I’ve got a new piece over at Year Zero that explores how progressive nonprofits went over the waterfall on gender ideology:
Thinking every issue all the way through to the end is hard. We all use shortcuts, even when we know we shouldn't. Gender identity hacked those shortcuts by capturing trusted institutions, monstering reasonable critics, and exploiting vulnerabilities in the ways nonprofits like mine operated.
When my organization set out to write a report, we tended to know what we would find before we looked. We always already knew what the funders wanted us to find, what would be politically convenient, what would let us add "now more than ever" to what we had always said. ‘Politically convenient’ is too crass, perhaps. We believed in what we were doing. We wanted our research to serve a good cause. So we made sure that it did.
Now there are areas of research where it's safe to draw basic conclusions in advance: Hunger hurts. Poverty limits. But there are risks to mixing research and advocacy. Take that working-backwards approach with gender identity, and problems magically melt away. If 'transwomen' are women, it doesn't matter if they have an advantage in sports or if they pose a risk in women's prisons.
If we want male people to be treated as female people for any or all purposes, then we can't acknowledge there are any possibly relevant differences between male and female people—even if we sound totally bonkers.
If we want to remove gatekeeping around medical transition, then detransitioners are a problem. Therefore, the finding must be that nobody or almost nobody detransitions and that nothing could have or should have prevented people from going on these enlightening 'gender journeys.'
When people like Maya Forstater raise concerns, they find themselves demonized because they worked forward from the evidence rather than backward from the desired conclusion. You're not supposed to do that. You know not to listen to someone like Forstater because she came to the wrong conclusion. You can avoid becoming like Forstater by working backwards from the right conclusion.
Besides, when it comes to gender identity, you never know what you can say without landing yourself in hot water. So, rather than speaking thoughtfully out of the desire to be understood, you speak cautiously out of fear of the consequences. Over time, anyone with an instinct for self-preservation will find herself speaking less and less.
You're told that you don't need to understand gender identity to support trans people. In fact, you're told that you will never be able to understand it as a "cis" person. I'd have expected more of my colleagues to chafe at such orders. But most submitted. Most were happy to do so. Their self-image as progressives demanded just this form of submission.
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