Guest post: They are pretending they have the right to be certain
Originally a comment by Sastra on Top of the roller coaster.
Silent Bob #21 wrote:
And what has it got to do with “pretending” anything? Trans people are people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies. What does this have to do with any pretence? What pretence? I
Are we assigned “gender” at birth? I thought we were supposed to be assigned sex. Gender involves masculinity and femininity. Assigning gender at birth would be putting pink frilly bonnets on girl babies and calling them “quite the little princess” or shoving a male infant into a miniature Green Bay Packers onesie. Which, admittedly, we do.
In which case, if trans people are really just “people who are much happier and healthier living as a different gender to the one assigned at birth and (typically) reassigning their bodies” they’d be saying “I’m a feminine man” or, perhaps, “I’m a feminine man who wants to pretend I’m a feminine woman and hope others will do so, too.” Which isn’t what they’re saying. There’s no pretense in saying “I want to pretend.”
But I think there is pretense when people say “I know WHAT (not “who”) I am.” Or “TW ARE Women.” They’re pretending that they not only experience the same internal mental state as the opposite sex (no, not “gender”) but can know that. It’s not a matter of whether they’re sincere. I can grant they’re honest in that respect just as readily as I can grant that the religious are sincerely certain they have experienced God. Self-deception occurs when the interpretation of what we experience is considered the gold standard of reliability, without the honest recognition that it has been filtered through a plausible prior narrative or strong personal desire to believe. They are pretending they have the right to be certain.
Exactly. Sincerity of true believers. At least the religious acknowledge the importance of FAITH.
“Reassigning their bodies?”
Oh, Bob, that’s a strange catechism.
I wonder if sbob still pretends he is banned over here.
Well he’s not pretending about that. I do have him on the blocked list. I unblocked his comment this time because it was so eloquent I just felt I had to.
What, Silent Bob can read the replies to his comment but can’t give any rebuttal (or hypothetical apology?) That doesn’t seem fair.
Personally, I’ve never understood blocking someone from a place which isn’t a designated safe space for those recovering from serious trauma.
I dunno, if he did reply I might let the comment through.
As for blocking in general – it has to do with quality control as well as politics and personal pique and all that. I don’t do it a lot but there are people who just rage and rail. Newspapers don’t publish every letter they get.
Ooooh. I wondered if Silent Bob occasionally wanders in here to check if the place is still full of filthy terfs, and then can’t help himself and just has to comment. Now I’m imagining him commenting all the time, despite his comments never appearing. I’m not sure which I find more worrying.
Heh no, that doesn’t happen. This may be the only time. I did a search and was surprised to see how recently he was still here, and how often.
I’d like to offer at least a partial concession to Silent Bob’s argument about gender being “assigned at birth.”
If we take gender to broadly mean the sets of customs and behaviours that are expected of us based on how we’re perceived sexually, then in most other cultures, people really are assigned a gender at birth — they’re assigned a very specific cultural role in their community. Elsewhere in the world, your observed sex at birth will determine which gender role you are assigned, and this will determine which clothing and jewellery you can and cannot wear, which hairstyles you can and cannot adopt, what kinds of work you can and cannot do, which sexual partners you can and cannot have, and what rights you do and do not have.
The thing is, the more a culture loosens the rules about what men and women can and can’t do, the less the idea of “gender roles” makes sense. If it’s no longer illegal or taboo for a man to wear a dress and grow his hair long and have sex with men, there’s no need for such men to deny that they’re men.
In Samoa, for example, which maintains extremely strict and segregated masculine and feminine gender roles, it’s a man’s job to cut open a coconut. I saw a video of a butch lesbian in Samoa, defiantly cutting open coconuts, to show that she has a mascuine gender. She recognizes that she’s female, but because she’s butch (and gay) in a culture where these attributes break the rules that apply to women, she perceives herself as inhabiting a masculine gender — fa’afatana, in the way of a man, akin to a “trans man”, or perhaps more closely to a “nonbinary” female. She’s well aware that she’s female, but she doesn’t see herself as a woman, because to her, woman is a gender role.
But in the US and Canada we don’t prohibit women from cutting open coconuts. She’d have no need to identify as anything but a woman here. Because gender roles are gone, at least in law, and the only thing left that the words “man” and “woman” refer to is our sex.
So why has the idea that everybody needs a “gender role” come roaring back with a vengeance since social media came along? It’s probably partly to do with increased pressure to conform to stereotypes. It may be legal for a woman to open a coconut here, but if her social media feed has nothing but images of Kardashian clones she may develop a sense that she’s alienated from “woman” as a category of person and seek to find a label that doesn’t make her feel bad.
But there’s a far, far bigger factor at play. Man and woman may not denote “gender roles” in our culture anymore, but they still denote sex categories. Sexuality, not “gender roles”, is the primary reason men claim to be women in the Euro-American world today. To put it bluntly: when gay men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to straight men, and when straight men pretend to be women, it’s because they want to look sexually attractive to themselves. And when women pretend to be men, it’s often because they’re trying to get away from male sexual attention.
You can see this in the different ways men and women endorse gender identity ideology: many women mistakenly think it’s about liberating people from sex-based oppression: they think females who identify as male or nonbinary are freeing themselves from the threat of male sexual assault, and they think the same of men who identify as trans. But men like Silent Bob don’t see it as freedom from danger but an expansion of choice. To men, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because more choice. To the women who believe in gender ideology, crossdressing guys in women’s bathrooms equals more freedom because less danger.
It’s the total conquest of straight men’s rights over feminism and gay rights, masquerading as liberation.
I hope Silent Bob reads this and has a think.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on They are pretending they have the right to be […]