Increasingly bizarre
Paula Scanlan on being shoved aside by Lia Thomas:
In a recent congressional hearing, I beseeched lawmakers to keep women’s physical safety in mind when considering policies that affect women-only spaces like locker rooms. The issue is close to my heart: I was a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania alongside my transgender teammate Lia Thomas, whose participation on the women’s team raised serious questions about the eligibility of athletes who identify as a different sex to the one they were born as.
…
The politics of womanhood has become increasingly bizarre in the aftermath of the #MeToo revolution. In 2020, the otherwise left-leaning British author JK Rowling fired the tweet heard around the world when she mildly criticised the excesses of the transgender rights movement. Like me, Rowling is a victim of sexual violence, and felt that the admission of male bodies into women-only spaces could pose a risk.
See I don’t accept the implication of “otherwise left-leaning” that knowing men are not women is right-leaning. You can’t have any kind of women’s rights or liberation or equality or “inclusion” if you don’t know what women are, which includes knowing that they’re not men. More curtly, feminism is not right-leaning.
There is very little that’s genuinely leftish about trans ideology. Carving out weird exceptions for the more powerful class is not leftish. A sense of entitlement that could power Chicago is not leftish. Calling women misogynist names is not leftish. Misogyny itself is not leftish (although the left has all too often been infected with it).
While sports is the most high-profile example, there are many sex-segregated arenas that have, in recent years, exchanged their sex-based eligibility for one based on “gender identity.” Most Americans are likely unaware that, due to a quiet administrative change, the federal Violence Against Women law is now being misused to violate the privacy rights of women in the most vulnerable of situations: domestic violence shelters.
…
Given today’s shift, a man – perhaps a domestic abuser with no history of gender dysphoria – could potentially follow his female victim to a women-only shelter, and those tasked with safeguarding would be powerless to deny him entry to what once was a sacred safe space. After-all, he only need tell them that he identifies as a woman to gain entry.
A safe space at any rate. I don’t think there’s any need to call it sacred.
On the other hand, if we could find a way to harness that power, perhaps we could end our dependence on fossil fuels. That would be leftish.
True. Misogyny is neither left nor right. It’s on its own orthogonal axis, as are so many things that get lumped into our political monoliths. Partisan tribalism apparently can’t abide the idea that something is unrelated to group membership, so all that someone believes is good becomes part of the tribe, and all that’s bad gets attributed to the other side.
But here I’m going to disagree. Entitlement is at the root of the Leftist project. (Not liberalism, mind you.) It’s right there in, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” The least capable is entitled to the labor of the most. Refusal to hand over the product of your effort to those who didn’t contribute to it makes you morally blameworthy. It’s in Marx himself, who chafed at the necessity of earning money to support his needs when he would have preferred to spend his days writing. He was being estranged by the economic system from the fulfilling work to which he was entitled. An entitlement that was his in virtue of nothing. An exception that he carved for himself from nothing.
Trans ideology is best understood as an outgrowth of this pure leftism. The rhetoric proceeds by means of applied conflict theory, with the cis/trans dichotomy carving an exception by dividing “woman” and (less dangerously) “man” into the necessary categories of privileged/oppressor and marginalized/oppressed. This framework sets up the relationship between cis and trans as one of exclusion from that to which the latter is entitled.
@Nullius in Verba:
You are right, left-ism is based on a sense of entitlement, an entitlement to equal outcomes. It’s based on the idea that wealth is primarily the property of the community (rather than of the individual) such that each person deserves an equal share.
But then comes the question, why are people entitled to equal outcomes?
It’s highly tempting to answer that with blank-slateism: “because everyone is equal in all abilities”, such that any inequality can only arise from unfair “oppression”. (= wokeism)
Hence, if men and women are identical, there’s no good reason to deny someone self-IDing as the other sex if that’s how they really feel. “Be kind.” This does follow more naturally from left-wing thinking.
And it is indeed more “right wing” to reject blank slatism and be readier to accept differences between people (and so to regard differences in outcomes as not a problem).
But, a left-wing person does not need to go down the blank slateist route. They can see advocacy of equal outcomes as a moral issue, not a claim about biology, and thus not resting on equal abilities. Indeed, they can want re-distribution of wealth precisely because of inequalities in ability.
