Who just went along with it
Michael Deacon at the Telegraph asks an important question:
How did something as self-evidently bonkers as trans ideology gain such a powerful grip over our society?
Or to put it another way, how did and do so many adults manage to believe, or act as if they believe, such a self-evidently bonkers claim?
(Which claim? The claim that sex is not in the body but the mind; that people can be the opposite of the sex they obviously are; that sex is a matter of idenniny as opposed to fact; that genitalia have nothing to do with which sex a person is. That claim.)
Over our politics, our universities, the BBC and countless other institutions? Funnily enough, the people I blame most are not the fanatics who actually believe in this nonsense – for the simple reason that there are, in reality, very few of them.
No, I think the real blame lies with a group of people who are rather more numerous. That is: the cowards who just went silently along with it all, or even pretended to believe in it, because they didn’t dare speak out.
But we don’t know, do we. It’s another black box. We don’t know how many are just obeying as opposed to genuinely believing. We can’t tell. The perps have arranged it so that we can’t tell.
To be clear, I’m not having a go at ordinary people in ordinary jobs. I’m talking about the cowards who are rich and successful: big-name figures in everything from publishing to pop. Such people could, like JK Rowling, have used their influence to help defend women’s rights and everyone’s free speech. Overwhelmingly, however, our elites kept their mouths shut and their heads down.
Or they in fact busied themselves shouting at JKR and all the rest of us evil refuseniks.
This does raise an issue I’ve been thinking about (in my capacity as a Man). Women have the most to lose from transgender ideology and activism. Yet it is also women who tend to be the most enthusiastic supporters of this same ideology.
Not just rich women like Jamie Lee Curtis, Cynthia Nixon and Charlize Theron either.
I’ve heard working-class women come out very strongly for “the ideology”. I’ve heard a female friend saying that she would have no issue with sharing a changing room with a trans-identified male, even if he still had male genitalia. I’ve heard another working-class woman – a disability activist – openly claim that the Keir Starmer government is plotting to murder trans people in Britain.
I don’t know why this is so. Can any of the women here offer me an explanation?
I sure can’t. I’m just as baffled as you are.
Unless…I suppose I do have a faint ill-formed idea that it could have to do with the expectation that women do the touchy-feely stuff while men bring home the mastodon carcass. Even those of us who reject those stereotypes are subject to them.
Maybe it’s a generational thing?
Women who don’t buy into the magical gender souls thing are routinely demonized as old, ugly, ignorant, politically authoritarian, “Extreme Online”, “Stuck In An Echo Chamber”, reactionary, prudish, White, Christian and middle-class….you know the cliches at this stage.
Supporting the gender-woo might be seen as being “on the right side of history”, a way for a young woman to differentiate herself from her mother, aunts and grandmothers.
Perhaps this is an illustration of how memes work, right? There is this idea that a female mind (and mind is ill-defined) can be trapped in a male body, and since it’s the male mind that is most likely to commit sexual abuse then such women feel safe with an intact male who has a female mind in their space. So, if for Brian Wu to go in and trade lipstick tips, well that’s just being “one of the gang.”
I think that the second issue that’s blocking people from thinking skeptically is the association that people have cultivated between right-wing ideology and being anti-trans. So, any sort of objection to men in womanface in women’s restrooms is dismissed as being MAGA or UKIP. Also, I see people making the ludicrous suggestion that if their only goal is to molest women, they wouldn’t go through the whole womanface thing. A rule isn’t a barrier.
The third is that skeptics skew left politically and there are many topics on which left-leaning people adopt prima facie and that is the idea that the transgender experience is as much a natal characteristic as is sexuality. If one can be born gay, lesbian, or bisexual, then it is very much the same thing to be born trans or enby. Questioning that is as bigoted as questioning any other innate characteristic. And the problem is that by adopting this uncritically, bystanders who lean left follow along.
I don’t know how much sociology is taught in secondary education, and I took it as an elective back in the 1970’s; but we learned very clearly the difference between sex and gender roles. We learned that even though gender roles are founded on sex difference, they varied from society to society. My anthropology course confirmed that. Logically from that, I do not see how gender identity can be innate. It’s not a leap to understand how certain aspects of personality are innate, so that if someone has preferences that are considered to be more characteristic of the other sex one might be scorned for acting on those preferences. Suppression of those preferences might express as a sexual fetish in a Freudian world, and as we know, gender is a trap that reduces our options for expression. My impression is based on several courses in psychology, even though I am not a trained psychologist. But my conclusion is that by tying gender directly to sex in a way that leads people to believe that they will be whole by modifying (here used as a synonym for mutilating) their body to match the appearance of the gender whose roles one prefers to express, is a result of toxic masculinity and a symptom of regression. It is an affirmation of the gender trap, rather than a refutation of it.
Things have gotten so tangled and gnarled that those who would prefer to express as androgynous now call themselves “Non-binary” and that is considered a third choice on the forms where we report our sex. I think that the “Free to be, you and me” program was a great start in attacking the gender trap, but it seems to have been abandoned. Sociobiology from the seventies and eighties, and evolutionary psychology in the current century, seem to create the meme that sex and gender are irrevocably intertwined and that to have feminine characteristics a male must be truly female, and vice versa.
I don’t think that most of those good-meaning people who “support transgender kids” hate girls or women consciously. I don’t think they are stupid. I do recognize that many men who demean women as “ugly TERFS” hate women and find this another issue on which they can shout women down and tell them they are stupid and ugly. But for the large part, those who adapt the ugly adaptation of the rainbow flag do so out of a desire to be more inclusive, and the meme has replaced their skeptical thought patterns on this issue.
Last weekend I came out as being pro-Title IX at an atheist meeting and was being shouted down by someone who demanded to know if I know anyone who takes cross-sex hormones. I know that person doesn’t hate women, and I know she considers herself a skeptic. But, I think she was infected by the transgender meme.
Mike Haubrich:
Yes, I think these TRA women think of the “change” from male to female as being a *mental* thing. So if their “trans woman” friend identifies as female despite having a male body, then he thus becomes “female” and hence peaceful and no threat to women in locker rooms, etc.
Even if said “trans woman” friend also has a big hairy penis and pair of testicles.
I’d also agree with you that a false connection has been created and promulgated between “right-wing ideology and being anti-trans”. Nearly every left-wing or centrist critique of gender critical feminism that I’ve read ended up making this argument at one point. And everything from that stupid Kate Nash song “GERM ” to that turgid tome “Enemy Feminisms” by that disgraceful excuse for a public intellectual, Sophie Lewis, is devoted to perpetrating that idea.
I have no doubt many women who would regard themselves as being on the “progressive” side of politics hear these claims and are thus frightened off even considering gender-critical ideology. “Oh, you don’t support puberty blockers for children? Are you a Trump /Farage / Orbán supporter then?”
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Mostly Cloudy:
…that were sexually orientated towards women; many women still associate “trans-identified male” with “gay male”, and “gay male” with “effeminate, non-threatening male”?