Guest post: Turning into a right wing “hurr durr” fest
Originally a comment by Artymorty on The naughty apparatchiks.
The sheer number of “GC twitter” people on board with Trump’s (and the Manhattan Institute bros’) racist bullshit makes me sick.
A lesson I learned from the New Atheist movement comes to mind, a little line I started mentally sneering at people as I began to sour on the skeptic bros who flooded the meetups-in-the-pub and the comment threads on the blogs: Dude, it’s not a great feat of intellectual prowess that you figured out god doesn’t exist. The debate about religion is far more complex and interesting and important and relevant for what it reveals about the flaws in humans’ ability to think — the fact that highly intelligent people can fall under the spell of god-bothering, and the impact it’s having on society.
The people who never got past “Hurr durr, Christians are so dumb” always seemed, quite frankly, less pleasant to be around than many of the well-intentioned, thoughtful theists with whom I passionately disagreed about religion.
Not that there was anything necessarily wrong with people openly mocking the stupidity of Christianity. I didn’t disagree with what the “hurr durr” lot were saying. It’s just that by itself, they weren’t saying much, and in their lack of interest in the deeper ideas that swirled around the religion-atheism debate — the impacts it had on politics and social progress and justice and all that — they were revealing to me that they weren’t really my kind of people.
So it is with the “GC” movement, for lack of a better term. “Hurr durr look how dumb the libs are acting with all this troony nonsense” is a fair criticism. Liberals are indeed acting incredibly dumb about crossdressers and gender benders. But by itself it doesn’t offer anything but condescension, and without the broader context (well-intentioned people thinking they’re doing good by gays and women, but being misguided, for example) it can very quickly turn into a sour, anti-humanist right-wing self-serving attitude.
I’ve frankly had it with a lot of the people in the gender-critical twittersphere. My gender atheism hasn’t waned one bit, but I’m far less interested in socializing among the GC folks than I was a couple years ago, given that it’s turning into a right wing “hurr durr” fest. The Libs-of-TikTok-ification of the gender discourse is fucking tedious.
I should add that I think part of the rightward shift in response to gender fundamentalism is that there isn’t any debate being had.
Atheists have had their share of oppression throughout history. But in the New Atheist movement, they weren’t facing bans from public platforms, and threats of arrest and imprisonment. (Though they certainly got their share of personal attacks and they faced social repercussions for their outspoken blasphemy.)
Christians and atheists were actively engaged in debate — there were debates all over the place!
The gender mess has had virtually no actual debates. Only rabid protests and threats and attacks on our civil liberties.
So that’s a big factor in driving people away from the left. And I can sympathize at least a bit with that.
It’s funny how that works. Neo-Inquisition. Religion, meh, up to you, knock yourself out. Gender? HERETIC! BLASPHEMER! GET THE FIRE READY!
I’m not sure I’d consider the ‘Libs of Tiktok’ types to be gender critical. Remember, the term gender critical started with the meaning of ‘person that is critical of the idea of gender as an internal identity’ or similar. The only thing the hurrr durr crowd shares with that idea is a rejection of policies catering to trans people, but for completely different reasons. That group often believes whole-heartedly in gender as a social role, determined at birth by the individual’s sex.
And so I encourage resisting the efforts of the trans brigade to lump us together. We are briefly allied on one political issue; should it be resolved in our favour, we will immediately part ways.
I wouldn’t call it an “alliance” but a coincidental agreement on the nature of material reality. It’s the old “Even a broken watch is correct twice a day” thing. Just because I happen to agree with a Nazi that the sky is blue, gravity is a thing, and that 2+2=5, that doesn’t make me a Nazi. The congruence between our formulation of gravitation, light diffraction through our atmosphere, and the functions of mathematics with our experience of the physical universe is not because of the correctness or accuracy of Nazism. There are likely thousands (millions?) of discreet topics and claims which both myself and a Nazi will agree are correct conclusions about the nature of the material world. This “agreement” doesn’t make me a Nazi “ally” or “sympathizer.” The agreement isn’t political. That supposed “agreement” does not impinge on my ability to dismiss the specific claims of Nazism without fear of being accused of inconsistency.
My understanding is that there are some parts of the gender critical “side” who are indeed taking more of an “alliance,” approach accepting that incidental agreement on the nature of reality as the basis for some degree of political action and common cause. They are mistaking the momentarily correct broken watch for a reliable device that has a broader use and application than would be advisable. I don’t think this is a good idea, because it does allow that transactivist tarring with the same brush to stick more than it should. At some point, believing the broken watch is going to make you miss your train, left in a place where you don’t want to be.