Another blood libel
There’s another thing Jolyon Maugham said a couple of days ago…
That’s not it (I’m getting to it), but I’ll just say I haven’t seen anything like that from the gender critical side. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, but on the other hand, I think if it did exist we would be buried in screen shots of it. I doubt that it does exist. I think Maugham is equating skepticism about Magic Gender with calling women ugly hearted cunts. I think they are very different.
But that wasn’t it; this is it.
It’s the assertion that “deliberate misgendering” will “contribute to deaths and self-harm” and that that’s a very real wrong done by all of us who don’t believe in Magic Gender, including Maya. It’s the assertion that Maya’s non-compliance with orders to pretend that men are women will cause trans people to die.
He’s a QC. He has some fame and clout. He shouldn’t say things like that.
It’s emotional blackmail. “Don’t talk about this or people will kill themselves.”
No. I’m not responsible for an emotionally unstable person harming themselves, just because of words that come out of my thoughts. I consistently vote to improve the social safety net in the United States, so if anything, I’m helping to try to provide the mental health programs that suicidal people need.
There will always be someone who says things that we don’t like to hear. Part of being an adult is learning to hear those things without reacting in unreasonable ways.
Yes, it’s a kind of infantilization of The Other. It reminds me of “liberal” defenses of blasphemy laws. “They” can’t handle the truth, “They” aren’t strong or fit or capable of dealing with what you are capable of dealing with. They’ll break, They’ll become violent. Don’t expect more of them. It’s not in them.
It’s what I call the Little People Argument.
Deliberate propagation of the myth that people can change sexes leads directly to medical and psychological harm to children, causing many to become castrated, sterilized, crippled, or permanently ill. It also increases the suicide rate of children. Why is a QC advocating harm to children?
There’s a bizarre circular logic in the way Jo Maugham and trans activists talk about trans people.
The principle behind sex-segregation and women-only spaces is that there’s no way to tell the “good” guys from the bad, and the number of “bad” guys is sufficiently high that society has to operate as though any man is a potential risk in environments where women are vulnerable. I like the British term for it — “safeguarding,” which I hear a lot in this debate, mostly around the similar idea of safe spaces for children. They’ve formalized the principle and made it explicit in their policies that in a safeguarding situation as a rule you should by default assume any man is a potential “bad” guy and treat him accordingly.
Jo Maugham takes that principle and flips it on its head: males who declare themselves to be trans immediately cease to be categorized as men and instead become the most vulnerable group in need of the most safeguarding: suddenly it’s society’s obligation to assume by default that any trans-identifying man is a “good” guy and that it’s bigotry to apply the same rules to him that we would apply to any other man. And once a man has claimed the “trans” label, it’s a self-fulfilling truth that any attempt to treat him like any other man is proof of his own vulnerability and need for special protection. It should be plain obvious to anyone that a loophole this big is going to be exploited, a lot. Add to that the fact that they keep broadening and loosening the definition of “trans,” but they aren’t tightening the safeguarding rules at the same time. Which means the loophole is only getting bigger.
It’s the same with “misgendering.” Maugham thinks people who claim the label “trans” should by default be treated as more vulnerable than all the people they’re imposing their pronouns on. There *might* have been *a kernel* of truth to that once upon a time when transsexuals were rare and defined by deep and meaningful transition. Trans activists themselves are the ones who have undermined that position. You really do have to wonder why there are so many people aligned with trans activism who are so eager to undermine safeguarding principles.
The idea that transgender people as a whole need special protections because they are so uniquely delicate and susceptible to the slightest hint of non-validation is, I believe, nothing less than transphobia via low expectations.
The suicide rates are high. Not a as high as trans advocates claim, but high.
But where’s the evidence that the reason for those rates is “deliberate misgendering”, or “transphobia” however broadly or narrowly defined? Have other potential factors (co-morbidities common to people who claim transgender identity, for example) been ruled out?
(Spoiler: No, they have not.)
So wishing painful death in terror is equivalent to being skeptical of the sensus genderitatis is equivalent to challenging a man on why he wants men to have access to women’s spaces.
‘Kay. Well, at least I learned something today.
Artymorty, that’s very nicely put.
It resonates with me because this sort of reasoning turns up quite often in some of my security consultancy work. I won’t bore everyone with the details but the parallels seem strong enough to hint at an underlying human stupidityness.
We can’t tell good guys from bad guys, but we pretend we can because it makes us feel safer.
We implement systems and laws that don’t protect the people who need protection – or even those we think need protection – and we pat ourselves on the back for a job badly done.
If there’s a threat, we will either vastly underestimate or overestimate its importance, likelihood and potential impact, regardless of evidence.
