What are the rules?
I’m still chewing on Kevin’s formulation.
Meanwhile, in reality, transgender kids are bullied for being trans; the principle effect of that bullying is psychological harm; the principle means of that bullying is misgendering; and the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people.
The transgender kids who are bullied for being trans…would they be bullied any less or more if they were not trans but nonconforming? Does Kevin know? Does anyone?
As many people have pointed out, kids are bullied for a slew of reasons, because kids seem to have a deep need to police other kids and/or take out their aggressions on them.
How does Kevin or anyone know that “the principle means of that bullying is misgendering”? Nothing about clothes, toilets, voices, preferences, names, haircuts, habits, manners?
And the bit about “the principle justification for that misgendering is trustworthy adults in those kids’ lives who argue in support of misgendering transgender people” really doesn’t ring true at all, unless we’re talking about teenagers (or not even then, really). These kids are explaining “I get to call you the wrong pronoun because these adults I know and trust argue in support of doing just that”? Of course not, but then how does Kevin know that’s the chain of causation?
Anyway…what’s the overarching principle? What if a kid insists she’s a tiger, and gets distraught if anyone disputes her claim? Should teachers and schools tell all the other students to talk to her as if she were a tiger, and call her by tiger-appropriate names, and so on? Which fantasies or counter-factual beliefs about the self are we required to agree with and which can we decline to believe? What principle is there that distinguishes among them?
Adults do play along with children’s pretending, but that’s a different thing. The youngest children may believe or half-believe the parents mean it, but mostly the children know everyone is pretending. Is it really an excellent plan for schools in general to mandate pretending about which sex children are on the say-so of the children themselves?
I’m not convinced it is, myself.
And a related question to that, of course, is should other tigers talk to her as if she is a tiger and call her tiger-appropriate names? And not eat her?
“If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.” Or so says Wittgenstein.
The principal means is misgendering? I would have thought the principal means would be “You are weird!” statements/derogatory name calling/ cold shouldering/physical abuse such as shoving/ destruction of property/hacking school computer accounts. Why would a statement such as “you are not really a boy/girl” be so much worse than any of that?
Why is the notion that “You are a girl but you can wear whatever you like and be called John” so terribly unsatisfactory?
Every single person on this blog who has ever replied to Kevin has referred to his child as his son, and has been nothing but sympathetic. No-one has said “you’re doing the wrong thing” or said anything abusive about his child.
Yet Kevin keeps coming back here demanding we agree that people can change sex; that gender performance is dictated by one’s sex and not one’s preference; and that we are personally responsible for the suffering of trans children. I become less sympathetic to Kevin each time.
Kevin really wants us to tell him he’s doing the right thing, and that it’s the only thing he can do.
Every single woman I know is dissatisfied with her body and struggles with sexism and gender expectations for women. Every gay man I know struggled with how to accommodate masculinity with homosexuality. It’s hard. It’s a massive step back to say “Not happy with your body or sexuality? Conforming to gender stereotypes is the way to go!” All the work we have done allowing people to be the person they want to be is being undone by this bizarre insistence that gender performance and sex are the same.
I wish I had Lady Mondegreen’s talent for posting clearly and in under 25 words!
I’m usually on your side in this, and there’s a lot wrong with what Kevin writes. But if a child told me they were being bullied for being transgender I would immediately find it credible, as I would if they told me they were being bullied for being gay. Bullies are very good at finding things that their audience will disapprove of to justify their bullying. I was mildly bullied for being bookish, but it didn’t get serious because most people realized that being bookish in school is not such a bad thing.
David, who is saying “we don’t believe transgender children are bullied”? Kevin says misgendering is the principal form of bullying.
Women are socialised to care about everybody’s feelings but their own. Nurturing, caring, self-sacrificing, self-denying= socially acceptable woman. This “don’t misgender me! It’s the worst you can do!” is directly aimed at women. “Oh okay, use the women’s toilets/participate in womens’ sports/ come in the communal shower with me. I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings.” Don’t mind what I need, I’m just a woman.
Parents, teachers and doctors dealing with the psychological problems of troubled young people have an incredibly difficult task. They need to support the young person without causing further harm. It’s important that we are allowed to discuss if transient children is the best way forward, whether Kevin thinks we should or not.
What if a kid insists he is a girl and gets distraught if anyone disputes his/her claim?
Can we dismiss the two claims with the same level of confidence?
