Other minds
Watching this stirred up a question for me – not a new question, but one that never really gets answered so probably never will.
The question is not about the fluffy teddy bear conspicuously at her elbow.
(But now I mention it what is that fluffy teddy there for? What she’s talking about in the clip is her having been struck off for giving blockers to children – so why remind everyone of herself & children by having a teddy sitting next to her like a support animal?)
The question is about what she and trans ideologues in general think is going on with “trans children” and “trans” anybody. What does it mean? It’s not physical; it’s in the mind. Trans people “feel like” the opposite sex. Trans people “feel as if” they are in the wrong body. It’s about feeling and feeling like; it’s about ideas and self-something – explanation? description? understanding? It’s interior, and it’s emphatically not physical. It’s in the mind.
So the question that occurred to me, that is not new but never gets answered, is how does anybody know? It’s 100% subjective so how can other people be so certain that it’s reliable and we absolutely must honor it and treat it as true, and not only true but true in defiance of the obvious visible reality?
We don’t know this stuff about other people. Nobody does. That’s just not how it works. This is why lying works, it’s why fraud works, it’s why perjury works. Other minds are notoriously a black box. So how can a purported mental state that contradicts physical reality strike so many people as convincing enough to put a torch to existing laws and rules governing sex-based rights?
It’s just weird. It ignores one of the most basic things we know about human relations: that we can never know for sure exactly what other people are thinking. People can say one thing but be thinking its opposite. We can’t pry open the skull and take a look to make sure.
So here I am wondering what’s going on in the minds of people who take the ideology seriously.
There is no criterion by which to ascertain which trans claims are sincere (“true trans”), and which are lies (opportunistic men preying on women in multiple ways). Kinda like Schroëdinger’s Rapist — you can’t tell just by looking which men are dangerous to women, you can’t tell just by looking which men claiming to be trans are “sincere,” and which are just exploitive opportunistic perverts, although I think the percentage of “trans women” who are dangerous to women is higher than the general percentage of men who are dangerous to women. And that’s why NO MEN — not one, and certainly not those who pretend to be women — are allowed in women’s spaces.
Exulansic has been doing an ongoing series called “The Dead Names”, about children who were “affirmed” as the wrong sex, often given hormones and sometimes surgery, and killed themselves. She argues that in many instances it is the hormones themselves that are driving the kids bats and making them suicidal. In other instances it is, perhaps, when they realize that their bodies are mutilated and sterilized, or that people don’t want to have romantic or sexual relationships with them because their bodies are iatrogenically messed up.
https://exulansic.substack.com/
I think the teddy bear is supposed to be camouflage. It’s supposed to disarm us, just like TiMs wearing outfits more appropriate to little girls than women. It’s screaming “I AM HARMLESS!!” at us. That she includes this despite the potential to remind viewers of stunted, mutilated children, is because it’s a stuffty shield, not a reference to her past and current crimes. I don’t think she has enough self-awareness to make that referential connection, because, in her mind, she is right, she is innocent. It’s supposed to distract us from the dangerous, creepifying reality, though she would deny there was any such reality to hide. Still, she’s got that bear to make her look vulnerable and sensitive.
There’s so much infatilization woven through this ideology (see also furry and anime avatars, use of pink and baby blue, etc.). This is just another example of it.
There’s something about gender expression and magical thinking that seems remarkably consistent across cultures, at least in boys, if not as often in girls. Males who exhibit atypically feminine interests or behaviours are often deemed to have extra-mystical souls. They’re more connected to the spiritual world than other men and women. They’re often made out to be shamans, or priests, or are assigned to ceremonial or ritual duties. They aren’t treated as entirely human.
It accidentally exposes how primitive the thinking is among “gender identity” believers: for all the trans activists’ window dressing about spectrums, they still envision men and women as essential castes. Men and women are material after all; the “spectrum” is the liminal space between the essential man and the essential woman — it’s an opening into the spiritual domain, whose inhabitants transcend the material world.
These are precious beings who must be protected and revered, because they aren’t quite material; they are outside the corporeal sexes.
Therefore it’s immaterial what we do to a trans person’s body. The body is merely the vessel that this magical being occupies. It is not the being himself; it is a vulgar carapace. All the better to enhance it — to shape it to reflect the beauty of his soul.
All of this is an outcropping of our species’ innate instinct to tell men and women apart. As always, the transgender phenomenon only proves how fundamentally we distinguish between males and females. It’s just that the trans believers process the stereotypical outliers in a radically superstitious framework, and the “gender criticals” don’t.
