Originally a comment by Artymorty on Well knock me down with a feather.

How have so many of them managed to convince themselves that children who “have doubts about their gender identity” are in touch with a great truth as opposed to just being uncomfortable in an ordinary way that dissipates over time? How have so many managed to convince themselves that it’s better to tamper with children’s sexes rather than watch and wait?

Nobody likes Nazi Germany analogies, but the phenomenon where everybody remains complicit even in the face of the worst atrocities under certain circumstances when the social system is arranged just-so… I suspect this has to be some kind of vestigial behavioural trait from our bygone tribal apehood. (As so much of human irrational behaviour is.)

The tell that there’s something deeply primitive going on, to me, is that over and over again I hear the same thing: those of us with our eyes open make a good-faith effort to try and show our friends what’s going on, and they flat-out refuse to see or hear it, often on the verge of panic while doing so. Repeatedly, from different people on different continents, I’ve heard about lifelong friends or relatives literally putting their fingers in their ears rather than hearing us, usually right at the point when the listeners seem to know that they’re about to hear something they can’t disprove or ignore. Same with the strange phenomenon of people being less likely to read articles about transgender if they’re presented as more likely to change their minds about it.

A Hannah Arendt-ian view might say that on the matter of transgender, these people prefer to be nobodies rather than somebodies. They place the locus of responsibility outside themselves and they refuse to be persons. Their moral framework rests fundamentally on their sense of obligation to fit into the social groups they’re in. This is in contrast to the “upstanders” (as therapist Stella O’Malley calls them) for whom their moral framework rests on an inner dialogue about right and wrong, who will naturally deviate from the group if their inner moral compasses direct them to. The first group can’t bear the idea that they might have to build up a moral framework about transgenderism out of a sense of right and wrong that comes from inside their own minds — this is completely alien to them. For the second group, the locus of right and wrong already resides inside their own inner dialogue with themselves, so it comes naturally.

…they did not feel an obligation but acted according to something which was self-evident to them even though it was no longer self-evident to those around them. Hence their conscience, if that is what it was, had no obligatory character, it said, ‘This I can’t do,’ rather than, ‘This I ought not to do.’

It’s strange; there are parallels between Arendt’s philosophical ideas about individuals’ morality and ideas from anthopology and sociology about how societies are organized overall. They both come into play around the subject of gender. Arendt says that people seem to naturally gravitate towards one of two internal moral frameworks: most people rely on obligations to their in-group collective, but a minority rely on their individual, internally-constructed sense of right and wrong instead. Anthropologists say that societies tend to be organized around collectivist values or individualist ones. And furthermore, collectivistic cultures teach people to fit into the gender roles prescribed by the culture they’re in, and individualistic cultures teach people to follow their individual sense of self, which comes from within. See the parallel? People with collectivistic moral frameworks don’t see the problem with transgender, and people with individualistic moral frameworks do, just as societies with collectivistic frameworks foster gender norms and rigid gender roles, and individualistic ones don’t.

If the age of enlightenment was ushered in when individualistic thinkers with individualistic internal moral frameworks took leadership over societies — I’m thinking of the Founding Fathers, specifically — and established that the values of individualism would dominate in society, perhaps our current age, which has suddenly lurched regressively back to old collectivist gender roles, reflects a fundamental shift back to a dominance of collectivistic values over individualistic ones.

You could probably argue that we as a society have rapidly become more influenced by our social interactions with social media apps than we are by social interactions within our local communities. Social media is a collectivist as it gets: an endless popularity contest of likes, on literally a global scale.

Maybe the drug of social media is rewiring everyone’s brains to be less capable of formulating their own sense of right from wrong anymore.

Upstanders just don’t get enough likes.