Guest post: Is that an appropriate thing to ask?
Originally a comment by Screechy Monkey on Can you affirm my gender at 3 p.m. Tuesday?
The “gender affirming” bit is key. It seems to be what all of these fights are about, or at least most of them.
Yaniv wants these spas to give her treatments that will supposedly “affirm” her in her gender. (I’m more than a little suspicious that this is Yaniv’s only or even her main motive, but let that go for now.)
Trans women athletes want to compete with cis women because it will “affirm” their gender to be in the “women’s” event. (Again, I’m being charitable and assuming that they’re not motivated by a desire to win awards and scholarships.)
Same for arguments about having birth certificates changed — it seems to be about getting the state, or other people or businesses, to “affirm” their gender.
And… is that an appropriate thing to ask? I think other civil rights movements have wisely focused on concrete, meaningful rights that directly affect people’s lives: the right to employment, housing, legal benefits of marriage, and so on. In fact, in the gay marriage debate, it was the anti-SSM side that insisted that the liberals were gonna make you renounce your religious views about homosexuality and swear fealty to our new gay overlords. Marriage equality advocates generally kept the focus on “no, we just want the same rights as everyone else. You can think our marriage is stupid or immoral or illegitimate in your eyes or God’s, just as we have opinions about some straight people’s marriages. Just give us the damn legal rights.”
Purely as a matter of public persuasion, I think it’s a big ask to demand that the state, or people generally, certify that someone’s perceived gender identity equals their gender. I also suspect that it would be a poor legal strategy, as it opens up some possible First Amendment (in the U.S.) implications regarding compelled speech and religious freedom.
I can’t help but draw the parallel to religious zealotry.
It is not sufficient for the theocrat to be allowed to believe and freely practice his or her religion. No, everyone else must profess the core articles of faith. Even that’s not enough. Everyone else must behave according to the faith’s doctrines. And yet still it is not enough. Everyone else must sincerely believe the faith’s dogma, and that belief should not be as Saint Thomas’s—it should be on faith, accepted on no more than the testimony of those blessed enough to hear the words of the divine. Science curricula must conform to the revealed truth. Anyone who expresses doubt or challenges the hierarchy must be ostracized.
It is not sufficient for non-binary and transgender people to be allowed to believe and live how they wish. No, everyone else must profess that transwomen are women period. Even that’s not enough. Everyone else must provide gender affirmation, from ball waxing to preferred-gender sports to sex. And yet still it is not enough. Everyone else must sincerely believe that a transwoman’s biology is female, and that belief should not be through rational inquiry—it should be on faith, accepted on no more than the testimony of the lived experience of trans and non-binary people. Science curricula must conform to the revealed truth. Anyone who expresses doubt or challenges the hierarchy must be ostracized.
It’s as though in the absence of formal, organized religion, people find other ways to act out the worst parts of the religious form. The notion that most people aren’t ready for a world without religion used to strike me as indescribably condescending, Honestly, though, I’m beginning to think there might be something to it.
Nullius, I think one of the core takeaways from your post is that no matter what you do, it will never be enough. They will continue to push the envelope until everything breaks.
I don’t think it’s so much that we aren’t ready for a world without religion as it is that we aren’t ready for a world where things are uncertain and blurry around the edges. The need is for simple answers, simple truths, and the actual world isn’t simple. So, ignore reality and place your opinion derived on faith in its place.
Saves the trouble of having to make decisions if you are able to swallow a pre-digested dogma, three tablets in the morning, three at noon, and three in the evening. Everything mapped out, nothing messy.
Nullius, your first paragraph reminds me of the whole fight over school prayer. Advocates of prayer in public schools aren’t fighting for the right of their own children to pray; they already have that right (provided they’re not disrupting class). What they want is the right to make everyone else’s children pray, or at a bare minimum (and many won’t even accept this “compromise”), make other children ostracize themselves by being excused from class during prayer.
