Guest post: Where are the skeptics?
Originally a comment by latsot on Scary guy.
I know we’ve all made this point a thousand times but I never claimed not to be boring: where are the skeptics?
They (we) were right there front and centre when homoeopathy was a hot topic. You know what? In retrospect I think we probably exaggerated the harms, I don’t mind admitting it. Not the harms of believing nonsense, I don’t think those can be overstated, but the harms of fannying about with water for pretend ailments or ones that will eventually sort themselves out anyway*… there’s a case to be made that we might have had our thumbs on the scale when we raved about it as a scourge. Understand that I regret nothing and I’m no less opposed to fake medicine than previously, but I wonder in retrospect whether we had a bit of a perspective problem and I think my focus might be different if I did it all again.
So if skeptics were – I hesitantly suggest – a touch over-zealous about quack medicine that was stupid and wrong and harmful – but perhaps not as harmful as we made out – why are so many of them cheerleaders for largely untested, off-label medicine which we know for scientific fact is extremely harmful and is being prescribed without adequate research, guidance or supervision?
The roster of former movement skeptics who are openly critical of puberty blockers is depressingly small. Ophelia, of course. Andy Lewis. Our own Arty. Moley (who I had the pleasure of meeting recently!) There are not many others. Where is Ben Goldacre? He wrote a whole book on ‘medicine’ that does more harm than good and another whole book on the dubious practices of pharmaceutical companies in selling medicines that have not been shown by any reasonable standard to work or be safe. Where is he? We used to be fairly regular correspondents because we were both stalked by the same deranged individual but now he wont talk to me at all. If anyone should be taking a stand against puberty blockers, it’s Ben.
He should be all over this.
Where.
Is.
He?
I made the point about our perhaps being over-zealous about the harms of certain quack medicines to throw the lack of outrage among movement skeptics about puberty blockers into sharp relief. Never mind the messy, politically-charged and deliberately-obfuscated business of whether humans can change sex or whether men should be allowed in women’s spaces**; this is an issue about whether a particular drug is safe and effective. It’s right up the skeptical movement’s alley. Where is everyone?
* I know there are cases of homoeopathic nonsense being responsible for suffering and death. I’m being deliberately flippant to eventually get around to making a point.
** Can’t, shouldn’t.
And now that I think of it, I think (though am not sure) homeopathy was/is also on the left/liberal ‘be kind’ side of the aisle, and (I guess) being supported by the same people. So it’s not a political thing, as far as I can tell. Really, the only explanation that makes any sense to me is misogyny, backed by lots and lots of money (again I may be wrong but although I believe homeopathy controls a large market it’s not nearly as large or powerful as the established pharmaceutical companies).
With hindsight, trying to look back I wonder if the problem isn’t simply that movement skepticism/atheism had a number of transsexuals floating around at the margins the same way the LGB community did for decades and no one had really felt the need to go after them because no one thought they needed to because everyone knew what a real woman and a real man was.
So when Trans Activism began to gather steam lots of skeptics/atheists found themselves in the situation where they’d have to go after people who’d been in the community for years without much interrogation, but if Transgenderism really was a pseudoscience why hadn’t they, as proud skeptics who aren’t afraid to tell grandma she’s going nowhere after she dies, been smart enough to see it? The answer must be that it’s not a pseudoscience, because to admit that it was would be to admit that they weren’t as smart as they liked to think they were.
It’s that plus some ingroup solidarity, lots of atheists never had a church or other community to loose, so they never had to deal with the feeling that they were betraying their community, and when they finally faced that with Transgenderism, they caved the way a lot of quiet atheists do in religious communities because they’d rather maintain community harmony than become a black sheep.
The ‘skeptics’ are not just staying out of the conversation, though there are notable people who do that, many of them are actively perpetuating nonsense themselves.
David Gorski, Steven Novella, PZ Myers, Rebecca Watson, Matt Dillahunty, and I am sure a number of others I cannot think of, are all in the business of promoting ‘sex is a spectrum, what is a woman anyway, if you really think about it?’ types of garbage arguments.
If you had told me in 2010 that we would end up here I would never have believed you.
And promoting those “arguments” with the venom and contempt we’re so familiar with.
Yes. Your experiences with PZ were the canary in the coal mine for me. He really exposed himself as a nasty piece of work. ‘Be Kind’ is one thing, ‘Be Kind, or else…’ is a very different proposition.