Oof. Noisy round of applause.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Other […]
Perhaps an aside, but how much money can a person make exploiting this ideology for personal gain? We see the “good law” project selling merch and capitalizing on this fad, but more ghoulishly, “doctor” Helen as well, but with a more hands on approach, which is ghoulish, but also (speaking of Exulansic GW@2, who followed this story) how blatantly evil to make a whole television series about a minor, Jazz, who is shuffled down this narrowing, inescapable corridor so his parents and degenerate TV profiteers can exploit him? Ruining children’s lives for profit is a particularly dire kind of depravity.
I recommend Julie Bindel’s substack post (), in which she talks about a debate she had with Helen Webberly. It is headed:
“I was in the presence of evil”
And:
“Being face-to-face in a room with Helen Webberley, the ‘Gender GP’, felt similar to the times I have interviewed rapists and murderers in prison. I was in the midst of a malign presence.”
I don’t why the copy & paste thing I did didn’t work and those brackets came out empty.
Julie Bindel’s substack address is: juliebindel@substack.com.
@twilighter #7
That’s why I stopped donating to Planned Parenthood. They got onto the trans medical care gravy train, instead of sticking to reproductive health care.
Same. I wondered if they did that to make up for the loss of federal funding, to maintain the ability to provide actual reproductive health services, but still, I was just very disappointed to find out that they distribute cross-sex hormones
The assumption seems to be that you won’t lie about your gender identity because you have a psychological need to have everyone else know and somehow “affirm” it. This is apparently vital. It’s at the ground level of Maslow’s pyramid. Whatever gender identities are exactly, it seems like it’s really important to have other people know about them. (Hmm….) And how could you ever dare misgender yourself?
I don’t understand this line of thinking at all. Maybe normal people have a kind of instinct, or perhaps a sixth sense, which imbues them with this knowledge from birth. But I don’t; I’ve looked and I’ve looked and at this point I’ve gotten fairly certain there’s no such thing anywhere in my brain. I seem to be the gender identity equivalent to a sociopath, suffering from some unusual condition which prevents me from “getting” other people’s pink and/or blue auras.
But then, it appears to be quite possible to have deep-seated, ineffable convictions, and to be completely and utterly wrong nonetheless. So why should I treat TRAs’ claims as being any more plausible than, say, tarot readers’? As far as I’m concerned, there isn’t any more of a “gender identity” part of the brain than there is a “quantum healing” part of the brain. Perhaps one day I’ll find that elusive gender identity thingy hiding inside a forgotten cranny in the depths of my psyche, but for the time being it seems reasonnable enough to assume it doesn’t exist. The human cranium isn’t roomy enough to contain all the stuff I can’t rule out.
The “I feel like a woman” thing falls apart under any actual scrutiny, really. Even if we take the self-assessment at face value–that they have these feelings, and there is no ulterior motive for seeking to affirm them–it still doesn’t mean they ACTUALLY feel like women, because they cannot know what women actually feel like. Instead, all they really know is that their feelings don’t match what they’ve been told men should be feeling, so they assume they’re actually women (as opposed to, you know, just non-gender-conforming men, which as identities go is a pretty decent one to work from).
@4t this is reminding me a bit of something Patricia Fara says in her book about how Isaac Newton became the archetypal ‘genius’ – she suggests that women, by definition, can’t be ‘geniuses’ because the label ‘genius’ incorporates the ‘feminine’ characteristics of intuition, imagination, ‘flightiness’, opaqueness, into a ‘masculine’ character, setting the bearer of that label into a category different from other men.
@guest,
Ooh, fascinating! It’s very much old-timey sex essentialism all the way down, isn’t it.
Meanwhile, I’ll have to give Patricia Fara’s book a read. Thanks for the tip! I hadn’t heard of it.
Now that you’ve intrigued me into googling it, from what I gather, the gist is that Newton is more of a modern branding idea than an actual a person with a true biographical history that aligns with the legend. And that kind of analysis is right in my sweet spot. Very much might read!
Cheers!
@15 yes exactly, Newton’s image was very carefully and deliberately crafted to support a specific agenda. I highly recommend the book; as someone who was identified as a ‘genius’ early in life I learned a lot about what that actually means.
Just one question, guest. Are you a very stable genius, or just a run-of-the-mill genius? Inquiring minds want to know.
I’m a pretty ordinary genius as geniuses go.