One day we’ll awake and see the truth
No YOU are.
Whittle thinks that our awareness that people can’t change sex will one day strike us as “absurd, even unhinged.”
That day will not arrive. Why not? Because people can’t change sex, and we won’t one day decide they can, just as we won’t one day decide that people can fly or live under water or pick up the Chrysler building with one hand.
We’re not the absurd, even unhinged ones in this brawl. The absurdity is insisting that people can change sex, or that they can have a sex that’s the opposite of the one their bodies are.
It’s not absurd or unhinged in the same way to think that it’s “kind” to pretend that people can change sex, and that we ought to do so because it’s kind. It’s wrong, but not absurd/unhinged the way believing in magic gender is.
The fact that Whittle refers to people disparagingly as “sex realists” says it all, really. As if “realist” is ever a bad thing. Not long ago she wasn’t this extreme. Her grip on reality appears to be slipping. It’s particularly striking because right now in light of the WPATH and Cass controversies, many others are going the other way: trying to swim back to the slightly shallower waters of gender woo, where sex isn’t entirely nonexistent but maybe just a bit pliable at the edges, and pretend they had never ventured so deep into total, complete sex denialism. Whittle, meanwhile, is racing straight out to sea.
Trans people are not, themselves, a cult — the accusation of “cult” involves an entire ideological network of beliefs and behaviors which contain cult-like elements. The people who identify as trans are often sincere and well-meaning, or confused victims themselves, Children aren’t recruited in the clumsy sense of deliberately approached and encouraged to join an alien system. It’s more subtle than that, because people think they’re helping kids discover or reveal the truths that are already inside them. This whole description can be interpreted in a ham-handed and cartoonish way which few GC and Sex Realists believe — and that’s probably Whittles’ interpretation.
It just seems so Straw-Man-y..
Hate (read: love) to break it to you, Steph, but the Satanic Panic and recovered memory comparisons work the opposite of the way you think. We aren’t the ones implanting delusions and illusions in children’s minds. We aren’t the ones getting them to believe that their parents are evil and abusive and out to get them. We aren’t the ones telling children they’re victims and demolishing their sense of having an internal locus of control. We aren’t the ones peddling faddish pseudoscience incompatible with established knowledge. We aren’t the ones getting all the credulous media attention.
That’s all on you.
Artymorty, the point is to draw a parallel with “race realists” which is a cuddly rebrand of neo-Nazis.
What Prof Stephen Whittle wants to believe is that people can be whatver they want to be. A man can believe that he is a woman, and vice versa. One can accept that if a man states a belief at whatever level of sincerity that he is a woman, then the most the rest of us can honestly accept is that he believes that he is a woman; and that he is delusional. Though we are not obliged to hurt his feelings and upset him by telling him that he is delusional, at the same time we are not morally obliged to ‘humour’ him by telling him that yes, he is in our view truly and definitely a woman. The most we can honestly say is that yes, we believe that he believes that he is a woman, though we ourselves think otherwise.
To ‘play along’ is for ourselves to consciously tell a lie; and that in turn will likely do harm to the self-esteem of any such reluctant liar.
It also gets nobody anywhere.