Guest post: In the finest DARVO tradition
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Donors are disgusted.
but the new bit is thinking feminism and anti-racism didn’t work that way, why is that? Well why is that? Because fragile is the last thing we want to be or appear to be or claim to be. It’s degrading. It pulls against equality and ordinary inclusion in public life. So…why is it so appealing to “the trans community”? Why do we hear so very very much about it?
I think part of it that campaigns against sexism and racism were eager to argue their position, to have the opportunity to present the facts of the matter to the court of public opinion, to win hearts and minds in order to win the rights that women and African Americans had been denied. Both movements were struggles for justice. Trans activism wants to skip the whole making their case bit and move right on to getting what they want. They want what they want handed to them without discussion or debate because their demands, and the justification for them, would not survive the encounter with reality. That’s why we are never told what trans “rights” are; what is it that they are being denied? What is the injustice they are fighting? A good argument might win them more support, but they don’t have any good arguments; their demands are not for rights but for privileges. They’re not being exploited or abused. In Western society, they have the same basic rights as everyone else. And that’s a problem. What they want is more. They want more cookies and ice cream and television. Quick, give them what they want before they faint dead away or kill themselves!.
These days, EVERYONE is fragile. I am urged to say and do nothing in my classes that might offend or hurt any group of people, including trans, LGB, veterans, youth, climate change deniers, farmers…the list goes on and on.
Strange, given that “trigger warnings” were originally intended as WARNINGS about WHAT IS GOING TO BE TALKED ABOUT, and that prospective audience members should join in or stay away as they deemed appropriate for themselves. Like warnings about physical effects like smoke, strobe lights, gunshots etc. posted at theatres as a courtesy to those who might be adversely affected. These were warnings to NOT COME IN if you were prone to such negative reactions. Other warnings covering coarse language, nudity were, similarly, warnings to STAY AWAY if you were at risk of having your sensibilities offended. Now the warnings are going in the other direction, speakers themselves are to STAY AWAY from “offensive” material, at the risk of being shut down, fired, whatever.
Playing the easily triggered snowflake is a way of objecting to the presentation of information you object to without having to show why it’s wrong. Being told you are “hurtful” by someone is harder to argue against than being told you are “factually incorrect.” How can you argue against someone’s feelings?. You can’t. And that’s the point. Being accused of hatefulness puts you on the defensive. Claiming hurt is less work than having to argue your points, especially when you have no argument. Used in this way, it’s the rhetorical equivalent of stamping your foot, or holding your breath until you turn blue. Apparently too many adults are flummoxed when confronted with another adult engaging in this behaviour. They’re all too ready to hand over the cookies, ice cream and TV, along with the rights to safety and dignity of half the human population: women. Mustn’t argue; mustn’t offend.
The general idea seems to be that “hurt feelings”, “offense” etc. become especially worthy of sympathy and respect when coming from people who otherwise threaten to make your life Hell at best, and end it at worst.
Indeed. And feigning weakness and claiming to be the aggrieved party is good camouflage for the underlying threat if demands are not met. It also helps hide the fact that these demands are themselves offensive, intrusive, and illiberal. In the finest DARVO tradition, attacks (verbal or otherwise) on opponents can be presented as “self-defence.” The whole “marginalized community” bit lets those claiming “marginalization” to get away with a lot. It appeals to, and exploits, traditions of not exploiting the weak and vulnerable, of fairness, “sportsmanship”, and not “kicking a man while he’s down.” To oppose or question anything they want is deemed churlish and mean-spirited, when their own actions are churlish and mean-spirited to start with. Here we have a group that is exploiting the idea of weakness and vulnerability itself. Not a bad bit of jujutsu for a group consisting largely of straight, white males, one of the least weak and vulnerable “communities” on Earth.
That definitely hits the nail on the head. Take the anti-racism bit; the black camapign agaist segregation shows the future direction clearly for the trans-rights campaign. It comes down to desegregation of dunnies, toilets, washrooms, ‘womens’ faciliteies’ or whatever. That and the right of a minority of XY humans (ie people born with male genitalia) to be treated as what they are not (ie people born with female genitalia.)