CB, indeed. Each one of those you named has disappointed me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. PZ and Rebecca most of all because their absolute betrayal of women seems the most jarring.
And I could have picked at any number of threads, couldn’t I, which would have been grist to the mill of former skeptics, now conveniently ignored, without ever even getting close to the fact that, you know, men aren’t women.
Puberty blockers, the misinformation around DSDs, the claimed biological basis of gender, male and female violence statistics, men in women’s sports, men in women’s prisons, men in women’s everything, NO DEBATE…
I could go on all day. And not one of those cowards would touch a single one of those topics in anything approaching a critical way. And yet they’re all such perfect, straightforward, self-contained topics for skeptics to address. Funny, that.
I haven’t looked at Pharyngula for a long time now, but last time I was there I did a fairly comprehensive last-ditch search to see if PZ had ever written anything about the competitive advantage of men in women’s sports. It was a little after Lia Thomas was big news and I figured that if PZ hadn’t written about that, then there was absolutely no doubt at all that he was deliberately ignoring it because it was so inconvenient.
Fuck all. Not a dicky bird. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned, if it wasn’t already.
(In truth, I had closed that case long before).
@CB #5
The thing is ‘be kind’ was never PZs shtick until Transgenderism came along. Was he being kind when he drove a nail into a communion wafer and tossed it into the trash? No, he was being provocative and making a point about religious freedom, and dare I say it, he was doing it in an exceptionally dickish way. PZ was always closer to Hitchens’s idea of ‘antitheism’ in his interactions with religion and anything he considered a pseudoscience than he was to ‘agree to disagree’ style moderates. Ridicule was one of the things PZ believed (does he still believe that? idk) was absolutely worth using against bad ideas because bad ideas lose a lot of power when people are free to mock them. It’s remarkable how Transgenderism has rotted the brains of so many people who really should’ve know better. I’ve had all sorts of silly manipulative arguments put to me in defence of Transgenderism from self identified skeptics who would see right through those same arguments if they came from religious people in defence of their beliefs.
@Latsot #6
Given how many of those people helped popularise ideas like ‘Schrödinger’s Rapist’, which points out that it’s not really possible to tell which men are likely to rape someone if they get the chance and which won’t, so women and children need to be cautious no matter what, it’s bizarre that they can seriously push the idea that transwomen are no special threat to women if allowed into their spaces when there’s no meaningful way to tell the difference between real* transwomen and men who just want to access women only spaces for whatever reason.
*not that there’s any such thing as a ‘real’ transwomen, real is just a synonym for ‘sincerely delusional’ in this context.
@latsot I still had PZ in my RSS feed for a couple of years after he treated Ophelia so abysmally for actually acting like a skeptic, But I saw many other issues relating to this come up and he either ignored them or commented on them in way I could see was dishonest. So I am unsurprised by how much he has debased his legacy.
For me Gorski and Novella are worse. They are medical doctors, they have presumably taken more biology classes than I have, and yet they are peddling stuff which would fail them a basic biology exam. They *must* know better, but yet they are still pushing absolute bullshit.
I think a ‘Most disappointing so-called skeptic’ award ceremony would be something I would watch.
@vanitysfiend good point. I liked the skeptic movement because I thought it actually was provocative, it actually relished having difficult conversations. Now I feel like they were great at taking apart ideas I was perfectly capable of taking apart myself, like paranormal instances, UFOs, chakras and other similar horseshit. But when they were faced with horseshit that would require them to be rude to people they knew, they just quit.
I can’t stand even to go back to SBM or Neurologica since Novella, et al. piled on Harriet Hall.
Why is she still writing for them?
Gorski, a brilliant debunker of pseudomedicine, has been particularly painful to watch disintegrate into a mere ideologue on the issue of “gender.”
@Mike B I listened to the SGU podcast since around 2003. When Perry Deangelo died I was genuinely upset, even though I never met him.
I agree that Harriet Hall should have cut ties. I remember reading her review and wondering how long it would take for Gorski to take it down. The answer was 24 hours, and the bullshit they published to try and recover their pro-trans at all costs reputation was nonsensical, and anti-science in a number of ways.
I think Gorski once published an article about how dangerous it was to prescribe Lupron when it was not clinically tested or needed, I forget the exact details. Now he apparently thinks it should be given to children like smarties, based on their own say-so.