The problem there, though, as the blank slateists see it, is that that involves conceding that the right-wing does at least have a point. And thus that there needs to be some balance between the two perspectives.
Of course, that everyone has equal abilities doesn’t per se justify equal outcomes as a moral principle. And it’s obvious that it couldn’t, because it’s a descriptive statement about the world, not a normative judgement or value. The is-ought divide is not so easily bridged, much to ideologues’ frustration.
It’s always seemed to me that the idea of equal outcome as the just default is so unnatural, so antithetical to our evolved sense of justice, that it can’t logically precede the entitlement. (After all, the basis of fairness and justice is good for good and bad for bad, which is an unequal outcome.) It must instead follow as a post hoc justification for the entitlement to whatever is in question. The fact that the equity principle justifies all the rest is the very reason to accept the equity principle in the first place.
“I want that thing you have,” is the first thought, which then becomes, “I deserve the thing you have. Why do I deserve it? Um … Oh, because everyone deserves it! See how completely generous I am? How not self-serving? No, don’t be silly. I’ve earned the right to it by not having it, and the more I’m deprived of it, the more I deserve it.* No, the fact that advancing this principle gets me everything I want is completely irrelevant. It’s a pure commitment to justice. Now let me [drink] your [milkshake].”
—
It may be worth noting that the obverse of this is more associated with Rightism and is also bad. “I’ve earned the right to it by having it, and the more I hold on to it, the more I deserve it.” That is, being born on third base and thinking you hit a triple.
I’m not so sure. I’m not convinced it’s perverse or weird to think that ideally everyone should be happy and healthy and prosperous. The “ideally” bit is important, but that’s the point. In the real world it’s hard to square that with everyone pitching in to do the work, but in the ideal world that’s not an issue.
Is it the case that ideally everyone ought be happy, healthy, and prosperous? Sure, I’ll grant that, but we probably have different perspectives on the nature of the ideal. And while “there should be equality of outcome” isn’t the same thing as “everyone should be happy and healthy and prosperous”, even this prima facie reasonable maxim strains under close inspection.
At root is, as you point out, the heavy lifting done by “ideally” or “in an ideal world”. Consider the Kantian maxim, “Do not deceive.” In an ideal world, this maxim is followed universally: no one lies and and everyone always tells the truth without deception. However, every first-year ethics student will tell you this maxim isn’t without problems. First, there’s the simple test of lying to the SS officer at your door about whether there are any Jews hiding in your house. Requiring that I reveal their presence by answering truthfully is a clear failure. Second, there’s the problem of universal compliance. As obedience to the rule approaches total, the advantage to be gained by disobedience skyrockets. (Just think of Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying.) A rule that benefits exploiters is also a failure. And there’s a third issue: In an ideal world, there would be no Nazis at your doorstep and there would be no exploiters. In this ideal world, it is a true ethical statement that everyone ought never lie. It’s true because the ideal world is one in which it is true, a world where all its problems are erased by fiat. This sort of idealization serves to avoid facing potential defeaters rather than highlight, explore, and defuse them.
Similar questions arise for the principle of universal flourishing. Does the Nazi deserve to flourish? Does the rapist’s flourishing impinge on others’ flourishing? Where does desert factor in? In an ideal world, would everyone have happiness, health, and prosperity, regardless of any other facts about the world? Or would everyone have happiness, health, and prosperity, because everyone lives so as to deserve them? My ideal world would be one in which everyone deserves the good and achieves it.
This turned into an essay, for which I apologize. I’m bad at talking about such things in any other way.
Well, it’s an interesting (and knotty) subject.
I’ve been pursuing my version of flourishing by taking a bus to a distant suburb (Redmond, home of Microsoft) to walk a trail along a river.
“ Does the Nazi deserve to flourish? Does the rapist’s flourishing impinge on others’ flourishing?”
I think under the framework of health, happiness and prosperity, a Nazi may flourish, while not succeeding in spreading Nazi ideology and rule. I mean, if the only thing making you unhappy is your inability to send Jews to concentration camps, then you are, by any reasonable measure, very happy indeed.
Likewise the rapist: if the only thing negatively impacting your happiness is an inability to go raping, then you are in fact very happy.
No fair system can reasonably provide humans for others to destroy in order to pursue their concepts of happiness.