It’s all about rights. And no bullshit please about responsibilities, or respect for competing rights. It’s all about THEIR rights.
It’s all about THEM.
The idea seems to be:
1.) Women know they’re women
2.) They are accepted and treated as women by others.
A.) Transwomen also know they’re women
BUT
B) They are NOT accepted and treated as women by others.
This is GROSSLY UNFAIR. Being accepted as who/what you really are is a right so basic and fundamental it’s like the air we breathe — taken for granted. We only realize how important a right it is when we don’t have it. Trans ppl are therefore the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.
Invisible rights. There’s also an awful lot of invisible work going on in that “knowing you’re a woman” part.
SO MUCH invisible work. Being a woman isn’t in fact a matter of knowing, end of story. It’s an objective fact, with a whole lot of science to explain it and back it up. Women “know” they’re women for a billion reasons; men, not so much. Men who don’t claim to be trans know they’re men for the same kind of billions of reasons women know they’re women. It’s not some sacred internal conviction, it’s reality.
And that whole being accepted as who/what you really are thing when the “what you really are” is in fact what you really are not is beneath contempt. It’s embarrassing seeing grown-ass adults pretending to believe it.
But what is “know” supposed to mean in this context? This “knowledge” sounds like one of those Facebook clickbait “tests,” where you’re scrolling through some sort of internal checklist of likes, dislikes, and feelings, ticking off boxes. Like pink? Check. Like make-up and high heels? Check. Then you tot up your score and see where your number places you in the range of prepackaged answers. Get the right score and you “discover” you’re a “woman.” So one’s “womaniness” is contingent upon being aware of, accepting, and acknowledging this “result” from this pop-psyche internal census? Except that any such “multiple choice quiz” is predicated on the feelings and preferences being stereotypically indicative of being a woman. This “method” could allow some men to have a higher “woman score” than some women. Some TiMs claim to be better at being women than women. This is only possible if “being a woman” is uncoupled from a specific, material state of being, which one either is, or is not.
Step back a bit, and you see how this concept falls apart. Does anyone “know” they are a human or a mammal in this way that is being posited for “knowing” that one is a woman? I don’t think so. One just is a human. Humans are mammals. There’s no choice in the matter, and wishing otherwise makes no difference. One can’t be born into the wrong species or the wrong phylum (pace, Furries). Nor can one be born into the wrong sexed body. One is simply born, and you can’t do much about the material terms of one’s biological constitution. Even so, one’s sex should not be a pretext for limiting the choices and opportunities that are not constrained by the sex you are. The being a painter, plumber, fighter-pilot, nurse, teacher, bus, driver, etc., should not be preordained by sex. This is part of the “biology is not destiny” that feminism stood for, a fundamental opposition to “biological determinism.” At the same time, the constellation of one’s interests, feelings, and preference cannot is not a determinant of what sex you are; it does not over-ride the material reality of one’s very existence. Legal fictions won’t do the trick either. Some jurisdictions might allow men to change their passport’s “sex” designation to “F,” but that has no power to actually turn its holder into a woman, any more than a corporation’s legal “personhood” results in the creation of an actual person who can donate blood, babysit your kids, or tell you a knock-knock joke. The causality just doesn’t work that way.
Well, no they don’t. Women don’t “know” they’re women, or “what it feels like” to be a woman; they just are women. I only know what it feels like, or is, to be me. I don’t know what it’s like to be a man; I just happen to be one*. A person can only ever know what it is, or what it “feels like” to be themselves, because they can only ever be themselves. We are trapped, with no way out. Ever. And our self-knowledge is itself limited, imperfect, incomplete and subject to error. There are huge swathes of our own behaviour and “operation” that are forever shut off from our awareness and control.
