Guest post: The Big City with its urbane ways is just another tribe
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Any regrets?
To the extent that there is a causal pathway from “GC” to “MAGA”, it’s making people like Linehan so angry about the excesses of gender ideology that they no longer care who their bedfellows are
That’s an interesting point. Bedfellows is a lovely, poetic word for compatriots. I think there’s a deep-down, evolved need in most of us to situate ourselves within a tribe — within a safe, comfortable, familiar community of like-minded individuals, who have each others’ backs when we’re feeling besieged by a common enemy. In fact, that feels close to perhaps the biggest insight I’ve ever felt in my whole life: my whopping Eureka! moment. After several years working, writing, podcasting, grinding, ruminating — FULMINATING! — against genderwoo, trying to make sense of something so mystifying, I feel like I’m circling towards a kind of Grand Theory of Everyting That’s Wrong With the World, or an answer to the universal question, Why Does Irrationality Persist All the Time Within our Big Dumb Species? And it involves tribalism and that feeling of comfort that some people crave so much more deeply than others…
I mean, you could very well argue I was scratching at this itch long before gender became the focus of my attention: it was a fascination with religiosity in a broad, philosophical sense that initially captivated me and hooked me on critical-thinking blogs like B&W. I’m sure that’s the same with many other B&W regulars: we came here before gender; we came here because critical thinking.
Given the Jesus-based homophobia and misogyny faced by me and my single-parent feminist mother in my formative years, there’s no mystery where my interests in atheism, rationalism, and women’s rights came from. And that eventually led to a Centre For Inquiry membership, and then a particular fascination with the bizarre little demimonde of Scientology (as an observer, not a member, of course!). The Scientologists are so extreme, and so uniform in their extremity — and some of them seem otherwise so rational when you get them talking about subjects other than the cult… it’s like a perfect little petri dish for testing ideas about cult-think. They’re little rats in a maze, and the poor fools don’t even know it.
The disparate strands of my various fascinations only started really coming together and converging on the trans phenomenon after I divorced my ex and took a job at a gay bar in middle age. Before that stabilizing relationship, I was a ragamuffin gay-village street kid. It was afterwards, coming back to the subculture I’d grown up in, and seeing how culty it had become while I was away for a decade — while I spent a decade as a couch-bound, middle-class, 9-to-5 normie — that I started making shocking connections between the Southern Baptist evangelical family that had left me behind, the kooky Scientologists I prodded at online, and my immediate, real-world circle of friends and colleagues.
Up until then, I genuinely thought that us hip, sophisticated, arty (!), cosmopolitan folk were above such tribal irrationality.
But it turns out the Big City and its urbane ways is just another tribe, just another cultural comfort blanket, with rules, rituals, a pecking order, and everything else that tribal membership entails. The big-city tribe’s ideas and core values are generally more cerebral — I mean that literally, as in they’re ideas that rely on the processing fuctions that the prefrontal cerebral cortex handles, which is to say, they’re thinky and refined, compared to Red State-world’s aggressively unthinky and gut-level, knee-jerk values.
But the problem with humans is that more cerebral doesn’t mean more true. Sometimes knee-jerk feelings aren’t dumb: sometimes they point us to tried-and-true common sense. And sometimes deep thoughts aren’t smart: sometimes they lead us to overthinking: we see mirages because of overanalysis and neurosis. (Doesn’t trans fit that description so well?)
Humans occupy the material world — as real as rocks, as concrete as concrete; rawly physical — as well as the abstract, brainy web of ideas shared between us, in that invisible mesh network that connects our cerebral cortexes together into shared cultural domains. These virtual domains of shared experience and values — these tribal frameworks for our collective existence — feel just as real as the actual material world to people. It takes tremendous amounts of critical self-evaluation to parse the difference between the actual material world and the abstract, intellectual one.
But they’re both still real in the sense that they’re equally influential to the core of the human experience. We live simultaneously in both worlds, and our core instincts don’t distinguish between them, no matter how hard our highfalutin grey matter tries to say otherwise.
And frankly, both worlds are “demon-haunted”, to borrow Carl Sagan’s phrase — and to mildly rebut it. Both worlds are candles in each others’ darks. That’s the mess of the trans movement: it’s an atypical example of the demons haunting the sophisticated grey matter instead of the primitive amygdala. It’s an example of gut instinct being right and so-called “higher thought” being wrong: sex IS deeply ingrained, instinctually understood, readily observed, and it fucking matters to everyone, and we’re not demons for not trying to “think our way out of” the existence of sex.