PZ is a biologist, there is absolutely no excuse for him. Well, there’s no excuse for any of them, but especially PZ.
I don’t find it in the least surprising that performers adjust their performances to retain their audiences. It’s also unsurprising that a performer’s beliefs and attitudes would shift in order to accommodate those reward-seeking changes. It’s just operant conditioning and cognitive dissonance doing what they always do. If you’ve ever gotten a dopamine hit from seeing a tweet get a like or hundred or thousand, that’s the same thing. If you’ve given a thought to your karma score before posting something that’ll get downvotred on Reddit, that’s the same thing. When we add financial consequences to the social, the psychological effect is massive.
You could tell that PZ always got a rush from the commenting horde. Is it any wonder that where the most vocal commenters went, so did he?
And that’s another thing. Most people are conflict averse. Narcissists aren’t. Narcissists dominate social groups. It’s kind of what they do. Given the prevalence of dark triad traits in TQ+ types, it makes sense that such people would take over a comment section if left unchecked. Which PZ generally did, as I recall.
I think we have to pay more attention to the emotional reasons why people (1) believe the things they do, and (2) spend time and energy on the things they do.
None of us is a completely rational, calculating machine, adopting beliefs based strictly on the evidence and choosing our “battles” based on an expected value calculation. QAnon folks aren’t “persuaded” by the fraudulent evidence and ridiculous logic of their belief system, and most of them don’t have a track record of fighting child abuse and exploitation. It just feels good to them to believe that they are brave independent thinkers who are protecting children from the worst kind of evil which just so happens to be (according to them) perpetrated by people they already hate for ideological reasons. Anti-vaxxers and anti-mask crusaders feel good about being brave independent thinkers who are “fighting for freedom.”
The appeal of being a capital-S Skeptic is that it feels good to brand yourself as a bold independent thinker who is intellectually and morally superior to those who fall for “woo” and certainly those who promote it. Skepticism always contained a substantial element of “look at this stupid shit people dumber than me believe” wrapped in a layer of “I’m pointing this out because this stuff hurts people, this is a public service I’m doing, not just patting myself on the back.” I certainly indulged in it. Before I discovered the skeptical movement, I didn’t believe in any of that stuff; the only thing that changed was that I started spending time reading and posting and talking about it, because I found it fun and interesting and flattered myself that it was a worthwhile enterprise and not just indulging my own sense of superiority.
But there’s a reason why skeptics generally targeted the people making money off promoting woo, or at least the more obnoxious believers. It feels (and kind of is) a little gross to just mock ordinary schmucks who get bilked by their neighborhood palm reader.
So how does this tie in to transgenderism? Well, it feels (and is) kind of gross to mock people who seem to be in genuine distress about their gender. I’m not saying that’s what all, or even most, “gender critical” people are doing, but that element is there. Especially so among the religious right, who were already the ideological enemy of most skeptics. So for a lot of skeptics, being on Team Trans Rights means you are (1) defending, rather than attacking, a despised minority; (2) defending principles of “let people live the lives they want” that you already believe in; (3) doing battle against religious bigots who are already your enemies; and (4) revealing yourself as an enlightened and compassionate person who believes in equality. Now, even that appealing combination of motives isn’t enough to make a skeptic believe something that is 100% clearly wrong, but I think there’s enough ambiguity in some of these issues that I don’t have to accuse skeptics of abandoning reason to take the positions they do. I realize that many of you will disagree with that last point and insist that it’s just axiomatically obvious that women aren’t men, etc. etc. I’m not going to take up that argument, at least not today.
I would be remiss in not applying this same analysis of motivations to everyone. How, some of the aforementioned skeptics would (and did) demand, could a self-proclaimed skeptic like our host suddenly decide that they’re on the side of Ron DeSantis and other religious bigots, and against the predominant opinion of the medical experts in the field? If they’re being charitable, they would point out that there’s a motive to portray oneself as defending women from the vile attacks of misogynists and sexual predators, and as the intelligent and independent thinking child pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. That, too, is a flattering self-concept. If they’re being less charitable… well, you don’t need me to elaborate the motives they would ascribe.
And then, of course, there’s Screechy Monkey, who’s trying to position himself as the wise calm person who’s superior to both sides, because he finds that a flattering self-image.
