She pointed to vague notions of “knowing” and “feeling”
A psychologist at Feminist Current on how she bought into trans dogma until she didn’t any more:
Until mid-January, I was a stalwart advocate of what is commonly referred to as “transgender rights.” I didn’t waver in my belief that transwomen are women and transmen are men, that transgender individuals should be granted access to single-sex spaces based on their chosen “gender” (including female change rooms, homeless shelters, prisons, sexual assault centres, transition houses, etc.), and that those who question such beliefs were misguided at best, and transphobic bigots at worst.
Certain aspects of trans activism would occasionally unsettle me, such as self-identification being the primary requirement needed for transwomen to compete against female athletes and on women’s sports teams, but I pushed those concerns aside. This wasn’t worth my attention, when transgender individuals were supposedly being discriminated against in so many areas of society. Further, I had repeatedly read that transgender youth had a high risk for suicidal ideation and attempts, so when it came to advocating for transgender people, it was clear to me that time was of the essence.
It’s always been one of the biggest puzzles to me in this whole thing, how thoroughly some otherwise reasonable people buy into the official doctrines. I don’t expect that puzzle ever to be resolved; it just is puzzling. The core claims are so wack, so magic-adjacent, that all this furious impassioned belief is inherently surprising and baffling. I can understand buying into the idea that one must pretend to believe it all more easily than I can understand actually believing it all. (That’s still not very easily though. We don’t normally think we have to pretend to think other people’s flaky beliefs are true [with the massive exception of religious beliefs], so why has this one so suddenly and furiously been made socially mandatory?) The suicide explanation is some answer, I guess, but then that claim itself is not particularly credible on its face and falls apart if you do any research on it. So…it’s puzzling. Mystifying, in fact.
I discounted those who didn’t agree with my belief system — or rather, shouted online at them, in 280 characters or less. I used my PhD in clinical psychology as a sword, despite the fact my knowledge of the science and psychology of sex and gender was minimal. Most people who disagreed with me were women, who repeatedly stated that males could not become female, and that while the rights of every individual in society must be respected and protected, the rights of one group (trans-identified people) cannot be realized at the expense of another (women).
When asked why I believed transwomen were, in fact, women, I asserted that some boys and girls are “born in the wrong body,” and that our brains are gendered (thus, transwomen had a male body, but a “woman’s brain”). When asked to elaborate, I pointed to vague notions of “knowing” and “feeling,” rather than terms that were rooted in science and could be operationalized. When asked to explain further, I resorted to circular reasoning: some men feel like women, and only women can feel like women, therefore some men are women. When pushed on the question of how it is possible to “feel like a woman,” I’d argue that because I “felt” like a woman, it must be true.
Ah but do you “feel like a woman”? How do you know? How do you know you don’t just feel like yourself, while knowing that you are in fact a woman? I think that better describes what most of us think. We’ve always been told we’re female, so being ourselves is being female, just as it’s various other things we’ve always been told about ourselves; it’s not some special essence or core that is feelinglikeawoman. We can’t generalize from our own claim to “feel like a woman” to the existence of some essential “feeling like a woman” that exists independently of female people who grow up being treated like female people.
But at the time the formula worked for Alicia Hendley until it didn’t any more.
But early this year, everything changed. In January, information about the alleged misbehaviour of a self-declared transwoman (“JY”) was revealed. Initially known for filing human rights complaints against 16 Canadian women who declined to wax male genitals, JY was now alleged to have made predatory comments about young girls online. One comment JY allegedly left said, “Every single time I take that ferry there’s field trips with 10-12 year old girls on it… If a girl asks me for a pad or tampon and help on how to use it, if it’s her first time, what do I do?” A selfie of JY in the women’s washroom, which included girls standing in the background, also began to circulate.
People tried to talk about it, and found themselves kicked off social media for doing so. This made Hendley uneasy, so she consulted…Morgane Oger.
We spoke for almost an hour, and Oger listened to my concerns, telling me that other women had reached out regarding JY’s behaviour as well. Oger stated that it would be fruitless to bring such concerns to law enforcement unless there was concrete, verifiable evidence to present them with. I was encouraged to find possible sources and to get in touch if I found any. Based on our conversation, I felt Oger was troubled by the accusations that were being made against JY and was taking them seriously.
