Ideas and claims that can't withstand scrutiny create a dead zone. The dead zone surrounding gender ideology is so large that it covers women's rights and experiences entirely.
How does "taking back institutions" work when the driving force is both within and in those moving in? I see stories about medical schools and the woke medical students who are insisting on the usual TRA messaging — men are women, sex is assigned at birth, and all that. So we have the major medical associations, who simply are not paying attention and assume it's "just like the gay thing," followed by the clinicians, some who are complete ideologues, others who are following the crowd (the latest Porter-Jick) and still others who won't make waves even in the face of colleagues doing great harm, followed by the even more ideologically driven students fresh out of liberal colleges and universities where they are immersed in this stuff. I can't see it getting any better.
As for friends, I've lost my share and I know many of those remaining think I've lost my mind, become a bigot overnight because I can't face the thought of a trans child. That all of my ranting about studies and lack of evidence and detransitioners is a ruse to cover up my transphobia or simply a symptom of a distress-induced mental breadown. When I start talking about the wider societal harms and the threats to women's rights, the real shut down begins. They don't seem to notice or care about the subtle shifts, including that suddenly no one can define "woman," which they hand-wave away as a silly linguistic issue. It's LARP Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I very much want out.
What we are seeing right now in the sporting world is giving me hope that people are now emboldened to say the emperor has no clothes! (With deep irony, I say thank you, Lia Thomas!) The issue is there are so many true believers in positions of power, and it will be very hard work to get them out.
Reminds me so much of growing up religious. "Don't question your faith" my dad would say when I would ask inconvenient questions. Patriarchal religions are about male supremacy and trans ideology is no different. The belief system serves to prop up male power by disempowering women and reinforcing our subordinate status. Female deities are supplanted by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost making males the end all be all of everything (trans women are women, men can get pregnant, sex is "assigned") and women superfluous. The best women can hope for is to serve men in any way we can, be that parroting his dogma, preaching his gospel, mortifying our own flesh, or giving him children for his church. It's a cult through and through.
I'm interested in trying to understand what you describe as 'gender ideology as part of a broader trend toward truth decay and post-truth politics'.
As such, I've found the following book helpful: Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - And Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
The book finds commonalities between a range of contemporary theories, including gender identity theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory and others, which have increasingly achieved a dominant status in university scholarship and in so-called Social Justice activism.
The origins of these theories are traced back by the authors to the postmodern theorists of the 1960s, particularly Foucault and Derrida. There is a shared belief that the only reality we can know is that which is socially constructed through linguistic discourse, a related rejection of meta-narratives such as 'science' and 'progress', and an analysis of power that views it as inseparable from knowledge and deployed through all social interactions. So the role of the Social Justice activist is to deconstruct linguistic discourse to identify ways in which the power of the 'privileged' groups (cis, white, het, male) oppresses those self-defining within the whole panoply of less privileged (and ever more fragmented) identity categories.
What initially seemed a relatively arcane body of theory, confined to obscure corners of academia, and often infused with irony and playfulness, has now taken root in the wider world in a reified form, turbo-charging a form of activism at odds with the values of universal liberalism that most of us on the socially liberal left sign up to.
Unwittingly, the theorists of early postmodernism have unleashed a monster.
Whereas civil rights movements of earlier times invoked an identity politics of common humanity (in which everyone should have access to the same universal rights), the Social Justice activists of today practise a politics of the common enemy, in which ones own 'authentic lived experience' is the highest form of knowledge, and in which the voices of those in possession of 'privilege' have to be suppressed. Hence 'research justice' becomes not just about foregrounding voices that would traditionally have been marginalised, but about actively shutting down voices perceived as privileged.
It is the politics of division, not inclusion.
It is increasingly important that those of us concerned with universal liberal values and social justice (in the old sense) speak out against this increasingly strident, aggressive, divisive mode of knowledge production and its associated activism.
I am a serious but unpublished poet. I write poems on a regular basis (although recently I have had a dry period). I finally found an online publisher who liked my poems and agreed to publish some. However, he had all the earmarks of what I now call a "bleeding-heart liberal" (of which I was one until recently). For example, he sided with the Palestinians against Israel, even though the Palestinians do more to keep the violence going. And I noticed that any time he mentioned trans people, his comments were dripping with sorrow and sympathy. So, I posted my one anti-trans poem on the forum that we were both participating in. That precipitated a full day of arguing via emails, and it also caused him to withdraw his invitation to post my poetry on his site. So trans people have now managed to prevent me from getting my poems published.
