There’s no shame, no apology
Victoria Smith on Scotland’s belated “pause”:
This is a tremendous relief and, to some of us, a surprise. As Dr Hilary Cass noted, evidence-based care for vulnerable children has been disrupted by those who prefer “a social justice model”. Being in favour of the sterilisation of autistic and gay children — or “protecting trans kids”, as it’s been known — has long been a way to advertise one’s right-side-of-history credentials. It has also, in the eyes of certain Scottish politicians, been a way to indicate that one’s own country is young, progressive, and forward-looking, rather than mired in stuffy old principles such as “child safeguarding”.
It’s worth pausing over that third sentence for an hour or two. All these people who have seen themselves, and tried to bully other people into seeing them, as “protecting trans kids” when what they’re doing is sterilizing kids who think they’re something called “trans” – are they ever going to realize what they’ve been doing?
It would have been a tragedy if, yet again, adults were permitted to sacrifice the health and future wellbeing of children for the sake of their own egos. Even so, the announcement on the Sandyford Gender Service website leaves a lot to be desired. There’s no shame, no apology, seemingly no awareness that if you are indeed lacking “evidence of safety and long-term impact” for the therapies you have already been prescribing, you are complicit in doing harm.
You are. Not the people who have been urging you to stop, but you.
I have a sickening feeling that one reason the medical interference has been seen as okie doke is because so many people were doing it at the same time. There’s a “community” being built, and when there’s a “community,” well at least you won’t be lonely with your ruined body, you’ll be able to find other people in the same boat. Once that stops being the case, the interference stops looking quite so progressive. What does this mean? That much of the fervid proselytizing for medical interference has been recruitment – so that people who have already trashed their bodies will have a pool of potential fellow-miserables. A circle of horror.
The problem is not just that evidence-based medicine was abandoned in favour of cultural trends. Any return to basic standards has to go hand-in-hand with a serious critique of the culture. On the same day the Sandyford decision was announced, it was reported that “LGBT champions” are visiting primary schools in Scotland to teach children as young as four about gender identity. That is, to teach them that if they are gender non-conforming they may in fact be the opposite sex — there is no real “championing” of LGB in this entire enterprise.
More recruits to share the misery, eh what?
That’s the flawed premise at the heart of the Cass review: you can’t really tell how well gender medicine “works” if you don’t even try to address the mechanism through which it supposedly operates. It’s not enough to just look at mental health outcomes over the short and medium term. (And the Cass report wasn’t even able to do that, because the culprit clinicians banded together to withhold the follow-up data, which is where we’d expect to find the really incriminating evidence.) There’s no clear hypothesis to test!
I know that the subject of FGM is very sensitive to some because it’s so awful. But there’s an apt comparison here. The practice is, per UNICEF (via Wikipedia):
Is this not also a circle of horror? Compare that sentiment to this one about “gender medicine,” quoted in the Guardian, and cited here at B&W last week:
With the benefit of an outside perspective we can see very clearly that there’s no direct medical necessity to remove parts of women & girls’ clitorises and labia, and that whatever supposed mental health benefits this practice confers to such victims — I will never call them “patients” or “subjects” or any other word besides victims, no matter how “medicalized” these atrocities are presented to be — it’s entirely dependent on the cultural/social landscape: the domain of social hierarchies and taboos and superstitions and rituals, and the foul effluvium of woman-hatred that enshrouds the senses of those within it.
Now, imagine there was a report that analyzed the efficacy of female genital mutilation strictly in terms of short-to-medium term self-reported mental health outcomes without ever addressing the question of why the practice had begun in the first place. Outrageous! To be clear, I’m not trying to say that the Cass report is outrageous — far from it; I think it’s a powerful and necessary report, which is already proving to be greatly beneficial to the struggle to put this scandal behind us. But it’s a sign of how outrageous our current social climate is, how mired in the bog we are, that such a report can’t be allowed to step all the way back to show us the true horror of the big picture.
No human female is born with an innate medical condition in which she is doomed to suffer unless otherwise healthy parts of her genitals are sliced off of her body. This is self-evident.
Likewise, no human of either sex is born with an innate medical condition in which they will suffer from such dire psychological distress they might die of suicide unless their otherwise healthy breasts and reproductive organs are removed, their puberty suppressed, a host of other cosmetic medical treatments are given, and all of society is compelled to band together and suppress all evidence of the sex of these poor innocents. Again, this is self-evident.
The gender mess is ultimately a battle on cultural grounds, and as much as systematic reviews of mental health outcomes are one piece of evidence we can use to put an end to it, they will never be the smoking gun, because the guilty party is the cultural climate that fosters mental distress in vulnerable people who don’t medicalize their bodies, and which (at least temporarily) showers those who do go under the scalpel with praise and social rewards.
The supposedly “positive” mental health outcomes of victims of gender medicine are as dubious and precarious as the supposedly “positive” outcomes of the victims of FGM: if the circle of horror ever stops, the fog that dulls the senses will lift and the pain will be acute.
