Loyalty tests: Calling a deer a horse and a 'transwoman' a woman
A true test of loyalty hinges on an invention, a piece of pure fiction. If an issue hasn’t been invented—or distorted beyond recognition—it’s a poor test of loyalty, an experiment contaminated from the start in ways that might skew the results.
There’s a Chinese expression for this: “calling a deer a horse,” derived from a famous 2,000-year-old loyalty test that exposed and thinned the Chinese court and smoothed an Imperial Chancellor’s rise.
To bring us up to the 21st century, when Trump was newly elected, it was a test of loyalty to send out spokespeople and other sycophants to praise the unprecedented size of his inauguration crowds when anyone with eyes could see the distortion.
So loyalty is a function of disparity. The greater the disparity between what actually is and what someone attests to, the greater the loyalty that person demonstrates.
There are plenty of ways allies can voice support for trans identities. A trans ally might say something like 'transwomen are transwomen,' an (admittedly rather bland) statement that recognizes the unique status of males who identify as women. But 'transwomen are transwomen' isn't saying very much, is it? A male who identifies as a woman is a male who identifies as a woman. Why bother? Better to kick it up a notch: 'Transwomen are women.'
Enforce a line like "transwomen are women" and you'll learn something about the people who repeat it—or don't.
‘Transwomen are women’ is the perfect loyalty test because ‘transwomen are women’ is not a conclusion it’s possible to come to based on observation or inquiry or even just sitting alone in a room thinking your thoughts all the way through to the end. You have to take some other route to reach such an absurd conclusion.
Maybe you’re prone to taking mental shortcuts and making lazy associations and analogies (“This is just like marriage equality!”—except for all the ways it’s nothing like that).
Maybe you succumbed to emotional manipulation or lack confidence in your own judgment. Maybe you bought the line that it’s not your place to ask questions, just lend support.
Maybe you bought the marketing campaign.
Maybe you crib your political positions from your social circle.
Maybe you don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.
Maybe you think it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or not.
Maybe you’ve been indoctrinated.
Maybe you got there by motivated reasoning (‘if we agree transwomen are women, that would justify and advance my political goals, like putting transwomen in women’s sports, spaces, etc.’).
Maybe you’re craven or just ambitious, and willing to say whatever magic words are currently fashionable to smooth your ascent.
Maybe you’re afraid of the consequences — personal or professional — if you don’t go along.
Maybe you’re driven by your self-image as a progressive, and your desire to hold onto that identity makes your thought process easy to hack: progressive people believe X, therefore, as a progressive, I too should believe X.
Maybe you’re not willing or able to think your thoughts all the way through to the end, as Helen Joyce put it.
All this makes ‘transwomen are women’ a useful tool to sort those pesky people who insist on using their own two eyes from those who will let others tell them what they see. ‘Transwomen are women’ exposes both dissenters and those willing to go along with absurdities, whatever their reasons for doing so—and those private reasons never matter so much as the public willingness to spout and submit to absurdities.
Very insightful! Another, related, frame of reference is religion. This particular delusion is part of a larger modern religious revival, in which personal identity has been deified, in the guise of the "true self." As is always the case with religious doctrines, truth and falsity are not ascribed on the basis of evidence and reason, but as a matter of faith. It matters little what source may be postulated for that faith. What does matter is conforming to the liturgical prescriptions, dogma, and the sanctioned, orthodox creeds.
For me it is about power and domination, reciting the absurd upon request. I made the analogy somewhere of bigger child at infant school sitting on top of a smaller peer and punching him repeatedly until he admits to something he didn't do, or say.
Earlier today I read about "biofouling" where invasive species potentially cling to the hulls of ships cruising the Antarctic and this will become my preferred term for trans women, as opposed to males who self-identify. Biofoulers.
Drugged up with oestrogen, sliced open, chopped and changed surgically, nursing open wounds, taking a copious amount of drugs.
The problem is that the term "trans women" is almost perfect to go into language war with because it befuddles and confuses people who are not invested in the issue to a great extent, its origins are in the 90's I understand. It is aspirational for any ideologue to be called any form to type of woman, and "trans woman" smack of entitlement and licence to invade women's spaces and privacy, I avoid at all costs.
"Biofoulers" properly conveys my contempt for those who go beyond GNC or Transvestitism and seek to convince everyone else what their deluded and drug-fuzzled minds tell them, fuelled by the grotesque ideology that is Gender Identity.