How do we know
A question asked in a gender critical Facebook group:
How do we know we are on the right side?
I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve become extreme and captured…Are we on the right side? How do we know?
I think about that often. I’m sure all gender-skeptical types do.
One of the first things I think when I ask myself that question is the fact that I couldn’t believe in it if I tried. Even if I decided kindness or compassion or basic decency required me to, I couldn’t. The best I could do is fake it. Am I wrong not to fake it? Am I on the wrong side because I can’t fake it?
There are at least two parts to the belief problem – at least two things to believe or not. The first is whether or not men can be women (and vice versa but the men one is the one that raises all the power issues), and the second is if they can, what are we required to do?
I can imagine believing that men can (sort of kind of, in some sense, etc) be women, but I stumble at trying to believe that therefore it’s perfectly fair for men to take everything away from women. I couldn’t do it, not without becoming a completely different person, one I have no interest in being and no interest in interacting with.
It’s a bit of a brick wall.
Also: right side of which?
There are at least two aspects of the ideology that require taking a side.
One is whether or not men can be women and vice versa. A factual question.
The other is what do you do if you decide that men can indeed be women. A “now what?” question.
Even if I could bring myself to agree that men can be women, or at least that men can genuinely think they are women, I would still have to think about what to do about men who claim to be women.
Even if I could manage to believe that men can be women or deeply convinced they are women, I would still think they have no right to take what belongs to women.
I think I am correct in opposing a movement whose adherents make ‘no debate” a non-negotiable aspect of their movement.
I wouldn’t say I’m fully convinced that what I believe is right. What I am quite convinced of is that the other sides I have encountered are wrong, wrong, wrong. This is an important distinction: it seems that much support for trans ideology is motivated by gender conservatives saying crazy stuff, and vice versa. Every so often I feel ashamed to hold positions that current discourse largely fails to demarcate from those of the far right, but then I keep coming back to the fact that “gender identity” just doesn’t make any sense.
Ya that’s a good point. It isn’t really about me Believing I Am Right; it’s about knowing the bullshit is bullshit.
Oh but that’s so callous toward the people who believe it about themselves.
Is it though? People ought to be able to recognize obvious bullshit when it’s right under their noses.
Sometimes I like to imagine the moral-philosophical questions surrounding transgender as a debate between Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk.
We’d ask each of them to break all the variables down into that great moral philosopher David Hume’s two columns: what “is” and what “ought”. Everything in the “is” column is a morally neutral statement of fact, or what’s close enough to fact based on the evidence. Everything in the “ought” column is a prescription for behaviour that rests on value premises and moral sentiments.
The primary difference between the gender criticals and the gender zealots is the order in which the table gets filled in. Do you start by filling in the “is” column or the “ought” column? Critical thinkers start by filling in the “is” column: first, they gather the facts. Then they feed these facts into their moral calculus to determine what should or shouldn’t be done about the matter. That’s how they fill in their “ought” column. Rational, logical, scientific. Like Mr. Spock.
If Spock flew his spaceship back in time to Earth today and decided to investigate the trans phenomenon, starting with facts, and only assembling a moral case after the facts were gathered, he’d build up an “is” column that looks something like this:
– Transwomen are biologically male.
– Decades of studies show that some heterosexual males are autogynephilic, and some of them will mentally conceptualize themselves as “women” as a result of the neurochemical rewards associated with erotic and romantic pleasure that are activated when they do so.
– Decades of studies show that some homosexual males will also conceptualize themselves as “women” as a result of a handful of complex psychological conditions related to distress surrounding their sexual and behavioural atypicality.
– It’s an undeniable fact that teenage girls virtually never mentally conceptualized themselves as “men” until very recently, coinciding with the advent of social media.
– There’s overwhelming evidence that social media is the instigating factor in girls and young women recently taking up trans identities in droves.
From there, he’d have a very easy time filling in the other column with a list of oughts, marking out the moral boundaries of transgender acceptance in secular society. Those bounds would be mostly limited to their personal social sphere. He’d no doubt be fine with cross-gender dress and presentation, and he’d be fine with people engaging in whatever personal activities they like, imagining themselves however they like within the scope of personal private lives, just like with other groups, such as religious affiliations.
But he’d find very little merit in arguments for changing the sex marker on people’s passports or allowing males with transgender identities unfettered access to women’s spaces. And he’d no doubt be appalled at the misapplication of the label “transgender” onto children — he’d rightly see that as an egregious category error — taking an adult psychological/superstitious/sexual concept and re-framing it as an innate state of being.
