What Orwell did not predict
Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert on Orwell and Big Brother and who saw Big Sister on the horizon?
You also showed us the way out of this insane “sanity”:
“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
But you also wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” You said a boot. You did not say a men’s size twelve Christian Louboutin Hot Chick Patent Leather Pump stamping on a human face — forever. You, who predicted Big Brother would force us to say two plus two equals five and to say war is peace and to say we have always been at war with Eastasia, did not quite predict that we would also have to say that Big Brother has always been Big Sister, that the penis can be a female organ (and has always, when the owner chooses, been a female organ), and that males can give birth. You did not predict that “Transwomen are women” would be the pledge of allegiance — the oath of loyalty — we would all have to swear, hands over our non-binary chests.
He didn’t, but he did give us a lot of useful metaphors for the situation.
The authors of this article have written a book called Bright Green Lies, which is not about queer or transgender issues at all, but about how wind and solar power will not stop the murder of the planet. Our previous publishers refused to look at it. We shopped the book, and another publisher offered us a contract. Less than a week later we received the email we knew was coming — the one demanding we explain our “transphobia.” The publisher didn’t even bother to wait for our response before sending the next email: the one voiding the contract.
Well. Be fair. Which is more important, the planet or trans ideology?
In The Politics of Experience, psychiatrist R.D. Laing describes how one person can control another’s perception of reality. If Jack succeeds in forgetting something, this is of little use if Jill continues to remind him of it. He must induce her not to do so. The safest way would be not just to make her keep quiet about it, but to induce her to forget it also. Laing writes:
“Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on ‘bringing it up.’ He may invalidate her experience. This can be done — more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial, whereas it is important and significant to her. Going further, he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: ‘It’s all in your imagination.’ Further still, he can invalidate the content. ‘It never happened that way.’ Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality and content, but her very capacity to remember at all, and make her feel guilty for doing so into the bargain.
This is not unusual. People are doing such things to each other all the time. In order for such transpersonal invalidation to work, however, it is advisable to overlay it with a thick patina of mystification. For instance, by denying that this is what one is doing, and further invalidating any perception that it is being done, by ascriptions such as ‘How can you think such a thing?’ ‘You must be paranoid.’ And so on.”
That is a fine and useful passage.
When the invalidation, the impingement, and the guilt don’t suffice to shut Jill up, Jack can also call her a bigot, de-platform her, get her fired, have her book contracts voided, have her kicked out of public spaces like bars and Pride Marches, and punch her. Big Sister can do his damnedest to destroy her career. Big Sister can threaten rape and murder. Big Sister can threaten and commit other acts of violence, like nailing a dead rat to the door of a rape crisis shelter. In Canada, the United Kingdom, and some other places, he can sic the police on her and haul her into court. He can even murder her, her lesbian partner, and their son.
So, they sum up, we need to speak up and fight back. They’re not wrong.
I keep running across Trans Rights Advocates saying that the science is on their side. We’ve apparently learned things we never suspected back when we thought trans people were members of one sex who felt and behaved the way they thought the opposite sex feels and behaved. That was back when we believed in sex, and that human beings were a dimorphic species. Scientists threw that out a long time ago.
Yet all I can find on the “ this is science” assertion are 1.) Evidence for intersex; 2.) Evidence that male and female brains differ and this can track with behavior ( with overlap.); 3.) Evidence that some studies show that some parts of the brains of some trans people resemble the opposite sex more than their own, though most of these studies don’t seem to control for a resemblance to non-gender-conforming homosexuals. In other words, it boils down to claiming that modern science has clearly and unambiguously revealed that trans people are physically intersex — and there is no excuse for denying this once you learn about it.
They also cite numerous studies which show trans gender are happier as trans/ after transition, but I don’t think that addresses the claim that not believing trans women are, in fact, women, is pseudoscience.
Re the “science”
It bothers me, too, to see claims that the science is on the side of the trans activists, and that the people disagreeing are all “right wing” and “distorting science”. Such as this Friendly Atheist post from today:
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/10/06/right-wing-websites-are-distorting-scientific-data-to-attack-trans-people/
Surely it isn’t difficult to find indications that long-term effects of puberty blockers are not well understood, and that there are potential adverse effects. Surely it can’t be difficult to listen to the reports of desisters and detransitioners. Surely one can find sites rejecting trans ideology that are not Life Site News.
This sounds very emuch like the studies that show religious people are happier and live longer than those who are not religious. Howver true those findings may be, they do not count as arguments for the existence of gods.
