Guest post: A uniquely vulnerable, needy group
Originally a comment by Sastra on Hemantsplaining biology to a biologist.
In a way, trans ideology resembles a religious Accomodationist argument. Trans people, like the devoutly religious, are seen as a uniquely vulnerable, needy group utterly dependent on their belief. It provides them with their foundation for meaning and sense of self. Without the reassurance that there is this one thing they can know and depend on, their life shatters.
It comes back to New Atheism, which as I saw it was a reaction not so much against religion, but against Accomodationism. In Accomodationism, arguing for the truth of atheism was insensitive at best, a cruel intellectual exercise which ignored the grieving widow in need of a future heavenly reunion and the young person in need of the knowledge that God loved them. Dawkins and his book The God Delusion were trying to take this away. Calling their experience a “delusion” was not only disrespectful, but denied their reality. Even if there really is no God, religious people can’t handle the truth, the Accomodationists said. If you can’t reassure them, then at the very least shut up.
A foundational tenet of New Atheism was that no, the religious CAN handle the truth. Life’s meaning and human ethics don’t require supernatural foundations. The Magic of Reality, the Poetry of Reality — Dawkins’ constant theme is that Nature alone is sufficient for everyone. Reason works. The religious aren’t too fragile. They can do without the delusion. They would do better.
Compare this to the Gender Critical belief that the transgender could and would be capable of accepting Nature, too. It’s not true that everything about them as a person depends utterly on their not being the sex they were born as. Therapy, time, and reason could work wonders. Trans people are more capable of resilience than they think they are. They can do without the delusion. They would do better.
Unfortunately, New Atheism’s stance on aggressive religion’s relationship to the religious was often misunderstood. Its premise that ordinary people were being controlled by a toxic religious ideology was often flipped into the claim that toxic people were creating an ideology for the purpose of controlling others. This lead to an Us vs Them mentality where criticizing religion entailed criticizing the religious. The world is thus divided into Black and White: the Good Guys, who is Us, and the Bad Guys, who is Them.
Needless to say, the belief in transgender identities is enmeshed in this demonization of the other side. What Hemant and other former New Atheists took away from New Atheism was an attitude and approach to the Opposition which wasn’t originally there. The Accomodationist position was that the problem with religion is the nasty people in it — condemn them, but give religion a pass because it helps the weak ones who need it.
Somehow, New Atheism inspired some followers to become Accommodationists. If you can’t reassure trans people, then at the very least shut up.
Was Hemant a New Atheist? I guess I’m not that familiar with his content. I always thought of him as being, not quite the scoldy you-all-need-to-shut-up Accomodationist type, but not really in the NA camp either. Perhaps I was just confused by the name. I only read the occasional blog post from him back in the day, because I found him kind of “meh.”
Funny how this common description fails to hide the fact that trans activists are a uniquely powerful and demanding group.
@Screechy Monkey
I believe so.
There wasn’t a good consensus on what New Atheism entailed. The idea that religion wasn’t sacred and was fair game for critique, criticism, and ridicule just like any political or social belief was probably the most commonly held assumption . Religious people were — or should be — capable of accepting this. Same with the claim that there was a conflict between science and religion, and that a scientific approach towards the existence of God was perfectly legitimate. Those two major tenets were held by most people who identified as New Atheists.
I think there was less agreement on that aspect of New Atheism that saw ethical problems inherent in faith itself so that even moderate and liberal believers were part of something unethical, because if you read what was written by at least some of the major proponents this meant that religion itself is a corrupting force. It can justify anything . As the saying goes, for “good people to do evil, takes a religion.” Therefore even theocrats and fundamentalists are what they are because they want to do good.
This is in direct contradiction to the idea that shitty people adopt religion as a form of hatred and control and those (few) religious believers who weren’t shitty were just enabling the shitty ones by making religion look like it wasn’t a tool for evil. Yet many atheists who used the label were convinced this was New Atheism. You could be as vicious as you wanted because 1.) religion isn’t sacred and 2.) it’s shitty people doing shitty things. Obviously, many New Atheist critics thought this was exactly what New Atheism was about (despite the fact that the so-called 4 horsemen were almost unvaryingly polite to the faithful themselves.)
Meh, the faithiests always bugged me. Or, as I think Dawkins or Hitchens called them, “atheist butters”. (As in, “I’m an atheist, but …”) No, I’m not going to go up to random churchgoers and grill them on the foundations of their faith, but I’m also not going to pretend that something is so when I don’t believe it to be. The atheist butters could never distinguish between the two scenarios. Any refusal to play along with delusion, or (heaven forfend) explicit disbelief, was seen as equivalent to harassing believers at a funeral. You see this all the time with trans skepticism.
NiV,
I always capitalized it as “Atheist Butters,” because there is (or was, it’s been a long time since I watched it) a South Park character named Butters whose “aw shucks fellas, can’t we all just be pals” demeanor seemed to match these folks so well.
Screechy,
I don’t think I’d ever made the connection to Butters for some reason.