The hate crime is on the other foot
It seems that if a woman “identifies as” a gay man then that’s what she is. Simples.
Who is Chiyo? I had to look it up. The BBC last August:
Being judged on his masculinity is something Chiyo feels every time he steps outside the front door.
Chiyo is transgender and, in April next year, he’ll be standing on stage with a group of other men – who aren’t trans – to be judged in what is ultimately a male beauty contest.
He’s a finalist in the (coronavirus-delayed) Mr Gay England 2020.
In other words Chiyo is a woman, who next month will be standing on stage with a group of other actual men to be judged in a male beauty contest.
But no no how very dare we? Chiyo is “living his life as a gay man” therefore he is one. Only, how would anyone even know that? What does it mean? It’s not as if there’s an Inspectorate sending inspectors out to do surprise checks. Chiyo could be lounging around the house in girl-mode, as Eddie Izzard so obnoxiously calls it, and no one would be the wiser. “Living one’s life as” is just obfuscatory-speak for playing Let’s Pretend. It doesn’t transform you into what you’re pretending to be except in your own head, as an imaginative game or mind-expansion or whatever you want to call it. It’s fine to pretend; it’s not fine to force other people to say you are what you’re pretending to be, much less to punish them for refusing.
The gay man bullied by the Mr Gay England Twitt has deleted his account.
“Living a life as a gay man” means partaking in the notorious “gay lifestyle,” which, I have been reliably informed, consists of mowing the lawn, walking the dog, paying taxes, and just generally minding one’s own business while being gay.
I guess being a heterosexual woman was just too boring. Not enough cool points. Not enough snowflake points.
Apparently “living as a gay man” includes this:
Also, tellingly, this sad bit of backstory:
I guess it’s much more impressive and exciting to be a trans gay man than it is to be a boring old heterosexual woman. Even if nothing materially changes about your life, because you still date the same people, you still have periods, you’re ‘extremely femme’, you still talk about your ‘wet ass pussy’ (see Satra’s quote above). It’s all exactly the same, except you’re special now.
I watched a YouTube documentary recently, a deep-dive into the Flat Earth and QAnon mindset. One of the conclusions was that for ‘believers’ it’s more about loyalty and power than facts. To them, the strong-willed should be in control, and what better way to demonstrate strong will than to claim to believe something that is unbelievable. By asserting to believe such a thing, they’re asserting their power over those who are so weak as to be constrained by facts, and proving their loyalty to their side.
It struck me while watching, how similar trans activism is. Both the right wing and the left wing are competing over who can claim to believe the most unbelievable thing.
Very interesting point.
I would say the left have won that one. While it is highly improbable that there are pizza parlors operating pedophile rings under the supervision of Hillary Clinton, it is not impossible. In other words, it does not violate the laws of biology or physics, just…extremely improbable.
On the other hand, the idea that men can become women (or vice versa) is an enormous violation of biological reality. Pedophiles exist; pizza parlors exist; Hillary Clinton exists. They are real, even if they are not operating together. Sex-changing humans? That’s a delusion.
No, I disagree. The Right wins the Loony-Toon Award, hands down. The woke Left doesn’t think sex changes through a magical morphing. In fact, they don’t think sex changes at all. Their arguments are both more subtle and yes, plausible than conspiracy theories about networks of pedophiles. And let’s not forget Young Earth Creationism, God sending hurricanes as punishment for gay marriage, and Donald Trump caring about anyone other than himself.
Not even a contest.
Sastra, I would consider PZ and his adoring mob to be on the woke-side of the left, and they have a firm belief that people can and do change sex. PZ has said that people do it all the time.
Of course, that depends on who they’re talking at and the claims that they are responding to. If told that people cannot change their sex then they will insist that people absolutely can change sex, but on the other hand they will deny the existence of sex-changes (it’s just gender ‘realignment’ these days) when they want to put forward the pretence that a trans-x has always been x but was mis-assigned their gender at birth.
At least the Right’s lunatic fringe is generally consistent; the Left’s batshit craziness is all over the place, with several different and incompatible definitions all held to be simultaneously true.
AoS
I can’t (and really, really wouldn’t want to) speak for PZ, but what I think he meant by “people change sex all the time” is something like this:
Sex is a spectrum and it’s complicated, with various factors determining sex. These factors can vary, which changes the position of the factor-haver along the spectrum. Thus, if one of these factors – say, testosterone level – changes, then that person has changed sex.
I don’t think he means change from one binary to the other, because he (sometimes) purports not to believe in sex binaries in humans.
