Guest post: Being one of the gang
Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Who just went along with it.
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.
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, 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 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 adopt 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.
Thanks, Ophelia. Do you mind if I copy this over and use it as a post on my Substack?
I’ve said this elsewhere, but I do think some men on the political left see the trans cause as a “Get Out of Feminism” card. Once they take up the cause of trans-identified men who identify as women, they can be utterly *vile* to actual women (call them “ugly TERFs” and worse) and almost nobody will call them out on their behaviour.
Jolyon Maugham and Owen Jones spring to mind.
Also, I remember the same progressive journalists who were rightly horrified at all the assault, rape and death threats sent against women during G.am.ergate.
But when assault, rape and death threats were also sent to feminists (including the world’s most famous living children’s author) they either excused it, joined in or said nothing:
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211122-j-k-rowling-reveals-death-threats-over-transgender-row
Here’s one of the places where the forced teaming does much of the dirty work.
But they might be homophobic, like Susie Green. Thanks to forced teaming (again), that homophobia that results in “transing away the gay,” is camouflaged by the “LGB” part of the chimerical “community identity.” Ditto the portrayal of lesbians’ resistance to TiMs’ demand for admittance into single sex spaces that lesbians have established for themselves as “bigotry”. The whole LGBT mess hides the fact that the attacks are coming from inside the supposed “community.” T gets to have whatever it wants, including exclusively trans spaces and events, but the L, G, or B are compelled to invite T to their gatherings, organizations and events. Funny that.
Mike @ 1 of course I don’t mind! They’re your words!
Here you go!
https://open.substack.com/pub/mikehaubrich/p/being-one-of-the-gang?r=1hfti&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Well said, Mike. I think you’ve captured most of the perfect storm of trans ideology.
I don’t know how representative my experience is, but the first time the whole trans issue really exploded into my consciousness was with the whole high school bathroom thing. If that was an intentional strategy to make trans ideology mainstream, it was brilliant. We all know how fraught high school can be, especially bathrooms and locker rooms, and especially for marginalized groups, and riding on the coattails of the movement to accept gays and lesbians as they are, it seemed like the nice, even the compassionate, thing to let kids use the bathroom of their choice. After all, everyone should have the basic right and dignity to pee in peace. And once you’ve convinced liberals to be compassionate towards a group, you’ve just about won the battle. You’ve inserted the tip of the spear into their conscience, and it’s not coming out without a lot of pain and anguish.
WaM, that was the first time I paid any attention, too. It was quickly followed by the dogpile on Ophelia, which sent me scrambling to follow her to this site, and eventually, to drop Pharyngula (which became quite boring anyway, but the sheer hatred was the number one reason I opted out of FtB).
It shocked me when my boss announced a bathroom policy that was essentially ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ – in short, if you see someone in the ‘wrong’ bathroom, don’t point it out, because they know what sex they are, and which bathroom is appropriate. Don’t say ‘hey, men’s room is right next door’.
I wonder how many people recognize this ‘leave ’em alone to pee in peace’ as another type of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy, a policy which LGB fought against when it manifested against them in the military. Now there are too many of them that accept, and even espouse, a new version this one used to harm women.
Your Name’s Not Bruce:
I know people like Malcolm Clark have been critical of what they see as the “forced teaming” of gay and transgender issues, especially since the “T” has taken over mainly formerly LGB-exclusive organizations.
Back to the idea of the “female mind” Mike discussed: there was a stereotype in TV shows like “Will and Grace” and “Sex and the City” for women to have a “gay best friend.” * This GBF was empathetic, gentle, funny, knowledgeable about female fashion and, of course, had absolutely no sexual interest in women. I wonder if the popular idea of the “transwoman” in TRA discourse might be a version of the GBF.
That is, a “transwoman” is also seen by female TRAs as empathetic, gentle, funny, knowledgeable about women’s fashion and, of course, has absolutely no sexual interest in women. So they think: it’s okay to let them into your toilets, changing rooms and sporting events, and only some mean old Bluestockings mentally stuck in the 70s would object to this.
And yet, one of the salient characteristics of transwomen is that they often don’t act like women. The interwebs are full of videos of these men acting entitled and aggressive and belligerent and sometimes threatening. They display exactly the behaviors that make men dangerous to women. Imputing a “female mind” to such a person seems senseless. Relying on that imputed mind for your own safety seems reckless in the extreme.