One might imagine what it might be like, but neither imagination, nor force of will turn you into anyone, or anything other, thanwho and what you already are. We are each limited to our own unique, limited perspective, imposed upon us by a combination of the facts of our material existence, and the circumstances of our lives and the experiences we have. It is the conundrum within the question “Is what you call ‘red’ the same as what I call ‘red’? ” writ large. To claim some sort of ability to know what it is to be something you are not, never have been, and never will be, is impossible. That goes for “knowing” you are any other individual human at all, let alone the other sex, another species, another being of any kind. Each of these alternative perspectives, these other “identities,” is equally unattainable. Empathy and imagination might offer an inkling (given the broad similarities of human lives and human mental processes), but it will only ever be a rough sketch, never the complete picture. Each of us is unique, and that uniqueness presents an unbridgeable gap to perfect knowledge and understanding of anyone else from the inside.
Replace “women” with any other noun designating an object, entity, or being that is something other than the subject “They,” and it makes perfect sense. Because they are not that other thing that they are not. And everyone can see this. They aren’t Napoleon, or the Planet Jupiter, or an armadillo. Adding “woman” to this nearly infinite list of things they aren’t (when the individual in question is not a woman), is not a slight, a slur, a hardship, or an injustice. It’s just the way things are. This is not a conspiracy against trans identifying people, it’s just the nature of reality. Word games that depend upon the arbitrary imposition of novel redefinitions of our words for the sexes (or at least those of the female one) can’t change this, no matter how many degrees in gender studies one might have acquired.
*I believe this would be true even if there actually were “male brains” and “female brains.” One would still only have access to their own inner experience, without any ability to say “I have the thoughts and feelings of the other kind of brain that is not mine.” A test that could objectively determine whether a subject’s brain was “male” or “female” would be able to find a mismatch between “brain sex” and “body sex”, but I don’t think that self reporting this fact would be possible because of the inability to “inhabit” any perspective other than one’s own. I think.
Exactly. I only know what it’s like to be this particular man at this particular time. More to the point, I don’t need to know “what it’s like” to be the Platonic idea of a “man” to know that I happen to be one. If I woke up tomorrow with total amnesia and not knowing who I were, I could easily determine my own sex by the simple act of looking in a mirror. I could do this while fully dressed and even after I shaved off my beard last year. No need to look like Chris Hemsworth . If simple facial recognition algorithms can do it (much to the dismay of TRAs), then so can I. The fact that a tiny minority of TIMs, and a much larger percentage of TIFs, (through a combination of surgery, hormones, photoshopping etc.) may be able to “pass”, as the other sex is no more relevant than the fact that an actor can be made to superficially resemble a Hobbit or an Orc. I know I’m a man the same way I know that Eddie Izzard is a man and the same way I know that “Elliot Page” is not. Either that or “man” is a meaningless word.
It’s exactly like that! Defining “man” and “woman” in terms of physical traits is like defining “redness” in terms of something objective and measurable like the wavelength (625–740 nm) and frequency (480–400 THz) of light. I don’t need to know if your subjective experience of “redness” is the same as mine to have a meaningful conversation, make meaningful generalizations (about energies, diffraction and absorption properties etc.), and agree on, say, which lamp on the traffic light is the “red” one. Even a colorblind person for whom red and green photons trigger the same subjective impression should be able reach the same conclusion by means of measuring devices, seeing which light frequencies are absorbed by which materials etc.
