Wanted to share this insightful comment from Lee Patterson (@Bio_logical on Twitter) on my recent post, All About Doubt: As you signal by making it the subhead, the theme of your article is summed up in this quote: "The ways in which the decision to identify as trans and transition mirrors an authentic journey of self-discovery makes it harder to question."
There is no route to self discovery without being challenged from outside yourself. A self delusion doesn't yield to introspection but to examination in the cold light of anothers mind. This does not mean that another gets to judge, simply that they force the self explorer to look at the issue from different perspectives. If I have a belief but can't explain why or justify it then I am forced to admit that it is a belief that I hold rather than a provable fact.
The greatest crime being committed on trans youth is that their flawed beliefs are unchallenged. This allows others to hijack their minds and persuade them to mutilate their bodies to try to match the broken mind.
The biggest hypocrisy is that the genuinely gender dysphoric who need the treatment and support can't get heard because the activists are too busy shouting down people with real concerns.
You have to know yourself before you can be yourself.
Your observation also helps to explain with autistic children fall prey to the trans understanfing of self. Autistic children have a severely impaired theory of mind, and thus lack the tools to process an outsider's conception of their predicament, while the body/mind dualism of trans ideology is a neat package to the autistic child, because it offers an explanation that does not expect any degree of introspection to validate. With evangelical fervour, autistic kids are presented a magical explanation for their otherwise unfathomable discomfort, and to them it fits perfectly.
"Forcing people to pretend they believe in a subjective, anti-scientific idea with no basis in reality, will go very badly wrong." Very true. The danger we face is that we cannot know *how* it will go wrong. The Christian "cult" of the 1st century survived to spawn one of history's most successful triggers for state-sponsored murder (a.k.a. warfare). Science emerged during the early decades of "the Enlightenment" as a way to counter the intellectual backwardness imposed by religious orthodoxy.
But institutionalized "science" has also been perverted for horrific ends -- just think of eugenics. The fight over epistemic authority is, in some ways, more serious now than ever before, due to the reach of social media. During the decades preceding the internet, editorial and production controls in major media normally hampered widespread dissemination of wildly kooky conspiracy theories, but today they thrive and threaten the foundations of democratic forms of government.
It's truly tempting to optimistically assume that "the truth will out," that science will emerge victorious in the TRA attempt to subvert any genuine application of reason to empirical evidence. But there are powerful forces massed against us. One of the central challenges is to identify and expose those forces. I don't believe it's any kind of single global conspiracy; the rise of gender ideology is the product of many converging causes. Nevertheless, they must be shown to be fraudulent. That's the real work we face.
There is no route to self discovery without being challenged from outside yourself. A self delusion doesn't yield to introspection but to examination in the cold light of anothers mind. This does not mean that another gets to judge, simply that they force the self explorer to look at the issue from different perspectives. If I have a belief but can't explain why or justify it then I am forced to admit that it is a belief that I hold rather than a provable fact.
The greatest crime being committed on trans youth is that their flawed beliefs are unchallenged. This allows others to hijack their minds and persuade them to mutilate their bodies to try to match the broken mind.
The biggest hypocrisy is that the genuinely gender dysphoric who need the treatment and support can't get heard because the activists are too busy shouting down people with real concerns.
You have to know yourself before you can be yourself.
Your observation also helps to explain with autistic children fall prey to the trans understanfing of self. Autistic children have a severely impaired theory of mind, and thus lack the tools to process an outsider's conception of their predicament, while the body/mind dualism of trans ideology is a neat package to the autistic child, because it offers an explanation that does not expect any degree of introspection to validate. With evangelical fervour, autistic kids are presented a magical explanation for their otherwise unfathomable discomfort, and to them it fits perfectly.
Thank you so much for these posts Eliza. You are a voice of sanity.
"Forcing people to pretend they believe in a subjective, anti-scientific idea with no basis in reality, will go very badly wrong." Very true. The danger we face is that we cannot know *how* it will go wrong. The Christian "cult" of the 1st century survived to spawn one of history's most successful triggers for state-sponsored murder (a.k.a. warfare). Science emerged during the early decades of "the Enlightenment" as a way to counter the intellectual backwardness imposed by religious orthodoxy.
But institutionalized "science" has also been perverted for horrific ends -- just think of eugenics. The fight over epistemic authority is, in some ways, more serious now than ever before, due to the reach of social media. During the decades preceding the internet, editorial and production controls in major media normally hampered widespread dissemination of wildly kooky conspiracy theories, but today they thrive and threaten the foundations of democratic forms of government.
It's truly tempting to optimistically assume that "the truth will out," that science will emerge victorious in the TRA attempt to subvert any genuine application of reason to empirical evidence. But there are powerful forces massed against us. One of the central challenges is to identify and expose those forces. I don't believe it's any kind of single global conspiracy; the rise of gender ideology is the product of many converging causes. Nevertheless, they must be shown to be fraudulent. That's the real work we face.