Guest post: A pyramid scheme where the product is “progressive values”
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Safe haven:
Even if we granted that adolescents who are “really” transgender would feel so bad they might commit suicide if they didn’t get surgeries to “correct” their genitals, the inextricable flipside of that is that adolescents who turn out to be “not really” transgender would feel so bad they might commit suicide if they did get surgeries which rendered their genitals “incorrect.”
Surely, then, it would be best to wait until they’re adults for surgeries. The risk of enduring a couple years in adolescence with the “wrong” genitalia is far outweighed by the risk of enduring the entirety of one’s adult life with genitalia that’s been surgically rendered “incorrect.”
That’s granting an awful lot, of course. But the point is, even in the baby blue and rose-coloured worldview of gender ideology, the logic still doesn’t make a lick of sense.
Add to that the fact that these surgeries don’t really change genitalia from male to female, and that there are risks (the surgery has an incredibly high complication rate, up to 50% in some clinics), side effects (lifelong medical patienthood and a significantly lowered life expectancy), and main effects (sterility)…
I give up!
To misquote Jonathan Swift, you can’t reason someone out of a position he was never reasoned into. The tools of rational argument won’t get us anywhere with these people. This is a socio-cultural/quasi-religious phenomenon. People came into these beliefs through strange eddies in modern political and cultural dynamics. And those are the tools we’ll have to use to get people out of it. Whatever benefits the gender ideology tribe is offering to its prospective members, we need to identify them and undermine them, or counter-offer with something better. And I’ve actually got an idea about where to start. Hear me out:
Ironically, the appeal of gender ideology is its unpopularity — most people don’t actually like it.
All the civil rights movements started out unpopular, and only became popular through arduous campaigning and struggle. This pattern repeated itself enough times that everyone absorbed three things:
1. The eventual outcome for all civil rights movements is success and widespread adoption by society. Why should the next one turn out any different than all the ones that have come before it?
2. The eventual outcome for those who oppose civil rights is social shame. For this reason, overt opposition to sex equality, racial equality, sexual orientation equality, disability rights, etc, has largely quieted down. (I may still have anti-gay colleagues, but no one’s said anything overtly homophobic to me in a workplace for 20 years because they know they can’t anymore.)
3. The eventual outcome for those who embrace civil rights is social capital — virtue. The earlier someone joins a new civil rights movement, the more virtue she will eventually receive. The very earliest adopters of civil rights eventually get statues and holidays in their honour.
This pattern suggests that the more overt opposition a (supposed) rights movement has, the earlier it is in its inevitable trajectory to widespread adoption, and the greater the virtue will be amassed by those noble souls who were the earliest to heed the calling of progress. It’s counter-intuitive, but it’s the same pattern of human behaviour that has driven people to join religious sects. Call it the economics of religion.
It’s kind of like a pyramid scheme where the product is “progressive values” and the reward is “virtue.” It doesn’t actually matter what you’re selling; the point is that you always have to have more people below you to sell it to, or the whole thing collapses. The other civil rights causes have lost their usefulness precisely because they no longer have a huge pool of outspoken opponents. There isn’t an anti-gay or anti-Black equivalent of JK Rowling, and by progressive logic today, that’s a weakness for those movements, not a selling point.
The best way to stop a pyramid scheme is to point out to everyone that it is a pyramid scheme. You don’t keep people out of Amway with bad reviews of the junk they sell; you do it by showing them that the whole thing is a scam and if you sign up, you’ll go broke. Unfortunately for some, they don’t get the message until they start seeing people around them go broke.
For this reason, we don’t need more science to prove that there are only two sexes or that sexchange surgeries are risky and harmful — deep down, everybody already knows this, just like deep down every Amway salesman knows his products are garbage.
We need to show people that gender identity ideology is an ersatz “civil rights campaign” and those who get on board are not going to end up alongside Martin Luther King, the Suffragettes, and the Stonewall rioters on some imaginary Mount Rushmore of civil rights heroes. We need to remind them of the very real civil rights they’re destroying right here and now, nevermind some imagined future where they’ll reap so much virtue.
Unfortunately for many, they won’t get that message until they start seeing people around them regret the surgeries they’ve been sold.
A more recent example: a while back I was forever seeing ads that said something like “you missed out on Bitcoin/Ethereum, so buy this [obviously scammy] cryptocurrency.” An appeal not just to greed but to fear. Not so much FOMO as “fear that you may have missed out”. It’s almost as if the obvious irrationality of invited response is part of its appeal, like some sort of exercise in parody nostalgia. Fortunately that scam seems to have died a death.
The movement uses LGB rights campaigns as a magnet to draw up all the iron shavings of anyone who wants their version of –sexuality* or Tumblr Gender Identity Pokemon protected against hate thought. “You’re just as bad as the anti-gay bigots from 30 years ago!” And there’s the added bonus for misogynists to virtue signal by denigrating women as TERFs and Karens. They get those cookies they envied for years.
*a, demi, (see current list here: https://www.healthline.com/health/different-types-of-sexuality#a-c )
Gold!!
Over the 3 decades of trauma care, it became clear that there were many, many reasons why young people with developing brains attempted suicide. Also apparent was that if they failed, and got proper care, (not of the body altering kind) they were usually able to survive their youth. To my knowledge, I never encountered gender dysphoria as a root cause. Lots of abused kids, unloved kids, kids with access to Second Amendment iconography, access to drugs, kids with bad breakups, kids unable to see that clear seas lay ahead if they could just make it a little farther, kids who were gay, kids who couldn’t imagine that 10 years in the future, they’d hardly remember high school, etc. Of course we still have all those issues and show no inclination to do much about it, but hey.
Brilliant.
Excellent post that hits the nail squarely on the head — people think they’re on the right side of history. The 3-part pattern really distills the (mostly subconscious) thinking to its essence.