Guest post: The concession that gets the justification spiral going
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on But whose dignity?
Using preferred names and pronouns, referring to TIMs as a kind of “women” (more specifically the “trans” kind as opposed to the “cis” [1] kind), reframing special privileges as “rights”, reframing forced obedience as “respect” or “dignity” etc. are the Trojan horse, the foot in the door, the thin end of the wedge, the seemingly (at the time) benign concession that gets the justification spiral going:
Only a weak-minded dolt would have made these concessions because of simple peer-pressure, tribalism, fear of ostracism etc. But I’m not a weak-minded dolt, so if I did make those concessions, it had to be the only reasonable, or even decent, thing to do. By the same logic, the people who didn’t make the same concessions have to be unreasonable, indecent bigots and haters who only deserve to be fired from their jobs, being flooded with hate on social media 24/7, having their names pulled trough the dirt all over the internet etc. They have to be the villains so that I can be the good guy!
If “Linda” (she/her) here, with her “lady-cock”, is indeed (as I have already conceded!) just another kind of “woman”, comparable to black women, disabled women, working class women etc., who but a bigot could possibly advocate excluding “her” from women’s toilets/changing rooms/showers/jails/rape shelters/sporting events/awards etc.? Furthermore, since “Linda” (she/her) has to be a “woman”, being a “woman” (of any kind!) cannot be about biological sex. In fact, biological sex cannot enter into it at all [2], since that would allow us to talk specifically about biological females to the exclusion of “women” like “Linda” (she/her), hence sex has to be arbitrarily “assigned at birth”, a Western cultural construct (inextricably linked to Western hegemony, cultural imperialism and white supremacy), a “spectrum”, or, at the very least, too complicated and messy [3] to allow us to say anything about the sex of individuals. On the other hand the word “woman” has to refer to something real. After all how can “Linda” (she/her) be “a real woman” if there are no real “women”? Therefor something other than physical traits has to make “Linda” (she/her) a woman. And not only that: To make it true that “Linda” (she/her) does indeed belong (as I have already conceded!) in all the same spaces as the apocryphal biological females, the thing that makes the latter group “women” has to be the same as the thing that makes “Linda” (she/her) a “woman”. Hence biological females are whatever they have to be to make “Linda” (she/her) one of them, and they don’t get a say in the matter [4]. Well, if someone is indeed a “woman” in every relevant sense of the word, they don’t stop being so the moment they commit a crime, so “Linda’s” (she/her) long history of violently forcing her “lady-cock” on “cis” women is irrelevant to whether or not she belongs in a women’s prison. And if that means putting the cis women at increased risk of rape and violence, that’s their problem. Fuck’em! I mean literally!
I think something like the above is not too untypical of how people get from a (misguided, but still) sincere desire to be “kind”, treat others with “dignity” and “respect” etc. to putting dangerous rapists in women’s jails and going out of their way to destroy anyone who objects.
1. Once again, either “trans women” relate to “cis women” the way baseball bats relate to fruit bats (i.e. not at all, it’s just a bad pun), or there is no justification for equating biological females with “cis women”.
2. Unless the point is to argue for the necessity of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, “gender affirming” surgery etc. Then Oceania has always been at war with East-Asia changing one’s physical features into a bad simulation of the ones associated with the other (supposedly non-existent, or at least totally irrelevant) biological sex is so vitally important that anything other than automatic affirmation in advance is “hate”, “violence”, or even “murder”.
3. Needless to say, no comparable demand for clearcutness or simplicity applies to “gender identity”: Circular definitions (or no definitions at all), equivocations (a.k.a. bad puns), word-magic, proof by assertion/loudness/endless repetition etc. Anything goes.
4. Since the thing that makes both “Linda” (she/her) and the apocryphal biological females “women”, cannot be physical traits, it has to be something “internal”, a way of thinking or feeling etc. best left unspecified. Hence calling someone a “woman” (whether “cis” or “trans”) is to make an implicit claim about what’s going on inside their heads. An exception can be made for a minority of “trans men” and “non binary” people as long as no one challenges the larger framework of “male” vs. “female”, “masculine” vs. “feminine” ways of thinking and feeling.