Please note: I’m not saying this position is either internally or externally consistent or even coherent. I’m just saying that I think it’s what PZ means when he talks about people changing sex.
Maybe hard science isn’t as cool as relativistic wokeness. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They may sound superficially plausible, but when you drill down (and you don’t have to drill down deep), it’s obvious that there is nothing remotely plausible about what they believe or are claiming to believe. Yes, the pedophile ring conspiracy theory is total out there nuttery; the fact that I think the left has won the nuttery Olympics is just my own opinion of how extremely nutty it is.
To believe what the right say, you would have to believe that some people are pedophiles, that it is plausible to run a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor – the first is not only plausible, it is something we accept; the second is possible, and maybe plausible, but highly improbable for any individual pizza parlor – and that Hillary Clinton is involved. This is again highly improbable, not particularly plausible, but…this is the crucial part…NOT IMPOSSIBLE.
As for the trans, we just accept: (1) Men can become women by saying they are women and/or (1a) Some men have always been women. (2) A penis can be a female penis. (3) Men are not stronger or more muscled than women. (4) Allowing men into women’s bathrooms will pose no threat to the women, because some sort of magic trans-dust, I guess. (5) Men can have babies. (6) Men can menstruate. (I realize in these last two cases, those are actually women, but…well, I rest my case. We are told they are men, full stop). (7) Women share no common experiences or common characteristics that define women. (8) Two different sexes is a western construct.
Sorry, while I think the right wing conspiracy theorists are totally out of their tree, I think the left woke brigade has totally left the forest. Pedophile pizza parlors run by Hillary Clinton do not require magical thinking of any sort, just irrational thinking by uninformed people. Trans ideology requires the abandonment of scientific reality and the embrace of some sort of fuzzy world of total self-centered narcissistic solipsism that you insist all others share.
Both, however, have equally bad consequences.
iknklast,
“Sex is a social construct.”
“Intersex people prove we’re not crazy.”
latsot, I’ve a feeling that whatever PZ does or doesn’t mean, the ambiguity he employs is a deliberate method of leaving himself a get-out, some sliver of plausible deniability for as and when the trans bubble bursts. It might just allow him to claim that his writing was clearly metaphorical; of course people don’t really change sex, ha-ha, it was a rhetorical device to make people think about the science. Pretty much the same thing as theologians explaining away the impossibilities contained in religious texts.
iknklast, Sastra: Another, more simple reason for handing the Loony-Tune Award to the Left is that the Right had a massive head-start but haven’t really tried to up their game*, while the Left has made massive strides in such a short period. Effort alone should count for a lot in considering the winner and the Right simply weren’t trying too hard, for them it was business as normal, new lunacy but no more lunatic than the old stuff..
* in a way, they actually got less loony for a while and the double-whammy of a black president followed by Trump merely stoked the madness back up to where it once was. They didn’t get better at being loony, they just recovered their old vigour.
And it appears if you are a woman with a penis you run into trouble with airport body scanners.
No sir, that is not a bomb down my trouser leg, just my girlie dick. Wanna suck it and see?
https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/health-safety/trans-woman-rose-montoya-shares-fury-over-airport-check-on-tiktok/news-story/040ed2c6321a016884e6ffb8020e9ec3
AoS@15:
Well, he has already done that with the horse sex thing. Or at least he has explained it away in at least two different ways which are mutually contradictory, even if you adjust your switch to its charitable setting (I’m not sure I even have a charitable setting any more).
But I no longer have any doubt that PZ is a True Believer in the nonsense he says about sex. Some of the time, at least. I think he believes the crazy stuff when he says it. At other times, when he’s not saying the crazy stuff or when he’s saying things that directly contradict the crazy stuff, who knows?
Roj,
Yeah, I’ve been informed before that airport scanners are transphobic as well as pointlessly invasive (they don’t stop people bringing guns and bombs on planes). No doubt, opting out of the scanner would also have been transphobic unless he could have forced a female security officer to fondle his groin.
If they’d simply believed that he didn’t identify as a terrorist, there’d have been no need to scan him?
What strikes me most about the kerfuffle is that ‘Mr Gay England’ has reported the person who tweeted to the police as perpetrating a ‘hate-crime’. Have the police nothing better to do, when they are not assaulting women in Battersea Park, than waste their time on this sort of thing?
