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.
You might be being too kind here. I’m not so sure they believed it was true themselves. They might have claimed they believed this, but I think that ultimately they just didn’t give a shit. It was always just good old-fashioned male entitlement, pushing on regardless, because they wanted what they wanted, but it had to be camouflaged in fragility and powerlessness. Anyone else’s wants were beside the point, but the inability to make their case by making a comparison on properly calibrated want-o-meters, meant that trans activists had to hedge their bets on any sort of comparison or measurement by piling on threats of suicide, and claims of impending trans genocide, so that these kinds of assumptions and claims were not probed too deeply, or at all. The whole “NO DEBATE!” strategy was an exercise in deflection and avoidance of any kind of argument or justification for all trans claims and demands. It was a cover for a radical, behind-closed-doors political movement that strenuously rejected all examination and inquiry, based on the supposed desperation and vulnerability of its promoters and beneficiaries.
How do you argue against “Give us what we want immediately, or we will kill ourselves”? Allies could run interference and claim cruelty and callousness in response to the mildest doubt or question, transforming critiques of any of the claims of gender ideology into campaigns that were “denying trans peoples’ right to exist.” This approach simultaneously deligitimized and demonized critics, particularly those from the demographic that would pay the highest cost for the fulfilment of this movement’s unreasonable, irrational, incoherent, and dangerous goals: women.
Trans activists denied that there was any conflict between their desires and women’s needs, and that women had absolutely no legitimate reasons to oppose those demands. Arguments based on the easily predicted dangers to women’s rights, dignity, health, and safety were all derided as cynical pretexts to indulge in bigotry and hatred against “trans women.”
Government institutions themselves weren’t so much weighing or comparing wants and needs, as they were simply plowing women’s justified concerns under, in favour of men’s wants, however hideously unjust, collateral damage inflicted by Karen Whites, Barbie Kardashians, and Isla Brysons be damned. Again, it was dressed up as a matter of “safety” for the men, but women’s safety was simply ignored. Women’s concerns were made invisible, and treated as if they did not exist. It became the ultimate zero-sum game, and women lost completely. Incomprehensibly, grotesquely, some women cheered this on. Who needed Orwell or Kafka when you had Sturgeon?
Because if you don’t we’ll make you. This is where the bullying and intimidation came in handy. If the emotional blackmail they tried in order to play on female socialization to “be kind” didn’t work, there was always the stick. Or the baseball bats wrapped in barbed wire, or the dead rats, or the effigies hung with nooses, or the threats of guillotines, or the brandished guns, knives, the smoke bombs, or the smashed windows, blockaded meetings, the punches, and kicks. Threats of rape and murder. Or the police and courts.Yes, oh so helpless and marginalized they were. You will love Big Brother or else.