This week, Inez and I start by talking about Chris Christie and Mike Pence entering the 2024 race. We talked about the potential impact of a Trump federal indictment, which we found out was happening less than two hours after our recording. That led to a discussion of the slippery concept of norms, why they’re necessary, and how they’re broken. I bring up my theory that Bob Dole hawking Viagra breached some kind of threshold and changed our politics. We also talk about the role of the Clinton impeachment.
Out of all the theories I've heard, I still find "it's feminism's fault" the least convincing.
You don't need to believe in the importance of sex differences (or even their existence) to reject most of the demands trans activists are making of society! There is nothing in liberal feminism that supports the idea that society has an obligation to "affirm" (i.e., provide medical or mental health support for) anyone's gender identity, particularly when it falls afoul of decades of medical and psychiatric understanding. To the contrary, feminism, applied consistently, turns gender into a private matter, no more political than one's musical taste or fashion.
The main points on which trans activism is clashing with the wider society are currently (1) children/teens transitioning, (2) pronoun demands and (3) colonization of single-sex spaces (sports, shelters, prisons). Both (1) and (2) can be rejected without contradicting classical liberal feminism. As to (3), the very existence of single-sex spaces is a deviation from principle in the first place, but most feminists have grappled with the question and found one or another way to rationalize it or at least except it from their ideology. Compared to the contrivances other ideologies need to invent to stay relevant, it's hardly noticeable.
I'm not sure how much liberal feminism will help solve these problems. It's certainly good for any political movement to have JKR on board, but she isn't working from a particularly ideological lens, nor do Singal, Shrier, Rufo or any others on this field. Theory (mostly not feminist) got us into this mess; there is no reason why theory should be useful in getting us back out. The time-tested strategy "pinpoint one thing everyone agrees is crazy, then fight it and whatever comes to its defense" is both safer and better at building coalitions.
> am still not completely sure why trans in particular has become such an important issue to educated white women
Because those educated white women have talked to people who are trans in person, heard their stories, and believe they deserve to live as the gender with which they identify. It seems pretty straightforward.
The other reason transgender discrimination is an issue now is because the issue of gay marriage is pretty much settled in this country. Gay people won the right to marry the person of their choice, so there's not a big need for activism on that topic.
> those educated white women have talked to people who are trans in person
And that somehow happened en-masse overnight just a few years ago? Trans ops aren't new technology that was invented in 2018, and it's not like the percentage of the population who have had this suddenly exploded. It's still very rare so this seems unlikely. Really it'd be surprising if the average educated middle class white woman has ever had a substantial conversation with a trans person about anything, let alone about their trans story.
It makes sense to study these sorts of changes in context. It's not just trans rights, it's green extremism, it's the obsession with African[-American] people (and not any other race), it's the bizarre speech codes and so on. These things are all linked.
> it's not like the percentage of the population who have had this suddenly exploded
I think what you're experiencing is that the trans movement has reached critical mass. It's always been there; the "T" has been part of LGBT for decades. But there hasn't been sufficient social force behind treating trans people as their preferred gender.
> it'd be surprising if the average educated middle class white woman has ever had a substantial conversation with a trans person
The average one? Probably not. But one of their friends must have. Or they read about an influential celebrity talking about their experience with a person who is trans. Or a trans person wrote an article in a magazine they read about their struggles. If someone goes from those indirect sources and decides to volunteer at the next trans activism event, then of course they're going to meet someone who is trans in person and have a chat. And then I guess they're not average anymore.
What's the actual claim you're making here? That these people changed their minds due to direct personal experience of hearing an emotional story, or that a tiny number read some influencer piece in the NYT lifestyle pages and then became an activist? These are very different things - originally you were positing a cause but the latter is an effect.
That seems empirically untrue. The LGBT cause is very popular because it pattern matches well with the previous gender discourse.
The controversy over gay marriage was precisely about other people’s realities. If two women are allowed to get married, if the state makes it legal, then it changes how other people should treat them. It literally redefined the concept of marriage from “one man and one woman” to “two adults.” That was a change to reality.