Here’s a report about FGM in the Guardian from last month:
See again how clearly the Guardian is able to report on these “procedures” as a cultural phenomenon instead of medical treatment — and a tragic and terrible one — because Kenya is way over there.
If only they could see clearly enough to report that the resurgence of sex stereotypes, in large part due to the rise of social media, is why so many women — and men, too — are choosing to undergo their own version of “the cut” right here in the Guardian readership’s own backyard, in Europe and North America.
Well said, as usual, Arty. Of course, we all know that the fear of being one of the ‘homophobic’ is also driving some people jumping on this bandwagon. If they find it uncomfortable (or found it so before they did a lot of mental gymnastics), they put that down to the way straight people found gay people uncomfortable until they became mainstream. It’s all part of the same package to a lot of people.
Like assuming that there actually are “trans kids”, much of the discussion over gender gives this non-hypothesis an undeserved cachet of existence it can’t live up to. It’s like debating a Christian about how exactly the Holy Trinity works before they’ve even offered evidence for the existence of any gods at all, let alone their particular one(s). In giving them the benefit of the doubt that they haven’t earned, we do their work for them, letting them skip over the trivial details like explaining the actual origin and cause of the phenomena they’re foisting on the world.
“Transness” is presented as something that’s “real” (even more real than sex of material bodies), but all we’re given is a verbal description of a what amounts to a black box. They guarantee that the box we are being told about (but which we aren’t allowed to touch, examine, or even ask questions about) holds something foundational, and precious, and holy, and, that it is in each and every one of us. And somehow this object or entity has a connection with, and influence, on the mind and body it shares space(?) with. But once you start poking and prodding, you realize there are problems with the stories we’re being told, and the conflicts and contradictions within the range of things it purportedly explains. It’s not just that this “box” is empty, but that it doesn’t even exist.
YNnB:
Or the more canonical debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Let’s first establish that there are, in fact, angels and that they can, in fact, dance before we get into the weeds on slicing up pinhead dancing area.
I’m convinced that part of the intuitional machinery they’re exploiting is essentially standpoint epistemology. You can’t talk about X-related things or even have opinions on X-related things unless you, yourself, are X. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve asked someone what [pick any Genderist thing] means only to have the other person excuse him- or herself from the epistemic burden entirely. “I’m not trans, so it’s not for me to say.” The epistemological attitude is identical to that of religious mystery. Upon encountering thoughts that touch the doctrine’s intrinsic contradictions, you’re to have your mind go limp and passive, virtuously beholding the numinous.
I had to bold that last sentence, because it’s so good.
Aw, why thank you. (I might have rewritten it a few times.)
I can’t believe that, said Alice.
Humbly, Nullius,
‘I’m convinced that part of the intuitional machinery they’re exploiting is essentially standpoint epistemology. You can’t talk about X-related things or even have opinions on X-related things unless you, yourself, are X. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve asked someone what [pick any Genderist thing] means only to have the other person excuse him- or herself from the epistemic burden entirely. “I’m not trans, so it’s not for me to say.”’
It does rather more than that. Failing to be trans oneself surely does as you say, making it impossible for the unfortunately not trans person to speak on any matter that is trans, but it also puts a stop to matters pertaining to oneself, even with fulsome apologies about not being trans and not talking about trans things, such as how it has effectively stopped women from discussing ourselves, meeting alone (eg Tickle v Giggle) etc.
How did they succeed in casting our lives as their business? And not at all our business?
My mother has that passage in a frame on her office wall.
Just so. The whole “we always get to talk, and you have to just shut up” thing is actually a (hush secret hush) feature of standpoint epistemology in general. The key move, which they ram through by playing on nebulous guilt, is the assertion that the oppressor is never situated to be able to perceive the oppression or the shape of the oppressive system. To have that knowledge directly requires an oppressed positionality. Crucially, this entails that the oppressor can’t know the oppressive system and can’t even know what he or she doesn’t know. The oppressor is entirely reliant on the oppressed to see. This is why the intersectional hierarchy of oppression is so important in the woke worldview: every level is dependent upon (and subject to as a child is to a parent or teacher) the higher levels of oppression. By situating themselves as the most vulnerable, most oppressed, trans-identifying people accord themselves paramount access to knowledge itself. They become the commissars of truth. Efforts to decolonize mathematics and other “ways of knowing” leverage the same logic.
You don’t even get to know the limits of the blindness imposed by your positionality, you oppressor, so any and all business is their business and only their business.
fyi I expanded my comment into a post at my Substack, presently titled “The Circle of Horror Must Be Broken”.
I must say, that’s quite a pleasing “minds think alike” type of thing.
ArtyMorty #1
Related to your comments on FGM:
I was recently listening to a podcast about some Chinese history, and an ethnic group was mentioned that was somewhat ostracised because they did *not* bind the feet of their girls.
