One of the most difficult aspects of being a skeptic is teasing out when you are being led by your ideology rather than following an analytic process to get to the truth, (or the closest approximation thereof.)1
I mean to say that there is a tendency to accept facts and theories that match our experiences as filtered through our worldview. We discard fact claims easily if they are counter to our self-perception as either liberal or conservative. Just within the last few days, a commenter replied on a YouTube video on Global Warming that Katherine Hayhoe is a lying commie for talking about Global Warming as if it is a fact. He’s made up his mind, not because of any analysis of evidence or facts, but because he believes it’s a hoax that carbon loading in the atmosphere is leading to global warming outside of the natural cycles. My tendency is to dismiss people like that out of hand, largely because anyone who uses the word “commie” like that is driven by a right-wing ideology that sees commies everywhere. But he also made the claim that satellite data shows that the earth’s global average temperature has been dropping for the last few years. And he didn’t supply a source.
I know that I should probably ignore such comments, on the proposition that to an independent observer, an argument with a fool with a fool tends to appear as two fools arguing. But, on the other hand, if there is an independent observer who sees that I don’t respond with facts, that observer may get the impression that the fool’s claim is correct. So I replied with a link to data, and not to convince the anti-commie fool, but for the lurker. I’m going to leave it at that, though.
While I don’t think that the terms “liberal” and “conservative” are all that useful anymore to describe the complex nature of political thought, it’s often helpful to use them as generalities. Too often the distinction between a liberal and conservative is used a broad brush to make assumptions of what people think on various issues, but also they are far to often used as guideposts for what position we, as individuals, should take on any issues that we haven’t investigated.
I think that this is why many who describe themselves as liberals or progressives have tagged along with gender ideology. It’s because it’s the “leftist” position in the current political milieu, and we have experience and observation in our own past that supports the idea that transgender adolescents have been subject to bullying for not conforming to gender expectations. We see the suicide rates of kids who have not been supported by their schools, we can see the efforts of cultural conservatives to oppose any laws againts bullying of gay, lesbian and gender non-conforming kids as a free speech issue. We naturally jump to the side of the bullied, and set our ideological path based on our deeply held beliefs that such teens need to be protected. This leads us to accept that transgender people are the most oppressed single minority group.
This is a conclusion that we’ve come to through generalization without proper examination. It becomes a problem when we now close ourselves off to any sort of counter arguments that don’t match our own pre-conceived notions about what is happening. Because gay and lesbian kids don’t often fit the standards of gender, they are singled out and isolated, and find the lack of support for them to be terrifying. Straight kids are assumed to be gay or lesbian if they don’t fit in; so a boy who likes theater musicals instead of sports is going to be called a “fag,” and girls who are perceived as tomboys will be assumed to be a lesbian. Gender expression and sexuality are socially linked, and so it seems like it should naturally be a reason for the transgender ID to be a part of the same community.
The media now lump all the issues together, so a story involving a gay or lesbian issue is reported as an “LGBTQ+” issue, and this inculcates the idea of solidarity between the two very different sets of issues. Fostering this solidarity leads liberals to accept the idea that objection to the assumption that a transgender ID male is a transwoman is based on the same sort of visceral hatred that fuels homophobia and lesbophobia. With ideology leading the perception of the facts, it then becomes easy to paint feminists and gender skeptics as being hateful, justifying the vicious responses to feminists and their supporters. I think this explains, in part, the silence of those liberal feminists who would otherwise have spoken out against the sorts of threats that are directed at women labeled TERFs.2
This lumping into the “liberal” position has recently been made clear most recently due to the execution by Missouri of a man who claimed to be transgender. NPR’s reporting leads with the statement that he is the first woman executed in Missouri since 1976. In this post from December, the slant of the article is that having to be a trans ID man in the closet led him to be an evil rapist, stalker, and murder, but once he was allowed to be a woman, in prison, he’s become a gentle soul about to be done unfairly by the system.
