Guest post: It’s not a myth
Guest post by Josh Slocum
Some people I know and respect have protested that academia is not in the grips of increasingly Maoist “liberal/progressive” young people. They say that it’s a right wing overreaction to isolated incidents. They then point out all that the right wing is doing to ruin the academy and strip colleges of funding.
Let me deal with the second claim first.
Yes. It’s a fact that corporatist politicians have slashed the budgets of our colleges and universities. Yes. I deplore it. Like you, I recognize it’s a huge institutional problem.
But as for “lefty madness is an isolated incident,” I part company with you. In fact, I think you’re dangerously wrong. Just wrong, not malicious. I’m not questioning your character.
But I am saying I think your emotional allegiances misguided you in this case, and that you cannot see a real emergency.
It cannot be the case that liberal-leftie outrage/infantilism, and all the pro-trans nonsense is “just isolated.” It can’t be true that “Most college experience isn’t like that.” It can’t be true that “most liberal arts colleges don’t have these problems.”
That is not believable. I know three separate undergraduate students at Smith, independent of each other. They have all told me privately that it’s dangerous there to question transgender activism. Did you know how many women at Smith are getting mastectomies? One friend noted last week by email—‘there are zero lesbians here.’
My own alma mater, Sarah Lawrence, has been entirely taken over by trans politics. And by “revolutionary” shit-head kids with money who are demanding things like free laundry soap, and taking entire academic buildings hostage while doing it.
I have classmates from SLC who will only speak about this to me in whispers privately. Some of them have lost their jobs in the arts community for being “TERFs”. I would be instantly banished from a reunion if I showed up.
And this is just my personal slice of the world. You can read the reports that are there for all of us to see and it’s obvious this is happening on campuses nationwide.
Trans-progressivism has warped the liberal arts academy beyond recognition. It’s not a myth.
“There are zero lesbians here” – at freaking SMITH??? I know people who went to Smith – used to be lesbians had to be in the shadows because of, well, the old usual. But there was a kind of tacit understanding. Then, lesbians were able to be out. Now, lesbians are being pushed back into the shadows, or, what’s worse, being told they don’t exist.
The New York Review of Books published an article on Andrea Dworkin recently. These days, she would be called a fascist who is committing literal violence by writing stuff down.
A certain blogger and Biology professor at a liberal arts college, whom I do not know personally and have lost all respect for, makes this exact protest regularly.
It’s pathetic, really, how so many educated people refuse to see what is happening right in front of their faces; it’s even worse when the professors are themselves part of the problem, encouraging the ‘wokening’ of their charges and labelling their critics as scum, bigots, and Nazis..
I should clarify. My friend means that there are ‘zero lesbians’ because all of them she knows have transed.
I just can’t grok why the “trans” thing is considered “leftist”
It has always struck me as a textbook example of the self-centred, misanthropic, ill-informed pseudo-logic that underpins libertarianism.
Yes. I’ve pointed that out a million times (mostly on Twitter). There’s just nothing lefty about it. It’s individualism taken to ludicrous extremes.
It does tick off a few boxes: “struggle, “rights”, “oppressed”, “minority”. It rode in on the coatails of gay rights. The addition of the T to the LGB movement was its foot in the door, is my guess.
Yes it does of course tick some of the boxes but most of that is fake. What “rights”? Not real rights, not universal or unversalizable rights, but pretend rights – the “right” to have all claims about the self believed without question being the core one. That’s not a real right. What “oppressed”? All too often that just means the core non-right isn’t being honored. What “struggle”? The struggle to monopolize all the attention at all times? Minority, yes, but that one has always needed stipulations to work at all, because by itself it doesn’t mean “unjustly oppressed minority.”
No they’ve co-opted the boxes, they’ve appropriated the boxes. The boxes aren’t theirs to check. The phoniness of the whole thing is why they don’t belong on the left (part of why).
That’s why I put the terms being checked off in scare quotes. This is a marriage of convenience between those who have co-opted the real struggles of actually oppressed people and those who collect causes and expect a pat on the back for how good, progressive and intersectional they are. Whoever let the first lot in the door in the first place weren’t being very good gatekeepers for admitting worthy “causes” into the fold. Unfortunately, too many on the left (and until recently, I would have counted myself amongst this number) just unthinkingly nod and say “Solidarity!” , thinking that this cause has been properly vetted before its addition to the List of the Worthy ones.
