, where Leonardo DiCaprio fakes being a doctor, leaving a real doctor to question himself:
Well, Ophelia, if you’re older than Mount Rushmore, how old does that make me?!
Anyway, I agree. The idea of gender identity is totally different from homosexual identity (if that is a term). Way back when, during the period of Freethoughtblogs, and Pharyngula and the Gnu Atheism, and even further back when I was still active as an Anglican priest, I supported gay rights when it was very unpopular in the church. In fact, my position elicited outrage from almost everyone. But I have always been suspicious of the idea of gender identity, and rebelled against the practice of disfiguring children on the basis of what has no obviously identifiable physical correlate. If a child cannot make up their minds about sexual relationship before they turn 18, how is it possible for them to adopt a gender identity before that? Unless there is a solution to that problem, gender-bending ideology has no firm ground on which to stand. This is obvious just from the ideological fervour and the fierce condemnation that gender-benders aim at those who dissent from the whole idea of it. It’s not an ick thing, it’s an evidence thing. There are conceptual problems with the idea of gender identity, and that is a sure sign of something amiss (or I wasted a lot of money studying philosophy).
Homosexuality never had the overload of ideological partisanship, so far as I could see. It was the ick factor that was really uppermost.. But homosexuality was something that could be located on an actual spectrum of sexual desire with fairly clear data points. Around 2 or 3 percent of the average population had homosexual orientation, with those clustered at the turning point who were Bi or who fluctuated between male and female norms. But gender identity has no obvious evidential basis, so numbers can be multiplied ad libitum. Pretending that there are male females and female males simply doesn’t measure up. I began questioning my earlier stance regarding homosexuality until I saw the difference. There are women whom some would identify as having masculine characteristics, and men who have feminine ones, but that is almost always related to the spectrum of sexual desire. But treating gender (which is, let’s acknowledge, a grammatical category) as though it were a disease needing drugs and surgery makes it clear that this is something else altogether. As Popper said, falsifiability is at least one measure of scientific evidence, and it is hard to see how you even provide protocols for selecting for gender identity that didn’t depend on personal feeling. Which means that there is no scientifically accessible evidence for it. It is an ideological or political belief system, dependent on feeling and not on evidence. How can you define gender identity except by referring to something subjective?
The other issue is the one that I’ve constantly noted in the media: The Problem of Three.
Bad People Bad is a powerful heuristic. It does make a certain amount of sense to regard, say, the anti-trans legislation proposed by DeSantis, Abbott and their ilk with caution. And I’ve often found that the superficially anti-trans bills contain other elements that are misogynistic, homophobic and so forth. So I tend to stay skeptical, even if the fluff description of the proposal seems to make sense.
The idea that those folks might be right about something is hard to accept. And really, they aren’t, but it requires a more-than-superficial understanding to see why that is–you have to go beyond the action to find the motive, and even then to find the underlying motives, which requires looking at context and history. And, well, humans aren’t wired for that, at least not easily. So when you have three distinct sets of motivation and reasoning, but only two outcomes (provided you narrow the point of view down to a single issue, and often a single aspect of that issue), then you end up with the assumption that Those People and Those Other People must be in lockstep against These People.
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