Hahahaha nicely done.
All true, of course. The one quibble I have is that I for one simply can’t believe the trans ideology even if I try. I did sort of try, in a half-assed way, for the few years between whenever it grabbed center stage (2010ish?) and the moment I couldn’t do it any more – I did sort of try but it was much more a matter of not thinking about it than it was of believing it.
I think we’re forgetting one of the larger skeptic communities: Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Society & Skeptic magazine. This was my first introduction to skepticism, humanism, and atheism.
I no longer subscribe to the magazine, but, from what I can tell, this is a branch of movement skepticism where the skeptics are by and large still skeptical of transgender medicine (as well as of the ideology.) It’s certainly still an issue up for debate. As someone who was involved with the JREF, CSICOP, & Skeptic Society, the last one was generally considered the more academic of the three.
If only Shermer were more skeptical about himself.
I think it’s interesting to compare the four points Screechy has outlined above with JK Rowlings #ThisIsNotADrill” Tweet:
It’s ironic that the point at which trans-captured skeptics would disagree with Rowling is on the reality of sex, and the right to force women who know and acknowledge (not “belive”) this, out of their jobs. In fact some of them have used one might say spent) their skeptic cred and positions as doctors and biologists to a) argue against the reality of sex and thereby b), justifyi the bullying. I’m sure PZ would lump this in with “punching Nazis.”
I think this is the place where many skeptics drop the plot, because transactivism goes so far beyond “letting people live there lives.” There are demands for Centering and Validation and Access that are placed on everyone else, demands that go past “tolerance” and require submission, obedience, and compliance. Gender ideology requires not only an audience, but audience participation. It is intrusive and colonizing of women’s single-sex spaces. That means state support of their claims, backed with the force of law. This is different from the struggles for gay rights and marriage equality, which sought to extend to homosexual men and women the legal protections enjoyed by heterosexuals. These are the same basic “human rights” which transactivism uses as a shield and cloak to cover its peculiar demands, which are not “rights” at all, and which it is signally reluctant to enumerate and describe.
What about women? What about their right to let them live the lives they want? The intrusive demands of trans identified males (and the risks introduced with self ID) prevent women from doing exactly that. Whatever happened to the PZ Myers who went up against the predatory misogyny of Michael Shermer? How did he lull himself to sleep in the face of the very real and manifest danger that trans’ demands for women’s spaces would impose on women’s health, safety and dignity? And Rebecca Watson; am I wrong to assume that she’d have been just as put off if Elevator Guy had been wearing a dress, heels, and lipstick? Would she have over-ridden her own instincts, and fight or flight response and accepted him as a “woman?” How would she have responded at the time had somene told her she should have? That it would have been her duty to do so? Well trans activism wants to throw all of women’s spaces open to Elevator Guy: Head-tilt Edition, and women are supposed to ignore their own instincts so he can be “validated.” How can she defend the voicing of her own irritation, unease, and discomfort, but deny all other women the right to say “Guys, don’t do that.”
One can still “defend rather than attack” a “despised minority” without rolling over and giving in to their peculiar and intrusive demands, especially when those demands impinge upon and take away from the rights of half the population. Skeptics seemed happy enough to defend women’s right to abortion in the face of unreasonable religious opposition that had inordinate influence on the machinery of the state (though one is now forced to wonder how much of that was an excuse to attack religious belief, with abortion rights being a convenient cudgel with which to do so). Well, they could continue this fine tradition of defending women’s rights if they really wanted to, because they are under threat from what amounts to a religious belief that has garnered for itself unwarranted and unearned power and influence over governments and othe institutions. In their self-congratulatory smugness on having landed on the right side of history, they’ve ended up on the wrong side of Reality. And Justice. But whatever.
Quite apart from transgenderism’s foundation upon the lie and delusion that one can be, or become, the sex one is not, maybe, just maybe, that minority would be less “despised” if it ceased its bullying, intrusive colonization of women’s spaces and admit that their are, in fact, conflicts between what they want and what women need.
‘Well, it feels (and is) kind of gross to mock people who seem to be in genuine distress about their gender.’
Agree–but, to go back to latsot’s analogy with other kinds of pseudomedicine, why is the skeptic community not going after the quack doctors peddling dangerous drugs and mutilating surgery to these genuinely distressed people?
