Guest post: Where the skeptics got confused
Originally a comment by Arty Morty on Where are the skeptics?
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?
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.
An excellent post. Well done.
I think that’s it exactly. The “kinder” society became to trans people, the more pressure there was to concede that “gender” is a real thing and that “gender dysphoria” is really a mismatch between this “real” gender and the individual’s body as opposed to a delusion. And the more society played along with this idea the more people there were who decided that they were trans, as opposed to mentally ill.
[TRA’s and their allies also think they’re very transgressive for saying that it’s okay for a guy to want to wear dresses and modify his body. They wrongly claim that Gender Critical people would forbid such behaviour. In fact, it’s the GC’s who say: “You do you.” It’s the TRA’s who insist that a guy who wants to adopt “feminine” mannerisms must not be male at all, but female. They’re the essentialists.]
I’ll admit to having been agnostic as to the existence of “gender” and concepts such as “cis” and “trans.” But seeing the way that transwomen behave (committing crimes of sexual violence at an equal or greater rate than regular guys), reading the incoherence and dishonesty of their arguments, there is not much left in me that can believe in their religion.
Yes it doesn’t get any more persuasive over time, does it. More the opposite.
Thus the necessity of “NO DEBATE!” and the need to label simple facts of material reality as “transphobic.”
So reality has a transphobic bias?
Having read through the comments in the thread from which this came, I think you’re right Ophelia. There is room for a book in this question. I’ve been puzzling over this myself, often commenting about my own speculations. One of the key things that I learned as an active member of the atheist community, is that we have this oonceit that as atheists we are skeptics. I think it’s a conceit because the easiest people to fool are ourselves. What we don’t often take into account is that there is often personal cost to factor in when we approach a subject and make a subconscious decision about just how skeptical we are willing to be. As the aforementioned homeopathic remedies go, there is very little cost in being skeptical about empty pills. It’s fun to laugh about flat earthers, bigfoot hunters, ghost chasers, and the like. But some people really hate Monsanto. Some people really want a keto diet to solve their weight problems. Some people are libertarian, and that means that they will take a very guarded approach about the causes and remedies for global warming.
I recently downloaded a book by Donald Prothero that he’d written about 2011 and it is a guide to skepticism, and I was not surprised to find the same approach to the same subjects as nearly every book on skepticism in that time frame. I realized that even though he’s a very interesting science writer, there is a boring pattern to many skeptic books; very few books that I had found actually involved writers applying skeptical analytics to subjects that are close to them and could upset their apple carts.
When it comes to the trans gender issue, this is a field ripe for takedown by the Big Guns, but they have personal reasons that they don’t disclose for not doing so. It might be as simple as not wanting to upset their own applecarts due to close personal friendships, and I’m aware that Matt Dillahunty has a vested interest in not allowing discussion AT ALL that questions the issue of gender identity. It’s just to close to home.
Arty, it’s true, the rest of the world does need fixing in the way we approach the role of gender. I think if we didn’t label desires and roles as feminine or masculine and try to force people into those buckets, then we wouldn’t be causing those who don’t conform to quesiton themselves so deeply that it causes such pain and discomfort for them they are are looking for something to make them think they are the other sex. If we could find our way back to Marlo Thomas’ vision of “Free to be, you and me” I think we could alleviate most of this. And what should be the most glaring point to even the casual skeptic is how gender affects teen girls so much that they just want to be boys to escape it.
But what I came here to write, originally, is how disheartening it’s been to see the acccusations of bigotry and hatred being bandied about. It’s the ease with which the community was fractured by the assumption that qustioning gender is due to “Fear of the different” that surprised me. It’s the first answer and the one that too often people setttled on. Imagine knowing somoene for 15 years, and not even giving him or her the benefit of the doubt for questioning an extraordinary claim about male personae trapped in women’s bodies, or the other way around. That’s disheartening. I would expect that skeptics would instead consider “what do they see that I don’t?” Ostracizing is sometimes the easier route.
The most disturbing book I read in 2022 was The Painted BIrd. by Kozinsky. A Roma kid was left to wander through Europe during World War II trying to avoid being turned in to the Nazis. He rarely found any shelter and was often close to capture. No one treated him well, and he was often tortured by people who were sheltering him. In one village he observed a game that the villagers played, of painting a bird and releasing it into its flock. The other members of the flock didn’t recognizing the bird as being one of their own so they would attack and peck at it until they had killed it. It’s allegorical to how even those of us who think we are above the pettiness will treat each other when we all of a sudden see a member of our community in a new light.
