Guest post: The long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity
Originally a comment by Timothy Harris on Call me them.
I feel as though the act of misgendering erases the person I have worked so long and hard to become.
How can you ‘become’ in this way? I am a bit long in the tooth now, but even in my mis-spent youth I should not have been able even to begin to think in these terms. All human beings are astonishingly complex, nobody really knows who, intrinsically, they are because your self is not something that exists in some pristine and well-locked little box inside you, and that might be changed by some effort of the will (who changes who?), but is in a state of constant flux & creation through your relationships with others, with society, and with the wider world, with things that are beyond your control.
I find in this sort of statement the long and unacknowledged reach of Christianity, with its insistence on willed belief, and the whole Western insistence on achieving things through force of ‘will’, a mostly meaningless concept whose existence and nature are assumed and never examined. What these people work ‘so hard and long to become’ is in fact a caricature, not a person.
Well, it’s very kind of you to put this up Ophelia. Thank you.
In connexion with this mysterious ‘person’ who sits inside you and may be changed by force of will, there’s an interesting video in today’s Guardian about the connexion between concussion and what is called ‘sub-concussion’ and early-onset dementia in rugby players first of all, with reference also to the incidence of this kind of dementia among soccer-players (repeatedly heading the ball causes it) and, of course, among players of American football. Boxing is not mentioned, but I recall poor Muhammed Ali.
The video has of course a relevance to the cries that trans-women should be able to play in women’s rugby teams, but I do not wish to address that.
Dementia brings about the loss of the ‘person’ in all its complexity and its ties to the world. I witnessed this in the case of my wife’s mother, who died in a nursing home on the day before her 107th birthday, having been years and years in care and for many years wholly unresponsive. The strain on the family (that is to say, my wife in particular, since her father, who was ten or so years younger than her mother, had died some years before his wife, and she was the only child) was immense. I remember one day when we were at the home, a family came in to see their old husband and father, who was in the same ward as my wife’s mother, and the wife tried to speak to him and became distraught when he no longer recognised her. I had to leave the ward, the scene was so unbearable.
There is a wonderful book about dementia that should be read by those who espouse so readily superficial ideas about what a ‘person’ is: ‘The Old King in his Exile’, by Arno Geiger, in which his father’s descent into dementia is described.
Timothy, my step-mother has Alzheimer’s, and sometimes doesn’t recognize my father. Now I learned she has COVID, and we’re waiting to hear on my father’s test.
On the other note, of the person inside you. One of the things that strikes me is saying “the person I worked so hard to become”. I thought you were that person, that gender, that sex, innate and immutable. If you really are a woman, why must you work so hard to become a woman?
Very well put, Timothy.
Thank you, inklast. I’m very sorry to hear about your step-mother.
Yes, the person ‘inside’ you. But of course there is no ‘person’ inside you that is somehow separate from you, a ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ in a machine, in the Cartesian manner (which again is of thoroughly Christian provenance – give me Montaigne and his scepticism – or Hume – any day over Descartes and his thirst for certainty). You are a person, inseparable, all in all, and in touch with all the winds of the world. You cannot be not what you are, and you would be better off examining as much as you can what you are than trying to force yourself into some fond image of what you would like yourself to be.
That quote is as usual hyperbole so strained that it crosses over to become a lie. No, a person’s existence is not erased when misgendered. That’s not how existence works. A person can live in the wilderness alone, with not a single person on the planet aware of their existence, yet they will still exist. A person’s existence can literally be denied, and they will still exist. Example: hey, Ophelia Benson… you don’t exist!
(She still exists)
TRAs and enbies know this just as well as any other. What they are trying to convey, albeit in a covert way, is not that their person is taking injury when ‘misgendered’ or ‘deadnamed’. Rather, it is their persona, their fiction character, their ‘what if I had been born a girl’ version of themselves, their fantasy, their willing self-deception that takes damage. Every intrusion of the real world – “Sorry, you have to compete in the men’s division”, “surgery doesn’t make you a woman”, and of course the blunt “real women have a fanny” – these are corrosive to the fanfic version of reality they have written for themselves.
Hence the need to be surrounded by only those that constantly reinforce the character, and the need for the banishment – ultimately, the annihilation – of gender critical feminism.
And, iknklast, I’m also very sorry to hear about the COVID. I hope that all goes well.
Yes, the trans position rests on something very like the Christian notion of an immaterial soul. At the very least, it trades in mind-body dualism, perhaps even a sort of homunculus sitting in a Cartesian theater.