We tend to fast-track ‘solutions’ (laws, rules, technology etc) to threats stated simply rather than threats spelled out in detail with accompanying evidence. We really don’t like complicated problems or problems that need a complicated response.
We much prefer theatre above action. If we can whip up some flamboyant nonsense that looks and feels as though it’s addressing a poorly defined problem, regardless of the expense or efficacity, then we’re happier than if we identified an actual problem and systematically solved it.
And so on. I hope the parallels are obvious and that they suggest common human failings. I’m 100% certain that I’m not immune to any of them but I’d like to think my mind could be changed by such nowadays esoteric things as reason and evidence.
The skeptic movement turned out to be a wretched hive of scum and villainy but the premise was sound and we’re missing some sort of friction on an ever-more-quickly spinning wheel of bullshit. That last sentence is why I can’t be trusted with metaphors.
This from a new blogger at that other place. A woman who wants to be accepted as a man who thinks she is a homosexual because she likes sex with men. Curious, how does a gay man have vaginal sex?
A woman “sexually attracted to men” is what we could call straight, I thought.
I wonder how gay CIS men feel about this? Not sure too many are attracted to the lady parts, else they wouldn’t be gay.
One of the arguments advanced for homosexuality being a normal expression of sexuality was that it is displayed in a wide variety of animals, not just homo sapiens. And a fair point, I think. Still looking out for the trans apes, horses, whales, and gophers.
@ #9 Roj Blake:
Funny you should ask that. Just this evening I came across a piece of data that seems to indicate quite clearly that trans-identifying straight girls who claim to be gay men are not very well received at all.
I’m single and looking, and I installed a dating app called Hinge a few hours ago. It’s one of those apps where you swipe your way through a stack of people’s profiles one at a time, liking or disliking each one, and receiving a notification if there’s a match — i.e., the person reciprocated with a “like” when your profile came up on their stack. Obviously I configured my profile to show me exclusively men who date men.
I was immediately struck by how intimidatingly gorgeous the men on the app were. Stunning, model-like young men with magazine-worthy photographs and glamourous jobs. One after another. But then as I kept swiping through the stack, the overall appearance of the men settled down into the realm of very-attractive-but-approachable, and eventually to the realistically-attainable-for-a-schlub-like-me range. And as I kept swiping, it became extremely apparent that the entire stack was sorted based on some kind of algorithm. I’m virtually certain the app puts people with the most likes at the top of the stack (so you see them first, and you get the impression that this app is where all the sexy guys are therefore you should immediately pay to upgrade to a “premium” account — which I immediately did, desperately single sucker that I am), and sorting the profiles all the way down accordingly, from most-popular at the top of the stack, to least-popular at the bottom. (I found this very disturbing: the further I swiped the less white, less wealthy and less young the men got. God, I hate this world.)
Well, I’ve been swiping for a solid couple hours now — getting my $30 worth! I must have looked at every gay or bi man within a hundred kilometers of Lake Ontario by now, and I feel like I’m nearing the bottom of the pile. You know what I’m finding down here? Profiles with terrible, blurry pictures, no face pic, mean or off-putting biographies, guys with missing teeth, extreme obesity or bad hygiene… and otherwise cute, fresh-faced young women with short hair wearing baseball caps and hoodies, going by names like Jake.
So it seems, in the cruel popularity contest that is the dating app Hinge, gay men are as interested in dating cute, young, prime-of-their-life girls who self-ID as gay transmen as they are in dating toothless middle-aged Oxycontin addicts and morbidly obese guys in grease-stained t-shirts.
That sounds harsh, I know. But there you have it.
totally unrelated observation I had while swiping through the profiles on Hinge:
The app is weird in that it puts people’s political leanings and religious affiliation right at the top of their profile — I guess the computers computed that these are the most important factors in matchmaking. I was amazed by how many people identify as atheists! I take this as a sign that the New Atheist movement worked. Ten, fifteen years ago everyone tiptoed around the word “atheist” and identified as “not religious” or “agnostic” instead. I almost never met openly atheist people. That has definitely changed, and I’m certain all the publicity around the New Atheists played a huge role in shifting that particular Overton Window. Cheers to you, Hitchens.
Excuse me, I’m right here.
;)
Artymorty, re the dating app, I guess gay men are no different to straight men, in that we have fantasies about dating to hottest hottie. I’m straight and have spent a lot of time on dating apps in the past. And Yup, I get all fantasy eyed about some of the first profiles, but then reality hits, and I go away from the physical and start looking for the other attributes I seek in another person. Shared interests, alcohol not needles, hotels not canvas, and so forth.
Good luck in your search.