Transgender are happier after transition? Maybe not.
An alarming number of the people state that they are also autistic, or had/have other issues such as eating disorders, but these were apparantly ignored by the supposed professionals who counselled them all the way to full transition.
https://news.sky.com/story/hundreds-of-young-trans-people-seeking-help-to-return-to-original-sex-11827740
It might depend on how “transition” is defined. I can imagine that people who have gone through rounds of mutilating surgery and debiltating chemical interventions in order to “transition” may have more cause for regret, and less they can do about that regret, than those for whom “transition” consists of little more than pulling on a dress, applying lipstick and vocal demands for the usage of their preferred pronouns.
#1 Sastra
You bring up their usual ‘science’ arguments, but I always find it remarkable how …vaporous they are.
1: Is not in dispute, and is also irrelevant.
2: The heavy overlap means this is a secondary characteristic, like height, rather than a primary characteristic like penis/vulva and hence not a sign that a person is “actually” the other sex.
3: Similar to 2 in that it identifies a characteristic with heavy overlap and not a primary characteristic; worse, the evidence thus far remains sparse.
Impressive.
Holms – I would add – the science on the brains shows that more women have a “man’s” brain than a “woman’s” brain. I doubt that all the women with men’s brains are trans, since it is more than half.
If so many women have “man” brains, that might go some way towards explaing the fact that so many men have none at all…
At least the new owners are likely putting them to better use than the original ones did.
I’m suspicious of all studies of “happiness,” not just ones in the trans context.
As far as I know, there’s no practical way to disentangle actual experienced happiness from the propensity to claim happiness. (One idea that occurred to me while writing this comment was to compare reported happiness to actual suicide rates — some preliminary Googling suggests that at least in the wealthier countries, there is a positive correlation, i.e. happier countries/regions have higher suicide rates.) I seem to recall reading that there’s been an effort to argue that “fulfillment” is a more important measure than happiness — though I’m suspicious of that impulse, too, as it seems to arise out of a reaction to the findings that parents are less happy than non-parents. (That can’t possibly be true, we’d better come up with another measure! That same impulse seems to be lacking when happiness surveys back up conventional morals — for example, I rarely see that caveat uttered when reporting results that show that happiness decreases among people who spend more time on social media, because as a culture we’ve decided that social media is Bad For Us.)
Anecdotally, it’s been my observation that many perky, every-day-is-a-blessing types turn out to be deeply unhappy in their lives, while others who come across more like Eeyore or Marvin (from Hitchhikers’) are actually fairly content.
The whole male brain vs female brain (as well as straight vs gay) makes me feel squicky. A lot of it is based in functional MRI which is notoriously overinterpreted, not to mention that whole kerfuffle a few years ago about errors in statistical methodology. And sample sizes tend to be very small because MRI is an expensive technique, adding further fuel to the fire that a lot of the scientific papers out there are flaky.
What differences do exist have to be considered in the context of the fact that life experiences *literally* shape our brains. There are not enough studies performed on non-whites even in developed countries with broadly similar expectations of each sex but race, class, and religious affiliation all intersect with those cultural expectations. There are no studies that I could find in populations where cultural expectations of each sex are very different from the Western view of the world.
So consider me skeptical of the whole male brain/female brain dichotomy. The science on which it rests is not sound.
Screechy, that’s so on the nose. I know my mother always reported herself as happy, but no one who knew her would call her that. She felt she was supposed to be happy as a wife and mother, and was worried people would use unhappiness among housewives to promote rights for women to be something else, so she would never admit to being unhappy. (And she had six kids, but was not fulfilled – that’s a loaded term, as well, and who says the people without kids are less “fulfilled”? Many people find fulfillment in being who they are, who they want to be, and working in a job where they feel like their skills are utilized).
On the other hand, my husband is definitely Eeyore, and I am Marvin, and while I wouldn’t call myself happy, I would say that on some measures, such as personal satisfaction, I am content (to use your word). And I feel content may be more important than happiness. We put too much stock in happiness.
Amen…if I may be allowed to say so.
Yeah, permanently happy is frankly downright suspicious.
I’m more or less content with my personal life. Maybe not what I expected or wanted, but it’s a good life with a fulfilling and interesting job working with nice people. From time to time I’m happy. That might happen more often if I ignored the world and lived in blissful ignorance, but then that’s why the world is going to hell. Precisely because so many people live in a state of bliss purchased by ignorance.