Butterflies and Wheels has been the wakeup call and education on this subject that I needed. I’ve now got a much clearer idea of what’s behind the trans activist movement. As you note, it has nothing to do with real rights; trans people have those already, along with all other human rights. They want Donnie’s second scoop, they demand obiesance and fealty that yes, they are the most oppressed of the oppressed and thus deserving of all and everything they want as reparations, almost all of which is at the expense of women and girls. That’s why I think it’s so important that gender critical thought be given the widest possible audience. There’s a greater chance of pushback against trans over-reach if more people realize what’s at stake. Those trans “allies” who are so heavily invested may or may not be a lost cause; stories like those of Alicia Hendley give some cause for hope; https://www.feministcurrent.com/2019/04/10/i-supported-trans-ideology-until-i-couldnt-anymore/ The stories of the de-trasitioned and desisters is also important. There are many voices speaking out. They cannot all be silenced forever.
And then there’s Reality. In the end reality will win. It always does. Delusion can only succeed for a short time before it collapses under the weight of its own incoherence and pretension. Winter sets in and the emperor gets frostbite. The question is how many lives will be ruined or lost before reality speaks up and steps in?
Sorry if I was belaboring the obvious. I should have said “and” rather than “but” – it does of course tick some of the boxes and most of the boxes are fake.
True that “it’s so important that gender critical thought be given the widest possible audience.” I was saying that yesterday to a despairing friend who was having a “there’s no hope, they won’t listen” moment. The dogmatists themselves won’t listen but bystanders will and do and have. There are vastly more of the latter than the former.
Count me in this category until the FTB blow up. I shrugged and said, okay, give them all the rights they should have. I never realized they were fighting for non-rights, and that they were willing to sacrifice women to that cause.
And of course, me too also, about having witnessed the Terfening at FTB, and what it did to you, O, and it waking me up. Butterflies and Wheels has woken me up to a great number of things that needed a more adult perspective than I had walking in.
The blog that doubles as an alarm clock!
But seriously thank you & I’m blushing modestly.
Sometimes the obvious isn’t always obvious, so a little potential belabouring is fine. I’ve been oblivious to the obvious often enough to have some inkling of the limits of my knowledge and understanding, but I likely still have huge unexamined swathes of ignorance and cluelessness, so your belabourment is appreciated. This whole process has been a near continuous series of instances where , like Huxley, I’ve said “How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that.” (I’m not anywhere near as smart as he was, so I have better excuse. I’m also a man, so the implications of trans demands are not as obvious to me in my everyday life). And there may be others here just starting on this path of awakening for whom these things are all new territory (i.e. me a few years ago).
Another wake up call for me (though by that time, the OB alarm clock had already gone off in my head) was when I experienced the dismay of discovering that plays I had written around environmental themes (one of them on colony collapse disorder) were being misread as plays to support trans rights!
I find that a broad range of non-academic bystanders quickly relate to the unfairness of male bodies in female sports. Lesbian erasure means more to me personally, but if I tried starting a bystander there, it would be a higher degree of difficulty!
In some sports, judges award higher scores to successfully completed moves that have higher degrees of difficulty. Just be sure to stick the landing.
@Your Names Not Bruce:
“Unfortunately, too many on the left (and until recently, I would have counted myself amongst this number)…”
Why stop calling yourself ‘left’ because other people who do so harbour a view on a particular issue that you don’t agree with?
If you were left wing before i would assune you believed, at a minimum, in heavily regulating capitalism (if not moving beyond it altogether) in order to increase the welfare of the least well off and reduce inequality. Presumably you also believed in something like universal human rights, international peace etc.
My guess is, if you believed those things before this trans debate erupted, you still believe them now. And you seem to be saying the trans movement isn’t genuinely leftist. So why should you be the one to stop calling yourself a left winger?
I don’t mean to be petty. The right, especially in America, seems to think being left wing is all about identity politics. But that’s a myth: as far as i can see, identity politics is individualistic, which is a characteristic of right wing thought. Leftists should challenge that myth by criticising identity politics and capitalism at the same time, and hanging onto words like ‘left’and ‘solidarity’.
I took the “until recently” parenthetical comment to include what followed; that is, people on the left who unthinkingly nod and shout “Solidarity!”.
Maybe i misunderstood. My point is general though: some people (present company excluded perhaps) claim to have ‘left the left’ because they’re alienated by identity politics. E.g. gender critical feminist Posie Parker. Which is counterproductive for the left and helps the right.
Hi Ben.
What Sackbut said. Still turning left, just having to dodge the TRAs hogging the lane, going in the opposite direction.
Yes. I refuse to leave the left, because it doesn’t belong to the asshole faction. Also, in all fairness, the left has always been riven with disagreements, including violent ones. Naturally it has: it’s an enormous category, so it can’t be uniform. The Stalinists-Trotskyists split makes this one look like a tea party.