I’ve been struggling with whether to post this article from Megan McArdle, in which she discusses the case of Dr. Walter Freeman, lobotomist, who spent much of his life trying to find evidence that lobotomies helped. She introduces the notion of what she calls “The Oedipus trap”*:
And then she raises the key question:
But it’s all very oblique; she never answers the question for herself. In the comments some accuse her of trying to atone for allegedly voting for Trump, but she points out in reply that she never supported him (and there would be a digital trail if she had).
But without imputing any opinions to her, I think it’s clear how this could apply to so-called “gender affirming care”. I wonder who will be wandering around in twenty years trying to justify their current actions.
*Not sure if this is a valid reading of Oedipus, who did seem to realize what he had done.
Oedipus, who did seem to realize what he had done
Yes, he does, at the end. But when he finds out, he tries to “unsee it.” As it were. 8-(
WaM
That’s very interesting, thank you. “The Oedipus trap” sounds very much like cognitive dissonance and rationalization by another name to me (In the same neighborhood as the Sunk Cost Fallacy too), but I like it! I seem to remember reading that many of the therapists pushing recovered memories are still sticking to their guns as well. What has changed since the recovered memory craze is that the internet has allowed toxic ideas to reach a lot more people a lot more quickly. It has also allowed the online thought police to monitor people’s every move for signs of Wrongthink a million times more effectively. Last but not least, by putting everything permanently “on the record”, the Internet has made it a lot harder to backtrack by pretending you never said what you did, that your words have been misrepresented, misremembered, misinterpreted etc. This is one of the reasons I for one am not optimistic that the trans craze is going to go away any time soon*. Too many people have invested too much in the cause and burned all bridges behind them. They will never stop pushing this stuff.
* Actually I am but only because climate change, the mass-extinction of species etc. means everyone will soon be dead, or at least too busy with their moment to moment survival to worry about pronouns.
That’s the spirit! “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.”
#YNnB?
You know I like to spread some sunshine everywhere I go :D
To be fair, though, by the time people get around to accepting the self-declared identity of someone like “Linda” (she/her) the justification spiral has probably already been going on for a while. A more promising candidate might be “Victoria” (she/her), formerly Victor the sensitive, highly effeminate
gay boyAMAB who always preferred dolls and dresses to cars and jeans and insists she always knew she was a straight girl on the inside. And how about “Steve” (he/him), formerly Stephanie, the deeply troubled autistic teenagegirlAFAB who discovered trans activism online and now realize* that his long struggles with social awkwardness, anxiety, depression, self-harm etc. were all because of gender dysphoria?Who could possibly be so heartless as to deny these non-threatening, severely suffering young people a few special dispensations if it means to much to them? Even if it means making some concessions that you wouldn’t have made otherwise, what’s the harm? So you concede that there is such a thing as “gender”, that being a “boy” or “girl” is about “gender” rather than “sex”, that the only way to determine a person’s “gender” is self-id etc. So by the time someone like “Linda” (she/her) comes along claiming to self-identify as “woman”, you have already made the critical concessions, and now there is no way to reject “her” demands without looking inconsistent or hypocritical even to yourself. But of course you’re not an inconsistent hypocrite (←cognitive dissonance kicking in), so “she/her” it is, and if that means putting someone like “Linda” in women’s prisons, then so be it!
As I keep saying, I think the main reasons TIFs, or even the traditional “effeminate gay boy” kind of TIMs, get any attention at all from TRAs are to keep up a minimal appearance of consistency and even-handedness, and to serve as a Trojan horse for the AGP agenda. Once again, if “sissies” and “tomboys” were in charge of contemporary trans activism, it would probably rank very low on my list of concerns, but that’s not the trans rights movement we do have.
*On some level he always “knew”, of course, but hearing from other trans people online finally gave him the courage to come out.
This underlines yet again just how conformist Trans Ideology really is. Now we can’t have boys like that, now we must sort them all into their Correct gender. How is that an improvement?
This “Oedipus Trap” raises a question in my mind.
“How can we make it easier for people to say ‘this decision of mine was a mistake & we should reverse it’? Make it easier to limit the damage from a mistake & honor the courage to admit a mistake.
Is there a limit to how much we should do so? After all we both want people to back off from their mistakes & to put some thought into the original decisions.