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A Dyslogy for Ireland's "Hate Speech" Bill
When someone shows you who they are, believe them
In several posts over the last few months I've alluded to a piece of legislation making its way through the Irish houses of parliament. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 (widely referred to as the “hate speech” bill) was a bill which would provide the government with sweeping powers to arrest and convict individuals they suspected of “stirring up hatred” against members of communities defined by one or more protected characteristics.1 This bill has been enormously controversial throughout its entire lifecycle, with precisely 40% of pollsters in favour and 40% opposed, and no less than Elon Musk pledging to pay the legal fees of anyone prosecuted under it in the event that it passed. It was first proposed in October 2022, passed in the Dáil2 in April 2023 after several rounds of amendments, and then made its way to the Seanad3, where it languished for well over a year, being neither approved nor rejected.
What an unmitigated joy and relief it was two weeks ago, to learn that the bill has officially been shelved by Ireland’s Minister of Justice, Helen McEntee. This specific bill has proved something of an albatross around the government’s neck for months, and not even a change in Taoiseach4 was sufficient to kill it. But a general election is due to be held no later than March of next year, and the incumbent Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition government now finds itself in the unenviable position of needing to hastily course-correct just in time to appeal to the median voter (the budget announcement of two weeks ago, with its generous salary tax cuts, is part of the same drive). After the national embarrassment of a referendum rejected by fully 70% of the electorate, the government is finally cottoning on to the fact that its woke agenda, while enormously popular among progressive think tanks, NGOs and media outlets, is absolute cyanide at the polling station. Of course an effort to save face must be made, and Minister McEntee has committed to still pushing for hate crime legislation in spite of dropping the hate speech bill itself. But it’s also too soon to be doing victory laps, as McEntee has promised to come back for another bite at the apple if she’s reelected.
If you live in Ireland, you will likely have heard plenty of claims about what this bill entails: that previous legislation of this type proved ineffective at its stated aims, and so more robust legislation is required; or that the existing incitement to hatred legislation was drafted in a pre-digital, pre-social media era, and that this bill represents a simple but necessary “modernization” of existing legislation. (“Modernization” is the preferred term among the pathologically oikophobic East Yanks making up Fine Gael’s rank and file to describe the changes they wish to bring to bear on Irish society, who seem wholly unable to conceive that one could be opposed to such changes without being a parochial cattle farmer who takes his marching orders from Rome.) Given that there’s a significant possibility that this bill could be resurrected next year, understanding exactly what it entails remains as urgent as ever, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain what it proposed to do, in plain, unambiguous language. I will be quoting at length from the text of the bill which was approved by the Dáil in April of last year.
The first few examples of what constitutes an offense under this legislation are alarming enough. As outlined in articles 7-9, the bill would make it a criminal offense if a person “communicates material to the public or a section of the public… that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics”; if a person “communicates material to the public or a section of the public… that condones, denies or grossly trivialises [sic]— (i) genocide, (ii) a crime against humanity, (iii) a war crime”; even if no actual hatred or violence resulted as a result of this communication. These offenses would be punishable by a maximum of 5 years in prison or twelve months in prison, respectively.
It’s article 10 where things get really scary, however (bolding mine):
Subject to subsections (2) and (3) and section 11, a person shall be guilty of an offence under this section if the person—
(a) prepares or possesses material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics or any of those characteristics with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by himself or herself or another person
(b) prepares or possesses such material with intent to incite violence or hatred against such a person or group of persons on account of those characteristics or any of those characteristics or being reckless as to whether such violence or hatred is thereby incited.