The activist discourse is similar, but what each is trying to accomplish with that discourse couldn’t be more different. This is probably why trans activists are scratching their heads over why it’s not working for them. The reason is that claiming equal access to state-sanctioned marriage is very different than claiming equal access to privately-constructed understandings of gender. “Trans women are real women” is an authoritarian statement imposing one idiosyncratic view of womanhood on people with their own ideas of womanhood that often differ. There is no ‘right to womanhood’, not even cis women have such a right. So there is no right to be extended to trans people. What they really want is control of other people’s reality via control of their definitions. Most Americans have a natural immune system for this kind of Maoist authoritarianism.
The problem is (A) lots of biological women feel uncomfortable with that and (B) largely because of the origins in academia (I think), the left over-theorizes everything. Forget a couple of unlucky people with what's probably some issue with brain receptors for sex steroids living as a different gender, you have to *tear down the whole edifice of binary gender* and *question every binary*.
Now if you told me the whole thing was astroturfed by chemical companies to avoid paying settlements for problems caused by endocrine disruptors, and then got out of hand...well, I'd find that credible, but what investigative journalist would be left-wing enough to find all that dirt on companies and right-wing enough to cast shade on the LGBT movement? But it hasn't been that long ago. I'd bet a lot of the culprits are still alive, and there may be a paper trail or digital receipts somewhere. If someone with the necessary skills is reading this...
> still not completely sure why trans in particular has become such an important issue
> to educated white women.
I'm very interested in your theories. on this. I've been thinking it has to do with gatekeeping by the elites classes, sort of like changing the passwords and the locks to prevent circulation. In premodern India, the Brahmin caste excluded the lower castes from higher status by developing elaborate purity regimes, abstruse metaphysical theories, and intricate rituals. This is why we get this or that issue du jour along with new buzz words every year. It's a sign of degeneracy when an elite class feels this pressure to prevent circulation of new elites because their grip on status is growing increasingly tenuous. So by this theory, trans ideology and the inscrutable morality associated with it is the latest in a long line of exclusionary tactics by our elite.
I think the overall degenerate feminization of the elite class is a substantial factor. I mean we experience epistemological sink, believing that a proposition is true if and only if it keeps the peace, avoids disadvantaging any one person or group, and doesn't disrupt anyone's sense of safety. We then experience ethical sink where morality comes to be equated almost entirely with compassion and fairness while the level of one's moral status varies with one's group identity (and positively with one's level of weepy guilt). We then experience political sink where pressure to conform under the feminine threat of social ostracization, reputational damage, and public shaming encourages self-censoring even as public expression that slips through is corralled, monitored, and policed. Free speech is finally scoffed at as an artifact of dead, white male culture. This is followed by a complete aesthetic collapse where mental illness, moral turpitude, and physical unhealth are celebrated as bravery and beauty and abject nonsense becomes genius. Finally, artistic media unifies and homogenizes a message that perpetuates and calcifies these ideological rationalizations of the morality leading to our current post-modern canons of skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.
I like that theory because it paints the woke left as a bunch of hypocrites. Sadly, I don't think it's true.
Something like that would leave more records--someone annoyed would have spilled the beans. I do think it helps keep out the poors, but it's more of a fashion thing--well-to-do left-leaning people are always finding social causes they can get behind that don't involve redistributing their wealth.
That sounds about right. The upper classes in all times and places develop class markers. Generally speaking, this happens organically and in all earnestness. There's very rarely an organized and cynical plot. Something starts as the avant-garde fashionable thing. Then, if it catches enough momentum, it eventually becomes the right and proper thing to do, and people who don't do it are simply uncouth rubes.
I think that self-interest tends to show up largely in the steps between "avant-garde" and "catching momentum." Fashions that would be self-destructive tend to burn out faster. Some people on the margins between idealism and cynicism pile onto fashions that are more self-interested, and they help those fashions to gain critical mass and succeed. But, crucially, they didn't invent the fashions, and they never organized to say, "Let's focus on backing gay stuff instead of going after Wall Street or the military."