Nullius in Verba; trans cult indeed! Very succinctly put. The parallels are certainly there. What’s particularly disturbing is how quickly the cult has managed to capture or coerce so many institutions and organizations that one would have thought might have resisted it more or longer. Governments? Police departments? I would have thought they would considered trans ideology weird at best. I’ve wondered about this before on B&W and others have suggested that this rapid acceptance is partly because there’s a desire on the part of these entities not to be on the “wrong side of history again. That might be part of it, but on further reading and commenting, I’ve come to realize that however weird, strange, aberrant, or downright delusional trans ideology is, it is not revolutionary. It doesn’t threaten the status quo. It “only” infringes on the rights of girls and women, and when have they ever counted for anything? Maybe that rapid acceptance is because its tenets can be taken in by the powers that be without changing much except maybe the signs on the bathrooms. A few rainbow and trans flags and the powers that be have won themselves unearned progressive credibility. Bismarck with mascara and nail polish.
@iknklast #2: You are absolutely right. It’s the sort of thing you might predict with basic game theory. Increased rewards incentivize the moves that generate them. In the absence of disincentives, no self-interested player is going to altruistically choose to stop pursuing rewards.
I’m sure people feel the dopamine rush of righteousness when they talk about gender affirmation or punching TERFs. So, even more than easy, simple answers, I wonder if quasi-religion might fill a need for meaning-making. One of my teachers used to define a myth as “a model that connects us to a morally and emotionally significant universe.” The TRA worldview situates the faithful in a world of moral significance, where the innocent and powerless (i.e., trans and non-binary people) are oppressed by the infidels (i.e., TERFs). That’s gotta be tempting for people who don’t have some other source of meaning. Then you add in all the social reinforcement aspects of social media …
@Screechy Monkey #3: Yep, that’s exactly it! It’s insufficient to be okay with people praying. Everyone must participate in the pro-prayer paradigm.
When I got pulled into this topic a couple months ago, I saw a video arguing that it is transphobic to say, “If people want to be called by whatever pronouns, or wear whatever clothes, or, y’know, change their name, that’s okay with me. I haven’t got a problem with it at all. I think people should be able to do as they please.” My screen almost ended up with a wine glass–sized hole in it.
@Your Name’s not Bruce? #4: To be honest, I find the speed with which the cult has dominated government institutions and corporations to be mildly unsurprising. At least, not in our modern world where social media are considered a weather vane for public opinion. Politicians and businesses don’t want bad press, and there’s precious little press worse than accusations of bigotry, especially when disputing the charge is itself evidence of bigotry.
But it is still safe to say things about women, like “Hillary was ambitious, which is why I didn’t vote for her”; “Why doesn’t she smile more?”; “She’s old”; “Why don’t you have children?”; “I want you badly, so you need to go out with me” or lots of other things that are a lot worse than telling a male bodied person “you’re a man”.
Oh, for sure. That’s the curious part.
Maybe there is a novelty bias or something like that going on. Maybe it’s just a matter of numbers: since trans/etc. people make up a small part of the population, accusations of bigotry and claims of oppression get more traction. Maybe the male/female asymmetry is so long-standing that it’s invisible to most people. Maybe the linguistic obfuscation really works.
What do you think causes the disparity?
Men are larger than women. Men desire women. Men need women (to reproduce). So they wrote the rules early on that said women are subservient, they enforced them with their extra strength, they were willing to do nearly anything to protect the rules.
I also suspect a lot of it has sort of a “Dear Muslima” dynamic. Slaves were obviously enslaved, and that led to discomfort on the part of others, and it started a movement that still has power. Gay people were able to make themselves known by coming out, and people began to recognize how many of their friends and loved ones were gay…and good people that they liked.
Women aren’t obviously enslaved. The cages look okay to people who don’t have to live in them, and we are allowed to walk around without being arrested or having acid thrown in our faces. We appear to be living a great life, and heck, being patted on the butt every few minutes isn’t that bad, is it? We aren’t in a closet, because we are part of everyone’s lives. We are extremely visible, in fact, in the media that puts us in kitchens in the ads, in kitchens and bedrooms in the movies and TV (or in the trunk of the car or the refrigerator), in the literature that spells out what women are and how they behave. A lot of women react by internalizing those messages, and attempt to behave in accepted ways, also policing other women who are “uppity” or “masculine”.
Everything is so everyday, it doesn’t look like they are being sexist. It’s just…well, habit that is so ingrained most of us don’t even recognize it. When we do call it out, it looks like we are calling everything sexist because we call things sexist that are just such a part of the world that no one thinks about it.
That’s my thinking. I don’t know that I’m right. It could be that people just hate women.