Creating or owning material “likely to incite violence or hatred” against protected groups would be a criminal offense punishable by up to two years in prison, even if this material is never distributed. It’s not merely a crime to verbally express racist thoughts in public, or make sexist jokes on Twitter: writing something racist in a Word document on a private desktop computer to which you’re the only person with access and which isn’t even connected to the Internet would also constitute a criminal offense.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Did you know that when someone sends you an image on WhatsApp, by default that image is automatically saved down to the internal storage of your phone? This is true even of WhatsApp chats that you’ve muted or archived. This means that every image sent to you on WhatsApp is hence “in your possession”, by virtue of being saved on a device which belongs to you - the fact that you haven’t sent that image on to anyone else is irrelevant. Think about how many group chats you’ve been added to that you’ve had muted for months, in which ex-colleagues or old GAA teammates you didn’t even get along with at the time are constantly trying to one-up each other by sharing tasteless memes about the topic du jour. Think about your family group chat, to which your annoying uncle sends crudely drawn newspaper cartoons about “the old ball and chain”, amusing to no one but himself. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t create any of these images, that you didn’t forward these images on to anyone else, that you don’t agree with the contents of any of these images and actually find them crass and offensive - they’re saved to your phone, which means they’re in your possession, which means you’re guilty of an offense punishable by up to a year in prison.
Somehow, it gets worse. The bill also explains how search warrants are to be executed. If a judge was to be presented with compelling evidence that a given person is guilty of one of the above offenses, they can issue Garda Síochána5 with a search warrant, which must be executed within a week (bolding mine):
(2) A search warrant under this section shall be expressed, and shall operate, to authorise [sic] a named member…
(a) to enter, at any time within one week of the date of issue of the warrant, on production if so requested of the warrant, and if necessary by the use of reasonable force, the place named in the warrant,
(b) to search it and any persons found at that place, and
(c) to examine, seize and retain anything found at that place, or anything found in possession of a person present at that place at the time of the search, that that member reasonably believes to be evidence of, or relating to, the commission of an offence under section 7, 8 or 10, as the case may be.
(4) A member acting under the authority of a search warrant under this section may—
(a) operate any computer at the place that is being searched or cause any such computer to be operated by a person accompanying the member for that purpose, and
(b) require any person at that place who appears to the member to have lawful access to the information in any such computer—
(i) to give to the member any password necessary to operate it and any encryption key or code necessary to unencrypt the information accessible by the computer,
(ii) otherwise to enable the member to examine the information accessible by the computer in a form in which the information is visible and legible, or
(iii) to produce the information in a form in which it can be removed and in which it is, or can be made, visible and legible.
(7) A person who—
(a) obstructs or attempts to obstruct a member acting under the authority of a search warrant under this section,
(b) fails to comply with a requirement under subsection (4)(b) or (5), or (c) in relation to a requirement under subsection (5), gives a name and address or provides information which the member has reasonable cause for believing is false or misleading in a material respect,
shall be guilty of an offence.
(8) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (7) shall be liable on summary conviction to a class A fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or both.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you are sympathetic to the stated aims of this bill, and you sincerely believe that far-right people spewing vitriol about immigrants online really ought to be locked up. Imagine you share an apartment with a flatmate called Joe, a shy, quiet guy who keeps to himself. You don’t consider Joe a personal friend, you don’t know much about him, and you don’t even eat your meals together - but he’s neat and tidy and pays the rent on time, so you have no complaints. Completely unbeknownst to you, Joe operates a pseudonymous Twitter account in which he expresses opinions about immigration to Ireland which some people consider offensive. Unfortunately for Joe, he’s been a bit careless about his digital footprint, and an anti-racist activist on Twitter was able to connect the dots and figure out his real name, which they pass on to the guards. The guards in turn determine his residence and request a search warrant, which is granted.
One evening you’re home alone (as Joe is away on holiday) when you hear a pounding at the door. Fearful that the guards will kick the door down (which they are perfectly entitled to do), you open the door. The guards explain they have a warrant to search your apartment, as they suspect that Joe (named on the warrant) is guilty of incitement to hatred. You explain that Joe is away and they should call back later. The guards don’t care, and demand that you present your wallet/handbag, phone and laptop to them so that they can search them for hateful material. You retort that this is ridiculous - you aren’t even named on the search warrant, you barely know Joe, Joe has never touched your phone or your laptop (or vice versa). The guards don’t care, and again demand that you surrender your phone, laptop, and the PINs to both. At this juncture you have the choice:
- Grant them access. The guards can now view all of your private documents, emails, messages and images. This would be invasive and potentially embarrassing enough, even if they don’t find any material they deem likely to promote hatred or incitement to violence against minorities. But of course, there’s every chance they might find an edgy meme that your annoying uncle sent to the family group chat which you didn’t realize was saved on to your phone - so they promptly arrest you, you’re prosecuted for incitement to hatred and sentenced to a year in prison.