You could kind of see the dynamic you're talking about with BLM. The whole George Floyd thing, for instance. Unlike a lot of conservatives I don't think he deserved to die. But if you survey an empire of 300 million you always can find some injustice to get worked up about, and conflicts between black men and the police had been ending badly and the media had been playing them up for a while. This one probably took off because everyone was stuck indoors. So 'defunding the police' became the cause du jour, and they tried to get rid of Paw Patrol and D&D modules with police procedural themes. Then crime went up and most of the attempts to defund police failed at the ballot. Gradually the left lost interest and started focusing back on trans issues and, ironically, the economy.
You always have a dynamic of people with varying levels of idealism and cynicism, and people all along that spectrum. It's tricky because the sort of people who comment on blogs like this tend to be very much in the opposite direction (and I'm a great example), but there are people who are really good at sensing fashions and moving with them, they tend to be in careers like media and the arts where that's useful, and they don't always have a clear distinction in their minds between idealism and cynicism--something's good for them, so they start believing in it. And they're good at swimming in the water of fashion, so it works for them.
What's the bit about geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths? (And this is where cultural studies is actually kind of useful--are we dividing things into three because of a longstanding Western tendency to do that which dates back to the Trinity? )
No, no, no, they're not hypocrites and its not a conspiracy. They don't even know what's really going on as to any of this because it happens over decades. We're talking about beliefs and behaviors that are high status. The elite classes define status for all of us, but we mimic them so we can appear high status. So what's been happening since World War 2 is high status beliefs have been drifting leftward *from the top* so as to maintain separation between high status beliefs and what everyone else believes. When non-elites catch up in their beliefs, elites have to find new territory to occupy to preserve their status. There are many reasons why the US Overton window drifts leftward over time, and this is one of the big ones.
It’s not a conspiracy. For 99% of the elite class it’s not even conscious. It’s just what works and has worked for retaining power post world war 2. When you’re an elite, you don’t know you’re learning the codes and passwords for access to power, you just go to Harvard.
If that was all there was to it, no one would care. But it's not all there is to it. There is an associated morality that requires one to bend their understanding of reality to conform to the personal identity choices of another person. If a man wants me to agree he's a trans woman, I will gladly do that. If a man wants me to agree he's a real woman, I can't do that, because it's just not true in my framework of reality. Where does this moral imperative come from that I should feel compelled to alter my reality to conform to some external preference of another person? I really don't understand the moral reasoning that requires that of me.
Your example illustrates another point that gets lost in all of this. Namely, the body dysmorphia that leads to anorexia is understood to be a mental illness. And, at least for the time being, there is no social requirement that we play along with the delusions caused by mental illnesses. A lot of otherwise very compassionate peoples intuitively understand gender dysphoria to be a kind of mental illness that should be diagnosed and treated the way we do body dysmorphic disorder. It just seems sensible that helping people live comfortably in their own skin is the first priority. However, in the rhetoric of trans ideology this perfectly compassionate response is considered evil. And it's considered evil because men (especially) who decide to transition often have other motivations than escaping dysphoria. Just look at Dylan Mulvaney, a fairly non-descript gay man who designed and implemented the world's most public transition ever, rocketing himself to fame and fortune. This avenue to high status for men would be entirely choked off if society viewed gender dysphoria as an illness that is treatable. I know this is a little cynical, but honestly, I think it might not be cynical enough.
Directly from the DSM-5 (under diagnostic criteria for body dysmorphic disorder):
"Specify if:
Indicate degree of insight regarding body dysmorphic disorder beliefs (e.g., “I look ugly” or “I look deformed”).
With good or fair insight: The individual recognizes that the body dysmorphic disorder beliefs are definitely or probably not true or that they may or may not be true.
With poor insight: The individual thinks that the body dysmorphic beliefs are probably true.
With absent insight/delusional beliefs: The individual is completely convinced that the body dysmorphic beliefs are true."
With a few changes, these criteria could be directly applied to gender dysphoria. But somehow we're supposed to believe that people who believe they are the opposite sex are always correct in their beliefs and never wrong???
This is great! You're absolutely right. And there are so many questions as to why the psychological community refuses to look at gender dysphoria in this way. There have been some brave psychologists who publicly questioned all this. They're all probably defrocked and canceled by now. But there must be even more who privately wonder if the world has gone mad.