During our call, Oger mentioned an event that had occurred a few days earlier at the Vancouver Public Library, discussing gender identity ideology and women’s rights. While I was not at the presentation and could not comment on what occurred, I was struck by Oger’s description: “It was like 1933 Berlin.”
Hendley’s husband and children are Jewish, and that comparison was a large step too far. The slide began.
More conflicting thoughts followed. Was there any evidence that transgender people were at risk of imminent extermination, similar to vulnerable groups during the Holocaust? No.
Were transgender people, as a group, more vulnerable than women? I had no evidence to support this claim.
Was silencing women who say that transwomen are not women (and transmen are not men) a punishment that fits the “crime”? Should referring to a self-identified transwoman as “he,” even inadvertently, mean that women deserve to have online methods of communication (a vital tool for women, enabling them to participate in both public and private conversations) cut off? No.
She used her academic training and did a lot of research.
Like so many other women before me, I reached my “peak.” And finally, even though it may have taken a long time, I tipped, falling away from the beliefs ascribed by gender identity ideology, and onto firmer ground. I was no longer willing to “affirm” transgender individuals at any cost, especially if it cost us women’s rights. I was no longer willing to agree that the end (transitioning a teen) necessarily justifies the means (using scare tactics about suicide on parents). I was no longer willing to perceive every transgender person as made of finely spun glass, too fragile to be questioned, and capable of being broken by mere words. I was no longer willing to sacrifice truth and ethics for political correctness.
Now, when I reflect on my “switch” from being an unrelenting trans activist/“ally” to being critical of gender identity ideology and legislation, I’m chilled at how easy it was for me — a psychologist (now retired), ostensibly trained to understand the human mind — to become so caught up in the momentum of “trans rights” that I avoided critical thought, much like a new member of a cult.
Quite. The culty aspects are very obvious and very disturbing. It’s obviously not a coincidence that trans activism has a lot of both: 1) magic-adjacent claims and 2) ferocious bullying of dissenting women. If the claims were less magic-adjacent they wouldn’t be so god damn hard to believe, and thus wouldn’t require all this bullying and ostracism and silencing to enforce belief and repetition.
And, while I’m reluctant to call trans activism a “cult,” I’m aware of many disconcerting similarities: the absolute refusal to allow anyone to criticize issues; silencing, smearing, and ostracizing those who do ask questions (in this case, labeling them “transphobic”) about the ideology of transgenderism; and pressuring individuals (from parents to health professionals) to blindly adhere to the view that some people are “born in the wrong body,” and that the only way to “fix” this error is through medical intervention, such as puberty-suppressing drugs, cross-sex hormones, and various surgeries, rather than with psychological intervention. And, much like in a cult, those who push gender identity ideology discourage independent thought, and instead respond to requests for evidence and facts to support their beliefs with platitudes, mantras, and scare tactics, repeated over and over, until they become reality.
All of that, with knobs on.
H/t Lady Mondegreen
What I’d like to know, particularly, is how a trained psychologist lost the use of her entire education over this issue. How a therapist couldn’t see trauma reactions, social contagion, and abusive personality disordered activists with an obvious identity disturbance.
This *is her field*. I’d really like to ask her this. I’d like to ask a lot of them. Mental health professionals especially should be asked to introspect on this, and to have a conversation with the rest of us about it.
This is one of the things that stood out to me from the first (“the first” being The Shunning of Ophelia, which was when I began to really think critically about TRA claims).
I was a fragile person myself once, sure that mere words could break me.
That’s a bad thing. It’s a pathological condition that needs treatment. It’s not a reason to try and force the rest of the world to protect you from disagreement.
Talking about “magic adjascent claims,” how do TRAs square the claim that
with the assertion that TWAW whether or not they have had any of the above medical interventions and that all it requires is the transwoman’s say so? Why is it claimed that the penis can be a female organ? That transwomen have in fact been women from birth and that they have always had female bodies? Just what exactly are those who make these claims having “fixed?” Sounds like they’re trying to have it both ways. Why push children into irreversible medical interventions that at least one wing of the trans movement claims are completely unneccesary? Is this to recruit a cadre of young, impressionable people who have fully commited to the ideology with the sacrifice of their flesh, blood and fertility, while those higher up and in the know of this ghastly pyramid scheme claim the status of womanhood without any effort beyond donning a frock and reciting the magic words of identification to which all are supposed to bow?
