Cognitive dissonance and the good progressive

Source: NYT

About that wildly dishonest New York Times op-ed:

The author sneers at those who think they “see a scandal” unfolding, “albeit one with largely theoretical victims.” (In fact, Polgreen met with not-at-all theoretical victims on a recent reporting assignment. She just prefers not to think too hard about the implications of their experiences.) She studiously avoids handling any uncomfortable realities, like what the medical “autonomy” she advocates actually entails or what patients are being asked to consent to: sterility, the loss of sexual pleasure, and life as a guinea pig in an unregulated medical experiment. She attempts to relocate the debate from the realm of scientific investigation to a political battlefield, denouncing a “war on trans kids” that requires readers to pick a side.

Faced with evidence that patients continue to struggle with psychiatric problems, forming relationships, and holding down employment after transition, Polgreen deconstructs whatever she can: “There is, contrary to Aristotle, no universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes a good life.” What’s a good life, anyway? Who are we to judge? This is the same kind of open-minded relativism that would rather let drug addicts slowly decompose on city street corners than imagine what helping them might look like.

She goes on to note that, “[a]s much as Cass’s report insists that all lives — trans lives, cis lives, non-binary lives — have equal value, taken in full it seems to have a clear, paramount goal: making living life in the sex you are assigned at birth as attractive and likely as possible.” Ignore, for a moment, the pseudoscientific language — sex is not an arbitrary assignment but a biological fact — and focus on what is being criticised here: the desire for children to avoid unnecessary hormones and surgeries and strife through self-acceptance.

Yes, in fact, accepting your one and only body — rather than waging an unending war on your flesh and the world’s perceptions — is the best possible outcome for every patient who turns up at a gender clinic. It is truly remarkable that saying so has become fraught at all.

When confronted with disconfirming evidence, a believer has two options: walk away or double down. In his studies of disconfirmation and cognitive dissonance, sociologist Leon Festinger described the strategies believers employ to avoid painful reckonings, including the “avoidance of dissonance by misperception” and the push to demonstrate ever more enthusiastic, active, and total buy-in when one’s core beliefs are challenged. The greater the dissonance, the greater the pressure believers are under to reduce that dissonance by any means necessary.

It’s hard to imagine a much greater source of dissonance than the possibility that many US progressives have thrown their support behind a medical scandal targeting vulnerable children and young people who have been swept up in a dangerous delusion. If it were true that doctors were sterilising gender-confused patients incapable of providing informed consent, that would not only be a very bad thing in itself: it would make supporters feel like very bad people! Therefore, the claim cannot be true and only a very bad — or, in Polgreen’s words, a very “transphobic” — person would ever suggest it were. A good progressive does not entertain the ravings of transphobes.

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