Immersion

Kathleen Stock explains to us about immersive fiction:

Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box-set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it.

I did it in all my spare time (time not at school, not around grownups or for that matter children, time not doing homework) as a child. I was always “being” someone out of a book or a tv show. My way of playing was basically just to roam the countryside while “being” Mary Lennox or whoever – there was no plot, no dialogue, no story, that I recall, there was just the “being.” Immersive fiction was my happy place.

Being trans is a form of immersive fiction. Why do non-trans people immerse themselves in trans fictions? To be “kind,” to seem kind in order to earn social capital, to avoid shunning, and…

And fourth, there’s a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.

Why does this matter?

[I’t seems to me that transactivism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead.

Kathleen gives a fascinating account of the way academics are providing “surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.”

The game for some academics is to provide convincing-looking backgrounds for predetermined fictional conclusions such as “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”. Since the system currently rewards them for doing this, I think their unconscious motive is often career advancement and social recognition from peers, though it’s inevitably dressed up as something moral.

I picture them like the animators at Disney or Warner Brothers, cranking out the furniture for the immersive fictions of the day.

The Nimrod Effect: How a Cartoon Bunny Changed The Meaning of a Word  Forever « UNREMEMBERED

In the area I’m most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seek to provide complex and technical post hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer.  See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid—that trans women are women and trans men are men—is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.”  (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy).

I’m going to stop now, lest I quote the whole thing. It’s all that good.

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