On the other hand, defining “man” and “woman” in terms of, say, an “inner sense of self” is more closely analogous to defining “redness” in terms of subjective experiences or “qualia” and insisting that some of the photons the rest of us call “blue” (wavelength 450–495 nm, frequency 670–610 THz etc.) are actually red. If all we have to point to is the word “red” itself, then, even if I know what I’m talking about, I can’t possibly know that you are talking about the same thing. Likewise, even if a TIM knows what
shehe is talking about when claiming to be a “woman” he can’t possibly know that anyone else is talking about the same thing. But, once again, the whole justification for why TIMs need to be included in all the spaces previously reserved for the people formerly known as “women” was based on the premise that both groups are the same in some real sense (as opposed to in name only). We have been repeatedly told that being a “man” or “woman” has nothing to do with physical traits (which makes it unclear to say the least why it’s so vitally important to be able to change one’s physical traits into a bad imitation of the ones associated with the other, supposedly non-existent, or at least totally irrelevant biological sex). We have also been told it has nothing to do with gender stereotypes (despite the fact that all the various gender dysphoria checklists by groups like Mermaids take failure to live up to such stereotypes as signs of transness). What we’re never told, is what it does have “something to do with”. Everything about Gender Ideology is “best left unspecified” since even just a clear description of its contents (or lack thereof) amounts to a refutation.Over the last few days, I’ve been getting niggling thoughts about something I hadn’t considered for years. The social assumption that women are described in terms of how we look and our relationship with others, and men are described in terms of what they do. Newspapers, for example, describing a woman as ‘Mrs. Jane Smith, a pretty, petite, blonde mother of three’ and a man as ‘Mr. John Brown, plumber ‘.
Of course, we absorb these messages; they’re everywhere, starting in infancy (even in utero, when the sex of the fœtus is known); strong kicks are deemed to be an indicator of future sporting prowess in a boy (“you have a footballer there!”) and emotional instability in a girl (“Doesn’t she have a temper!”). All through childhood, boys are asked what they want to be (not do) when they grow up; girls are told that we’re going to be pretty, and make someone a good wife. Boys learn early that doing plumbing makes them plumbers, playing games makes them gamers, kicking balls about makes them footballers. Their identity is wrapped up in their career, to the extent that many men collapse shortly after retirement because they no longer know who they are. Only those who had previously not let their personality become dependent on their career but also had hobbies (“Hi, I’m Joe Bloggs, the solicitor and keen chess player – check my ranking!”) seem to do well in retirement.
If they aren’t what they do, then who are they? Nobody.
I see it manifest everywhere in the cohort of men pretending to be women; they are doing things which they associate with womanhood, therefore they are women. Denying that their assumption affects the material reality of their sex is is, to them, an existential threat.
Slightly OT, but tangential to the topic of doing vs. being. As I have previously written, I think there is a common perception on the Left that it’s ok to criticize what people do (or think, or say etc.), but not what they are, which is fine to a certain point. But of course, language is flexible. You can always invent a name for “the kind of person who does X” and frame that as an “identity” (how I have come to loath that concept!) or something you are as a person. And since “identities” are sacred, it seems to follow that any criticism of X is “discrimination”, denying other people’s “rights”, attacking the “X-doing community” etc.
E.g. within my adult lifetime (I’m in my late 40s) there was a time when this applied to “smokers” (i.e. “the kind of person who smokes”). Smoking (and forcing others to be passive smokers in the process) was not simply considered an optional and very bad habit, but part of who you were as a person. And if others didn’t enjoy inhaling your air pollution, so fucking what?! That was their problem! If anyone dared to complain they were seen as the assholes for discriminating against the “smoker community”. Every major workplace was expected to have a separate lunchroom for smokers. Every bar, restaurant etc. was expected to have a smoking section, and if you happened to work there, daily exposure to other people’s poison was considered the price you had to pay to keep your job. One of the worst train journeys of in my life (and I’ve had a few!) was a 7-hour trip from Trondheim to Oslo when the only available seats were in the smoking car. I have personally worked in places where it was tacitly understood and accepted by everyone that smokers were entitled to regular brakes to indulge their self-inflicted vices while the rest of us had to work. Needless to say, there were no similar arrangements to accommodate the habits of drinkers, sniffers, or syringe addicts. I guess those “communities” had the wrong PR team…
How attitudes have changed in less than 30 years! If only we could see a similar attitude change when it came to “the kind of person who decided to leave the most important questions in life up to blind faith and let others pay the price for their uninformed, unjustified beliefs”, “the kind of person who gets a kick out of imagining himself as his own porn-inspired jerk-off fantasy and insists that women pay the price for validating his fantasy” etc…
Funny, I was thinking about that smoker-as-identity item just yesterday. A certain former friend/comrade who suddenly lost his mind & became a pro-Trump anti-vax woman-hating rage machine had that very peculiar (peculiarly selfish) view of smoking all along, like a kind of Indicator Light for the direction he would suddenly go. It popped into my head from nowhere, the puzzle of how anyone can think the default is it’s fine for people to inflict smoke that is BOTH unpleasant AND unhealthy on unwilling others, and not fine to tell them to stop.
