Guest post: Specifically because it is untrue
Originally a comment by Holms on Misinformation circulated.
…I was expected to agree that scientific facts such as sex are to be sidelined. This position has never been debated and agreed by Conference but appears to be an implicit consequence of the Party’s stance on trans rights.
An ‘implicit consequence’ is exactly right. Rejection of the very existence of sex is not a stance that any of them would have held ordinarily, it is a stance that they were forced to hold – or pretend to hold – as part of the support structure of beliefs build around TWAW/TMAM. This central belief is in need of such support specifically because it is untrue: when it clashes with some other aspect of reality, the believer is confronted with a choice between incompatible sets of information. TWAW is only true if sex is rejected, and so sex is rejected. The concomitant beleifs then creep outward, as more conflicts are encountered.
Some people overcome their better judgement for the first few of such rejections, but reach a point where they simply cannot reconcile what they are expected to support with other sense and information they have. At that point, for me at least and I suspect many others, there is a kind of a snap-back or rebound – the support structure of beliefs become too much, something gives way and the whole thing unravels rapidly. The person is back more or less where they were before the creeping acceptance of misinformation began, but with greater knowledge of what is going on. They have been peaked.
For others, it seems the acceptance of misinformation gets easier with practice.
Believing patent bullshit is part and parcel of establishing a group identity and has nothing to do with fact:
https://www.rawstory.com/a-terrifying-new-theory-fake-news-and-conspiracy-theories-as-an-evolutionary-strategy/
Raises hand.
I was willing to believe TWAW as long as the issue was allowing people to use the restroom of their choice, and with the understanding that there were still important sex differences that everyone accepted. I mean, of course everyone would accept that trans women shouldn’t expect lesbians to date them, and shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s sports.
Damn, was I wrong. What finally pushed me over the edge was seeing the horde gang up on a former member who was defending a reasonable sex-based definition of woman (Lady Mondegreen? Sastra?).
Well put. I’ve been trying to think of any other situation where sex is suddenly deemed too messy, too complicated, too subjective to be considered a reasonable category and can think of only one other example, and one analogy.
When the average person considers people with DSDs who are difficult to categorize as male or female, the usual tendency is throw out the idea of typing them by sex and rely instead on how they present or think of themselves. It’s where they ‘really’ belong. This is how many transgender people seem to see their own situation, as a trick of nature — and they expect others to behave accordingly. And yet those with DSDs don’t argue that sex is no longer a useful category for people without DSDs. Why would they? They’re admittedly in an unusual situation, and outside of the general rules.
If trans people were simply seeing a “mismatched gender identity” as a form of DSD, I would expect them to claim that they, too, are hard to classify using the usual standards of sex. They wouldn’t argue that sex itself isn’t a viable category anymore for anyone. And yet they do. Something else is going on.
Which brings in my other idea. The analogy which rejects the usefulness of sex as a category are situations where activities, programs, and institutions which used to be either divided by sex or single-sex are made open to everyone due to more enlightened attitudes about aptitudes. Medical schools used to reject women; boys couldn’t take Home Ec; men’s service organizations are now just service organizations, and so on. We’re used to nodding approvingly when classifying people by sex is discarded … because we’re simultaneously throwing out gender.
I wonder if somehow these two situations are being mashed together. “I have a Disorder in Sexual Development that is going to force society to confront and abandon sexism forever.”
I don’t know. Maybe? It doesn’t work, of course, because 1.) DSDs involve reproductive pathways, not something “wrong” with the brain and 2.) the analogy to breaking down sexist barriers is extremely superficial. When we stopped caring about the sex of people registering for Advanced Auto Mechanics, we didn’t actually reject sex as a viable biological category. What we did reject was categorizing people by gendered ideas of how men and women are psychologically different.
And that’s what the TRAs are trying to replace sex with.
Oh hello, nice to be here. An anecdote I snipped from that comment for the sake of brevity. I used to argue with christian apologists fairly often some years ago, and that was where I first noticed this tendency of having secondary beliefs as a consequence of not wanting to drop the primary belief.
A certain kind of christian will claim that God is benevolent and just, yet is also terrible in wrath, punishing anyone that does not come to salvation through belief for eternity. I would often probe this, pointing out the massive unfairness of punishing people that died too early in life to have heard of religion, or who lived and died in a remote and uncontacted tribe somewhere that has never heard of christianity. Surely they would agree that this is not compatible with their belief in divine justice?
Typically, they would respond by agreeing that that would be unjust and even cruel… and so must have contacted them or arranged for evidences to be presented to them in some indirect manner, thus giving all people a chance to convert. God must do something like this, because otherwise they would have to abandon the belief that God is just.
The debate would continue from there, with the apologist coming up with new support beliefs every time a logical hole is pointed out. They didn’t set out with these beliefs, but developed them in preference to abandoning the primary belief. They are boxed in by that refusal and so build a structure of supporting beliefs which serve to patch over the logical problems in the primary.
Yet another parallel between gender theory and religion.
So, so true.
I’ve pointed this out many times before, but the strength of this binding effect, being closely tied to cognitive dissonance, is proportional to the audacity of the propositions in question. The more extreme, bizarre, and incredible the claim, the greater the loyalty your affirmation signals and the more permanent the effect on your identity. This last is partly because such propositions do not cohere with our other beliefs, so their adoption requires either amendment of existing beliefs or ad hoc mind caulk to hold everything together. And again, more ludicrous claims are likely to contradict more existing beliefs, necessitating more significant epistemic alterations.