I have been trying to understand why this issue has made such inroads among liberals, and I find two reasons: First, trans activists have portrayed trans people as the most pitiful of the most pitiful of the most pitiful of minorities in the world. They have painted an image of trans people as experiencing extraordinary existential pain from being trapped in the wrong bodies, and they have convinced us that it is not just adults who feel this pain, but small children too! (and who wants a child to suffer?) The fact that a lot of trans people are murdered or commit suicide bolsters their argument that trans people have an EMERGENCY NEED for sympathy. Of course, there is nothing that we, as outsiders, can say about this since we are not trans. If I say, "I don't believe they are suffering THAT much", I have no response to the people who ask me, "How do you know?" Having experienced existential pain myself during my life, I finally got to the point where I simply had to say, "I don't believe it" with no way to back that up. In other words, having experienced my own pain, I just decided that I don't believe that their pain can be that much worse. After all, many trans people spend decades of their adult lives living as their birth sex before they finally decide to transition. If it was so horribly painful, why didn't they transition sooner?
Another reason why I think that trans people have made such inroads among liberals is that, before this, the response of liberals to other minorities was simply inadequate. They claimed to support women, but then continued to hold the glass ceiling in place. They claimed to support people of color, but then continued to exclude them from their companies and white neighborhoods. Having failed previously to live up to their ideals, I think liberals decided that this time they were going to "get it right", and "getting it right" to them meant going in on trans ideology 150%. And so, they swallowed the whole rotten animal -- head, horns, hooves and tail. And now they feel committed.
Ironically, however, what they've discovered is that supporting white men in dresses makes them less uncomfortable than supporting actual women and actual people of color. So it turns out that everything has worked out to their advantage. White prejudice is safe!
George Lazoff has some great stuff about framing and specifically, how the right uses it to strategically dismantle the left and its positions with voters.
‘Who benefits?’ could be answered by asking ‘Which group wants to erode women’s rights to reproductive freedom?’ How better to silence protests against making abortion and birth control illegal than to redefine women as ‘front hole owners’ and mobilizing a minority group to demand that having a uterus be redefined out of the definition of a woman? How better to erode women’s rights than to divide them from other potential minority allies, to the point of vilification and the approval of violence against women, if they speak out?
‘Where is this headed?’
Starting in the middle ages and up until a couple centuries ago, there was a commonly used device in Europe called a brank or scold’s bridle. It had a variety of sharp or otherwise pain inducing barbs attached to a tab held in place in the mouths of women by an iron cage. It was purportedly used to silence ‘nagging, gossiping women’, but more often women who challenged priests, defied their husbands or rioted. A husband could parade his wife wearing this device around town, as a form of humiliation and torture. She would often be abused by people along the way. It sent a clear message to follow the rules and keep quiet.
Is this trend the modern equivalent of a Scold’s Bridle? On one hand I think it sounds way far fetched, but it’s rather uncanny how similarly the agenda of the radical trans activists meshes with the Republican agenda, regarding the appropriate behavior of women, even if they’re only impetus is to divide the left.
It’s also of interesting note that in Iran, religiously enforced gender norms are so strict that gay people are forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery or be put to death. Many flee. That overt a policy would not fly in the states, but propaganda does work well in the US.
Also, 4chan users have been known to create fake feminist accounts to foment discord and discredit feminists by posting nasty things and bullying people. I met a guy in NYC who was a paid right wing online troll.
On the other hand, maybe some people have become so unbalanced in lockdown, so isolated from contact, that they don’t know what’s real anymore and they’re hyper concerned with being viewed as ‘good’ or not cancelled. More people than ever are taking antidepressants, which tend to blunt empathy, so perhaps external cues guide their perception of being good, more than their feelings?
Eliza, what you wrote about not being able to predict 5 years ago what's happening now....is what I'm thinking all the time. 5 years ago my primary focus was preventing Ecological Disaster, including but not only Climate Disaster. Now I'm an outcast---a " transphobic bigot" to groups I worked with, and to friends. I'm doing pragmatic organizing work, but need new friends! And moral support. Do you have suggestions on this front....the front of how to find new friends, have moral support. It's hard in a time when people are afraid to state their names and show their faces? Are you anywhere near Seattle by any chance? I would love to invite you to a party! Feel free to email me thru my substack: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-transgender
A YouTube channel named Luxander has uploaded a video with a thumbnail of a concentration camp image covered in the trans flag and uses the horrors of the Holocaust to warn against 'trans extermination'.