Vanity’sFiend wrote:
This point has got me thinking, and I’m wondering if the reasoning wasn’t simpler even than that. “These are our friends in our community. If you didn’t know they were trans, you’d think they were gay. Having gay friends convinced liberal-minded people that there’s nothing wrong with being gay. So we’ve learned there’s nothing wrong with being trans.”
One thing that surprises me with the science-minded skeptics and atheists who support the replacement of sex with gender is how quickly and relentlessly they keep trying to turn the discussion personal. We are not going to start off with clearly defining our basic terms; we are going to talk about the vulnerable and marginalized. We aren’t going to deal with hypothetical questions and philosophical principles; we’re going to link arms with our friends who are just trying to live their lives. We aren’t going to debate this subject any more; we’re going to delve into what we think is wrong with you, that you’ve switched sides and joined with the religious conservatives. What’s in this for you?
I remember bringing up the basic skeptical principle that people who are highly emotionally invested in believing in something are probably far less likely to be able to evaluate that situation or issue than someone who had no particular dog in the fight, so to speak — and then applying it to trans people being able to validate their claims as opposed to their feelings — and the shock was palpable. This was cruelty and intolerance. It’s a personal animus on my part.
No, it’s Skepticism 101. People who “have experienced God” aren’t experts in God that we need to listen to. Particularly if they can’t even articulate a coherent understanding of what they mean by “God.”
Nullius @14
Quite a coincidence that this comes up just as I had come across a blog post titled “The Perils of Audience Capture (How influencers become brainwashed by their audiences):
It seems quite plausible to me, that this is what PZ succumbed to. Basically, his followers ate his brain, and he is now his followers’ follower. What a fate!
(I was going to post something about this over in the miscellany room, but then here seemed more apposite.)
I met him over a pizza years ago, and I recall him saying he was not all that interested in the skeptic movement. It shocked me a bit momentarily, but I think perhaps his point is that one needs to keep a somewhat narrow focus in order to be effective. He can’t fight all bad medicine out there, so he goes for something he has a chance to change. Such as more transparency in drug research, letting the world know ahead of time what trials you are going to run and what you’re looking for, in order to reduce the effect of publication bias.
In any case, the last post on his Bad Science blog was in 2017, so it seems he has lost interest in that sort of thing.
More about his current activities here.
I think everyone is making good points about reasons why the skeptics are failing to be skeptical. I think there is another reason, and I think it might be part of what captured FFRF (that and the fact that almost their entire staff is young).
It seems to me that some people automatically take the opposite position from that taken by the religious. And, of course, the right wing, but I think religion is a big feature here. They don’t like religion. Religion believes stupid things. Religions have done a lot of harm through history.
Without having to think about it, they have an automatic answer. Religions don’t like trans? Obviously the trans must be right. It never occurs to them that religious people can get some things right (and that sometimes even if they have suspicious motives or reasons, they might still be right, just for the wrong reasons). They are so used to the reflexive reaction when the religious try to pass something into law that it shuts down their bullshit detectors and their skepticism. All the work has been done as soon as the religions pick a side. You just take the other, and hey! No need to think.
@Harald H-O;
That reminds me of an old psych experiment students performed on their teacher (since replicated I believe.) The goal was to get the unwary professor to unconsciously stand in an unusual way by the process of subtle positive reinforcement. I don’t remember details, let’s say it was to stand to the far left of the podium while raising his right hand over his head. As the lecture began the students lowered their eyes and looked bored — unless the gesticulating lecturer moved at all to the left or raised his right hand ever so slightly, in which case the audience showed interest. By the end of class the teacher was far left of the podium with his right arm raised. This apparently had to be pointed out to him. He hadn’t noticed.
Or so I learned it as an undergrad.
@25 I heard a similar story–in the version in our university a class got a professor to fall off the edge of the podium he was standing on by being visibly more alert and interested every time he got close to the edge.
That wouldn’t work on mathematicians. We always lecture facing the blackboard, so we have no idea what the students are doing.
I’ve been racking my brain for years trying to figure this out, and the best I can come up with is this:
“Gender medicine” is a treatment for a mental health disorder but people are terrified to make any kind of association between atypical gender expression and being mentally disordered. To which the obvious reply should be, “Then get rid of gender medicine, you idiots!” But instead, the reply from skeptics, progressives and everyone else is a strange collusion with the patients that they can still have all the “gender medicine” they want but they’re not disordered, it’s the whole rest of the world that needs fixing.