- Refuse to grant them access. For refusing to hand over the PINs to your phone and laptop, the guards promptly arrest you, you’re prosecuted for obstructing justice, and you’re sentenced to a year in prison.
I see no reason, none, why the above scenario could not have transpired exactly as described above if this bill had passed according to the wording approved by the Dáil.
Now perhaps you’ll say to me - come on, that’s ridiculous. Maybe they want to enact this bill, but they won’t actually use it - it’s only being enacted as a deterrent, and maybe there’ll be one prosecution every five years for extremely persistent neo-Nazis literally waving 14/88 flags outside the synagogue in Terenure. Ordinary people with a dark sense of humour have nothing to fear from this bill.
I wouldn’t be so confident. For an example very close to home, consider section 127 of the UK’s Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” with online posts, on which it appears Ireland’s “hate speech” bill took at least some inspiration. As reported by the Times, at least 2,315 people were arrested under this section of the act in 2014, a figure which shot up to 3,395 in 2023. And before you say that all of these people were let off with a warning, 1,399 people were convicted under this act last year - and this was under a Tory government!6 Scale these figures down to the size of the Irish population, and ceteris paribus you would expect 253 arrests and 104 convictions in Ireland every year. In a period in which the Irish prison service is massively underresourced and ovecrowded, with the prison population consistently in excess of the total bed capacity by as much as 10-12% throughout the year - the government now wants to throw as many as another hundred people in jail every year for the crime of making tasteless jokes in the privacy of their own homes.
Or you’ll say, sure, the bill is written in an extremely sweeping fashion, but it’ll never actually be used to lock people up just for making a joke in poor taste. They’re keeping the wording expansive only so that genuine racists and far-right nutters won’t be able to weasel out of a conviction on a technicality, but the genuine racists and far-night nutters are the only people who’ll be targeted by it: otherwise decent, law-abiding citizens will be left alone.
I’m having none of it. Look at past efforts to control speech and behaviour and/or invade citizenry’s privacy from this century alone, and the apology outlined above pattern-matches to none of them. “Hate speech” legislation in France was adapted into ag-gag legislation so quickly it must have made those poor Parisians’ beret-clad heads spin (“stigmatizing agricultural activities” is certainly a colorful way to refer to any and all criticisms of factory farming). If you made a list of all the activities which could be reasonably characterized as aiding or abetting terrorism, I very much doubt “operating a fan website about the TV show Stargate SG-1” would make the top 100 such entries, or even the top 1,000: that didn’t stop the US government invoking the USA PATRIOT Act (enacted just six weeks after 9/11, ostensibly to combat terrorism) to subpoena the financial records of the unfortunate webmaster in question. When governments are afforded sweeping powers to invade the privacy of their citizenry, they tend to put them to full use. Consider the aforementioned section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 - do you think the only people convicted under it were outspoken neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Let’s see:
A 20-year-old builder has been ordered to pay more than £500 after he drew a penis on a police officer's face using Snapchat.
Jordan Barrack secretly took the photo on his mobile phone while being interviewed by an officer at Sleaford Police Station, Lincoln.
He then drew two penises on the picture using Snapchat, one over the officer PC Charles Harris' face, before sending it to some friends and posting it on Facebook.
…
He pleaded guilty at Lincoln Magistrates’ Court to 'posting a grossly offensive, obscene picture on a social media site' and was ordered to pay £400 in compensation.
The youngster, who lives with his parents, had to pay an additional £85 of costs and a £60 victim surcharge, and was ordered to serve a 12 month community order with 40 hours of unpaid work.