We can hope that Trans ‘medicine’ doesn’t last anywhere near as long as foot binding did in China.
I’m afraid I’m still somewhat at a loss. I’ve certainly observed things play out just as you say, and I agree that it appears to be so. But something still bothers me: how is it determined that women lose consistently in this?
“ Just so. The whole “we always get to talk, and you have to just shut up” thing is actually a (hush secret hush) feature of standpoint epistemology in general. The key move, which they ram through by playing on nebulous guilt, is the assertion that the oppressor is never situated to be able to perceive the oppression or the shape of the oppressive system. To have that knowledge directly requires an oppressed positionality.”
Women do indeed have a well acknowledged oppressed positionality here: we are obviously female at birth (sometimes before) and are marked and raised as such in a way that is widely acknowledged as oppressive, we have female bodies that modern medicine knows precious little about compared to male, we have uteri that produce babies and blood regularly, and the male sex exploits and derides this. TW do not have this positionality, yet the female sex is ruled ignorant, cruel, irrelevant to the matter of our own bodies in which we have “lived experience” and the oppressed positionality. I don’t get why we defer to blokes in lipstick on this matter. These dudes literally don’t know what they don’t know. Why isn’t the culture deriding the offence that these men or anyone would shit all over an oppressed woman’s positionality on this?
“Crucially, this entails that the oppressor can’t know the oppressive system and can’t even know what he or she doesn’t know. The oppressor is entirely reliant on the oppressed to see. This is why the intersectional hierarchy of oppression is so important in the woke worldview: every level is dependent upon (and subject to as a child is to a parent or teacher) the higher levels of oppression. By situating themselves as the most vulnerable, most oppressed, trans-identifying people accord themselves paramount access to knowledge itself. They become the commissars of truth. Efforts to decolonize mathematics and other “ways of knowing” leverage the same logic.”
Ditto, why aren’t TW begging to understand us, rather than lording it over us as they actually do?
“You don’t even get to know the limits of the blindness imposed by your positionality, you oppressor, so any and all business is their business and only their business.”
I just don’t get – apart from consistency of dudes rule girls drool – why this ends up with them “most oppressed” when we obviously are many times?
[…] a comment by Artymorty on There’s no shame, no […]
Arty @ 10 – it’s an outstanding comment. I was out running around yesterday afternoon and hadn’t caught up to it yet. Reading Substack version now.
Dang. Five stars.
Because it’s a Gnostic cult? Reason and rationality are irrelevant to religion. The evidence of the senses is to be denied if it’s inconsistent with revelation. Reason is to be rejected if it leads to conclusions incompatible with revelation. They’ve constructed themselves as mouthpieces of the divine. Actual oppression doesn’t matter, only the fact that they’ve experienced revealed truth, and society “marginalizes” them with its oppressive systems and structures, thereby preventing them from enlightening the rest of the world and ushering in the next step toward the perfection of humanity. Everything Queer exists outside of Western civilization’s cultural hegemony, therefore anything Queer is more oppressed than anything that is not Queer.
Gnostic cult: https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2022/sacred-and-divine/
WARNING: UNEVIDENCED SPECULATION AHEAD!
I wonder if it’s a combination of forced teaming with LGB (thereby drawing on the history of the struggle for Gay Rights, allowing them to retcon themselves into the Stonewall Riot via the transing of Marcia P. Johnson), and the perception that a man becoming a woman is a step “down” in power, importance, etc., and somehow ‘reduces” the man to something lesser, as if he’s willingly handicapping himself, and thus to be pittied. That they were supposedly “born this way”, and that “can’t help it”, and that they do this in order to “be their authentic self” just makes them (according to this speculative scenario) even more pitable, poor liddle diddums. (Whereas a woman becoming a man is seen as a step “up.” It’s interesting that men don’t seem to feel the need to defend their exalted position against the impertinent intrusions of trans identified female imposters (who are intruding on “men’s territory”), in contrast to women’s need to guard what precious little space they’ve managed to win for themselves against the intrusion of men pretending to be women. I believe the fact that women don’t represent any real threat to men in the way that men are a threat to women, explains a lot of this difference between the sexes’s differing responses.)
I believe – but I am open to correction – that an admission of responsibility for doing harm would lay them right open to legal action for damages.
I don’t think that’s true of people who simply advocated for the gender ideology. I don’t think it’s possible to sue people for that. Advising specific people to get surgeries or cross-sex hormones yes (maybe) but just defending the idea in general…I don’t think so.
People burble away about the glories of alternative “medicine” with impunity, so…
Ophelia @ #21
I should have included the previous sentence in my quotation from Victoria Smith’s article:
She is referring to the absence of any apology from Sandyford Gender Service. This is morally shocking but understandable in a legal context, where it might be used to support a case for damages. The Scottish Parliament passed an Apologies Act in 2016, but the situation is not straightforward. A legal opinion:
But
Oh I see. Interesting; thank you.