When I take a step back and look at the way trans issues entered the public consciousness, I am heartened by the fact that it's the result of people choosing to be compassionate. You say you're a man/woman, ok, I believe you're hurting over this. How can we help? Use your pronouns? Ok. No workplace discrimination? Ok. Calling my sister a birthing person? No, I'm sorry. Your self-image is not more important than hers. She is a mother and she deserves to be called a mother and I will call her a mother. So compassion has a sensible limit when the object of your compassion demands too much. Each person will reach their limit at a different point, but many compassionate people are reaching their limits with the trans movement. Many more will soon. So, I look on all of this as a somewhat unfortunate lesson our society needs to learn about the limits of compassion.
I like the "There's more demand for oppressed people than supply" idea.
Educated white women mostly work in jobs that are stable day-to-day, with relatively limited project-based career growth potential, that they aren't especially passionate about. The jobs are boring so they focus on finding passion in other ways, which then settles on excessive displays of compassion and caring. But they also live easy lives in easy offices in easy societies, where there aren't many people around who need that compassion. Hence the desperate search for oppression and the hatred for people who point out that the claimed oppression doesn't really exist. It's robbing them of meaning, of their own identity story. It's not about other people's identities, it's about theirs.
Men can be the same way of course but are more likely to find self-actualization through career growth and hard skills.
All of the wokester agenda is to further the eugenics agenda. Period. Cleverly presented. Teenagers seem to be susceptible to the supposed ideology. It's amazing how much attention this flim flam has taken root in the zeitgeist. Can't father a child if you can't play pocket pool. Can't drop a baby if you're pumped full of testosterone.
I'm all in favor of conspiracy theories, sometimes several at once from people who don't like each other. Are the rich encouraging the left to get into the race and identity politics weeds to prevent a cross-racial working-class movement from arising? Was the pre-woke liberal synthesis an attempt to make the world safe for capitalism? Did pre-woke American history cover up all the nasty things the ruling class did? Are lesbians and feminists (who overlap a lot) making impossible sex rules in colleges so boys can't ask girls out? Are Democrats trying to increase ethnic diversity so they never lose an election? Are progressives trying to encourage kids with no other diversity points to identify as LGBT so they rupture with their families and become progressives? Yes.
It makes sense. People with power shape society to further their interests. 1000 years you had the Catholic Church saying the feudal order was the will of God, all the while trying to steal power from the knights. Large primates gonna large primate.
But...eugenics agenda? Whose? The guys who used to hang out with Epstein? They like having hormonally normal teenagers around, for reasons we won't go into here. The woke left? They hate Scott Alexander because he said something in an email that sounded vaguely close to the stuff. Siilcon Valley techbros? Some think eugenics is OK, but they're hardly woke, most having annoyed some girl by asking her out at some point. Evangelical Christians? They don't believe in eugenics and they are definitely not supporters of wokery. White nationalists? They hate this stuff, it's a Jewish plot to castrate America so they can get all the shiksas. Diana Fleischman? She's the only one I know who's actually advocated eugenics, and she's not even woke.
You could make a very good case that the current every-sexuality-except-straight-white-male-is-good regime is a strong selection regime for young men who resist leftist indoctrination and the hedonic pull of video games and anime, and are masculine enough to attract women. Except that I doubt the sort of traditionalists who would benefit from this long term are behind any of it.
Sort of. I think you have lots of liberal and progressive people who don't want kids and come up with excuses about the warming of the planet and the first world to justify that, and they are sympathetic to this stuff. I think not having kids is secondary or tertiary, though. They actually believe this stuff.
The recent success of gender ideology requires adherence to what I call "radical affirmation", meaning other members of society have to not only accept but actively affirm a person's belief in their identity. We've been increasingly subject to such an approach through the feminization of modern culture, which has infiltrated mental health and the medical profession (among others). I see the current increase in trans among young women as another variant of body dysmorphia generally, but in the past, we didn't tell a young woman starving herself to death because she believed she was fat that she was indeed fat.
Out of all the theories I've heard, I still find "it's feminism's fault" the least convincing.