…
"They confiscated my phone at the time and I still haven't got it back over five months later even though the case is finished now."7
As I've gone out of my way to outline above, criminal offenses are defined so broadly under this bill that you would be hard pressed to find someone who isn't guilty of one of them - after all, who among us hasn't been sent an edgy or offensive meme by a relative, work colleague, or friend of a friend? Some apologists for this bill will use that very fact as a point in its defense: they think there's some kind of “safety in numbers” effect, wherein a bill which makes a criminal of just about everyone will quickly be exposed as a farce and abolished. But this defense rests entirely on the touchingly naïve assumption that the government (or more specifically, the director of public prosecutions) would have the slightest interest in enforcing this law in an impartial manner. On the contrary: a crime which is defined in such a way that everyone is guilty of it is an absolute godsend to a cabinet looking to silence or intimidate its opponents. Selective enforcement is the name of the game, and you can be certain that the DPP would come down like a tonne of bricks on anyone critical of the establishment, but look the other way when people who toe the party line crack offensive jokes or say hateful things.
Hell, even if they're unable to secure a conviction, being dragged through the courts is exhausting, expensive and humiliating enough. If you criticise the government, and then have to endure the embarrassment of the guards rifling through your personal effects and private documents for hours, getting arrested and charged with possessing materials which could be used for incitement to hatred, having to waste hundreds of man-hours and tens of thousands of euros mounting a legal defense before showing up for your day in court - even if you win, even if the state agrees to pay your legal fees (which they probably wouldn't), do you think you'll be as strongly inclined to criticise the government going forward? No one wants to go through that grief even once, never mind twice. The process is the punishment, and “hate speech” legislation can here function as the criminal justice equivalent of a SLAPP lawsuit. Don’t believe for a second that this has anything to do with combatting “hate” or “prejudice” or whatever: this is the iron fist in the rainbow glove all over again.
Apologists for invasive, authoritarian legislation of this type sometimes fall back on that old saw: “if you're innocent, you've nothing to worry about”, or as one commenter on the r/ireland subreddit put it, “just don't be a cunt and you'll be fine”. Putting aside the question of whether it's appropriate or proportionate to jail someone for a year or longer for the crime of “being a cunt”, what I've tried to do in this article is emphasise that this argument simply does not apply in the case of this specific bill. Whether by accident or by design, collateral damage and guilt-by-association are built into this bill from its foundations. If enacted, it will be entirely possible to go one's entire life without expressing a single hateful opinion or tasteless joke, and still be convicted of a criminal offense. All because you had the poor fortune to live in the same house as someone who has done one or more of these things, or because someone sent you a tasteless image on WhatsApp and you didn’t realise in time to delete it.
This government spent most of 2020-21 urging its populace to practise social distancing and limit their social contacts for fear of spreading a virus. Now they are doing the same thing, only for “viruses” of the mind. Think about the kinds of behaviour being incentivised, when people realise that they could be found guilty of a criminal offense simply because someone else (even someone they don't know, who they've never met) sent a crass image to their phone. The chilling effects are predictable and inevitable: people will steadily begin to avoid giving out their phone numbers (even to potentially valuable business contacts, or potential friends or romantic partners); will avoid joining WhatsApp groups unless they are certain that none of the members of that group have offensive opinions (something they can never be certain of, obviously); and will begin to curtail their documentable interactions with anyone without the “correct” politics (baldly counter to the basic goals and values of a pluralistic society). Ireland is already the loneliest country in Europe - how could such a situation not be exacerbated by this bill, if Irish people are reluctant to give their phone numbers to acquaintances out of an entirely legitimate fear that doing so will put them at increased risk of arrest and prosecution?
Meanwhile, anyone with unorthodox politics or a dark sense of humour will find themselves left out in the cold, their friends having blocked them on WhatsApp for fear of being convicted by association. Confused and hurt by rejection from all angles, they will retreat into online echo chambers of like-minded individuals, in which their worst tendencies will be amplified beyond all proportion. Far from serving as an effective antidote to far-right radicalisation, this bill is a recipe for it.