The hypocrisy at the heart of the gender identity movement is best exemplified by the euphemistic term “gender affirming care.” It says, we’re giving you some kind of care but it’s not medical treatment for a medical disorder, no no, my goodness no! It’s just wholesome gender-stereotype-smashing affirmative progressive feel-good “care.”
Under the “gender affirmation” euphemism, puberty blockers, genital reconstruction surgeries, synthetic hormones… none of this stuff needs the same scrutiny that any other medical treatment does, because none of it is really medical treatment, because that would imply that there might sometimes be a connection between gender expression and mental health disorders.
Of course there’s a connection between gender expression and mental health disorders — and the gender identity movement is the thing that’s perpetuating it!
Before the gender identity movement took over the medical establishment, there was the “watchful waiting” model, whose central premise was to reduce patients’ delusions about being the “wrong” sex with as much psychiatric care as possible before resorting to permanent medical body modifications, which would never literally “fix” the patients’ sex but which might help to alleviate their distress.
This seems to be where the skeptics got confused: it turns out that “gender medicine” isn’t entirely bad — some patients do seem to benefit from it. So completely abolishing medical treatment for gender distress is off the table — that would be bad, regressive, harmful. But acknowledging that this stuff is treatment for a mental health disorder is also off the table. Having a mental health disorder is the thing that leads you to seek medical treatment, but the medical treatment is the thing that makes you “trans.” Literally by definition, being trans means having a mental health condition. And that simply cannot be allowed. Their hands are tied: they have to endorse “gender medicine” in principle, because they know that it works sometimes. But they can’t allow themselves any kind of scrutiny about how it works, who it works for, what it actually does, what the risks are, etc, because that’s a foul reminder that we’re talking about a connection between “gender identities” and mental health disorders.
And right on cue, in swoop the charlatans and the quacks and the pharmaceutical hawks and all the other nasties looking to exploit a blind spot in everyone’s critical thinking. And boy are they making a killing.
It’s such a bloody mess. And all we have to do to untangle it is to collectively sit down and face the fact that the entire gender identity movement is an attempt by people with mental health disorders to feed their delusions instead of overcoming them.
ArtyMorty #28 wrote:
This is a very good insight. We shudder at how recently not just homosexuality, but failing to act properly “masculine” or “feminine” required intervention for the patient’s own presumable good.
I’ll venture to add another possibility:
The alternative to Gender medicine is trying to change the disordered mental state but people are terrified to make any kind of association between atypical gender expression and being able to change.
One of the justifications the Gay Rights movement latched on to was that the atypical gender expression of being gay was acceptable because it wasn’t a choice. Just like heterosexuals, homosexuals were “born that way.” None of us can change the way we’re born. This was I think partly for parity, and partly in response to the Religious Conservative argument that gay sex was a rebellion against God. No, same-sex attracted people were made that way — by God, if that was the framework being used. Conversion Therapy was going against God’s Plan and thus a kind of blasphemy. It was for some an effective tactic.
But I always felt it was a crappy argument. Not the science, which seemed to support it, but as a moral justification. For one thing, years dealing with various stripes of theists on ethics had convinced me they’d simply point out that we’re also born prone to violence, jealousy, and greed and yet we don’t consider that destiny or virtue. But more important, homosexuality isn’t okay because it’s “natural;” it’s okay because it doesn’t cause any harm. Even if it WAS a choice — so what? An ethics which makes no reference to avoiding unnecessary harm is weak.
But the precedent was set. The absolute revulsion many liberal skeptics seem to feel towards a therapist trying to persuade a young gay man that he’s not really a young straight woman makes little sense unless we start out with the Gender = Born That Way association.
And once all the other possible therapies are off the table (along with the dreaded “watchful waiting = you’ll grow out of your GNC phase approach) all that’s left is Gender Care.
Arty:
Well, obviously. What needs to be shown is that the benefit differs substantively from merely giving someone what they want. An addict feels distress when denied a fix. A narcissist feels distress when not fawned over. A child feels distress when told, “No, you can’t have a BB gun with a compass in the stock for Christmas. You’d put your eye out.”
