A puzzle
What’s the issue? The issue, or question, is whether or not there is a moral obligation to affirm, or at least not deny, people’s claims about themselves.
Put like that, it seems obvious that there can’t be such an obligation without a lot of stipulations and exceptions and so on. People can lie, people can cheat, people can forge – the list is long.
Ok but maybe trans people are exceptions. They’re not trying to empty your bank account or move into your house or turn your brother into a ballerina. At least, not all of them are. Probably not a large number of them are. Why not just give them what they want? Why not just go ahead and validate them?
The thing is, they really really want you to. They want it a lot. It’s important to them. How can you be so callous and brutal as to say no?
But the problem with that is, they’re not the only people who have wants. They want us to lie for them, but we want to be not bullied into lying for them.
The assumption is widespread that they want what they want with far more desperation than we want what we want. I think that assumption is false, and I also think they have no right to think it’s true. Why should we dedicate ourselves to lying for them because of their depth of feeling while they treat our feelings as so much dross?
Not all wants are social injustices. The way I see it; that’s the key, in my mind.
People want stuff really really bad all the time. Sometimes tragically. Cancer patients really really want to not have cancer.
But also fantasists really really want to have whatever their fantasy is.
It’s not just that the trans thing is a fantasy. It’s not just that it’s superficial. In fact to some of them it really hurts so much it’s perhaps closer to cancer in a way. It’s a deep, deep pain and a life-threatening thing.
But it’s still not a social injustice.
We made a terrible mistake — we, as in liberal society — when we let transvestites’ deep compulsions slip into the category of social injustices.
Entitled men will push and push and just seemingly naturally try to find a way to get what they want no matter what. No matter the cost to anyone else. Their logic is driven by self-interest, wholly, radically, entirely. I thought we all thought this was obvious. And I thought we all saw that trans was that.
I have failed to understand what other people understood in the same way that most everyone else has in this mess.
I’m just as guilty as the rest of us in this regard. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Pretty much all of us played a part in this mess.