Guest post: Like eating Pringles
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on There’s no undoing any of this.
So much of Genderism succeeds because its supporters have no skin in the game, which lets them play a different game entirely. They face none of the consequences (as far as they can see, at least) of the policies they support, but their support earns them social credit. It’s in their interest to be blind to consequences that don’t affect them and to those that affect them less than the status they might gain. Setting men aside, handmaidens to the trans movement do not perceive significant consequences to themselves, so they will not see significant consequences to other women, because that sight would lose them status. Just look how casually they dismiss as trivial the trampling of other women’s sporting dreams. The vast majority of people, never mind women, have no hope of participating in high level competition, so there’s no skin in the game. Male incursion into sport will never affect them, so it can be ignored. Pro-life women exhibit the same myopia, perceiving pro-choice descriptions of real consequences to be no more than rationalizations to avoid the consequences of promiscuity.
And why should we expect otherwise? Rationalizing consequences away is normal. After all, in the absence of real consequences, you’re free to play the status game, and you really want to play that game. There is status and prestige to be gained (within your tribe) by supporting your team. The more zealous your support, the more status you earn, which necessarily means that you earn less by having any reservations or criticisms. People have to be scared out of playing the status game, because only when repressing a concern obviously costs more status than voicing it do you allow yourself to even become conscious that you have any concerns in the first place.
But by the time that should happen, you very likely have been complicit in the construction of social dynamics that elevate the cost of dissent beyond the immediate cost of compliance. The young zealots who have rewarded you for nodding along will turn and feast on you in a heartbeat, and you know it. So you stay silent, both internally and externally, and your bright red line gets pushed back. And it happens again and again and again as you voluntarily cooperate in building the walls of your own prison.
Compromising moral principle for social benefit is like eating Pringles: once you pop, you can’t stop.
That’s so true.
I’m obsessed with finding a way to deprogram the gender zombies. I have a whole imaginary Ted Talk lined up in my head, and it’s aimed squarely at those whose endorsement of gender woo is motivated by social status over moral principles.
It involves getting them — the gender zealots, my imagined audience — to imagine not just their current social status but their future social status, too. To consider whether or not backing gender woo will give them net-positive social credit over the course of their lives, rather than simply right now. To consider their investment in gender woo as a kind of bet on the long term trends of the social landscape, rather than just the immediate conditions. That if they’re wrong, they will face terrible social consequences for having picked the wrong side. And so they better consider the evidence, for the sake of their future social credibility. It’s a bit like Pascal’s Wager, I guess.
The film and play Inherit The Wind serves as the framing device. Inherit the Wind was of course a parable about McCarthyism, despite being superficially about creationism and the Scopes Monkey Trial which had happened a few decades before.
The great trick of it was that, for all the courtroom drama on the screen (or the stage), the real people on trial were you, the viewer: it said to you that, with the luxury of time, you can look back at the rubes who stubbornly refused to accept evolution and cringe, and judge them harshly for having gotten it all so wrong. Then it asks you to look at yourself and imagine the people in the future judging you about your cowardice in the face of the Second Red Scare.
That can be extrapolated to our present era, Gender McCarthyism, or the Great Transphobia Panic, or whatever we want to call it. That if you think you’re getting off scot-free when you ignore the facts and the principles and the truth for easy social cred, you’re wrong. The bill will come due for you, as it does for everyone eventually, when they dare to deny reality.
A favourite line of mine, which I’ve quoted here at B&W before, is, “You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themself into.” It’s in the spirit of that (bastardized) Jonathan Swift quote that I’m trying to reason the gender zealots out of their position by the same door through which they walked in. It’s the appeal of gaining social standing that motivates them into genderism, so it is most likely to be the threat of losing social standing that will usher them out.
Now, won’t someone give me a big auditorium full of genderists to try my bit out on?
An apt comparison. Pringles are to potato chips as trans women are to women.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Like eating […]
There’s likely a range (dare I say spectrum?) of motivation, conviction, and commitment amongst the adherents of genderism, ranging from all-in True Believers, opportunistic bandwagoneers, and unreflective types going-along-to-get along. You never know who might be ripe for epiphany, disillusionment, and deconversion. You never know what approach is going to work on whom. It helps a great deal that we have reality on our side; this makes it so much easier to keep the facts straight. There’s no need to waffle, or switch meanings and definitions mid-stream, though as you note, referencing reality and facts might not be sufficient, as they’ve been there all along. While they might not have “skin in the game” with regards to many of the personal costs faced by those subjected to the trans “rights” they support and fight for, the risk of future disapprobation once reality regains the driver’s seat is very real. Their faith in the permanence of the surprising victories they have won might very well be their undoing. Wishing or insisting things are other than they are only takes you so far for so long, forced teaming and institutional capture notwithstanding. Playing slippery word games, and monkeying with passports doesn’t change Reality, which is always going to be there, patiently waiting to bite them in the ass.
A tempting fantasy, but you’d have to catch them by surprise, or lure them in under false pretenses. If they knew what you were up to, they’d try to cancel the event beforehand by threatening the venue, or once underway, disrupt it by pounding on the doors and windows. If those failed, they’d shout you down once you began to speak.