I think I know where it's coming from. I've been repeatedly suspended from twitter and finally now permanently banned for questioning the science and logic concerning the evidence, and the way it is presented to us by the powers that be, that a new respiratory disease allegedly started in one of the most heavily polluted ( and increasingly more so) cities in the world and that a new invisible particle was definitely the cause of it, even though no-one had actually been able to see it or observe it indirectly. https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/seeing-is-believing
These forces hate women, and the innate wisdom and power of women with a passion.
This assault on free speech, debate, women's rights, human rights to personal, physical, health and intellectual autonomy is all part of the same agenda to subjugate us.
I am a serious but largely unpublished philosopher. I read the works of Tim Morton. Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, a number of contemporary and ancient Buddhist texts, and many more with great joy in my heart because here are expressed ideas that make me feel good. I once gave lessons in Foucault, which would have never let Butler's reading in the door. Everything I write is informed by my immersion in this beautiful philosophical world at my back. Although I once worked for a PhD many years ago, I felt that an auto didactic existence in a world of ordinary work and "business" would be personally more fulfilling than competing for tenure - and even thirty years ago I could sense the growing ideological power of university administrations and hierarchies. So I look forward to the day one of these woke idiots discovers a copy of Zarathustra or The Archaeology of Knowledge or some other such seminal work in the history of our western ideas and reads it to discover some offence, whereafter great bonfires are lit in the gardens of, just for example. the gardens of George Square in Edinburgh where I graduated with my Masters, as docile students run back and forth to the university library looking for fuel. For then I will be vindicated. Completely. The dead white men for whom students of media/gender/film studies are anathema will then surely be wiped from history and the next generation will be able to pursue the study of its own consciousness without hindrance.
"... ressentiment (it’s your fault) and bad conscience (it’s my fault) and their common fruit (responsibility) [are not] simple psychological events but rather ... the fundamental categories of Semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general."
How does "taking back institutions" work when the driving force is both within and in those moving in? I see stories about medical schools and the woke medical students who are insisting on the usual TRA messaging — men are women, sex is assigned at birth, and all that. So we have the major medical associations, who simply are not paying attention and assume it's "just like the gay thing," followed by the clinicians, some who are complete ideologues, others who are following the crowd (the latest Porter-Jick) and still others who won't make waves even in the face of colleagues doing great harm, followed by the even more ideologically driven students fresh out of liberal colleges and universities where they are immersed in this stuff. I can't see it getting any better.
As for friends, I've lost my share and I know many of those remaining think I've lost my mind, become a bigot overnight because I can't face the thought of a trans child. That all of my ranting about studies and lack of evidence and detransitioners is a ruse to cover up my transphobia or simply a symptom of a distress-induced mental breadown. When I start talking about the wider societal harms and the threats to women's rights, the real shut down begins. They don't seem to notice or care about the subtle shifts, including that suddenly no one can define "woman," which they hand-wave away as a silly linguistic issue. It's LARP Invasion of the Body Snatchers and I very much want out.
What we are seeing right now in the sporting world is giving me hope that people are now emboldened to say the emperor has no clothes! (With deep irony, I say thank you, Lia Thomas!) The issue is there are so many true believers in positions of power, and it will be very hard work to get them out.
Reminds me so much of growing up religious. "Don't question your faith" my dad would say when I would ask inconvenient questions. Patriarchal religions are about male supremacy and trans ideology is no different. The belief system serves to prop up male power by disempowering women and reinforcing our subordinate status. Female deities are supplanted by Father, Son, and Holy Ghost making males the end all be all of everything (trans women are women, men can get pregnant, sex is "assigned") and women superfluous. The best women can hope for is to serve men in any way we can, be that parroting his dogma, preaching his gospel, mortifying our own flesh, or giving him children for his church. It's a cult through and through.
I'm interested in trying to understand what you describe as 'gender ideology as part of a broader trend toward truth decay and post-truth politics'.
As such, I've found the following book helpful: Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity - And Why this Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
The book finds commonalities between a range of contemporary theories, including gender identity theory, queer theory, postcolonial theory, critical race theory and others, which have increasingly achieved a dominant status in university scholarship and in so-called Social Justice activism.
