Guest post: A social justice version of pareidolia
Originally a comment by Sastra on It’s a war on multiple fronts.
The identity theft of an entire sex (both of them) could never have been pulled off without guilt: guilt over the way we for so long refused to accept homosexuality as a perfectly normal and natural orientation; guilt over the way we for so long put women and men into restrictive “boxes” of attitude and behavior; and guilt over the way we for so long allowed children to be mercilessly bullied on the supposition that it made them “toughen up.” By “we,” I mean modern Western society. We ought to have known better. We should have been heroes.
And so we — some of us, that is — overcorrect by experiencing a social justice version of pareidolia, seeing Faces in the Clouds of fuzzy concepts running up against an incoherent concept propelled by soppy thinking. Trans people “know who they are” in a secret inside way. Don’t they look like gay people? Trans identities defy traditional ideas of men and women. Doesn’t this appear to be sexual nonconformity? Trans folks are fearfully dependent on being accepted by their peers. Isn’t this resembling fragile youngsters trying to navigate a schoolyard filled with popular kids gatekeeping who’s in and mean kids intimidating who they can? Look at the shapes. No way that’s a coincidence.
And, for the rainbow coming out of the clouds, we have the same group responsible for our wicked past re gay people, sexist roles, and bullying now coming out against trans identities: the conservative religious right. It’s like the voice of God telling us “Yes, that’s totally a face in the clouds.” Hero time. This is how we’re going to get it right.
Pareiodolia is an evolved instinct. I think it’s not really a mystery why people see a resemblance between solid social justice issues and the nebulous, undefinable, innate sense of transgender self billowing itself around their shapes. The interesting thing is how we are able to second guess ourselves, look closer, and accurately see nothing.
I get the superficial resemblance part, but I also think the superficiality of the resemblance is pretty hard to miss.
(Did you mean soppy thinking, or is it a typo for sloppy? I was going to fix it but soppy fits too.)
There’s also the complicating factor of the basic reality denial introduced by “queer theory” and “gender studies.” Faced with the facts that mammals only have two sexes, and that humans can’t change sex, a large dose of creative fiction is needed to get the whole trans project over the hump of its material impossibility. While institutions that “got it wrong” in the past with regard to homosexuality, sexism, and bullying are being extra careful and sensitive to handle gender issues with kid gloves, genderist academia is burning down the house with the effective reintroduction of mind-body dualism, and the corrosive eagerness to “transgress” boundaries, borders and definitions that would normally be used to describe the material nuts and bolts of the human sexes. If definitions and boundaries are created and imposed by hegemonic power through the promulgation of approved, orthodox discourses under their control, rather than neutrally discovered through impartial observation, then any effort to defend and uphold rights based on those definitions and boundaries is by definition illegitimate, oppressive, and targeted for destruction. It’s funny how the old standards of material reality are ripe for overthrow because they were arbitrarily imposed by those in power, but the new standards of “identity” are somehow immune from the same scrutiny and questioning. The power genderists now claim for themselves is true, and right, and just, though they would be the first to deny the truth, rightness or justice of the “imposed” standards of reality they’ve been so vocally dismantling. Somehow, magically, their discourse is correct, even though they’ve taken great pains to destroy any notion of truth by which that “correctness” could be determined. Turns out “NO DEBATE!” cuts both ways. Who knew? They desperately desire to stand atop the very same pinnacle of power they’ve fought so hard to tear down. They can’t see themselves as just another interested power bloc exercising its perogative to shape reality according to its own dictates. Meet the new boss….
Transwomen who are homosexual men who wished they were actually female (so that men would desire them the same way) were part of the gay community. Nobody was asking too many questions because who would have thought that it would lead to heterosexual male fetishists calling lesbianism “sexual apartheid” and male rapists getting to be incarcerated with female prisoners.
@ Ophelia;
The superficiality of the resemblance between trans identities and homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and bullied children is hard to notice if your entire peer group is endorsing it. It’s also the framework TRAs relentlessly promote. One of the easiest heuristics for understanding new ideas is by way of analogy. Once we feel we discovered a key resemblance uniting the new with the old, it’s usually hard to backtrack from that ah-ha moment and uncouple them..
Maybe being GC is like being an atheist. There are those few who couldn’t see the point of or reason behind the God concept even as very young children. There are the many who took the simplistic dualism and rampant social projection of their childhood, applied it to their culturally approved God narrative, and became believers. And there’s the group that accepted what seemed obvious — and thought their way out. This usually takes longer than the ah-ha moment because we’ve consciously or unconsciously built up a series of objections which haven’t “yet” been explained.
(I made a typo for “sloppy.” I also notice multiple grammar mistakes and awkwardnesses, but that’s par for my course.)
@YNNB;
If human life invariably involves power struggles that can only be resolved by force, then we all have skulls on our helmets. I am sporting a powerful symbol of human persistence in the face of death; you are wearing something gruesome to get an effect; they are Nazis.
Somewhat apropos of this, John Oliver had a segment last night on “LGBTQ” rights. He started with a cringe-inducing introduction to a Mike Wallace report on “The Homosexuals” from the ’60s, and then transitioned right into trans rights. I turned it off at that point.
YNnB, I suspect part of it also has to do with the transgressing boundaries thing. One, it shows we are not just boring old establishment thinkers, we think for ourselves. I suspect this is paramount for a lot of the younger people who drank the Kool-Aid. The other part is more malignant; there have always been men eager to transgress women’s boundaries. I suspect there always will be.
WaM, the last John Oliver I managed to watch was the one about sex work. “Imagine having sex… And getting paid for it!” Most of the “sex workers” they spoke to were men in dresses, too.