Knives out.
Me wrote:
Not necessarily — at least, not when we’re dealing with the science-based, rational, skeptic section of Trans Rights Activists. Their position is a bit complicated. From what I can tell — and cleaning up the vocabulary— they believe the following:
1.) Gender identity is formed during the early development of the brain. It’s our internal sense that we’re male or female (or both or neither.)
2.) It’s not directly connected to any social stereotypes about masculine & feminine. People with a misaligned GI (trans)are no different than ppl with a GI that aligns with their sex (cis) so will have the usual mix of masculine & feminine traits.
3.) A few trans ppl will adopt the stereotypes of the sex they sense themselves as. There are 2 reasons they do this
A. When young they pick up & adapt themselves to the sexist messaging aimed at the sex they consider themselves to be, just as most children do.
B. They may deliberately adopt the stereotypical behavior of the sex they know themselves to be in order to signal to other people that they’re that sex. This means that a trans girl, teen, or woman may only be wearing frilly dresses for others to recognize or acknowledge their sex, not because they really love them.
By refusing to classify gender dysphoria as a mental illness, the responsibility for trans ppl’s associated gender-stereotypical behavior shifts on the sexist public.
Continual reference to those who’ve been helped by “transition” is annoying enough on its own, but it’s extra frustrating from so-called skeptics. Every single argument marshaled against homeopathy, osteopathy, chiropracty, and every other sort of medical woo applies to gender medicine. Every one of those other pseudoscientific treatments has helped someone. Even more people believe themselves helped by them. Skeptics know this and nonetheless reject the woo in all cases but Genderism.
And that’s before we even bring up people who claim to have been saved by religion.
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Ophelia:
The mark of a bad argument (or book, film, play, etc.) is that you have to avoid reflecting on it, because the more you think about it, the worse it gets. This’s a problem for those of us who have a hard time “turning our brains off”.
@Nullius in Verba;
What’s particularly striking in TRA skeptics’ analysis of Gender Medicine is the almost total absence of references to, or concerns about, the Placebo Effect.
Sastra:
But then we ask the epistemological questions, and it all collapses back to norms and stereotypes. In the end, the complicated, nuanced, sophisticated position also supports the position that “S likes pink or S wears dresses” implies “S is a girl or S is a woman”.
Sastra @ 9: Right? It’s as though placebos can’t exist in the presence of gender dysphoria.
@NIV #10:
When I ask the epistemological questions, it tends to all collapse into “you have to ASK” with comparisons to gay people feeling sexual attraction & religious conservatives not believing them.
@Sastra #12
Apropos gay people – on thing that bugs me is when people insist that they IDENTIFY as gay!
So if you identify as non-binary and is a male, and is attracted to females – you too can be a lesbian!
If challenged – then the issue is not what being gay or lesbian means, but whether you identify as gay! or even worse as queer!
I’ve had philosophy 101 so I know that the relationship between words and objects is iffy, and ideas and words has a complex relationship.
However it’s a travesty when the struggles gay people have had is coopted by people who insist that being gay has no implicit meaning, it’s just a label you apply to yourself – like they do with the word woman.
But the person you’re supposed to be asking has only ever had experience of being themselves. It’s not like they could have tried out more than one way of experiencing the world, through another personality, one that isn’t their’s, and find they have a preference of one over the other. I’ve only ever had experience of being me. I am male, but that doesn’t mean I have an inner sense of “what it’s like to be male.” I only have an inner sense of what it’s like to be me. I can imagine that other people have their own inner sense of “me-ness” as well, but I don’t think that there’s any innate sense of maleness that is also present, at least not one that is separate (or separable) from plain old “personality.” I’m not denying that there are “male” or “female” ways of being in and experiencing the world (but if there are, we haven’t found them yet), that there is no “maleness” or “femaleness” wired into our systems, but I am suggesting there is no way we can escape our own foundational subjectivity and say “I’m not this, I’m actually that.” I’ve often used the example of someone claiming to be another species, and that this claim is as ridiculous and impossible as claiming to be another sex. Let’s take a step back and get even more basic. I would deny that someone can have the inner experience of another individual and be able to claim that they weren’t really themselves, but actually that other person instead. This is without even considering the existence, or not, of any “gender identity.”
