Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on They simply memorized a rule.

when faced with a “gut” common-sense feeling that something’s amiss with transgender ideology, the “rote lesson” they’ve absorbed is to distrust their own “gut” sense that something’s wrong because there must be some kind of higher, intellectual, rational justification out there somewhere that they fear they just haven’t worked out yet.

Kind of like, All these other important people have figured it out already; why haven’t I?

On occasion, I’ve wondered how it is that this exact kind of argument never worked with regards to religious belief. There’ve been lots of important and brilliant people who’ve held devout religious belief, yet their own faith made no dent in my lack of belief (once I’d finally come to that position in my own thoughts and feelings about the matter). The faith of those smart people did not make me rethink my perception of the impossibility and ridiculousness of the supernatural aspects of their religions. For me, the supernatural bits get in the way of those few moral and ethical bits that are actually worthwhile.

Transgenderism rests upon a set of essentially religious, supernatural beliefs. An implicit Cartesian dualism, the primacy of the “gender identity” over the sexed body, the concept of being born into the “wrong” body, the belief that sex is a spectrum rather than a binary, and that humans can change sex. Like religion, there are all sorts of subsets of belief, many of which are mutually exclusive (is gender fixed or fluid; is it innate or can it arise later; how much , if any physical transition is required; etc.), all of which still, supposedly, fall within the trans “community” or under the trans “umbrella.”

I’m having an argument with Freddie deBoer over at Substack right this minute, over his insistence that there’s such a thing as a “trans child”, and he’s reacting very much like someon who’s been conditioned to believe that his own doubts about trans medicine are signs that he might secretly harbour some kind of hate for the “LGBTQ” somewhere deep down.

Well, this potential “hatred” may actually be partially true if he supports “trans medicine” because he’s supporting transing away the gay. Those who claim there are “trans kids” are starting with their conclusion by squeezing all disphoric children into a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of transness. “The awnswer is trans; what was the question?” Remember Dawkins invocation of the “Conservative child” or “Keynsian child” to point out the inappropriateness of talking about a “Muslim child” or a “Catholic child?” I’ve come to think that transess is more a belief than a condition. Talking about “trans children” is akin to pre-emptive recruitment into an ideology, a staking out of a political claim in the flesh and blood of children, rather than a medical diagnosis. Treatment then, is not so much an attempt at any sort of cure, but a sacrifice to faith, a pricey token of commitment. And this commitment must be made before they have a chance to desist.