Tag: Purethought

So let’s talk about gender.

First let me stipulate that I care deeply about the feelings of every one of you, and of every one of the people not reading this, too.

Let me stipulate that I’m taking the greatest care not to wrench any of those feelings.

Let me underline that I would never cause any bruising to anyone’s feelings if I could possibly help it.

Let me add that I understand profoundly and abjectly that intent is not magic.

Let me insist that your feelings and the feelings of everyone are the first thing I think about when I wake up in the morning.

Let me say that I love you all more than I love Talenti raspberry chocolate chip gelato.

Let me assure you that I’m on your side.

Let me emphasize that I hope to be an ally, a good ally, a serious committed sensitive perfect ally.

Let me say that I understand completely that an ally’s job is to shut up and listen.

Let me swear that I will never talk over the voice of a marginalized community…except women of course, and lesbians and gays and queers, but never ever the voice of my trans sisters and brothers.

Let me admit that I know nothing at all about gender, that in fact I have minus knowledge about gender – I have ideas about it that are so wrong they suck all the knowledge out of everything for a 15 mile radius.

Let me confess that I’ve been a feminist for a long string of decades, and that therefore I am necessarily and automatically wrong and full of shit about everything – feminism, gender, LGBTQ issues, especially trans issues of course; identity, society, performativity, marginalization, stigma, GMOs, veganism, gluten, selfies, shoes, femmephobia – and everything else.

Let me bow while you spit on me and I assure you that my intentions are good even though they’re not magic.

Now, let’s talk about gender.

Oh dear I’m afraid that’s all the time we have. Tune in tomorrow for another episode of “Say Nothing Until You Have Apologized For All Of It First.”

There’s an aspect of the recent clusterfuck that I think needs more attention, and that is the way the rhetoric and some of the thinking around it – and around trans activism in general – often has a religious flavor, or an Oprah-therapeutic flavor, or both.

For instance it’s a very popular trope to claim that the enemy of the moment, or the remark or joke or blog post or magazine article or book of the moment, is “hurting trans people.” Just today I saw a claim that trans people have “been hurt by Ophelia’s actions,” and that’s not the first claim of its kind that I’ve seen. You know what that sounds like? The all-too-familiar claim that an atheist or feminist or humanist has “hurt the religious sentiments” of people in Bangladesh or India or Pakistan.

Why is that such a popular trope? It’s not so in other branches of social justice or identity politics or whatever you want to call it. I don’t recall anyone ever saying of the slime pit or A Voice for Men that they were “hurting feminists” – do you? Damaging, harming, silencing, yes, but hurting? It sounds babyish. It sounds like children whining in the back seat – “Mommm, he’s hurting me!!” It doesn’t sound like something an adult wants to say.

Why is it different with trans issues? I would really like to know.

There’s also the attitude to belief, and to credulity. I talked about this in early June, as the clusterfuck was getting under way, in If someone says it, then you know it. There is this insistence that you have to accept what you’re told by the Approved People, and that not doing so is itself transphobic. What kind of epistemology is that? It’s not a kind I ever signed up for, I can tell you that.

And there’s also the attitude to heresy, which is what you would expect from believers.

The story they’re telling is that I simply can’t tolerate disagreement. That’s bullshit. The clusterfuck was never a matter of disagreement – it was a matter of heresy-finding. Alex Gabriel’s ridiculous “Smoke, fire and recognising transphobia” post was not a matter of disagreeing with me, it was a matter of sniffing out my heresy and denouncing it.

That’s what I have no intention of tolerating. And, after all, the people sniffing it out don’t want to tolerate what I do either – because they think it’s not so much wrong as evil.

There are of course plenty of views I consider evil and would never want to be associated with. I would agree that my attitude to such views is comparable to the attitude of religious people to heresy. It’s not that there’s never reason to consider a particular view morally unacceptable. It’s the particulars I differ on; I don’t agree that I’ve said anything morally unacceptable.

I think the bar for what’s morally unacceptable on this subject has been set in a very odd place, or maybe a whole bunch of very odd places (it keeps shifting). I think the subject has been loaded up with pointless arbitrary thought-free shibboleths, and I don’t think that’s healthy – especially for trans people.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are afraid to say a word on the subject, because it’s so very easy to be branded a heretic and expelled from the community of good people.

It’s not good. It’s like trying to walk a tightrope over a pool full of sharks. That’s not how to have a working politics or a reasonable worldview or a moral compass. If we can’t think or talk clearly because of the sharks, we’re screwed.

This is quite funny, in a sad sort of way – a piece by Greta C. in Free Inquiry and republished on her blog.

“Fundamentalist believers want everything to be simple. They want their moral choices to be straightforward: they want a clear rulebook that outlines their choices, written for them by a perfect god. They want the world divided up into clearly labeled categories, with good people in one box and evil people in another. It’s so childish. The world isn’t like that. And the world shouldn’t be like that. It would be horrible. Why would they even want that?”

Lots of atheists I know say stuff like this. I say it myself.

See what I mean? Funny.

Either/or thinking is an easy way out. But it’s a trap.

Of course, the most important problem with the either/or view of life is that it’s, you know, not true. Insert rationalist rant here, about how reality is more important than any comforting lies we could make up about it, and how we need to understand reality as best we can so we know how to act in it. But the other problem with the either/or view of life is that it’s a trap. It closes us off from life. When we follow someone else’s pre-packaged rules about how to act, without ever questioning them, we retreat from engaging with the world at the most intimate and powerful level. When we slot everyone into boxes, we don’t let ourselves be surprised by them. The hard, bright walls clearly dividing the world become a prison. Living a life of absolute certainty, with every decision already made for us — it would be like living in Nineteen Eighty-Four, or in Camazotz.

Or at Purethought Blogs.