Gender zealots, on the other hand, lead with their feelings, like Captain Kirk. They start by filling in the “ought” column. The first order of business upon hearing the word “trans” is to establish one’s value premises and moral sentiments. Am I a good liberal? Do I care about “LGBTQ”? Isn’t it virtuous to support smashing barriers around “gender”? Don’t I just hate those horrible
Klingonshomophobes who were so cruel to gays and lesbians? Then, after their moral framework has been laid out, they start to fill in the “is” column: they go out and gather facts, unwittingly letting their biases influence where they’re getting their data from.– They suddenly find themselves eagerly swallowing postmodernist gobbledygook in order to justify their biased desire to conclude that transwomen are not, in fact, biologically male.
– They willfully accept absurd claims that “autogynephilia is a myth” desipite the comical abundance of evidence that cross-sex erotic roleplay is a massive kink for some men.
– They block out their own memories of their own childhoods, where “trans kids” clearly didn’t exist, and none of their classmates and neighbours killed themselves because they couldn’t get sex changes before they were old enough to get a driver’s licence.
On and on. From there, once they’ve got both the “is” and “ought” columns filled in, they see the whole picture quite differently. That’s why they’re so utterly blind to the scandalous goings-on. They think they’ve got the complete picture already. But because they started assembling the picture with their biases, the rest of it ended up terribly biased as a result, and there’s no room left in either column for dissenting views.
Captain Kirk was a passionate man, who led with his emotions, and he saved many people — and aliens! — with his daringness and bravery. But he was also flawed: good liberal that he was, devoted to the
Space UNFederation’s progressive, pluralist, diplomatic, largely pacifist, science-embracing objectives, his passions also gave him a prejudice: a hatred forhomophobes and by extension transphobesKlingons that lasted for several years, from 2285 to 2293 (or, from Star Trek III to Star Trek VI, if you must). Ultimately, it was combination of persuasion from Spock and personal experience that helped him see past his biases around this touchiest of subjects, those blastedtransphobesKlingons.Hopefully, with a combination of persuasion from us gender-criticals plus personal experience as a result of the mounting chaos the gender mess has created, the otherwise well-intentioned gender zealots will eventually come to the light of reason. It took Kirk eight Space Years to reconcile with the Klingons. How much longer until the gender zealots come around?
“Rational, calculating, scientific. Like Mr. Spock.” LOGICAL, not “calculating”! How did I not say LOGICAL! It’s his trademark word!!! Logic is Spock’s whole thing.
I am so stupid sometimes…
No, Artymorty, just human.
hahaha, now YOU sound like Spock.
Anyway, I fixed it for you.
Good analysis, Arty, but I think to make a moral, rational decision, the ‘is’ column would need to include a few things about what difference this makes to other groups; in short, a risk assessment. We know that men are larger than women (on average). We know that men have held most of the power through the ages, and only recently deigned to share with women (and only after women put in a lot of time, money, and pan to get that). We know that there have been abuses by TiMs in women’s spaces. We know that TiMs on women’s sports teams create a huge advantage for one side over the other. We know that little girls are being exposed to male genitals in supposedly woman-only spaces (something that would be called unlawful if the individual was not TiM).
We know that the trans claim a high suicide rate if denied access. We know that this has not been demonstrated. We know that trans claim a higher than normal murder rate. We know that this has been refuted by the data. (Just the facts, Ma’am.) We know that TiMs claim to be the most oppressed minority ever in spite of evidence to the contrary. We know there have been assaults on women by men in women’s prisons. We know there has been predatory behavior in a certain percentage of TiMs.
All of this, I think, is probably important in making a moral decision. What are the costs to women? What are the costs to men? What are the costs to TiMs? (Time to channel Jeremy Bentham here.)
With this information properly filled in, and evaluated, the moral answer is at least slightly obvious. The problem is that trans allies are more than slightly oblivious, and in fact resistant to even hearing this. They would fill in the ‘ought’ side, even with the data listed, with the idea that they must protect trans, and that women are not in fact oppressed (we’ve had a woman vice president!), and that a few women harmed is a small price to pay for saving thousands and millions of trans lives. Then, of course, they would fill in the ‘is’ side with the ‘fact’ that trans are murdered at higher rates, and that failing to affirm gender identity leads almost inevitably to suicide. Facts be damned.
@iknklast
Totally agree. Risk assessment rates, for sure. Also, all that data regarding detrainstion and regret rates. There’s so much we could put in the “is” column. The facts of the matter are abundant with data that support the gender-critical position. If only the “other side” would have chosen a facts-first order of operations in its approach to this subject, instead of a feelings-first order of operations.
The order of operations is key here, I think. Humans tend to be Captain Kirks; only a few of us are Mister Spocks, who put logic ahead of tribal, emotional connection. Not that we’re incapable of emotions, or tribal loyalty, and all the rest. But we recognize those important moments when logic needs to take precedence over it.