You don't need to believe in the importance of sex differences (or even their existence) to reject most of the demands trans activists are making of society! There is nothing in liberal feminism that supports the idea that society has an obligation to "affirm" (i.e., provide medical or mental health support for) anyone's gender identity, particularly when it falls afoul of decades of medical and psychiatric understanding. To the contrary, feminism, applied consistently, turns gender into a private matter, no more political than one's musical taste or fashion.
The main points on which trans activism is clashing with the wider society are currently (1) children/teens transitioning, (2) pronoun demands and (3) colonization of single-sex spaces (sports, shelters, prisons). Both (1) and (2) can be rejected without contradicting classical liberal feminism. As to (3), the very existence of single-sex spaces is a deviation from principle in the first place, but most feminists have grappled with the question and found one or another way to rationalize it or at least except it from their ideology. Compared to the contrivances other ideologies need to invent to stay relevant, it's hardly noticeable.
I'm not sure how much liberal feminism will help solve these problems. It's certainly good for any political movement to have JKR on board, but she isn't working from a particularly ideological lens, nor do Singal, Shrier, Rufo or any others on this field. Theory (mostly not feminist) got us into this mess; there is no reason why theory should be useful in getting us back out. The time-tested strategy "pinpoint one thing everyone agrees is crazy, then fight it and whatever comes to its defense" is both safer and better at building coalitions.
> am still not completely sure why trans in particular has become such an important issue to educated white women
Because those educated white women have talked to people who are trans in person, heard their stories, and believe they deserve to live as the gender with which they identify. It seems pretty straightforward.
The other reason transgender discrimination is an issue now is because the issue of gay marriage is pretty much settled in this country. Gay people won the right to marry the person of their choice, so there's not a big need for activism on that topic.
"educated" aka indoctrinated white women with mental issues and depression find gender and trans ideology fascinating
why shuld that be?
the Mentally ill and unwell flock together
> those educated white women have talked to people who are trans in person
And that somehow happened en-masse overnight just a few years ago? Trans ops aren't new technology that was invented in 2018, and it's not like the percentage of the population who have had this suddenly exploded. It's still very rare so this seems unlikely. Really it'd be surprising if the average educated middle class white woman has ever had a substantial conversation with a trans person about anything, let alone about their trans story.
It makes sense to study these sorts of changes in context. It's not just trans rights, it's green extremism, it's the obsession with African[-American] people (and not any other race), it's the bizarre speech codes and so on. These things are all linked.
> it's not like the percentage of the population who have had this suddenly exploded
I think what you're experiencing is that the trans movement has reached critical mass. It's always been there; the "T" has been part of LGBT for decades. But there hasn't been sufficient social force behind treating trans people as their preferred gender.
> it'd be surprising if the average educated middle class white woman has ever had a substantial conversation with a trans person
The average one? Probably not. But one of their friends must have. Or they read about an influential celebrity talking about their experience with a person who is trans. Or a trans person wrote an article in a magazine they read about their struggles. If someone goes from those indirect sources and decides to volunteer at the next trans activism event, then of course they're going to meet someone who is trans in person and have a chat. And then I guess they're not average anymore.
What's the actual claim you're making here? That these people changed their minds due to direct personal experience of hearing an emotional story, or that a tiny number read some influencer piece in the NYT lifestyle pages and then became an activist? These are very different things - originally you were positing a cause but the latter is an effect.
Except nobody is fooled by putting a T on the end LGB, as if the fight for gay equality is the same as the fight to define other people's reality.
That seems empirically untrue. The LGBT cause is very popular because it pattern matches well with the previous gender discourse.
The controversy over gay marriage was precisely about other people’s realities. If two women are allowed to get married, if the state makes it legal, then it changes how other people should treat them. It literally redefined the concept of marriage from “one man and one woman” to “two adults.” That was a change to reality.
The activist discourse is similar, but what each is trying to accomplish with that discourse couldn’t be more different. This is probably why trans activists are scratching their heads over why it’s not working for them. The reason is that claiming equal access to state-sanctioned marriage is very different than claiming equal access to privately-constructed understandings of gender. “Trans women are real women” is an authoritarian statement imposing one idiosyncratic view of womanhood on people with their own ideas of womanhood that often differ. There is no ‘right to womanhood’, not even cis women have such a right. So there is no right to be extended to trans people. What they really want is control of other people’s reality via control of their definitions. Most Americans have a natural immune system for this kind of Maoist authoritarianism.
