Points of view.
Oh what was that? thought I, and it didn’t take much hunting to find out.
It was on PM on Radio 4, so I’ll be listening later.
Well that’s a stupid question for a psychologist, even a TV one. Of course we can debate what people claim to “know” and “feel.” If we couldn’t there wouldn’t be much debate about anything.
Surely one of the first and most basic things you learn in psychology is how very fallible human knowing and feeling are. It’s even a bromide – “the easiest person to fool is yourself.”
That is in fact one of the things that irritates me the most about this idiotic movement, the sudden disappearance of this basic item from the toolkit of people who “identify as” skeptics and fans of reason and secularists and all the rest of it. It’s all right there in the question that started my departure from Freethought Blogs: “Do you believe trans women are women, yes or no?” One, no, but two, more to the point, nobody expects a trannish inquisition. Since when do unabashed atheists interrogate other unabashed atheists about what they believe?
It makes people stupid. The whole “movement,” as a movement, makes people stupid, and then it makes them dogmatic and punitive.
Comments
10 responses to “Have friendly chat beforehand”
I “know” a lot of things; some of them appear to be correct, insofar as we can know what is correct. For instance, global warming. No one feels they can’t debate me about that, even though as an Environmental scientist, I might get all huffy about denying my existence. Or is that only when I identify as an Environmental scientist?
I “feel” even more things. Possibly fewer of them are correct. Like, am I a fake, a fraud, someone who really doesn’t know anything? Am I really less worthy than my loser brother? Am I really old and ugly? (Well, old, yes, but I can’t speak on the other? Was I really fat when I weighed 100 lbs at 5’10”? Some of this could be verified, I guess (certainly the last), but much of it is subjective. If I “feel” or “know” I am an otter, do other otters have to accept me as one of them? Maybe if I shriek (or Tweet) TOAO!
Otters are burdened by their fear of the other, odder otter.
Willoughby is in shock and feels existentially threatened because Stock won their argument decisively.
A challenge to deeply-held beliefs really can be deeply upsetting. Of course Kathleen doesn’t want to “eliminate” India, but framing things that way may feel safer than acknowledging “I got nothing; maybe just maybe she’s right.”
Assuming Stock’s description of their pre- and post-conversation interactions–particularly the bit about ‘agreeing to do it all again’ is accurate (and no reason to believe they aren’t, other than that I’ve grown a bit cynical, even of folks I generally agree with), then it actually suggests something interesting–namely, that for Willoughby, ALL of this is just theater, a performance for the public, and not really meant as anything else.
Freemage, it’s on tape. Willoughby agrees to do it again right there on the show.
Ha! That’s hilarious. I’d say the modern equivalent of “oh no you di’n’t” if I knew what it was.
(And hopefully I managed to enter my email address correctly for once so this comment goes through.)
Freemage, I remember a Warner Bros. cartoon for that.
Dave Ricks, that’s pretty close to what I was getting at, yeah. Also an old film called “From the Hip”, wherein a pair of lawyers (one on each side of a civil suit) collude to make the trial (which is a fairly innocuous matter, two rich guys engaged in an ego-fight) into a big public circus. They don’t exactly rig the trial, but they talk about how to best frame their respective arguments to draw more publicity, and then to look good in front of the press, all while dragging out what should have been a couple hours in court into a three-day fiasco.
That’s how Willoughby comes across here–and, to use a phrase that’s been tossed around a bit, it demonstrates a lack of a theory of mind on Willoughby’s part, too. It’s simply inconceivable that Stock is coming from a place of sincerity.
About midway in, Willoughby sneaks in “my biological gender.”
Doc Stock may have missed an opportunity to highlight this disingenuous tactic (conflating sex with gender).
I double checked, Willoughby said “…internal innate biological gender…”
I suppose it’s possible that there is some kind of genetic (or developmental) predisposition to feeling a “gender”, since the social construct of gender is in part contingent on biological sex. But I would still conclude that societies just need to be more tolerant of GNC people generally, while still retaining protections for biological females.
However, this may be too big an ask, since sex and gender are such critical features of humans and their social systems (e.g. recent kerfuffle over the definition of marriage).
The concept of sex evolved about a billion years ago, most likely to compete effectively against bacteria (and viruses), due to their efficient genetic-information sharing systems. So the main reason we have men at all, is so babies can survive getting sick. A high price indeed, but for a important benefit.