Guest post: Zyklon B doesn’t give a crap about your pronouns
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on What genocide is and is not.
Hitler didn’t wipe out 6 million Jews by calling them something else, he wiped them out by murdering them.
Exactly, it’s roughly analogous to arguing that:
Denying the existence of God
≈ denying that there’s such a thing as “God’s chosen people”
≈ denying the existence of that which the Jews are
≈ denying the existence of Jews
≈ envisioning a world in which Jews don’t exist
≈ advocating genocide.
Therefore atheism is just the Holocaust
I have never heard a single Jew make such an argument. If your kind has been murdered by the millions, you don’t have to resort to this kind of language-games and stretching of word meanings beyond the breaking point to explain what the problem is. Zyklon B doesn’t give a crap about your pronouns or how you “identify”. As I have written many times, my peak trans moment came from seeing this kind of genocidal attitudes attributed to gender critical feminists while knowing what the latter had actually said. That’s when I thought “I get it now. When TRAs are talking about feminists promoting ‘hatred’, denying the ‘rights’ of, or even advocating ‘violence’ against trans people, this is what they’re talking about: Women saying that biological sex is real, that biological females are an identifiable group with its own specific issues that are not entirely reducible to those faced by biological males who prefer feminine pronouns, and that we have to be able to address them as such.” That’s when I realized that this was a pseudo social rights movement.
I have, however, seen believers interpret the atheist’s desire to “eliminate religion” as wanting to force it underground. The Janice Raymond phrase about “morally mandating” transgenderism out of existence is interpreted the same way — “through limiting education around trans people (advocating a return to section 28 in the UK) and through limiting medical access.” Which is nonsense. Raymond was simply pointing out that, in a society without sexist gender roles, nobody would feel they were born the wrong sex. That’s her goal. And of course atheists want people to be able to use the tools of reason to draw a different conclusion. Neither position involves suppressing a group through force.
Yet within both theism and transgenderism lies an assumption:” God/Gender Identity is True, intractable, and the critics know it. Therefore, they must be attacking the people, not the ideas.” That they’re taking their paranoia to the extreme and envisioning genocide is a reflection of how they can’t envision the possibility of being wrong. Arrogance, in other words, hiding under the claim of persecution.