Lol
Ironically I basically agree.
The problem is (A) lots of biological women feel uncomfortable with that and (B) largely because of the origins in academia (I think), the left over-theorizes everything. Forget a couple of unlucky people with what's probably some issue with brain receptors for sex steroids living as a different gender, you have to *tear down the whole edifice of binary gender* and *question every binary*.
Now if you told me the whole thing was astroturfed by chemical companies to avoid paying settlements for problems caused by endocrine disruptors, and then got out of hand...well, I'd find that credible, but what investigative journalist would be left-wing enough to find all that dirt on companies and right-wing enough to cast shade on the LGBT movement? But it hasn't been that long ago. I'd bet a lot of the culprits are still alive, and there may be a paper trail or digital receipts somewhere. If someone with the necessary skills is reading this...
> still not completely sure why trans in particular has become such an important issue
> to educated white women.
I'm very interested in your theories. on this. I've been thinking it has to do with gatekeeping by the elites classes, sort of like changing the passwords and the locks to prevent circulation. In premodern India, the Brahmin caste excluded the lower castes from higher status by developing elaborate purity regimes, abstruse metaphysical theories, and intricate rituals. This is why we get this or that issue du jour along with new buzz words every year. It's a sign of degeneracy when an elite class feels this pressure to prevent circulation of new elites because their grip on status is growing increasingly tenuous. So by this theory, trans ideology and the inscrutable morality associated with it is the latest in a long line of exclusionary tactics by our elite.
This plus women are insanely conformist and hysterical
I think the overall degenerate feminization of the elite class is a substantial factor. I mean we experience epistemological sink, believing that a proposition is true if and only if it keeps the peace, avoids disadvantaging any one person or group, and doesn't disrupt anyone's sense of safety. We then experience ethical sink where morality comes to be equated almost entirely with compassion and fairness while the level of one's moral status varies with one's group identity (and positively with one's level of weepy guilt). We then experience political sink where pressure to conform under the feminine threat of social ostracization, reputational damage, and public shaming encourages self-censoring even as public expression that slips through is corralled, monitored, and policed. Free speech is finally scoffed at as an artifact of dead, white male culture. This is followed by a complete aesthetic collapse where mental illness, moral turpitude, and physical unhealth are celebrated as bravery and beauty and abject nonsense becomes genius. Finally, artistic media unifies and homogenizes a message that perpetuates and calcifies these ideological rationalizations of the morality leading to our current post-modern canons of skepticism, relativism, and nihilism.
Well said
I like that theory because it paints the woke left as a bunch of hypocrites. Sadly, I don't think it's true.
Something like that would leave more records--someone annoyed would have spilled the beans. I do think it helps keep out the poors, but it's more of a fashion thing--well-to-do left-leaning people are always finding social causes they can get behind that don't involve redistributing their wealth.
That sounds about right. The upper classes in all times and places develop class markers. Generally speaking, this happens organically and in all earnestness. There's very rarely an organized and cynical plot. Something starts as the avant-garde fashionable thing. Then, if it catches enough momentum, it eventually becomes the right and proper thing to do, and people who don't do it are simply uncouth rubes.
I think that self-interest tends to show up largely in the steps between "avant-garde" and "catching momentum." Fashions that would be self-destructive tend to burn out faster. Some people on the margins between idealism and cynicism pile onto fashions that are more self-interested, and they help those fashions to gain critical mass and succeed. But, crucially, they didn't invent the fashions, and they never organized to say, "Let's focus on backing gay stuff instead of going after Wall Street or the military."
You could kind of see the dynamic you're talking about with BLM. The whole George Floyd thing, for instance. Unlike a lot of conservatives I don't think he deserved to die. But if you survey an empire of 300 million you always can find some injustice to get worked up about, and conflicts between black men and the police had been ending badly and the media had been playing them up for a while. This one probably took off because everyone was stuck indoors. So 'defunding the police' became the cause du jour, and they tried to get rid of Paw Patrol and D&D modules with police procedural themes. Then crime went up and most of the attempts to defund police failed at the ballot. Gradually the left lost interest and started focusing back on trans issues and, ironically, the economy.
