The view from the outside
Lisa Nandy is really digging in on this “self-identification is a right” nonsense.
Sure, people have a right to say “I know better than a psychiatric assessment who I am.” What they don’t have is a right to impose that claim on anyone else, a right to live according to that claimed knowledge in all circumstances without question, a right to lie on official documents, and so on. An absolute right to self-identify, with no stipulations or limitations of any kind, does not exist. Nobody has a right to self-identify as Lisa Nandy MP for example, because Lisa Nandy MP is one specific person who has the documentation (and public profile) to back up her identification.
It’s so Ayn Randy, so libertarian, so trumpian, this insistence that The Sacred Individual has an absolute right to self-identify while all the people who have to deal with The Sacred Individual have no rights. Labour MPs should know better.
And by the way people don’t always know better who they are than others who can see them from the outside. Look (again) at Trump, for example. Look at him. He has no clue.
This is really sloppy. It’s also foolish. I daresay many psychiatric patients reject their diagnosis. “I’m not an addict — I can quit anytime.” “There’s nothing wrong with me, it’s my wife … and my coworkers, friends, family, and random people in the street.” “I’m not a hoarder, those boxes of magazines, barrels of string, and piles of perfectly useable dead animal carcasses show I’m just frugal.” Self – diagnosis is really, really fraught with peril. That Ghost Whisperer could be psychotic.
We may NOT know better than psychiatrists. We may not even be particularly good at knowing “who we are.” There might be a legal right to say otherwise, but I don’t think there’s an epistemic right. And that’s particularly true when people with comorbid conditions insist all their problems come down to being trapped in the wrong, disgusting, hated body, and they’ll be happily resolved by becoming a permanent medical patient.
@1 your comment reminds me of a story someone I knew used to tell about teaching science and engineering students about literature. She’d draw a dot on the board, and ask them to tell her something about it. Then she’d draw and label x and y axes, then ask them again about the dot–it was now possible to say something meaningful about it because it could now be described within an objective framework. Her point was that literature provides examples of lives, ideas, behaviour, meaning, against which we can measure our own; my point in repeating the story is that it’s pretty much impossible for us to ‘measure’ our own behaviours, beliefs, internal conversations, etc. without some understanding of ‘is this normal?’ ‘where do I fall in the range of human behaviour in my culture?’ Oftentimes questions like these are best answered by professionals.
It’s really amazing how many of these people are sex offenders… Could there, just maybe, be a connection between sex confusion and sexual violence?
If it’s not a matter of anatomy, and it’s not matter of fitting or not fitting with your culture’s expectations and requirements for boys/men and girls/women, and it’s not a matter of how you’re seen and treated by others, how could you know what it “feels like” to be the other sex? Does it actually “feel like” something? You have access only to your own feelings, so how could you ever know whether yours match someone else’s? And how could you know whether that match (if it’s there) was a result of your being the same sex and/or gender?
I realize this sounds like the cliché “Whoa… What if, like, my blue isn’t the same as your blue?” insight. But isn’t that what this comes down to? “So-and-so just always knew they were really a girl.” What can that even mean? What did So-and-so know when they “knew” that?
The insight may be a cliché but it’s all too easy to forget about it so frequent reminders are necessary. That’s one reason I keep mentioning Theory of Mind.
@4 here’s a great story about that:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/22895
To be fair to Rand, her statement of the primacy of existence rules out self-id.
Leaving aside the wrongs and wrongers of the actual pledge, I’m struggling to see why Nandy is doing this. OK it will gain the support of Trans activists and fellow travelers – which is going to be hundreds, maybe thousands of votes – but at the expense of … well just about everybody else’s support really
I’m figuring it’s one of:
1) She believes in this and is acting on principle. You’d have to admire this in a way but after the Brexit fiasco I’ve come to think that cynical, pragmatic politics isn’t all that bad after all.
2) She doesn’t get out much and is assuming that as this goes down well with the lobby groups she is familiar with, it will go down equally well with members in general – having met precisely none of the latter.
3) She knows she’s going to lose and is trying to build a base so the new leader can’t sack her.
4) Desperation – since to most people the leadership contest is between Starmer, Long Bailey and thingy.
Probably, Nandy has only been exposed to stories about trans women being raped and abused in men’s prisons. Such stories are out there, and almost certainly true. I doubt she’d ever heard of Karen White etc. before she locked herself into this position.
Self identification SOUNDS like the perfect answer. You don’t have to commit to some professional ‘evaluator’ to judge the validity of anybody’s ‘transness.’ But we know that that isn’t enough. No matter how small the percentage of misogynist autogynephiles is among trans women, its too large to be ignored.
Just like Trump is making the status quo look not so bad here in the states.
I’ll accept that as a possibility, but the stores of women being raped in women’s prisons are myriad, and I don’t remember so much shouting and outrage about it, even though there were several orders of magnitude more women involved.
Listen to who shouts the loudest. They must have the most backing. Never mind that all they have is the biggest megaphone, coupled with physical advantages that allow them to intimidate their opponents.
Really? All of them?
That’s a very large claim; a good deal too large, I think. There’s a hell of a lot of handwavey generalization about this subject and we need to be careful not to echo it, much less say it’s almost certainly true. There are stories about trans women being raped and abused in men’s prisons, but there are also wild generalizations about trans women being raped and abused in men’s prisons. The latter are not almost certainly true.
And here we have another male sex-offender, quite unrepentant, who now claims to be a woman.
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/119758881/jailed-doctor-david-lim–who-now-identifies-as-a-female–has-been-denied-parole
For better or worse this one will become Malaysia’s responsibility to deal with.