Not to mention, they have the physical size of men and so are innately less vulnerable to violence than women, especially from other women.
Because when it comes to minority groups, society has a long shameful history of not doing that, and being really, really wrong about it. We’ve learned about privilege, that just because you don’t see or can’t understand the struggles that oppressed people go through, does not mean those struggles aren’t really happening. We’ve learned to listen to victims, and to give them the benefit of the doubt. We’ve made a conscious decision not to be the kind of people who tell homosexuals that they’re wrong about who they are, not to tell them to “try being not gay”, not to tell them we know them better than they know themselves, not to tell them to just stop being so icky.
When someone tells you they’ve suffered abuse, believe them.
We want to the kind of people who help. We want to be better than those assholes who came before us. We want to be… woke.
That’s why.
No, that doesn’t answer my questions. At all. It just takes all the claims at face value, which is what I’m questioning. “We’ve learned to listen to victims” – well which victims, and according to what? How do we know who are the victims and who are the perps, and who are a mix of both? What do we do when one set of claimed “victims” establishes its “victimhood” by stamping as hard as it can on another set of victims, a set that constitutes half of humanity? What do we do when we have rival bands of “victims” with competing claims and incompatible rights?
This kind of thought-free “wull this group is just like all the others” response after all this time is not useful.
Really? Trump tells us that constantly; should we believe him? No, of course not.
There are people who lie. There are people who lie and manipulate and make shit up and exaggerate and bully. Lots of men claim to be abused by women who won’t have sex with them – cf incels and Elliot Rodgers. White nationalists claim they’ve suffered abuse via the presence of brown people in a White Nation. Rich people think they’re abused by taxation. Rachel McKinnon claims to have suffered abuse while dealing out abuse by the bucketload. No, I’m not going to “believe them” just like that, without any thought or investigation or analysis.
OB – Thanks. I’ve always been disturbed by that. I was disturbed when PZ said you should listen to the women. Then he moved on and ignored the women and said listen to the trans. Now he is willing to ignore the women. So I think it’s about more than just listening to those who claim victimization, it’s examining the claims with an open min and being open to the reality of privilege and victimization, without just letting your brains fall out and believe that a person is victimized because a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone with a penis who claims to be female.
The other problem is, the ‘victims’ don’t all agree. Ann Coulter is a woman – should we listen to her? Or Christina Hoff-Sommers? What about Valerie Salinas? There is a wide range of opinions and feelings about these things, and many of them conflict. So we have to use critical thinking and not just assume what someone says about their own experience is correct.
As for trans, same thing. Tiggerthewing does not appear to agree with the abusive, shouty trans activists on most things. Tiggerthewing also does not present as a spokesperson for the entire group of trans people, anymore than you or I present as the spokesperson for the entire group of women. We throw thoughts and ideas out there and try to contribute to the discussion, and would be glad if people listened to us, but as for myself, and I suspect for you, we want them to listen to us and evaluate the ideas we put forward, couple it with evidence, and come to a reasonable conclusion.
The ratchet of relentless ‘affirmation’ seems particularly insidious. Like all those social workers and police who relentlessly ‘believed the children’ while they coached and coerced them into reporting imaginary ‘Satanic abuse’ all through the ’80s.
How can gender-nonconformity, or the most basic opposition to patriarchy, survive when every manifestation of individual difference is pounced upon to justify feeding children into the Trans Mill?
It would be so helpful if it were as simple as “Listen to the victims,” but that’s some other world, not this one.
So when women claim that they get catcalled in the street regularly, or groped on public transport, because I walk down the street and use public transport all the time and I’ve never seen those things happen, are you saying I should have not believed them until scientists started doing proper investigation and analysis on how much that really happened?
No, I’m not. Why? Well, for a start, it happened a lot even to me once I hit adolescence, even though I’ve been a jeans and sweatshirt type my whole life. It’s also not a particularly outlandish claim.
What about you? You ignored all my questions. Should we believe Trump’s claims of victimization? Manafort’s? White Nationalists’?