Assuming you reside in Ireland, I’m not going to tell you how to vote in the next general election - that’s entirely your business. But before you cast your vote, I’m pleading with you to consider this. Listed below are the names of the TDs who voted in favour of this bill when it passed in the Dáil.8 If you are considering voting for any of them, please bear this in mind: these people know that, as a consequence of this bill, a member of the public, just like you, could be sent to prison for a year for refusing to disclose the PIN to their phone to a police officer, without having ever been named on a search warrant or having been personally accused of incitement to hatred. They know that a member of the public could be sent to prison for a year merely for possessing an image that somebody might find offensive - even if they didn’t create it, even if they never sent it to anybody else, even if they literally didn’t know it was in their possession (because it was sent to a WhatsApp group of which they are a member, but which they’ve had muted for months). They know this for a fact, and they don’t care: they are completely fine with it. And if the opportunity presents itself, they’ll vote for it again, as Minister McEntee surely expects them to do.
Maybe knowing this fact about these politicians isn’t a deal-breaker for you. But it is for me, and I don't even care that this bill hasn’t been enacted (yet): by voting for it, these TDs have told me everything I need to know about them and their respect for ordinary people and their civil liberties. To keep myself honest, I am making a public pledge: I will never give any of the names which appear on the list below any preference in any ballot paper I fill out until the day I die, unless the politician in question gives a public apology for voting for this bill and expressly admits that they personally were wrong to have done so. If they canvass me, I will ask them point-blank why they think it’s appropriate to arrest someone because someone else sent them an offensive meme. If the only candidates running in my constituency are candidates who voted in favour of this tyrannical, authoritarian monstrosity and express no remorse about having done so, I will abstain.
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Andrews, Chris
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Berry, Cathal
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Brady, John
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Brophy, Colm
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Browne, James
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Browne, Martin
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Bruton, Richard
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Buckley, Pat
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Burke, Colm
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Butler, Mary
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Byrne, Thomas
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Cahill, Jackie
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Cairns, Holly
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Calleary, Dara
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Canney, Seán
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Cannon, Ciarán
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Carroll MacNeill, Jennifer
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Carthy, Matt
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Chambers, Jack
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Clarke, Sorca
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Collins, Niall
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Conway-Walsh, Rose
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Costello, Patrick
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Coveney, Simon
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Cowen, Barry
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Cronin, Réada
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Crowe, Cathal
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Crowe, Seán
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Daly, Pa
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Devlin, Cormac
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Dillon, Alan
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Donnelly, Paul
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Donnelly, Stephen
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Donohoe, Paschal
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Duffy, Francis Noel
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Durkan, Bernard J
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Ellis, Dessie
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English, Damien
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Farrell, Alan
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Farrell, Mairéad
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Feighan, Frankie
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Flaherty, Joe
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Flanagan, Charles
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Fleming, Sean
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Foley, Norma
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Funchion, Kathleen
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Gannon, Gary
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Gould, Thomas
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Griffin, Brendan
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Guirke, Johnny
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Haughey, Seán
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Heydon, Martin
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Higgins, Emer
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Howlin, Brendan
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Humphreys, Heather
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Kehoe, Paul
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Kenny, Martin
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Kerrane, Claire
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Lahart, John
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Leddin, Brian
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Lowry, Michael
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Mac Lochlainn, Pádraig
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Madigan, Josepha
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Martin, Micheál
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Matthews, Steven
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McAuliffe, Paul
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McConalogue, Charlie
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McGrath, Michael
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McGuinness, John
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McHugh, Joe
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Mitchell, Denise
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Moynihan, Aindrias
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Moynihan, Michael
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Murnane O'Connor, Jennifer
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Nash, Ged
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Naughton, Hildegarde
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Noonan, Malcolm
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O'Brien, Darragh
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O'Brien, Joe
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O'Callaghan, Cian
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O'Callaghan, Jim
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O'Connor, James
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O'Donnell, Kieran
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O'Dowd, Fergus
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O'Gorman, Roderic
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O'Reilly, Louise
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O'Rourke, Darren
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O'Sullivan, Christopher
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O'Sullivan, Pádraig
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Ó Broin, Eoin
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Ó Cathasaigh, Marc
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Ó Cuív, Éamon
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Ó Murchú, Ruairí
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Ó Ríordáin, Aodhán
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Ó Snodaigh, Aengus
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Quinlivan, Maurice
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Rabbitte, Anne
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Richmond, Neale
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Ring, Michael
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Ryan, Eamon
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Ryan, Patricia
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Smith, Brendan
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Smith, Duncan
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Smyth, Ossian
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Stanley, Brian
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Stanton, David
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Tully, Pauline
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Varadkar, Leo
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Ward, Mark
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Whitmore, Jennifer
I hope for our sakes that Elon Musk’s coffers are as deep as everyone says they are.