That’s important, you know? I think the GC liberals (not so much the GC conservatives) comprehend that.
@Ophelia
thanks for the fix! much appreciated.
Of course TRAs would dispute the “men becoming women” framing of the issue. “TWAW”, remember? According to gender ideology these people really are “women” in the one and only sense in which anyone is a “woman” (i.e. being in possession of an invisible, undetectable, unverifiable, indescribable, undefinable female soul or essence), and the apocryphal concept of distinct and identifiable “biological sexes” has nothing to do with it (except, of course, when it does). In reality all they have done is change the topic and hope nobody notices since they’re still using the same words. And, as I keep pointing out, by redefining “woman” to make it tautologically true that TWAW they have deprived themselves on any justification for saying that the apocryphal “biological females” are “women” in any sense of the word that’s relevant to the case they are trying to make. If “Trans Women Are Women”, they are the only “women”. But, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, the whole point of redefining “woman” in terms of an inner essence in the first place was to justify giving TIMs access to all the same spaces as the (supposedly non-existent or at least totally irrelevant) biological females. Once again, it’s homonyms and word-magic and equivocations and bad puns all the way down.
Technically anything that doesn’t involve a contradiction is “possible” (in the epistemological sense of “could be true for all we know”). There are “possibilities” that I’m pretty sure don’t apply to the real world that are still worth taking seriously, e.g. I’m pretty sure there is no life on Mars, but I’m open to changing my mind in the light of new evidence. Then there are “possibilities” that may not be disprovable, but are too far-fetched and hypothetical to be worth worrying about, e.g it is technically “possible” that I am a (or, from your perspective, that you are*) a “Boltzmann brain“, materializing out of the vacuum of space through a freak fluctuation in the relevant quantum fields for just long enough to have whatever thoughts and experiences I’m having at this very instance (including false memories of a past that never happened) before going out of existence forever.
Then there are statements that fall into the “not even wrong category”, e.g. “God exists” or “TWAW”. The first condition for saying something true (or even possibly true) is saying anything at all, and the first condition for saying anything at all is making a meaningful proposition. As long as sophisticated theologians and TRAs are unable to say anything that’s both specific and unambiguous enough to give us something to argue meaningfully for or against, they are just making sound waves, or ink on on a piece of paper, or pixels on a screen. There’s not content to ascribe any truth value to in the first place.
* “It didn’t happen”, you might retort one second later. Ah! But now you no longer know that the things you seem to remember happening one second ago are real. You get the idea.
Always a pleasure Arty dollink
[…] a comment by Artymorty on How do we […]
* at this very instant
While I can’t honestly say that I burn a lot of calories worrying that TIMs might indeed be “women” in any sense of the word that would qualify them for entry into female only spaces, I think we all need to be wary of “capture” or “co-optation” or “appropriation” or “mission creep”. It is always worth asking ourselves “What are my ‘buttons’, and who else might be trying to push them for what ends? How can my anger at the excesses of gender ideology, wokeism, cancel culture etc. be manipulated by people with a very different agenda and made to serve their ends rather than my own current ones? If I were a Russian troll or MAGA influencer, how would I try to try to use the gender issue as a Trojan horse for smuggling in a bunch of other crap supposedly implied (for reasons best left unspecified) by a rejection of gender ideology? What is in fact implied by my views on the gender issue, and what is not? Never mind being against gender ideology, what are these people in favor of? Am I in favor of the same things? Are their reasons for opposing gender ideology the same as mine? Is the enemy of my enemy really my friend? etc. etc.”
[…] a comment by iknklast on How do we […]
Bjarte Foshaug, #16:
This is very well put. You’ve captured my feelings much better than I could have.
That’s it Bjarte, they’ve redefined ‘woman’ (though strangely, in practice not ‘men’ and the good bureaucrats like the medical person we saw declaring a few posts back testifying that she doesn’t know if a man can give birth, fall into line because they’re used to their bosses arbitrarily redefining words and they know it’s not their place to question. And the rest of us just have to be silenced by the “no debate” mantra. Because to redefine you need to have a new definition and the one they have is just another mantra effective only on the true believers. It’s truly terrible that no debate collapsed just at the right time to give Trump a boost, but it was always going to collapse. The TRAs were playing the scientology game but the mad truth was always going to come out because conspiracies always fail and relatively open ones like the Sacred Truth of Indefinably Female Soul fail sooner (in this case by the simple expedient of a few people reading and sharing some Reddit posts).
Bjarte #16
“Is the enemy of my enemy really my friend?”
The enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy. No more. No less
From
https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Maximally_Effective_Mercenaries