There was a lovely comment by Lady Mondegreen in the other topic that I thought I’d copy here:
This. I’m wondering to what extent “the principle means of bullying” is distorted by people engaging in perfectly ordinary and well-intended discourse that, deliberately or accidentally, doesn’t conform to the trans narrative.
I was bullied pretty badly. Being neither transgender nor gay, would I have been helped by being shoehorned into those categories? Children enforce sexism as viciously as they can, and seem to do so well before they have any ability to assess the trustworthyness of their adult influences.
John @8, and it’s not just sexism. It’s religious bias. Body shaming. Racism. Any difference that their parents notice, they will notice, without any training other than watching what others are doing, not only their parents, but their television, their computer, their friends, whoever is around. The messages are so pervasive they start to get them from birth.
David @ 4 – I didn’t say I don’t find it credible that Kevin’s child is being bullied. I didn’t say it and it’s not what I think. Of course it’s credible: bullying in school is a thing, a massive thing, and any kind of deviation from what kids consider “normal” is a target. I asked if the bullying would be any better or worse if Kevin’s kid were nonconforming as opposed to trans, and if he or anyone knows that, with the implication that it’s hard to know that kind of thing. I too was mildly bullied for being bookish, or not exactly bullied (I think because it was a tiny all-girls school, so there just wasn’t the anonymity and space for bullying to thrive) but excluded. I’m not a fan or a defender of bullying. It’s the other fact-claims in Kevin’s comment that I take issue with, along with his repeated practice of using his child to try to shame me, which I have explicitly asked him to stop doing at least twice.
learie @ 3 – I don’t wish your comment had been a word shorter. Not one single word shorter.
I don’t think having everyone displaying their own preferred pronoun sticker will address actual bullying problems. Let’s just call it what it is, namely a public relations effort to gain wider acceptance of the view that you are the gender you say you are. Whether or not that’s entirely fair to women is, of course, another matter.
That may be what it is, but that is not likely how it will work in the end. The likely outcomes of this are bad, and predictable.
In addition, why should people accept that you are the gender you say you are? What do we gain by that? What is the benefit to anyone? Is it even a benefit to the person saying they are a different gender than their sex, and how do we know that, since we apparently are not allowed to study it? Why should such an anti-scientific idea gain wider acceptance? Why do we insist that other people have to accept what you claim about yourself on this issue, and this issue only?
I can’t even force people to accept what I demonstrably am if they don’t wish to accept it, and I don’t expect that I should. One of my groups that I am a long time member of consistently ignores the fact that I am a scientist when they name the members who are scientists…can I force them to acknowledge that? No, I can’t. I can request them to, I can leave the group if they continue to refuse to, but I cannot force them to recognize what is true, what I have evidence is true, and it is something that is core to my personality. They recognize the male scientists as males, but the two of us who are female scientists are consistently overlooked. We both have credentials, and in fact more credentials than one of the men who continues to be called a scientist even though he has never done anything that gets you called a scientist other than get a bachelor’s degree in Geology. He hasn’t gotten advance degrees, done research, worked in the field, or taught.
People’s perceptions are what they are. If you are unable to muster the arguments to convince people that you are what you say you are, then there is nothing else that can be done other than choosing to ignore or unfriend that person, or whining a lot. Forcing other people to accept you at your own assessment (especially when all factors suggest something else) is simply not a legitimate right, and gaining wider acceptance for this is not a goal that the council should be working on. Especially when it is so harmful in the end to half the world’s population, that half that was born as women and still consider themselves women.
learie, thank you, but your comment was excellent just as it was.
J.A., I would add that it’s pr not just on behalf of the individual, but of the entire ideology.
That’s why I resist it. It’s not that I want to be rude to an individual trans person. My first impulse would be to go along with whatever would make them feel better.
In fact, if this really were simply a matter of courtesy, I’d use the damn preferred pronouns and not worry about it. It’s not like there’s anything wrong with a little social fiction to spare people’s feelings. But the pronoun thing is an obvious and aggressive attempt to spread and enforce the whole schmear–trans women ARE women and a woman is anyone who claims womanhood; gender identity is innate (except when it’s purely a matter of performance); “science” supports trans activists’ claims about sex, gender, and transition; trans people will kill themselves if their “gender identity” is not validated and affirmed; disagreement with trans claims makes one a “transphobe,” a bigot, and a fascist–and all the rest of it.
The more people conform to social pressure to observe “preferred pronouns”, the more trans ideology, in all its incoherent, irrational inglory, is normalized.
That’s why I for one won’t go along with it. I did for a while, but not anymore.
This is very well put. Excellent summation.