The origins of these theories are traced back by the authors to the postmodern theorists of the 1960s, particularly Foucault and Derrida. There is a shared belief that the only reality we can know is that which is socially constructed through linguistic discourse, a related rejection of meta-narratives such as 'science' and 'progress', and an analysis of power that views it as inseparable from knowledge and deployed through all social interactions. So the role of the Social Justice activist is to deconstruct linguistic discourse to identify ways in which the power of the 'privileged' groups (cis, white, het, male) oppresses those self-defining within the whole panoply of less privileged (and ever more fragmented) identity categories.
What initially seemed a relatively arcane body of theory, confined to obscure corners of academia, and often infused with irony and playfulness, has now taken root in the wider world in a reified form, turbo-charging a form of activism at odds with the values of universal liberalism that most of us on the socially liberal left sign up to.
Unwittingly, the theorists of early postmodernism have unleashed a monster.
Whereas civil rights movements of earlier times invoked an identity politics of common humanity (in which everyone should have access to the same universal rights), the Social Justice activists of today practise a politics of the common enemy, in which ones own 'authentic lived experience' is the highest form of knowledge, and in which the voices of those in possession of 'privilege' have to be suppressed. Hence 'research justice' becomes not just about foregrounding voices that would traditionally have been marginalised, but about actively shutting down voices perceived as privileged.
It is the politics of division, not inclusion.
It is increasingly important that those of us concerned with universal liberal values and social justice (in the old sense) speak out against this increasingly strident, aggressive, divisive mode of knowledge production and its associated activism.
Thanks for the post!
I am a serious but unpublished poet. I write poems on a regular basis (although recently I have had a dry period). I finally found an online publisher who liked my poems and agreed to publish some. However, he had all the earmarks of what I now call a "bleeding-heart liberal" (of which I was one until recently). For example, he sided with the Palestinians against Israel, even though the Palestinians do more to keep the violence going. And I noticed that any time he mentioned trans people, his comments were dripping with sorrow and sympathy. So, I posted my one anti-trans poem on the forum that we were both participating in. That precipitated a full day of arguing via emails, and it also caused him to withdraw his invitation to post my poetry on his site. So trans people have now managed to prevent me from getting my poems published.
I have been trying to understand why this issue has made such inroads among liberals, and I find two reasons: First, trans activists have portrayed trans people as the most pitiful of the most pitiful of the most pitiful of minorities in the world. They have painted an image of trans people as experiencing extraordinary existential pain from being trapped in the wrong bodies, and they have convinced us that it is not just adults who feel this pain, but small children too! (and who wants a child to suffer?) The fact that a lot of trans people are murdered or commit suicide bolsters their argument that trans people have an EMERGENCY NEED for sympathy. Of course, there is nothing that we, as outsiders, can say about this since we are not trans. If I say, "I don't believe they are suffering THAT much", I have no response to the people who ask me, "How do you know?" Having experienced existential pain myself during my life, I finally got to the point where I simply had to say, "I don't believe it" with no way to back that up. In other words, having experienced my own pain, I just decided that I don't believe that their pain can be that much worse. After all, many trans people spend decades of their adult lives living as their birth sex before they finally decide to transition. If it was so horribly painful, why didn't they transition sooner?
Another reason why I think that trans people have made such inroads among liberals is that, before this, the response of liberals to other minorities was simply inadequate. They claimed to support women, but then continued to hold the glass ceiling in place. They claimed to support people of color, but then continued to exclude them from their companies and white neighborhoods. Having failed previously to live up to their ideals, I think liberals decided that this time they were going to "get it right", and "getting it right" to them meant going in on trans ideology 150%. And so, they swallowed the whole rotten animal -- head, horns, hooves and tail. And now they feel committed.
Ironically, however, what they've discovered is that supporting white men in dresses makes them less uncomfortable than supporting actual women and actual people of color. So it turns out that everything has worked out to their advantage. White prejudice is safe!
George Lazoff has some great stuff about framing and specifically, how the right uses it to strategically dismantle the left and its positions with voters.
‘Who benefits?’ could be answered by asking ‘Which group wants to erode women’s rights to reproductive freedom?’ How better to silence protests against making abortion and birth control illegal than to redefine women as ‘front hole owners’ and mobilizing a minority group to demand that having a uterus be redefined out of the definition of a woman? How better to erode women’s rights than to divide them from other potential minority allies, to the point of vilification and the approval of violence against women, if they speak out?
‘Where is this headed?’
Starting in the middle ages and up until a couple centuries ago, there was a commonly used device in Europe called a brank or scold’s bridle. It had a variety of sharp or otherwise pain inducing barbs attached to a tab held in place in the mouths of women by an iron cage. It was purportedly used to silence ‘nagging, gossiping women’, but more often women who challenged priests, defied their husbands or rioted. A husband could parade his wife wearing this device around town, as a form of humiliation and torture. She would often be abused by people along the way. It sent a clear message to follow the rules and keep quiet.