I’m not sure how useful it is to frame this in terms of which side holds the craziest beliefs. For what it’s worth, I still think the greatest threat to liberal democracy is coming from the Right, and that the next election
wonstolen by Republicans is almost certainly going to be the last (somewhat) democratic election in American history. No need for any crazy conspiracy theories, only the unremarkable assumption that the Republican party will go on behaving pretty much the same way it has been behaving for the last decade or so. One of the great big ironies here is how many of the Trumpist’s weapons were handed to them on a silver plate by the postmodernist, deconstructionist crowd. Indeed one of the things Alan Sokal warned us about in “Beyond the Hoax” was that the Right would finally decide that “Two can play that game”, which is more or less exactly what has happened.Most of the “impossible” claims we are required to believe by the gender lobby are only impossible under the assumption that we all mean the same things by words like “man” and “woman”, and that we’re still all talking about the same things. Substitute “women” for “whatever trans-identified males happen to be” or “people who think and feel in whatever way trans-identified males happen to think and feel”, and most of their claims become, not only possible, but pretty much tautologically true, and of course, utterly meaningless (“Transwomen are women”=”Transwomen are whatever transwomen happen to be” etc.). As I keep repeating, the really disingenuous part is the part about deliberately conflating the two definitions (the “bad pun” part) and the part about having it both ways.
Now that this has happened to a man, we might see some actual outrage in the press.
(I know some men have already been reported to the UK police for supposed transphobia (I’ve been threatened with it a few times myself, although I don’t think it has happened) but this one is more public and visible than most and really throws the insanity into sharp relief. When Graham Linehan was reported to the police (and interviewed by them – see Tim Harris’ point at #20 about the police gleefully wasting their time) everyone just (wrongly) assumed that he was a big old terrible transphobe anyway and probably deserved it. The press backed that idea with some enthusiasm.)
Perhaps this incident will achieve some traction because it’s finally men who are being cheated out of something.
Bjarte,
I think you’re right, but I think it’s happening in both directions. The right has taken the postmodern chicanery from the left and used it to great effect, as you say. The left has taken from the right the attitude that openly lying about literally anything and everything to achieve a goal is not just acceptable, but virtuous. And it has really run with it. As I’ve said elsewhere, it’s running with scissors and will end in tears for everyone but in the meantime, the left is having a whale of a time with its new toy.
The left and right feeding from the worst parts of each other is an unwholesome image, but it’s how it looks to me.
It’s been said that the left has also taken on the authoritarian streak of the right, but I’d argue that it’s always been there under the surface, fighting to get out under the flimsiest pretext. There’s no denying that I’ve always been a big old lefty myself, but I’ve never been one for party politics. This is just as well because otherwise I’d now be feeling politically adrift as are so many. As it is, I’m mostly just bemused by it all, which isn’t much of a change from when the parties were acting more characteristically, to be honest.
And when you get to that Humpty Dumpty meaning of words, then the only conclusion is that a word has no actual meaning if it is so flexible that it covers every possible possibility in the world and doesn’t stand for anything.
As far as the left and right, I fear this transgender stuff is going to help the GOP obtain their permanent Republican power by pointing out the lunacy of the far left, with which the sane left is going to be brushed as well. And the sane left could depart in disgust to a third party, leaving the weakened Democratic Party to flounder, try to tread water, and sink.
I’m just going to drop this here again, where it clearly belongs:
https://4w.pub/fantasy-worlds-on-the-political-right-and-left-qanon-and-trans-sex-beliefs-2/
I’d say that all of these good points are intertwined, describing a phenomenon that is a self-generating, self-reinforcing, self-justifying web of amorphous beliefs and ever-shifting attitudes. From an external perspective, what they do looks like lying, or like language games, or like the destruction of meaning. From the internal perspective, it’s perceived as discovery of a new kind of truth, liberation of language, and dismantling of oppressive definitions. They don’t perceive themselves to be lying or playing dishonest games with language, because lying requires definitions be stable. That which is external to the belief system is intrinsically immoral, and since the belief system is built on the embrace of unstable definitions, ipso facto any sort of stable definition is external and immoral, an artifact of an oppressive dominance hierarchy imposed by those who are perforce evil.
I’ll repost a bit I wrote in the Room:
You’ll note that “sex” isn’t a player in the narrative, because male and female now refer to gender. This reduces sex to reproductive ability only — that is, when it’s not being equated with gender.
I think Nullius has it right. From inside this wise, informed, nuanced system of science and reason, it’s perfectly coherent. It’s also the Truth. Those who aren’t willing to accept it are morally suspect, because we’re clearly dealing not only with vulnerable people in need of help, but with the only legitimate way to break the stereotypes associated with gender, leaving gender simple and content free. These are therefore premises from which all else is derived.
It reminds me a bit of of presuppositionalism.
Thought I’d bring this here, as I suspect it’s relevant.
https://mobile.twitter.com/janeclarejones/status/1374623801573531651