But I digress. Back to Graham and the path from GC to MAGA, or MAGA-adjacent. Bedfellows.
This is all humans trying to make sense of our lives, and to find stability and comfort. It’s that all the way down. We need tribes to feel safe. Some of us more than others. When the heat gets hot, people’s deep, low-down, instinctual priorities change. It’s not a great mystery to me why it happens anymore. Just like it’s not a great mystery to me anymore why people become Scientologists. I marvelled and scratched at that question for years, but now I kinda get it. It’s my Eureka, that I mentioned earlier. I can finally see — and grasp — what’s up.
Graham and I have no doubt diverged in our political affiliations and worldviews, but that doesn’t even a little bit change my respect and admiration for Graham.
I see my friend as someone who’s looked at his personal need for tribal affinity and safety and taken actions that make him feel safest in that regard — away from the “progressives” who’ve ruthlessly attacked him. In fact, I can see how I must look utterly bizarre to some of my GC colleagues: the fact that I still identify as a liberal even though virtually all lefties have thoroughly rejected me, cancelled me, attacked me, and all but left me for dead! Am I some kind of self-hating masochist to still associate with lefties/progressives/liberals (whatever you want to call them)? That’s not an unreasonable question, at all. There are two kinds of people who emerge when faced with such a dilemma: my kind and Graham’s kind. We’re still two of a kind — erstwhile or ostensible liberals in crisis — but we’re different kinds, and this is how: Most people subconsciously associate their political positions with finding the best way to meet their personal needs and to feed their personal instincts. That’s Graham’s life path — and it’s perfectly human. Other people (such as me) associate our political positions with external ideas, and we separate ourselves and our needs from them completely. One path says, if this political worldview isn’t working for me, I should change paths. These people internalize the problem. Other people (my kind) externalize the problem: it can’t be me; it must be the system malfunctioning.
The irony is, both these worldviews have their merits. In fact, in a stable, normal world, in Graham’s worldview, it starts out with humility: the kernel of it says that *he himself* must have got something wrong, and it builds from there. That’s respectable!
This is all just a roundabout, elaborate way of showing you that if you break down the lefty position, right down to its framework, you can build it right back up to a sympathetic framework that has opposite conclusions.
MAGA and TWAW really are tremendously alike. And that’s a valuable thing to understand: it offers the possibility of hope and reconciliation.
xoxoxo
We can think of tribal affiliations in different ways, particularly when it comes to a love of truth. I think the intersection between the conservative gender critical position and the liberal gender critical position lies in the area where both sides accept that there are broad-based psychological and/or emotional differences between human males and females. This comes down (or should come down) to a scientific question involving studies, data, and neurology. It’s well established, for example, that women in the aggregate are more nurturing than men, men tend to be more aggressive than women, and there’s some biological basis for both. How much is an issue, but there’s an area of agreement and overlap between both sides.
The other issue is whether a nurturing male and an aggressive female are “okay,” or in need of social correction. And although the popular idea in some liberal circles is that MAGA folks would definitely whip those abnormal outliers into shape for the sake of a harmonious whole, from what I’ve seen that attitude’s rare. Conservative GC may believe traditional gender roles are best, but they no longer frown on gender nonconformity the way they once did. In fact, there’s a fair proportion of Trump supporters who believe that a woman having a career and housework subsequently split down the middle is just fine.
It’s possible then that the move between being a liberal with some views shared by conservatives and a conservative with some views shared by liberals isn’t a move. When liberals and conservatives begin to stop dealing with the enemy-in-the-head and actually spend time with each other, the dividing line can snap either way.
Militant Moderates for the win? Whatever THST means. I just know I have a visceral reaction to some of the right think on the critical theory left but also gag on the Trump worshipping antivaxxer right. I have no home.
Brian, I’m with you. There may be, and probably are, some good things in critical theory, but I doubt they’re worth digging through all the bullshit to find.