Is this trend the modern equivalent of a Scold’s Bridle? On one hand I think it sounds way far fetched, but it’s rather uncanny how similarly the agenda of the radical trans activists meshes with the Republican agenda, regarding the appropriate behavior of women, even if they’re only impetus is to divide the left.
It’s also of interesting note that in Iran, religiously enforced gender norms are so strict that gay people are forced to undergo gender reassignment surgery or be put to death. Many flee. That overt a policy would not fly in the states, but propaganda does work well in the US.
Also, 4chan users have been known to create fake feminist accounts to foment discord and discredit feminists by posting nasty things and bullying people. I met a guy in NYC who was a paid right wing online troll.
On the other hand, maybe some people have become so unbalanced in lockdown, so isolated from contact, that they don’t know what’s real anymore and they’re hyper concerned with being viewed as ‘good’ or not cancelled. More people than ever are taking antidepressants, which tend to blunt empathy, so perhaps external cues guide their perception of being good, more than their feelings?
🤷♀️
Eliza, what you wrote about not being able to predict 5 years ago what's happening now....is what I'm thinking all the time. 5 years ago my primary focus was preventing Ecological Disaster, including but not only Climate Disaster. Now I'm an outcast---a " transphobic bigot" to groups I worked with, and to friends. I'm doing pragmatic organizing work, but need new friends! And moral support. Do you have suggestions on this front....the front of how to find new friends, have moral support. It's hard in a time when people are afraid to state their names and show their faces? Are you anywhere near Seattle by any chance? I would love to invite you to a party! Feel free to email me thru my substack: https://caroldansereau.substack.com/p/hitchhikers-guide-to-the-transgender
A YouTube channel named Luxander has uploaded a video with a thumbnail of a concentration camp image covered in the trans flag and uses the horrors of the Holocaust to warn against 'trans extermination'.
I reminded of the Bush administration's disdain for the "Reality-based comunity" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community#Origin
I think I know where it's coming from. I've been repeatedly suspended from twitter and finally now permanently banned for questioning the science and logic concerning the evidence, and the way it is presented to us by the powers that be, that a new respiratory disease allegedly started in one of the most heavily polluted ( and increasingly more so) cities in the world and that a new invisible particle was definitely the cause of it, even though no-one had actually been able to see it or observe it indirectly. https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/seeing-is-believing
These malign forces, with huge vested interests, wish to silence dissent and debate about the toxic gene therapy they wish to mandate and vaccines in general https://georgiedonny.substack.com/p/lets-hope-the-monkey-pox-nonsense
These forces hate women, and the innate wisdom and power of women with a passion.
This assault on free speech, debate, women's rights, human rights to personal, physical, health and intellectual autonomy is all part of the same agenda to subjugate us.
We do well not to give in to it.
Thank you Eliza Mondegreen, power to you
Jo
As a life long long Democrat, I find this utterly depressing. They no longer stand for free speech , they have abandoned women.
I am a serious but largely unpublished philosopher. I read the works of Tim Morton. Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, a number of contemporary and ancient Buddhist texts, and many more with great joy in my heart because here are expressed ideas that make me feel good. I once gave lessons in Foucault, which would have never let Butler's reading in the door. Everything I write is informed by my immersion in this beautiful philosophical world at my back. Although I once worked for a PhD many years ago, I felt that an auto didactic existence in a world of ordinary work and "business" would be personally more fulfilling than competing for tenure - and even thirty years ago I could sense the growing ideological power of university administrations and hierarchies. So I look forward to the day one of these woke idiots discovers a copy of Zarathustra or The Archaeology of Knowledge or some other such seminal work in the history of our western ideas and reads it to discover some offence, whereafter great bonfires are lit in the gardens of, just for example. the gardens of George Square in Edinburgh where I graduated with my Masters, as docile students run back and forth to the university library looking for fuel. For then I will be vindicated. Completely. The dead white men for whom students of media/gender/film studies are anathema will then surely be wiped from history and the next generation will be able to pursue the study of its own consciousness without hindrance.
"... ressentiment (it’s your fault) and bad conscience (it’s my fault) and their common fruit (responsibility) [are not] simple psychological events but rather ... the fundamental categories of Semitic and Christian thought, of our way of thinking and interpreting existence in general."