Yet more support for the thesis that trans ideology is hopelessly regressive.
Great book addressing, among other things, the historically contingent idea that we all have an ‘inner self’ that we can choose to reveal to others.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30231789-the-fall-of-public-man
In college a friend of mine told me she wanted to go to India to find herself. I said “You were born in Vermont. What would your self be doing in India?” I understand the idea of wanting to learn more about oneself. Know thyself, the unexamined life, etc. But when the self becomes a noun by itself, is somehow separable from everything else in a person, nonsense must inevitably follow.
It’s not erasure the radtrans are talking about. Erasure takes work. Take an eraser to a page full of writing? Work. Things that disappear in an instant upon challenge aren’t like writing on a page, they’re like soap bubbles or balloons, flimsy things full of hot air. If something as simple as someone using the correct pronoun for a person’s biology makes their imagined self disappear in an instant, it’s because that imagined self is just a bubble of fantasy.
The rest of us are under no obligation not to pop others’ fantasy bubbles.
Thank you, Timothy Harris, for an excellent analysis. And thank you, Papito, too – for a wonderfully evocative comment.
Papito, that is a really good point. We can compare their idea of ‘erasure’ to the genuine attempts at ‘erasure’ of cultures or ethnicities, serious, intense and sustained efforts by state actors, which I’m sure we don’t need reminders of.
The idea of an immaterial soul is hardly unique to Christianity. It exists in many forms of religious and philosophical belief, going back at least as far as ancient Greece and possibly into the animism of pre-agricultural societies. That doesn’t mean it’s correct (our natural intuition can often be misleading) but it does mean that such a belief can’t really be blamed on a single 2000-year-old monotheistic religion.
I feel I should like to say one thing. I have known two trans-women. Both were charming people. One was a student of mine, a fairly gifted musician, at the university in Japan where I taught. Before that academic year began, a senior colleague came up to me and said that I should be having a trans-gender person in my first-year class, and would I please not be worried, the student came from Okinawa, where they were more nonbiri (relaxed) about this sort of thing. I said it would not worry me at all. At the first lesson, I read the register giving the name of the person + kun (e.g ‘Takahashi-kun’) for those with male names and the name of the person + san (‘Takahashi-san’) for the female names, as is customary. I hadn’t remembered the name of the trans-gender person, and read it out with the ‘-kun’ ending, and a tenor voice said ‘Here’ in the front row, and I looked up to see the face and discovered an obviously sexually male person in women’s clothes seated in the front row among some female students with whom she had already become friends. Thereafter I called her ‘Whoever-san’ when I read the register. She was a delightful person, and got on with her friends, who seemed to be all female (I don’t know how she got on with boys – so far as I know, there was no bullying or unpleasantness) and there seemed to be no great problems. She seems to have enjoyed her time at the university.
In East and South-east Asia, there seems to have been (until the advent of Western missionaries) no great problem with people whose sexuality or gender was ambiguous. They were regarded as anomalous, of course, but so far as I know, there was none of the Christian hatred of such people so common in the West, and no doubt the lives of such people were not so easy as they would be for others. In the Edo period, the great Ihara Saikaku wrote his ‘The Great Mirror of Male Love’, which was about homosexuality. Life is regarded as somewhat more ambiguous than it is in the West.
I feel great sympathy for people who genuinely suffer from what is called ‘gender dysphoria’, but have small time for the black and white distinctions that so many (mostly male) spokespeople for the trans cause indulge in. This is not an easy problem, and they are not helping.
#12.
I am not complaining about the idea of an immaterial soul or blaming such an idea all on one religion (though living in a non-Christian and polytheistic society does make you aware that the idea of what such souls are differ from the Christian idea, particularly as mediated through Cartesianism). What I am pointing out is that much of the trans defence in the West depends on the idea of there being some essential or true self that exists somehow independently from the body, though it is at the same time within the body, and this seems to me to be derived from Christianity and the influence of Descartes. In addition, very few religions depend, as Christianity does, on willed belief in this, that and the other (which accounts for much Western misunderstanding of other religions – Westerners tend to assume that all religions involve the kind of clear ‘belief’ that Christianity does – they don’t: nobody recites something like the Apostles’ Creed in Japan, unless they are Christian.) This focus on the will is why Christianity has historically been and still now is so worried about atheism. It also influences strongly how people think about certain things.