@Sastra,
The problem is that when you look at the details, it becomes easy to find quite a few examples of GC conservatives not accepting gender nonconforming people. Open disgust at parents who let their sons wear pink clothes (including one memorable tweet in an exchange I had in which someone said the parents of such children should be murdered, and that tweet was met with many likes). Open disgust at men who wear “feminine” clothing at all. Open disgust at butch lesbians who look too male. (Which basically tells detransitioned lesbians whose testosterone-ravaged faces have beards and receding hairlines that they should… what, exactly? Oh right: go off and die and get out of the picture.) Outright advocacy for legally barring same-sex couples from raising children. (“It’s not natural.”) Constant accusations that all gay men are sexual deviants and pedophiles, just waiting for their chance to molest all the children. (Anna Slatz — founder of GC outlet Reduxx, right-wing nutjob extraoridinaire, perennial figure in Canadian news for her racism, and, it’s rumoured, former Scientologist — passionately and sincerely argues that all gay men deserve to die of AIDS, and that we’re all f*g**ts. She’s repeatedly called me the f-word on Twitter, and convinced literally hundreds of GC women to do the same. To this day, Reduxx is treated by the GC crowd as a respectable news outlet — J.K. Rowling herself came out in defence of Slatz’s team while it was embroiled in a drama over its defence of her calling gay men including me the f-word and advocating for our death. Even G holds up Slatz’s pretend-good-cop sidekick/enabler, Genevieve Gluck, as a feminist hero. All that rage-against-gays business is just too inconvenient to address I guess.) The roaring return of advocacy for conversion therapy on same-sex attracted teens. (The gender-critical therapy organization Genspect tried to make a big media splash out of its partnership with a conservative Christian conversion therapy advocacy org as if it was some kind of exciting, game-changing breakthrough that the homophobic Bible-thumpers had also spoken out against trans medicine.)
The connection between old-fashioned conservatives and GC conservatives largely revolves around instinctual panic around male sexuality. The boundaries of gender expression overlap with the boundaries of male sexual expression. (Autogynephiles wearing skirts, for example.)
There’s very good reason for females to have strong negative reactions about male sexuality. They’re too obvious to spell out. But it’s important that such feelings not spill into outright man-hatred, because ironically, it’s often gay men and feminine men gender nonconforming men who end up facing the brunt of the hate. Almost like we’re the low-hanging fruits (as it were) that can be attacked in place of the rapists. I’ve seen it happen too many times. The nice feminine boys get attacked by the women and men who are angry and the rapist men.
I think one big reason for blunders in this area is just gaps in knowledge. Maybe that’s just me? But I can’t (or at least don’t) keep track of where everyone is on the political map. There are too many of us!
Fair enough, I guess. But I just don’t want to be called a faggot child predator who’s unsafe around children and who should probably die of AIDS and who is fundamentally an object of disgust, and who should be legally barred from raising children. I don’t know how much of that I’m willing to chalk up to gaps in knowledge. It hurts too much. But that’s basically what my experinece in GC land was like, and everyone else just brushed it off because they couldn’t “feel” it themselves, so they couldn’t see how awful and painful it was for us. (Of course they couldn’t: it wasn’t directed at them!)
Ugh, no, and nor should you.
Here’s another concrete example: a couple years ago Canada had these nationwide protests that were supposedly to oppose the teaching of gender ideology in schools. I agreed with that objective, so my org (LGB Alliance Canada) tried to get involved in organizing the events, well before the day they happened. We were involved briefly, but then we were kicked out, explicitly because we were gay, and the organizers were mostly Muslim and Christian anti-gay conservatives. I went to the Toronto event as an observer, and I saw the most homophobic protest I’d ever seen in my life. There were chants of “all homosexuals are psychopaths” and riotous cheers in response. It was a gay hate fest. But the gender-critical scene couldn’t bear to acknowledge the homophobia; they just whitewashed it out, and pretended the protests were a glorious example of gender-critical bliss. They threw us gays right under the bus. I tried to tell anyone who’d listen that the protests were anti-gay, but no one would listen. It was just too inconvenient. On and on like that.
(LGB Alliance itself couldn’t stop throwing gays under the bus — or at least throwing gay *men* under the bus — and the stuff I learned about that group and its founders has chilled me to the bone, so I’m no longer involved with them at all.)
Good god. I had no idea.
Geez, Arty. Had no idea they were that toxic. Ignorance no excuse I guess.
Arty
Ugh! What a shitshow…
Looks like I wasn’t just being paranoid after all…