You’re referring to That Guy, right?
What the rise of “trans” and the fall of “smoker” as sacred identities both illustrate is that there is rarely just one way to look at these questions, and whose framing of the issue is seen as the “right” one at any given moment, is highly contingent of shifting cultural moods, trends, power struggles, PR battles, group conformity, peer-pressure, who shouts loudest etc.
Yep, that’s the one.
They’re mimicking the outward appearance (womanface), but they’ve failed completely at capturing the aspects of “female” socialization where the needs and feeling of others are prioritized above one’s own. They let the aggression and entitlement of their “male” socialization take the wheel, thinking that a nice dress, heels and lipstick will be sufficient to convince everyone else that they are what they say they are. They concentrate on looking the part without knowing what their lines are. Dead giveaway. It’s like showing up in hockey gear and stepping onto the ice without knowing the rules of the game. The uniform alone isn’t enough.
Thirty years ago, I was in a band. These were the days when the whole bar was the smoking section. I’d come home after a gig smelling like an ash tray. I’d blow my nose and the stuff coming out would be gray (I know, too much information!). Whether this will have any long term impact on my health, I’m not sure. I used to build plastic model kits too, so I had already exposed myself to the fumes of adhesives, paints, and solvents for a number of years before the band thing even began.
Excellent comments all.
From what I can tell a lot of intelligent people — including those who aren’t particularly sympathetic to transgender claims — believe that there’s some sort of instinct we have which tells us that we’re male or female. It’s got nothing to do with adhering to cultural stereotypes or biological tendencies. It’s not learned or observed. It’s just an inner awareness which can’t be described in the same way qualia can’t be described. The evidence for it is supposed to be that when we all think about it, it’s obviously true.
People who disagree by saying they feel no such instinct are like the proverbial atheist who looks at the sun and denies its existence. People who disagree by pointing out that anything learned before the age of 3 will feel like something “we’ve always known” are pettifoggers grasping at straws. It’s possible that this tendency to believe in a sex-type instinct may be similar to the human brain’s natural tendency to see faces in the clouds or to divorce mind from the brain. As YNNB points out, our instincts aren’t necessarily right.
Ironically, the same people who easily accept instincts about sex-types and therefore support the trans right to equal treatment on this also tend to jeer at the simplistic, superficial fools who assume that appearance is reality and unthinkingly assign sex based on sex organs. “Boys have a penis; girls have a vagina” is a childish heuristic which deeper reflection and learning will dispel. This education usually consists of them bringing up DSDs like they’re a recent discovery, throwing around some studies which show vague similarities between trans ppl and their target “gender” (sex), drawing analogies between knowing your sex and knowing your sexual orientation, pointing out that hated conservatives hate the variation of gender ideology having to do with sex, and — of course — listening to trans people.
See also: the belief that memory (at least, the fact that “I remember it”) is infallible.
Sastra:
This is exactly the thing that I liken to the Calvinist notion of the sensus divinitatis, which is a gambit to shift the burden of proof onto skeptics. It’s frustrating that atheists who reject attempts to argue from the divine sense are completely willing to follow arguments from a sensus genderitatis.
But also … Reluctance to examine the concept of gender identity (as “sense of one’s own sex/gender”) seems crucial. Such critical inspection would involve seriously accepting the possibility of one’s own fallibility, as well as that of one’s various group memberships. That’s already a difficult ask, but to that we add the prospect of public shaming and of potentially having to reevaluate all of one’s organizational and ideological affiliations. In short, we’re seeing exactly why cognitive dissonance avoidance is dangerous.
[…] As I recently commented there was a time, not too long ago, when the same applied to […]