It’s also a big part of why Christianity is so irritating.
Tim, isn’t Islam very keen on willed belief in the same sort of way? Isn’t the Shahada a classic of willed belief?
Another thing about the focus on the self – the more you focus on your “self” the less interesting you are to anyone else. If you’re a literal hermit in the wilderness that doesn’t matter, but for everyone else, it’s somewhat relevant. It’s a big world, there’s a lot in it, there’s plenty to think about and learn more about other than one’s own self – and, bonus, the more you think about all that the less boring you’re likely to be. Example: Trump.
Yes, I think Islam depends very much on willed belief – though I am no scholar or specialist.
I very much agree that that a myopic focus on your self is likely to make you thoroughly boring to everyone else.
After 11 here – I must get to bed!
Personally, I can’t see what is so hard about saying ‘my new pronouns are…’ but that’s just me.
As for your self-entitled whine, what about the effect you have had on other people? What about the person you have erased? The person your parents presumably worked so long and hard to raise, to nurture, to teach? That person is now gone, never to be mentioned again – at least not in your presence. You have eradicated that person, yet nobody is allowed to mourn their loss because it might ‘hurt’ you to know they use your ‘deadname’, even when you’re not around. You have in all likelihood caused your family untold misery and are forcing everybody around you to tread on eggshells lest they accidentally mis-gender you (tricky, since you claim either no gender or both) but I’m sure none of that matters to you as long as you’re happy – for the time being, at least. Once everybody is automatically dancing to your tune, however, and your feelings are no longer the centre of attention, what’s your next ruse going to be to ensure that you are the focus of all?
All excellent points. But it’s also possible that the roots of the modern idea of “working long and hard to become a person who is erased by nonbelief” is found not in ancient religion, but modern technology: gaming. I’ve read several accounts written by people who once thought they were transgender because they came to identify with an avatar of the opposite sex.
A young man might spend months or even years playing a girl elf in a fantasy game. Everyone treats them and reacts to them as if they were that girl. They come to think of themselves as a girl when they play. And, if they play regularly enough, and with enough involvement, the online world of fantasy begins to feel like the “real” world — and that elf is their “authentic” self. They have worked long and hard to achieve that.
And when they get off the computer it’s all invalidated.
Ah yes, good point. Even just using a nym can tweak your sense of self.
People become accustomed to occupying their personae, whether digital or analog. Actors lose track of the line between themselves and their characters. Musicians try to hold onto the person they are on stage. Politicians become corrupt one inning of playing ball at a time. Self-image is a thing that is practiced. When we practice masks more than what lies behind, a sort of dislocation occurs where the authentic feels less familiar than the performance. Those who go through therapy (CBT or otherwise) for anxiety disorders often must overcome this unfamiliarity with their own internal world; i.e., emotions, thoughts, and beliefs.
What’s the missing word in “where the feels less familiar”? Usually I can guess and add it without asking, but not this one.
Nullius, that’s an interesting insight. I’ve been talking with my therapist a lot about how I don’t feel like I inhabit my own life. That’s probably exactly what that means.
Ophelia: Damn phone. As much as the word bothers me, due to how it’s abused, I meant to say “the authentic feels less familiar”.
iknklast: I dealt with something similar in my SAD therapy. It is apparently not an uncommon defense for people to essentially amputate large portions of their mental and emotional life, especially for targets of abuse. I had to learn how to interact with people without detaching myself, for instance.
An insightful video that touches on the subject, with an especially good example at 28:12: https://youtu.be/u91ctugBCsg
Also interesting on the question of personae is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
A little postscript: I recall reading, many years ago, in, I think Nigel Barley’s ‘The Innocent Anthropologist’ (a very good book, by the way) the story of some eager young anthropologist taking down the creation myths of some South American tribe from some elder. At some point in the session, the elder, who had doubtless had to do this umpteen times before with other anthropologists, turned wearily to the tireless student of mankind and said, ‘I suppose you think we believe in all this.’
Regarding Nullius’s point about actors, in my experience it is only bad actors who lose track of the line between their roles and their selves. There’s an interesting brief snippet of Olivier on the Dick Cavett show (Youtube) talking about Marlon Brando, whom he admired, and other matters, during which he remarks on the importance of technique if you wish to be a good actor.
Also, I liked Sastra’s point about video games, since it shows how much more fluid our selves are than we should generally like to suppose they are. But people want something that is fixed – hence, the flood of pedantic classifications.