Gender malware
Gender malware
When you first run into a claim like “transwomen are women,” your internal antivirus software pops up a warning: What's going on here? Are you sure you're on board with this?
Pop-up security warnings of the “Are you sure you want to proceed?” variety strike me as a near-perfect metaphor for how ideology can overcome our mental defenses to hack and hijack our minds.
Take the gender program we're all expected to download.
When you first run into a claim like “transwomen are women,” your internal antivirus software pops up a warning: Wow, this looks weird. What does that even mean? Are you sure you’re on board with this?
If you disregard those warnings and proceed anyway, you’ve let the hackers in. Once an idea like “transwomen are women” gets into your system, it insinuates itself everywhere and starts to dismantle potential sources of resistance.
Once you’ve decided to proceed anyway, it doesn’t really matter why you clicked "OK". Maybe you trusted the source. Maybe it seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe you thought it was no big deal. Maybe you didn’t even notice the warning. It's too late.
Your system now runs on a false belief. Once you’ve let such an obvious piece of nonsense in, once you’ve embraced this nonsense as the profoundest of truths, a lot of things have to bend or break to preserve that “truthfulness.” And bend and break them you will.
A hack like this turns your defenses inside out. Rather than defending your principles, your mission, what you know about _____ [insert issue here: sex differences, child safeguarding, biology, fairness, safety, reality, public-health campaigns, etc.], the malicious software you downloaded defends itself. Your thoughts short-circuit. Presented with evidence—let’s take unfairness in sports—you fall back on “but transwomen are women.”
Gender malware is the program you run now. Every time a challenge arises, the hackers shut it down.
There seems to be something attractive about believing such an absurdity, doesn’t there?
Because it’s so counter-intuitive (most things that are wrong are — thankfully), it seems ‘deep’, ‘philosophical’ and clever. The belief protects itself, because anyone that disagrees doesn’t ‘get it’.
But it’s just boringly, blandly wrong. I know that because of the logical inconsistencies. If a trans-woman is a woman, what’s the definition of ‘woman’? How can you compare your own entirely subjective ‘gender identity’ to anyone else’s to make sure there’s an objective commonality between them?
It’s maddeningly mad, the whole thing. But the virus has infected so many. They let it in because it seemed vaguely kind, and there’s no way back for them unless they swallow an awful lot of pride.
I think we may be stuck with this.
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