But McLaughlin’s story is different from any of the four other St. Louis County people on death row, and the 11 already executed.
When McLaughlin arrived in Potosi Correctional Center, Jessica Hicklin had already been there for over a decade. At first, Hicklin says she only knew McLaughlin from a distance as someone “very full of anxiety, scattered.”
Then, in 2018, Hicklin won a landmark transgender-rights case against the Missouri Department of Corrections, allowing her and other transgender inmates access to hormone therapy.
“As a result of that [case], I became a sort of mom to a lot of girls who were coming out and trying to figure out how to have coming-out conversations and how to get access to hormone therapy,” says Hicklin, who was released from prison earlier this year after serving 26 years.
One day another inmate introduced Hicklin to Amber McLaughlin.
Hicklin says she remembers thinking to herself, “Now, this makes sense. I’ve known you for a long time, you didn’t necessarily seem very comfortable in your skin, and now you’re smiling.”
“I didn’t really come to know Amber until, well, Amber became Amber,” Hicklin says.
In a brief phone interview, McLaughlin says that when she was around 12 years old she started wearing women’s clothing, though she had to do so away from her parents and guardians.
“I knew then this is what I wanted to be,” she says. “But I had to always do it secretly.”
He was executed. While I’m opposed to the Death Penalty for a variety of reasons3, I am opposed to and alarmed by the use of the transgender narrative to excuse his violence, and especially as a tool of persuasion to try to convince us that he should be pardoned.
First, this conveys acceptance that there really is such a thing as being a “woman trapped in a man’s body.” I’ve stated this is an extraordinary truth claim with no way to provide the extraordinary evidence. The second reason is that this absolves him of the crime, and dishonors the memory of the woman he murdered. “If only she’d understood,” his pain at being a transgender, he wouldn’t have killed her. The implication is that the victim is to blame for not loving him the right way.
Following his execution, he was still identified as a woman and there were many liberal responses decrying the injustice of executing a transgender woman, but these people didn’t identify his crime, only that he was a woman and should have been shown mercy by the state. Other people reacted that even though it was a horrible crime and he was rightly executed but that it was wrong to misgender him.
Even in death, he still has the power to control how people refer to him. And that’s the problem with using ideology to determine one’s morality. There is no reason to accord such a man any respect at all, let alone respect his preferred pronouns. If such people would step back and examine what is being asked in favor of transactivism, they could see how wrong it is to emphasize that he’s transgender and poorly done, than the fact that in doing so they are condoning a violent act against a woman he had stalked, murdered, and raped for the reason that she wanted to leave him.
It takes time to see this sort of thing if you have been conditioned not to see it, but if you ask first what is truly happening and what you are observing rather than look to see how like-minded liberals to yourself are respoding in order to form your perspective, you will be able to more closely approach an approximation of the truth.
Philosophically, the word “truth” is tricky and highly dependent on perspective. It’s also provisional based on the fact that we can approach truth only when we have a full set of facts to guide us, and if new facts are uncovered that contradict what we think is the truth, we need to reconsider. Here’s a discussion of “truth” in the Encyclopedia Britannica as examined through philosophy: https://www.britannica.com/topic/truth-philosophy-and-logic.
There are many women who were the targets of sexist threats and violence due to their roles in the trumped up “gamergate” and “elevatorgate” social media circuses, but have taken the sides of the transgender activists for some reason I haven’t yet fathomed.
Briefly, my opposition is based on the fact that the courts aren’t very good at actually finding the truth of whether someone is guilty or innocent and too many innocent people are killed but exonerated after they are dead. I also don’t think that letting the truly guilty off with an early death is justice. The families of the victims do not get relief from the grief their entire lives. The guilty get relief from their guilt when they’re killed. I think being trapped in prison their entire lives is a more suitable punishment.
Mike; Your discussion here really illustrates the links between trans activists and the incel movement. Both claim to be victimized. Both claim justification for their misogyny.