1In the order listed in the text of the bill: race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, disability.
2 Lower house of parliament.
3 Upper house of parliament.
4 Prime minister.
5 The Irish police service.
6 As pointed out by Greg Lukianoff, more people were arrested under this act in a two-year span than the total number of people arrested during that infamously repressive period in American history, the first Red Scare, even though the UK population in 2014-2015 was only 70% that of the US in 1920.
7 I wonder if the woke people defending legislation of this type, many of whom have “ACAB” (all cops are bastards) in their Twitter bios, are aware that it can and has been used to prosecute people for playfully teasing police officers.
8 And believe you me, I never foresaw finding myself in a position in which I’d have to give credit where credit’s due to Richard Boyd Barrett, Paul Murphy, Bríd Smith and the Healy-Raes of all people. Coalitions make strange bedfellows indeed.
Last Christmas I watched the film Wild (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(2014_film)) with my family, based on the memoir of the same name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_(memoir)) by Cheryl Strayed. The film concerns Strayed's successful attempt to hike 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail, solo. I didn't like the film for many reasons: its narrative structure (hiking interspersed with flashbacks) was monotonous; the dialogue was overwritten and stagey; the performances were of greatly varying quality; and what little CGI it used was unconvincing and distracting.
But the biggest reason I didn't like it was because I really disliked the protagonist. The death of Strayed's mother caused her to spiral into a deep depression, which she coped with by using heroin and having unprotected sex with strange men, despite being married. After one of these illicit trysts she gets pregnant, she decides to terminate the pregnancy, her husband (finally!) realises he's had enough and divorces her. At this point she realises she's hit rock bottom, prompting her to embark on her hike as a therapeutic exercise (explaining to an exasperated friend: "I'm going to walk myself back to the person my mother thought I was!").
And I just found her motivation and conception of herself so grandiose and narcissistic - the idea that her personal problems are of such profound import that the only way she can address them is by walking 1,100 miles, alone - that I couldn't stand her. Even when she correctly recognises that she's a piece of shit, she still thinks she's a piece of shit in a rather grand, exceptional way - a Mary Sue who's a villain is still a Mary Sue. Like, if you've (finally!) realised that it's wrong to cheat on your husband with strange men (and grief over your mother's death does absolutely nothing to exculpate you) - sure, you absolutely could try to address this by hiking 1,100 miles alone with little to no expertise, and potentially endangering other people who may have to come looking for you if you injure yourself.
Or you could, I dunno, not cheat on your husband, you stupid bitch.
Most of us go through our lives quietly toiling away at doing the right thing, not expecting or receiving any special praise for doing so. When we realise we've fucked up, we quietly toil away at trying to put things right. Most of us have the self-awareness to recognise that our personal problems are not huge, all-encompassing things which require extraordinary, dramatic efforts to rectify; for most people, their personal problems are ordinary and mundane, and can (must) be resolved or managed with ordinary, mundane graft. Cheryl Strayed can't even claim that the root of her personal problems is a traumatic event outside the realm of normal human experience (like being raped or horribly maimed; even having a miscarriage or a cot death would have been more sympathetic) - the death of one's mother is deeply upsetting, but unfortunately, it's something that the vast majority of people in the world will go through at one time or another. If everyone dealt with the death of their mother by abandoning their duties and embarking on a hike for three months - why, the Pacific Crest Trail would be clogged with people denser than Times Square and society would collapse. Strayed dealt with the grief over her mother's death by i) ruining her husband's life; ii) conceiving a child and then aborting it; iii) going on a long hike; iv) writing a book about her experience which made her millions (and she still had the nerve to complain that the film adaptation wasn't nominated for Best Picture and accusing the Academy of sexism). Most people take a few weeks off work and deal with their bereavement privately, with dignity. "But you don't understand, I had a really close bond with my mother!" - well, so did the Hispanic binman who collects your rubbish, Cheryl, who can't afford to take three months off work, because he has to put food on the table for his (un-aborted) children and (un-cuckqueaned) wife. It's the height of narcissism and self-absorption, perhaps even clinically significant delusions of grandeur.
