Being a Skeptic Means Being Called a Bigot

Just get used to it

I’m often skeptical about many claims, while I am not perfect at it. It seems that due to this I cast the perception that I am arrogant. I’ll elaborate.

My middle child has a seizure disorder, which presented itself suddenly when she was a toddler. The seizures are partial-complex, and without treatment they would be all to frequent and make her life unmanageable. She was having seizures at a rate of one every ten minutes when they first appeared and we realized that they were not due to anxiety over bedwetting. We rushed her to the ER and she was treated by the Minnesota Epilepsy Group. During the week that followed the doctors were seeking a way to control her seizures. We spent nearly the entirety of every day there, to the consternation of her older sister.

We were showered with unsolicited advice by well-meaning people, but they were not being as helpful as they thought. Suggestions on the cause included diet, of course. My first thought when that was mentioned was that we were careful to keep batteries out of her food, and choking would have been the more likely result of an electric diet. These seizures were emanating from a pair of nodes on her right frontal lobe. The doctors were able to control the seizures for a good ten years until she started puberty.

After a bunch of tests, they determined that surgery to remove that lobe is the best option to control the seizures. She would still need to take anti-seizure meds the rest of her life, but at lower doses with reduced side effects and with better control. So, shortly after the surgery, a helpful relative sent me an email to tell me that a chiropractor claims to be able to control seizures with realigment techniques. When I replied with a description of the source of the seizures and my reasons for being skeptical he replied that I am arrogant and dismissive. I hadn’t intended to be arrogant, and my intent was for him to explain how I might be wrong. I intend to further a dialogue with people whose perspectives lead them to different conclusions than I have come to.

Yes, facts are facts, but they can combine in different ways once they are ingested into our brains. When I first studied sensation and perception in pyschology intro courses, I had trouble understanding the difference between the two. When I realized that sensation is an objective experience, and perception is the subjective experience of the sensation, it started to click. For example, I lived in Arizona for several years. In the summer the heat during the day will be over 100F several days in a row. The night time temperature will drop into the 90F range. After a short period, I experienced the evenings, with the zephyrs, as being cool and comfortable. But now, in Minnesota, 90F is unbearably hot. The amount of heat that I sense is the same in either case, but the way that I perceive it is quite different. The setting is different between the two cases.

Perspective alters our perceptions, and since learning from the Symbolic Interactionist perspective of social psychology just how strong an influence on our thought our perspectives will be, I have been just as interested in seeing how people who disagree with what I think see the facts that I see.

I just haven’t figured out why my questioning is seen as arrogance, when I sincerely wish for a dialogue.

I run across this accusation of arrogance to an extreme degree when it comes to religion. I am an atheist, and I define that as seeing no reason to believe the extraordinary claim of supernatural beings in charge of the universe. I can’t claim to know that there are none, but I can’t bridge the gap between their possible existence and the mechanism of their ability to control the natural world. I can only see the forces of human imagination at work.

Yet, as an atheist who tried for years to get an explanation for the mechanism of interaction between the natural and supernatural, I have been accused of being a bigot for not accepting their belief. I am, unfortunately, a stickler for cause and effect.

Yesterday I was charged again with being a bigot for not accepting that the claim that transwomen are women. To my mind, it’s an extraordinary claim, and we are told that we must accept it axiomatically. And the only way to be able to accept it as true is to accept an alteration of the word “woman.” Politicians try to skirt the question attempting to be all things to all people, but the best that can be done is this: A woman is anyone who identifies as a woman. It’s self-referential, and it makes the word meaningless.

The extraordinary claim is that we are born with gender identities separate from our sex. It’s a perceptual value of how we fit into a gender-dominated society that values men over women. It’s a reflection of our personalities and our preferences for what we wish to do and the roles we wish to fulfill. The question that I want to have answered is this: “What is the source of a gender identity?” What is the cause and effect? I suspect that the cause is social, and the proper way to deal with those in pain due to gender’s caustic effects involves therapy. For that, I am often accused of being a bigot, and when I try to find out how such questions are evidence of bigotry, more accusations follow.

So, can anyone explain to me how this is bigotry? And especially why so many prominent skeptics such as Steven Novella and PZ Myers consider skepticism on this to be a question that is not to be touched? Myers calls gender skeptics “asshats,” and Novella replaced Harriet Hall’s positive review of a book on gender with a series of three posts that did not show any sort of explanation for how a trans identity arises naturally, but for how painful it was for the writers to live their lives as trans.

One can have sympathy for people without believing their claims, but we now live in a skeptical environment that eschews skepticsm over trans claims, and refers to it as bigotry. There’s got to be a reason for it. I can’t get a good reason from any writings that I read, but I do think it shows all the markings of an ideology that demands acceptance. It’s not too far from religion in that regard.

I was in an honest discussion yesterday, at least it started that way, and I used the example of how similar demand for acceptance of TWAW is for the tansubstantiation of the bread and wine at the Catholic eucharist. The other party dismissed it and said it’s not relevant. The other partly also patronizingly told me I don’t understand symbolism. When he revealed that he is ignorant of Catholic teaching but still thinks he can explain it to me, I decided that I was wasting my time and muted him.¹

I’ll be happy to hear a good explanation for how my skepticism is bigotry, so if you have something you can use to enlightenment as to the source of my darkness, please comment. And I will be happy to have a genuine dialog with anyone who stands in opposition to my position that transwomen aren’t women. From my experience as an atheist, I am used to being called a bigot, but I still don’t understand why this has become the default response to disbelief. It is an extraordinary claim, and it’s not even well-enough defined to provide ordinary evidence, let alone extraordinary evidence.

It may even be that my perspective is based on looking at it from the wrong angle.

1. I assume the other party is male, despite the “She/Her” pronouns, due to the phrase in the bio “not ‘cis.’”