You always have a dynamic of people with varying levels of idealism and cynicism, and people all along that spectrum. It's tricky because the sort of people who comment on blogs like this tend to be very much in the opposite direction (and I'm a great example), but there are people who are really good at sensing fashions and moving with them, they tend to be in careers like media and the arts where that's useful, and they don't always have a clear distinction in their minds between idealism and cynicism--something's good for them, so they start believing in it. And they're good at swimming in the water of fashion, so it works for them.
What's the bit about geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths? (And this is where cultural studies is actually kind of useful--are we dividing things into three because of a longstanding Western tendency to do that which dates back to the Trinity? )
No, no, no, they're not hypocrites and its not a conspiracy. They don't even know what's really going on as to any of this because it happens over decades. We're talking about beliefs and behaviors that are high status. The elite classes define status for all of us, but we mimic them so we can appear high status. So what's been happening since World War 2 is high status beliefs have been drifting leftward *from the top* so as to maintain separation between high status beliefs and what everyone else believes. When non-elites catch up in their beliefs, elites have to find new territory to occupy to preserve their status. There are many reasons why the US Overton window drifts leftward over time, and this is one of the big ones.
It’s not a conspiracy. For 99% of the elite class it’s not even conscious. It’s just what works and has worked for retaining power post world war 2. When you’re an elite, you don’t know you’re learning the codes and passwords for access to power, you just go to Harvard.
If that was all there was to it, no one would care. But it's not all there is to it. There is an associated morality that requires one to bend their understanding of reality to conform to the personal identity choices of another person. If a man wants me to agree he's a trans woman, I will gladly do that. If a man wants me to agree he's a real woman, I can't do that, because it's just not true in my framework of reality. Where does this moral imperative come from that I should feel compelled to alter my reality to conform to some external preference of another person? I really don't understand the moral reasoning that requires that of me.
Right? It'd be like an anorexic telling you she's fat, and you have to agree with it otherwise you face negative social consequences.
Your example illustrates another point that gets lost in all of this. Namely, the body dysmorphia that leads to anorexia is understood to be a mental illness. And, at least for the time being, there is no social requirement that we play along with the delusions caused by mental illnesses. A lot of otherwise very compassionate peoples intuitively understand gender dysphoria to be a kind of mental illness that should be diagnosed and treated the way we do body dysmorphic disorder. It just seems sensible that helping people live comfortably in their own skin is the first priority. However, in the rhetoric of trans ideology this perfectly compassionate response is considered evil. And it's considered evil because men (especially) who decide to transition often have other motivations than escaping dysphoria. Just look at Dylan Mulvaney, a fairly non-descript gay man who designed and implemented the world's most public transition ever, rocketing himself to fame and fortune. This avenue to high status for men would be entirely choked off if society viewed gender dysphoria as an illness that is treatable. I know this is a little cynical, but honestly, I think it might not be cynical enough.
Directly from the DSM-5 (under diagnostic criteria for body dysmorphic disorder):
"Specify if:
Indicate degree of insight regarding body dysmorphic disorder beliefs (e.g., “I look ugly” or “I look deformed”).
With good or fair insight: The individual recognizes that the body dysmorphic disorder beliefs are definitely or probably not true or that they may or may not be true.
With poor insight: The individual thinks that the body dysmorphic beliefs are probably true.
With absent insight/delusional beliefs: The individual is completely convinced that the body dysmorphic beliefs are true."
With a few changes, these criteria could be directly applied to gender dysphoria. But somehow we're supposed to believe that people who believe they are the opposite sex are always correct in their beliefs and never wrong???
This is great! You're absolutely right. And there are so many questions as to why the psychological community refuses to look at gender dysphoria in this way. There have been some brave psychologists who publicly questioned all this. They're all probably defrocked and canceled by now. But there must be even more who privately wonder if the world has gone mad.
