Figuring out what “side” people are on is hard. There are all these pesky matters of nuance and perspective and critical thought. So instead, we’ve learned to ask a few simple questions. “Was the election stolen?” “Do ‘All Lives Matter’” “What is a woman?” It doesn’t matter if you believe your answer to these questions, it just matters that you give the correct one. Your answer declares your allegiance, not the truth.
As I've written before, I have known several transsexuals and dated two of them, in the full sense of the word. Just to reiterate, I support fair and just treatment to gender dysphoric people and would approve raising my taxes to provide for their needs.
But two points are being lost here.
1) Gender dysphoria is not part of "normal human variation" like left-handedness and homosexuality, both of which appear at about 5% across time and culture. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and not just because it has an entry in the big book (as homosexuality did until 1974). This is not a dodge into definitions; the dysphoric are suffering with a pain of feeling incongruous with their biology, suffering that is only relieved by medical intervention. Genuine dysphoria is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births. It is not at a level that demands changes to language and law, aside from prohibitions on discrimination.
2) At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers, demanding privileged treatment, demanding an extra ration of special attention from everyone. Online they are the angriest and most unbalanced people I have ever seen, unable to change the subject. And they demand to be under the "trans" umbrella, which they do not deserve. Gender is not a continuum; gender is binary. And no I am not talking about pink vs. blue or football vs. dolls, I am talking about identity.
There are a few people in the world who have two heads. We don't need to specify "monocephalous" when talking about everyone else, why do we need to refer to the overwhelming majority who are gender-congruent as "cis?"
>" in their rush to be kind to one group, they overlook how callous they’re being to the other. "
I used to be all in for "empathy", believing it's largely what makes humans worthwhile as a species (to offset some of their other tendencies). I encouraged all forms of empathy.
But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy".
In tribal empathy, there are in groups and out groups; professing empathy for the ingroups is mandatory and lack thereof can be sinful; but professing empathy for anybody in an out group is socially punished as disloyalty to the tribe. People are trained to numb out any human empathy for members of "the other side". This kind of empathy is endemic and goes back to our prehistoric roots. (Perhaps, in less complex form, to pre-human roots; male chimpanzees groom and stroke other males who will fight with them against other bands).
By contrast, there is a flavor of empathy which arises spontaneously (not by command) and which can cross tribal boundaries to find a fragment of understandable humanity even in some in another tribe. This can be transcendant and transformative, and is closer to the inspiration for my original respect for empathy (which I still have, albeit in more nuanced form).
The former kind of empathy (tribal empathy) is just the "us" subset of an overall "us vs them" proclivity in humans. It can sometimes feel like a weaponized mutation of universal empathy but it's probably more primeval that the latter.
So nowadays when I see somebody advocating compassion for X, I ask myself whether the empathy energies are inherently tied to prescribed numbing of human empathy for a different group - or whether it's more universal (or individual).
In the present case, trans activism is definitely deep into tribal empathy - using mandatory (not emergent and inspired, but required) empathy for the feelings of trans folks, but inherently also prescribing a numbing of empathy for anybody else who may feel harmed. And the other side can do the same thing. People caring about both sides, and trying to find a nuanced compromise as respectful as feasible for everybody's needs - tend to be a small subset. For others, compromise is a dirty word, because it implies that other humans might have legitimate needs to be balanced against their own desires. Hence the prescribed numbing of empathy.
I want to note that a number of the trans folks I've known DO have empathy for the needs of cis women, and act accordingly. For every trans athlete entering women's sports, there are others who (mostly silently) abstain because it doesn't feel fair to them. But most of the personality type which is differentially attracted to trans activism seems to be amazingly unempathetic towards cis women's feelings and needs and highly entitled to have their own feelings and needs centered. This gives a distorted perspective to those who only encounter the louder activists and think them typical of all trans folks.
In everyday social and business transactions I really don't care about sex, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, political worldviews, etc. They are absolutely irrelevant to me. If someone can tell me why they should be relevant, I'll listen.
The exception, perhaps, is if, and only if, they have a chip on their shoulder about it that causes them to come across as an asshole. That makes it about being an asshole, rather than the issue that causes them to be one.
