Affirming 4 kidz
The wording. You always have to look closely at the wording. Like this NPR headline:
Supreme Court hears challenge to law banning gender-affirming care for trans kids
Calling it “gender-affirming care” is glaringly tendentious. Is it really care to remove healthy breasts or invert healthy penises in order to “affirm” a minor’s belief that she/he is the other sex? Is affirming children’s fantasies with drastic medical interventions really care? Is NPR really so confident that “yes” is the right answer to both questions that it doesn’t worry at all about encouraging teenagers to wreck their bodies?
If so, why? How? How do otherwise reasonable adults convince themselves that maiming teenagers is a good idea?
Front and center at the Supreme Court on Wednesday is the battle over the rights of transgender children. At issue is a state law in Tennessee that blocks minors from accessing gender-affirming care in the state.
But minors are minors. They generally do need parental permission for medical procedures, because they’re minors. It’s not obvious that “transgender children” should be an exception. It’s more obvious that they shouldn’t be.
In the last three years, more than two dozen states have enacted laws that ban puberty blockers, hormones and other treatments for minors seeking gender-affirming care. The issue has become highly politicized, as anyone who watched election ads this fall can attest.
But it’s already politicized. The whole idea is politicized. It’s a political fad encouraged by political enthusiasts and enforced by political bullies…and promoted by political idiots like NPR. The claim that there is such a thing as “gender-affirming care” is a gruesomely political and harmful claim. “First do no harm”: remember? Disrupting children’s puberties=harm.
Challenging Tennessee’s law in the Supreme Court are three trans kids and their parents.
“Kids” again: first in the headline and now in the story. What happened to the word “children”? Calling them “kids” is 1. part of the toe-curling folksiness and forced intimacy that NPR is so devoted to, and 2. careful avoidance of admitting that the “trans kids” are children.
The word “kids” appears nine times in the article. “Children” appears twice.
With many individuals, I’d be tempted to ascribe it to a tendency to outsource moral judgement, in this case deferring to some authority who has deemed trans “rights” to be a “progressive” cause. Once somebody higher up the food chain has blessed it, they don’t have think about it any more themselves; they can climb aboard the bandwagon with a clear conscience and an empty head. Once the bandwagon starts rolling faster and farther, passing ethical and prudential boundaries one might have baulked at, it becomes harder to get off without seriously lacerating your ego, and/or social relations. Before too long, you find yourself defending the absurd and horrific.
That’s for the passengers. As far as those driving the bandwagon, the ones setting the course and privy to the secrets they know they need to hide from everyone else, I have no explanation to offer, apart from wilfull ignorance. It can’t be lack of information: they have internalized the rules of self-censorship and rewording too well to be able to feign not knowing. Nobody writes a story about abortion that doesn’t use the the word “woman” by accident.
That faux folksiness also helps hide the politicization and the horror of what they are defending and promoting. They’ve chosen a side and they’re trying to put the best polish on it that they can. They have to know exactly what they’re doing in order to do that as well as they do. In the meantime they’re running interference for fetishists touting the mutilation and sterilization of children, and helping them camouflage themselves by agreeing to portray it as calling it “social justice.”
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Affirming 4 […]
Kids are the people you have to be down with. What else are you going to call them? “The youngest part of the [American] … Nation”? h/t Allan Bloom The Closing of the American Mind.
By listening to stories. From religion to pseudoscience to social experiments with the bodies of teenagers, all bad ideas are wrapped up in a compelling story.
“Once upon a time, there were babies born with a difference. Their inner gender didn’t match their outer sex and this made them very, very unhappy. They are among us today. It will never go away because these children know who they are. It takes an open mind and loving heart to first recognize and then accept these kids who are different, allowing them to become their authentic selves. One day, that person was you. Oh, they will now live happy ever after! The End.”
Once this narrative is set, all the facts and arguments trim themselves into character development and plot devices inside the narrative. We live through the stories in our heads. Thinking our way out into a different story is hard.
There’s a term I’ve mentioned here before. I can’t find the comment but it was something like “intellectual division of labour”. And I think the problem is less that we do it (since we live in a world where all sorts of division of labour are unavoidable) but that we don’t want to be seen to be doing it. I suspect it goes back to some sort of innate intuitionist understanding of morality. We all like to think we are some kind of Solomon and that our wisdom is our essence so when we get it wrong we feel we are diminished. Now I’m a moral abolitionist so when I make a bad ethical judgement it’s largely only my intellectual pride that is hurt* but for most people there’s real shame involved.
I genuinely believe that if we could just be more open about how we do morality we would have much less of a problem. And when we are in a world where socially deadly purity spirals are just a few dozen clicks away that need for that openness is urgent.
*I don’t mean doing an actually shitty thing. When that happens I do feel shame which I consider appropriate.
‘Gender affirming’ sounds so much nicer than ‘sex changing.’