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Harald:
Huh. Now I know I’m not completely off in left field when I talk about this phenomenon. It even comes with a catchy name. Audience capture. Cool.
To the extent that young women use transing themselves as a means to escape the sexist and sexualized roles the culture has prepared for them, the whole rest of the world does need fixing. Just not in the way that genderists imagine it should be fixed. Not through submission and compliance in using “preferred pronouns” or the linguistic erasure of women, or redefining them in law in order to include men, but in eliminating “gender” and “gender roles” themselves, which had been the goal of second wave feminists. Instead of making the world safe for women as a whole, we’re dangling the cruelly false hope of individual liberation from “womanhood.” We’re assisting the occasional “trans” escapee while leaving the “cis” penal colony system intact and strengthened.
That young women desperate enough to choose this escape route are being used as human shields and sacrificial cannon fodder by the AGP males who so often seem to call the shots in this movement, is one of the most tragic aspects of this whole scandal. Their goals, needs and desires are not conguent; that they are yoked together by forced teaming helps to conceal this conflict within the trans movement. It’s really not one big happy rainbow sparkle family under the infinitely flexible “trans umbrella.” These women want out; the men want in. These young women and girls will see no benefit from the push for self-ID that TiMs are spearheading, but their severed flesh and arrested development will serve just fine to help AGPs gain the access to women’s spaces they crave without any need for these men to desecrate their own bodies.
I came to this conclusion myself some years ago. “They can’t help it” really isn’t the winning argument that many of those who use it seem to think it is.
Another problem with the “homosexuality is natural” argument is that it’s potentially refutable. Suppose future researchers identify environmental factors that lead to future homosexuality; what then? Does that mean the moral, or compassionate, course is to avoid those factors so that your child doesn’t grow up gay? You know certain types would make that argument.
Nullius @ 30 – Sorry but that “Well, obviously” (and the ensuing explanation) was wholly unnecessary (and so it was quite snide). Arty’s comment is a gem and not in need of any “well duh” from anyone.
The comments on this thread would make an excellent book. Five stars, all of you.
[…] a comment by Arty Morty on Where are the […]
Ophelia: Hm, I didn’t mean to be snide to Arty. My “obviously” was directed at the skeptics mentioned in what I quoted. Sorry for any confusion, Arty.
Ah, okay. Rebuke canceled.
Phew!
(Coincidentally in a comment thread partly about social feedback.)
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Sastra:
In addition to the moral component, and I’m just spitballing here, the “born this way” parallelism might also have functioned as a way for straight people to understand gays and lesbians. For a lot of heterosexuals, homosexuality was so bafflingly inexplicable that they couldn’t even manage empathy. Disbelief was a fairly common response. It was like “you just haven’t met the right guy/girl” turned up to maximum. As Holden asks Alyssa in Chasing Amy, “Well, can I at least tell people all you needed was some serious deep dicking?” Framing sexual orientation as an inborn trait helped these straight people form an empathetic theory of mind using the phenomenology of their own orientation as a base.
Given the frequency with which the naturalistic fallacy was referenced in the New Atheism days, one would expect that members of the skeptic movement would have noticed it here. It’s an unfortunate illustration of how affiliation biases reasoning.
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What a Maroon:
This is a good point. Any synthetic proposition is in principle defeasible. If you set up your argument so that its conclusion depends on some synthetic premise, it really behooves you to make sure that the conclusion really does supervene. If it does, then a successful refutation of the premise should be welcome, as you’ve corrected an error in reasoning. If it doesn’t, then refuting the premise leaves you committed to your conclusion’s negation.
That’s some bad juju.
lol I love the shift between the penultimate paragraph and the ultimate one.
Heh, like George Carlin, I don’t do transitional material. I just use the language that means what I mean.
Or I try to. Sometimes I can’t remember how to say … you know … those things in … um … Oh, yeah, words.
You ever have a moment where the spelling of a commonplace word strikes you as wrong? Like, you go to write “with” and think no, that doesn’t look right? Just me?
NiV,
Happens to me, but more with the spoken word. Spoken, spoken, spoken….
Happens to me, too. I remember finding the word “the” suddenly strange. You are not alone!
Oh yes. Just the other day, though I don’t remember what the word was.
English must be especially conducive to it, because some of the spellings are grotesque. Like “grotesque” for instance.