As I've written before, I have known several transsexuals and dated two of them, in the full sense of the word. Just to reiterate, I support fair and just treatment to gender dysphoric people and would approve raising my taxes to provide for their needs.
But two points are being lost here.
1) Gender dysphoria is not part of "normal human variation" like left-handedness and homosexuality, both of which appear at about 5% across time and culture. Gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and not just because it has an entry in the big book (as homosexuality did until 1974). This is not a dodge into definitions; the dysphoric are suffering with a pain of feeling incongruous with their biology, suffering that is only relieved by medical intervention. Genuine dysphoria is extremely rare, one in 30,000 male births and 100,000 female births. It is not at a level that demands changes to language and law, aside from prohibitions on discrimination.
2) At this time there is a movement of people who claim not to be of the opposite pole of gender but somewhere between the two; this is not a medical condition, it is a fad and its members, in all my experience, are nothing more than attention-seekers, demanding privileged treatment, demanding an extra ration of special attention from everyone. Online they are the angriest and most unbalanced people I have ever seen, unable to change the subject. And they demand to be under the "trans" umbrella, which they do not deserve. Gender is not a continuum; gender is binary. And no I am not talking about pink vs. blue or football vs. dolls, I am talking about identity.
There are a few people in the world who have two heads. We don't need to specify "monocephalous" when talking about everyone else, why do we need to refer to the overwhelming majority who are gender-congruent as "cis?"
>" in their rush to be kind to one group, they overlook how callous they’re being to the other. "
I used to be all in for "empathy", believing it's largely what makes humans worthwhile as a species (to offset some of their other tendencies). I encouraged all forms of empathy.
But more recently, I've noticed that there are meaningful differences in the flavors of different examples. As a shorthand, I distinguish between "tribal empathy" and "universal empathy".
In tribal empathy, there are in groups and out groups; professing empathy for the ingroups is mandatory and lack thereof can be sinful; but professing empathy for anybody in an out group is socially punished as disloyalty to the tribe. People are trained to numb out any human empathy for members of "the other side". This kind of empathy is endemic and goes back to our prehistoric roots. (Perhaps, in less complex form, to pre-human roots; male chimpanzees groom and stroke other males who will fight with them against other bands).
By contrast, there is a flavor of empathy which arises spontaneously (not by command) and which can cross tribal boundaries to find a fragment of understandable humanity even in some in another tribe. This can be transcendant and transformative, and is closer to the inspiration for my original respect for empathy (which I still have, albeit in more nuanced form).
The former kind of empathy (tribal empathy) is just the "us" subset of an overall "us vs them" proclivity in humans. It can sometimes feel like a weaponized mutation of universal empathy but it's probably more primeval that the latter.
So nowadays when I see somebody advocating compassion for X, I ask myself whether the empathy energies are inherently tied to prescribed numbing of human empathy for a different group - or whether it's more universal (or individual).
In the present case, trans activism is definitely deep into tribal empathy - using mandatory (not emergent and inspired, but required) empathy for the feelings of trans folks, but inherently also prescribing a numbing of empathy for anybody else who may feel harmed. And the other side can do the same thing. People caring about both sides, and trying to find a nuanced compromise as respectful as feasible for everybody's needs - tend to be a small subset. For others, compromise is a dirty word, because it implies that other humans might have legitimate needs to be balanced against their own desires. Hence the prescribed numbing of empathy.
I want to note that a number of the trans folks I've known DO have empathy for the needs of cis women, and act accordingly. For every trans athlete entering women's sports, there are others who (mostly silently) abstain because it doesn't feel fair to them. But most of the personality type which is differentially attracted to trans activism seems to be amazingly unempathetic towards cis women's feelings and needs and highly entitled to have their own feelings and needs centered. This gives a distorted perspective to those who only encounter the louder activists and think them typical of all trans folks.
In everyday social and business transactions I really don't care about sex, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, political worldviews, etc. They are absolutely irrelevant to me. If someone can tell me why they should be relevant, I'll listen.
The exception, perhaps, is if, and only if, they have a chip on their shoulder about it that causes them to come across as an asshole. That makes it about being an asshole, rather than the issue that causes them to be one.