That trans women have been harassed or assaulted isn’t really the issue at hand, anymore than whether gay men who dress as drag queens have been harassed or assaulted. Such acts are of course to be condemned, just as such acts against women should also be. The question is whether or not claims that trans women are women, period, are valid. Concerns about trans women being women when it comes to athletic competition are serious and not simply dismissed by invoking testosterone levels, for instance. Or that trans women should be accepted as sexual equivalents to lesbian women and have easy access to their spaces is another example. Both of these of course have one thing in common – the assertion that trans women have an absolute right to enter any women’s space they want to. That there’s some push-back happening now from some women is due to them finally feeling pushed too far by TRAs who have harshly condemned any woman who expresses even mild reservations about trans women being women in all ways.
It would be odd if there were no deliberately ant-feminist “moles” among the trans-women, but perhaps a greater problem is that, when re-imagining themselves as women, too many give too little attention to dealing with the sense of superiority which had been trained into them as males and which they may even mistake for a personal quality rather than recognize as a social perquisite of their former gender. Feminists, don’t be cowed when these rascals try to bull their way into your leadership!
@Ophelia #11
So, sorry for the delay replying. I wasn’t intentionally avoiding it, but I wanted to take the time to gather my thoughts and respond calmly, and it’s been a hectic weekend for me.
Anyway, I don’t particularly enjoy fisking[0]. It tends to blow up quite spectacularly, where if Alice writes a 3-sentence paragraph, and Bob responds to each sentence with a paragraph of his own, and Alice needs to respond to individual sentences within each paragraph of Bob’s response with a paragraph of her own… I’ve just not found it very managable in the past.
And that’s with a threaded discussion medium, where recently updated threads can stay “on top”, like mailing lists or some other internet fora. If you’ve got an unthreaded discussion medium, like this blog, where it’s hard to see which comments respond to which others, and old threads quickly slip down and out of view, it’s just hard to find and keep up with the conversations you’re trying to have.
Also, I’ve always thought it a bit rude. And that’s fine if your goal is to be rude and take someone down, point by point, in the most devastating way possible. And that was not what I wanted to do there at all. But even if I did, this is your blog, and while I’m not always very polite, I do try to not be openly and unnecessarily rude to my host. (Like the final “That’s why” in my original comment. It’s unnecessarily confrontational, changes the whole tone, and I wish I could take that one line back. Oh well.)
So, yeah. That’s a long way of saying that the reason I didn’t try and refute all the points you made, is that I thought that that style of refutation just wasn’t appropraite here. I still think that.
Instead, I tried to pick out what I thought was the most important, most central point that you made, and refute that to try and keep the conversation short and focussed. (Although I did that badly too :-( ) Anyway, I still think that “people are overcorrecting for the ways their predecessors were shitty” is the best way I can make that point. If you just don’t buy that, I’m not sure that me trying to rephrase a bunch of different ways is going to help. But, I’m also fine with not feeling the need to make you agree with me.
Anyway, keep up the great work. I enjoy reading everything you post, and I have learned so much from your work. I tend not to comment particularly often as I find myself nodding along in agreement with 95% of what you say, and a lot of the rest of the time another one of the regulars has already made the point I was going to make, only better than I could have ever made it.
[0] http://catb.org/jargon/html/F/fisking.html
Oh, no need to apologize. It’s not as if you have a pattern of making condescending correcty posts and then ignoring all replies (cough *Skeletor* cough).
I do know what you mean. That history of not seeing oppression/victimization for generations is real, and it’s one reason I kept my doubts to myself for a long time (and I know many others who say the same thing). I agree that it’s a pattern, but I think it’s mostly been hijacked in this particular branch of social justice / identity politics. I think the fact that almost all the most prominent and noisy “activists” are trans women and that their targets are almost all women can’t and shouldn’t be ignored.
I don’t actually disbelieve the claims about suffering abuse. They’re not outlandish, and in fact they seem pretty likely. What I disbelieve is the claim that suffering abuse is a reason to bully women, especially feminist women. (That’s not literally the claim, but the relentless bullying of women is explained / justified / excused / brushed aside with ever-louder shouts about the abuse, as if the abuse were the fault of women.) I also disbelieve the notion that protection from abuse has to come at the expense of women – that women have to give up all their spaces and even their feminism in order to protect gender-nonconforming and dysphoric men.
Anyway, I do buy that “people are overcorrecting for the ways their predecessors were shitty.” I do think that’s a big part of what’s going on; I just don’t think that’s the end of the conversation (but maybe neither do you).
Thank you for the very thoughtful reply!