Nullius in Verba @37
This is a good point. Any synthetic proposition is in principle defeasible. If you set up your argument so that its conclusion depends on some synthetic premise, it really behooves you to make sure that the conclusion really does supervene.
A bit derailing the discussion, but that’s exactly how I decided to uphold any position based on natural sciences/biology into a broader moral/ethics category (that I could not be able to justify though, other than choosing to adopt these stands as a personal matter –in a way, very analogous to self-ID-ideation). My PhD supervisor once told me that the current defense of anti-racism based on Cavalli-Sforza (and restated by Gould & Lewontin if I remember well) about individual variation being greater than inter-group variation was a risky position once we dig in greater details about genomic variation. Indeed, we could uncover variation previously unsuspected, and we do not know the way it would translate.
I felt really uneasy a few seconds –intellectually paralyzed actually, and my supervisor was great enough to free me from that state by simply saying that it does not matter if there were any difference between groups whatever these differences might be if they even exist, it did not mean we must behave in accordance to nature or biology anyway.
Which brings us back to the issue of gender, and as cited above about JKR,
Two big issues are the useless denial of biology (biological sex is real), and of the reality of sexism (biological sex has important social consequences –among which but not limited to, strongly artificial gender roles). The aim of feminism is to free woman from sexism. As for anything beyond these issues, the (trans)activism behind both is puerile at best (respect pronouns) or dishonestly authoritarian (this is transphobic of you, and I’m glad I can pretend I am not by castigating you while feeling safe from my own hypocrisy).
Harald Hanche-Olsen@22ish
Your point reminds me of the characterisation of social media as Skinner Boxes, which I’ve written about here before. The re-enforcement mechanism is very clear and obviously designed to encourage people to take increasingly outspoken positions in the everlasting hunt for likes as returns diminish.
And of course once you’ve gone down one trouser leg of validation, it’s rather hard to come back. I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy is quite up to describing this effect because the increasing apparent conviction is based on diminishing returns for increasingly wild claims.
This is the only explanation I can come up with for the constant over-reaching of gender identity ideology and politics. If activists were to say, for instance, that TWAW is a linguistic argument; that we should change what “woman” means because of some greater good, then we’d have something to talk about. I wouldn’t agree, but we’d have the basis of a good argument about how to determine public policy, at least.
But that doesn’t happen. If arguments like that are ever made, they are motte-and-bailey’s or switched bait.
To make an actual, coherent, evidenced, logical argument, the proponent would have to inch back up toward the… er.. crotch of the trousers of validation (I now regret making that analogy). Every step in that direction loses more in terms of validation than even the decreasing returns gain in heading to the turn-ups (these are 80s trousers, in my analogy).
This is an obvious weakness of human brains. Arty talked about it in the latest Mess as brains being hacked by arseholes. The way it’s done could well be as simple as diminishing returns in likes, I reckon.
I think you were being a bit too glib about this, NiV; it’s easy to see what PZ does as a performance now that we have reason to condemn it. Of course there was always an element of performance, but the questions have always been about the crowd to which he was performing and whether and how that changed. And to what extent he was complicit in it.
My silly abstract model might be right as far as it goes. It might help us gain some insight into how people of conviction can so quickly and easily forget what they were actually convinced about in the first place and embrace the opposite. Or it might not.
But it’s not enough.
Oh, and over-reaching is something I think we should talk about more. Every argument deployed against us is an example of over-reaching. It’s terrible strategy. But that’s where every single argument in favour of gender identity bullshit goes, sooner rather than later. Be kind turned into be kind or else in the blink of an eye. TWAW was meant a lot more literally a lot earlier than most people imagine, as Ophelia can attest more than most.
It is all and always overreaching because it has to be.
We should talk about it more because it will be the downfall of the movement and because it tells us a lot about what we’ve allowed to slip and why, I think.
Re Ben Goldacre, btw: he often said he wasn’t interested in skepticism as a movement, he just wanted to concentrate on his particular thing. I’m all for that… and that’s why I pointed out that he hasn’t done that. At all.
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I wasn’t so much calling PZ a performer as I was making an analogy. That said, bloggers are performers, as are all writers. Social media creates performers of its users. Social interaction in general is performance enough that we’re vulnerable to “audience capture” or something very like it.
Truth. Which reminds me I’ve been meaning to read Presentation of Self in Everyday Life again.