Outside of the value-laden hierarchy of sexist, gendered personality traits, questions of “male” or “female” personalities are pretty much impossible to determine. If openness, sensitivity, and nurturing are “coded” as female or feminine, and, as such devalued against ruggedness, toughness, and assertiveness, then the deck is stacked against us. Within the confines of a sexist, patriarchal culture, where are you ever going to find a control group? Everybody has a mix of traits, but I don’t believe it’s possible to sort these into “male” and “female.” I think that “gender dysphoria” would not arise in a culture that wasn’t hierarchical and sexist, that whatever mix of traits one had would simply be considered your personality. Without the judgemental, subordinating, Sorting Hat of patriarchal culture, being male or female would not condemn you to a half-life where whole swathes of feelings and behaviours were forbidden to you because they were the domain of the Other, either failing to live up to your potential (as a “Man”), or trying to climb above your station (as a Woman). Within such a culture, expressing those traits makes one suspect of being the other; without the hierarchical construct and its boundaries and limitations, who would care? Without the hierarchical, social construct, does “gender identity” even exist? The transing of ambitious, accomplished women from the past is a clear indication of gender ideology’s dependence upon the reification of hierarchical, patriarchal, gendered sex roles that it claims to be subverting and smashing.
I certainly agree that humans aren’t rational beings, that many of our decisions, behaviours and allegiances are not based on calculation and deliberation, or that they necessarily should be. But if one claims rationality and objectivity to be behind one’s actions, then it had better be there. This where skepticism should be applied, not buried. Mistakes are mistakes, and harm is harm. Bullying and wishfull thinking cannot correct mistakes made or mend harm done, it can only attempt to hide them.
There are too many red flags in the “treatments” and “therapies” being foisted on people submitting themselves to “gender affirming care.” Once children have been put onto this path, it’s often too late. The supposed medical professionals to whom they are entrusting their lives might not have their best interests at heart. Too little curiosity, too quick to diagnose. Never ask a barber if you need a haircut. Even if you’re bald, they’ll find something they can do and charge you for it. The failure to properly study, research, and follow up in “gender medical care” sounds more like a cover-up than anything else, an attempt to hide mistakes made and harm done. When are surgical interventions the first and only solutions to mental health problems? How can you claim to make people “well” if you don’t track their progress after you’re done with them? How can you claim they’re “better” if you’re never done with them? I guess if the “treatment” never ends there is no “after” to check up on, is there? It’s all just part of the journey..
YNNB wrote:
I have been repeatedly told it would, especially by skeptics who think there’s an evolved neurological component within the human brain which leads to an individual’s fundamental expectation of being either a male or a female. Nothing else. These same skeptics are hyper-focused on denying there are any sexist reasons for rejecting one’s sex. They try to force-team GNC behavior and trans-sex identity so that they’re naturally and rationally connected. It’s not that defying stereotypes means you’re trans; it’s that being trans is another way of defying stereotypes. Conflict resolved.
Which, as you point out, it isn’t. When we try to consider the state of being transgender as a pure “expectation of sex” similar to proprioception or body-mapping (noticeable only when it’s gone awry) this may help to somewhat resolve the “we’ve only had experience of being ourselves “ conundrum. A TW doesn’t “feel the way women feel.” They experience a shock when their expectation that they’re female isn’t confirmed by their actually being female in the objective reality outside their subjective experience. I can barely conceive of this. But what I can’t conceive of is this being not just a puzzling unease, but an absolute existential nightmare. Not in a framework where the subject and everyone else starts out thinking sex is no big deal, I can’t.
You ask “Without the hierarchical, social construct, does “gender identity” even exist?” If this neurological body mapping version qualifies as GI, maybe — but it wouldn’t exist in the form it apparently does. Gender dysphoria wouldn’t and couldn’t be a crippling obsession because there’s no special import to being a man instead of a woman, or a woman rather than a man. And skeptics who are hyper-focused on there being no special import to being a man instead of a woman, or a woman instead of a man, would not be cheering on the crippling obsession by claiming it’s inevitable and reasonable. They wouldn’t be agreeing that being male or female is the fundamental component of the sense of self while simultaneously trying to downplay it.
It’s such a curious dance.
“Sex only matters for reproductive purposes, men & women should be treated the same as much as possible.”
“A trans kid may kill themselves if we don’t treat them like the sex they see themselves as because that’s who they truly are.”
“What sex someone is should be no big deal.”
“I absolutely support people who can’t live their lives having people think they’re the wrong sex — imagine if this was me!”
It’s a classic instance of trying to eat your cake and have it, too.
And they can’t see it when pointed out, because doublethinkers crimestop badthink.