When I take a step back and look at the way trans issues entered the public consciousness, I am heartened by the fact that it's the result of people choosing to be compassionate. You say you're a man/woman, ok, I believe you're hurting over this. How can we help? Use your pronouns? Ok. No workplace discrimination? Ok. Calling my sister a birthing person? No, I'm sorry. Your self-image is not more important than hers. She is a mother and she deserves to be called a mother and I will call her a mother. So compassion has a sensible limit when the object of your compassion demands too much. Each person will reach their limit at a different point, but many compassionate people are reaching their limits with the trans movement. Many more will soon. So, I look on all of this as a somewhat unfortunate lesson our society needs to learn about the limits of compassion.
I hope I'm right.
I like the "There's more demand for oppressed people than supply" idea.
Educated white women mostly work in jobs that are stable day-to-day, with relatively limited project-based career growth potential, that they aren't especially passionate about. The jobs are boring so they focus on finding passion in other ways, which then settles on excessive displays of compassion and caring. But they also live easy lives in easy offices in easy societies, where there aren't many people around who need that compassion. Hence the desperate search for oppression and the hatred for people who point out that the claimed oppression doesn't really exist. It's robbing them of meaning, of their own identity story. It's not about other people's identities, it's about theirs.
Men can be the same way of course but are more likely to find self-actualization through career growth and hard skills.
All of the wokester agenda is to further the eugenics agenda. Period. Cleverly presented. Teenagers seem to be susceptible to the supposed ideology. It's amazing how much attention this flim flam has taken root in the zeitgeist. Can't father a child if you can't play pocket pool. Can't drop a baby if you're pumped full of testosterone.
Fundamentally incorrect. What kind of eugenics is mass third world immigration + Planned Parenthood for natives?
The elite liberal agenda is dysgenic, and out of stupidity rather than planning.
I'm all in favor of conspiracy theories, sometimes several at once from people who don't like each other. Are the rich encouraging the left to get into the race and identity politics weeds to prevent a cross-racial working-class movement from arising? Was the pre-woke liberal synthesis an attempt to make the world safe for capitalism? Did pre-woke American history cover up all the nasty things the ruling class did? Are lesbians and feminists (who overlap a lot) making impossible sex rules in colleges so boys can't ask girls out? Are Democrats trying to increase ethnic diversity so they never lose an election? Are progressives trying to encourage kids with no other diversity points to identify as LGBT so they rupture with their families and become progressives? Yes.
It makes sense. People with power shape society to further their interests. 1000 years you had the Catholic Church saying the feudal order was the will of God, all the while trying to steal power from the knights. Large primates gonna large primate.
But...eugenics agenda? Whose? The guys who used to hang out with Epstein? They like having hormonally normal teenagers around, for reasons we won't go into here. The woke left? They hate Scott Alexander because he said something in an email that sounded vaguely close to the stuff. Siilcon Valley techbros? Some think eugenics is OK, but they're hardly woke, most having annoyed some girl by asking her out at some point. Evangelical Christians? They don't believe in eugenics and they are definitely not supporters of wokery. White nationalists? They hate this stuff, it's a Jewish plot to castrate America so they can get all the shiksas. Diana Fleischman? She's the only one I know who's actually advocated eugenics, and she's not even woke.
You could make a very good case that the current every-sexuality-except-straight-white-male-is-good regime is a strong selection regime for young men who resist leftist indoctrination and the hedonic pull of video games and anime, and are masculine enough to attract women. Except that I doubt the sort of traditionalists who would benefit from this long term are behind any of it.
Anti-natalists are the hidden forces behind the trans movement?
Sort of. I think you have lots of liberal and progressive people who don't want kids and come up with excuses about the warming of the planet and the first world to justify that, and they are sympathetic to this stuff. I think not having kids is secondary or tertiary, though. They actually believe this stuff.
The recent success of gender ideology requires adherence to what I call "radical affirmation", meaning other members of society have to not only accept but actively affirm a person's belief in their identity. We've been increasingly subject to such an approach through the feminization of modern culture, which has infiltrated mental health and the medical profession (among others). I see the current increase in trans among young women as another variant of body dysmorphia generally, but in the past, we didn't tell a young woman starving herself to death because she believed she was fat that she was indeed fat.