Guest post: A prefab understanding
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Not as familiar.
There’s a bleak irony here that I’ve tried to point out more than once: the loudest champions of gender ideology are often the ones most afraid to actually look at it. “Transphobia” is real and common — it just doesn’t manifest the way we’re told. More often, it takes the form of incuriosity masquerading as virtue. It’s the Ardals of the world — people who don’t know the first thing about the subject — who are phobic in the literal sense: afraid of what they might discover if they examined it too closely.
They haven’t merely absorbed a set of beliefs; they’ve been handed a full epistemic template — a prefab way of slotting “trans” into the social landscape. Activists brute-forced the phenomenon into the moral mould of gay rights and civil rights more broadly, and once that move succeeded, dissent ceased to be merely rude or wrong. It became incomprehensible. They were never taught how to take the story apart. It never occurred to them that it might need taking apart.
Preassembled beliefs. Outsourced judgment. Critical thinking, for Ardal and so many like him, means following the Ikea instructions.
Graham built his own moral framework, guided by principles he actually thought through. It’s not a mystery why they can’t see it — the glass is a one-way mirror. The Dunning–Kruger effect explains the rest.
Yes, I see it as an entrenchment of positions among people who consider themselves to be analytical and skeptical but stop when it gets into an uncomfortable place. And that’s when The Hand comes up, the one we can talk to. I can’t get answers from people who refuse to explain to me how they can justify that there is an internal “Gender Identity” that takes priority over physical sex when it comes to determining whether one is a man or a woman.
One place this is reinforced is in social media. Because the conservatives and moral reinforcers who parade family values also seem to be the ones who get caught sexually abusing children and arrested for child pornography, we see that when an arrest is made memes are created to point out that the perp was not trans. (MIC DROP!) It further cements the concept that any criticism of trans ideology is mean because they are more the victim of society, and outcast, when it’s really the “male” men who are the dangerous ones. The female men are victimized everywhere they go, and there are roving bands of repressed males waiting in restrooms for a trans man to enter and be bashed. Women’s safety is not a separate issue, you see, when female men are in danger, because only male men do the violence. Conservative, white, repressed Christian men are the only ones to watch.
Meanwhile, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals have social issues that have been shoved to the back seat while trans issues drive and navigate.