How to be friendly
Hemant Mehta, self-declared “friendly” guy, is not as friendly as all that.
“The trash.” Not all that friendly, is it.
Somehow, there are even more updates to the anti-trans controversy I first wrote about on Saturday.
In case you missed it, the short version is that biologist Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, wrote an article trashing transgender people.
No he didn’t. He did not trash transgender people. He disagreed with some of the claims of trans ideology (without calling it that). Here’s how he summed up at the end:
I close with two points. The first is to insist that it is not “transphobic” to accept the biological reality of binary sex and to reject concepts based on ideology. One should never have to choose between scientific reality and trans rights. Transgender people should surely enjoy all the moral and legal rights of everyone else. But moral and legal rights do not extend to areas in which the “indelible stamp” of sex results in compromising the legal and moral rights of others. Transgender women, for example, should not compete athletically against biological women; should not serve as rape counselors and workers in battered women’s shelters; or, if convicted of a crime, should not be placed in a women’s prison.
That’s not “trashing transgender people.”
Mehta goes on:
He insisted sex is binary, that trans women are more likely to be sexual predators (using misleading statistics), argued that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to counsel women who have been physically abused, rejected even the possibility of trans women playing women’s sports at any age, and said trans women shouldn’t be placed in women’s prisons (even though the alternative is disastrous).
Oh the alternative is disastrous, is it. For whom? For trans women, he means. But what about women if trans women, i.e. men, are placed in their prisons? Isn’t that disastrous? But for women rather than trans women? So Mehta is very protective of trans women and wholly indifferent to the safety of actual women.
I don’t call that very friendly to women.
To be continued.
So three highly respected scholars vs. Hemant Mehta, and he calls them trash. Somehow I think FFRF would be better sticking with Coyne, Pinker, and Dawkins (all of whom I have disagreed with at times, and can do it without referring to them as ‘trash’) than with the likes of the “Friendly” Atheist.
But he’s smiling in his photo! He gets to say anything as long as that photo stays smiling!! It’s like some kind of twist on The Picture of Dorian Gray; somewhere there must be a photo of Mehta showing all the “unfriendliness” he pretends not to have. Of course all the lying noted above isn’t really friendly either, though given his choice of cause to defend, it’s almost inevitable.
A belief based on dishonesty and deception can’t afford to engage in open debate and examination. Its adherents, supporters, and allies are compelled to lie in order to deflect attention away from any comments, however mild, that threaten either the ideology itself, or the dishonesty used to defend it. Mehta is just being a good ally, helping to bury comments that might unravel the whole ugly sweater of trans ideology. So all the criticisms and questions that Coyne, Pinker, and Dawkins have over the original article must be hidden and are therefore deliberately mischaracterized and transformed into “trashing trans people.” This isn’t even denying that your opponents have any valid points to make, or denying they were even trying to make any valid points. This is just making shit up, lying outright. The fact that he’s lumped all three of them together makes the wrong greater, though from his perspective, it economizes on his effort, as well reducing his expenditures on tar and brushes.
“You atheists just want to be able to do whatever you want.” Ironic that this familiar theist criticism of atheists fits so well in this case. When you cut yourself loose from the truth, you’re not arguing, discussing, or debating any more. This is part of the whole “NO DEBATE” strategy, which admits of the use of dishonesty to protect the great yawning moral and logical emptiness that is at the centre of genderism. Why go to the trouble of arguing against your opponents when you can make up things up that push them beyond the bounds of courteous discussion? By villifying your opponents, you free yourself from having to answer them, because they are beneath courtesy nd consideration. In fact, by calling your opponents ‘trash’, you are announcing that you never have to address anything they say ever again. You’re also saying that nobody else has to, or should, either. Nice trick that; you only ever have to mention their unpersonhood, and their ideas vanish! Game over; YOU WIN!
Mehta is now invested in this, and will continue to lie in order to defend and protect the lies he’s telling now. The farther he goes, the harder it will be to walk any of it back. There will be a price to pay; the meter’s always running, and the price only ever goes up. Outside of the trans buuble, everyone else can see what he’s done here. It’s not pretty, kind, or “friendly.” Just like captured media, he’s sold his soul to trans ideology.
I have a modest suggestion, after one of the precepts of Magdelen Berns*; I think Mehta has truly earned himself a new, more appropriate name. I give you Hemant Mehta, The Fucking Liar.
For those unfamiliar with this, she once said in one of her videos “I’d rather be rude than a fucking liar.”
How do these people not see that they’re fighting a battle that’s already been lost? Like creationism versus evolution, or Lysenkoism versus genetics, genderism versus sex was never a real scientific dispute. Creationism and Lysenkoism and genderism are/were social movements that reacted against the unstoppable march of scientific progress, but never actually had a chance of defeating it. The truth always wins in the end.
We already know the truth about transgender. We already know why some people become attracted to the idea of swapping their sex. And we already know why they lie to themselves and to others about their deep-down motives for claiming to have actually swapped their sex. Sexologists and sociologists and psychologists are out there right now, hard at work adding to the growing library of rigorous scientific papers that comprehensively document and explain the phenomenon.
I keep picturing the small town folks of the fictional town of Hillsboro, Tennessee in Inherit the Wind, who angrily rejected Darwinism because they perceived it as a threat to “that old time religion” they thought was essential to keeping society from falling apart.
Progressives like Hemant seem to think they’re obligated to angrily reject “the sex binary” as though it threatens the collapse of civilization and the deaths of zillions of LGBTQWERTY people.
We’ll look back at those woefully misguided progressives the way Inherit the Wind invited us to look back at the Tennessee townsfolk of the 1920s: with remorse and pity.
May Hemant Mehta live long enough to look back with great shame at his own terrible behaviour.
Minor quibble: Hillsboro, TN isn’t fictional.
Oh! I did not know that. Still, the Hillsboro of Inherit the Wind is at least a fictionalized version of the real life Hillsboro, because it’s a stand-in for Dayton, where the Scopes trial took place. (Google tells me the real-life Hillsboro has a population of only 433, so it appears to be much smaller than the film’s Hillsboro, which is depicted as being closer to Dayton’s small-city population of a few thousand.)
“Friendly”. It’s almost as if self-identification can’t be trusted.
I strongly doubt Mehta read the original, all too often it is enough to read someone else’s take on it and conclude that the original must indeed have been awful.
He mentions a lot of specifics though; I think he did read it.