I imagine you can guess where I'm going with this. You've been talking about this "hock" thing for at least a few weeks. You seem to expect us to be impressed by your plan to do this - well, I'm no more impressed by hearing about people's plans to complete punishing physical ordeals than I am by hearing about the idea someone has for a novel: the execution is the thing. ("Oh my God, you're thinking about running a marathon?! That's amazing! You're so disciplined and dedicated for thinking about doing one! And here I am actually running one like a sucker!") But more than anything I just find your motivation for doing it contemptible in exactly the same way as Strayed. You think you're the first guy in history to ever feel lonely or romantically frustrated? You think the only way you can deal with your personal problems is to embark on some punishing attention-seeking voyage? In your circumstances, most people just practise their people skills, improve their diet, go to the gym and perhaps attend a therapist if applicable - and they (we) do so quietly, with dignity, without any expectation of praise or commendation.
If you're lonely and romantically frustrated, I'm sorry to hear that, I've been there and it sucks. But whining about it on a forum is not going to help you, especially not when you rubbish all of the well-meaning and practical advice offered in reply (all of which that I've seen is more sensible and likely to help the issue than "go to Alaska alone"). If you want to do your "hock" thing, go for it, but don't delude yourself into thinking that it will magically resolve all of your personal problems in one fell swoop - wherever you go, there you are. And for God's sake, stop telling us about how you're going to do it and expecting us to be impressed in advance by your resolve and determination. Prepare for it in your own time, complete it, then you can feel proud of your accomplishment, and perhaps even write a postmortem about what you got out of the experience.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
- Washington Post: "Donald Trump just threatened to commit genocide"
- Foreign Policy: "This Is How Every Genocide Begins"
- Foreign Policy: "U.N. Genocide Watchdog Suggests Trump, American Hardliners Fueling Hatred of Muslims"
- Sky News: "Donald Trump warned of 'genocide' over threat to 'obliterate' Iran"
- Channel 4: "Trump’s foreign policy may be seen as ‘open invitation to commit genocide’, warns Turkish Kurd"
- Al-Jazeera: "The Muslim ban and the ethnic cleansing of America"
- Truthout: "When Trump Calls People “Filth,” He’s Laying Groundwork for Genocide"
- KCRW: "Is Trump Building a White Ethnostate?" (Betteridge's law of headlines notwithstanding)
- The Guardian: "How white supremacy went mainstream in the US"
- Vanity Fair: "How Trump Became an Accidental Totalitarian"
- Reuters: "Michael Moore compares Trump to Hitler in new documentary"
- Daily Commercial: "Yes, there are parallels between Trump and Hilter [sic]"
- Vox: "A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany"
- MSNBC: "MSNBC’s Deutsch equates Trump voters to Nazi guards: ‘If you vote for Trump, you’re the bad guy’"
- The Independent: "Donald Trump using Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' playbook, says world expert on Nazi leader"
- Salon: "If Trump wins, say goodbye to your black friends: A modest proposal"
- Time: "The Billionaire and the Bigots" (which comes perishingly close to predicting that Trump will be directly responsible for the founding of a new white nationalist political party)
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole.
No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.
I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.
Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.
A leftist talking point between 2017 and 2019 was that if someone seems to deny someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights. Therefore, it is okay to "punch Nazis".
I think this is incomplete. The standard framing of this is "if a person in a position of power denies someone else their rights, then they forfeit their own rights, therefore it's okay to punch Nazis."
It's the same reasoning that underlines "you can't be racist against white people" - racism = prejudice + power, ergo it isn't racist for a black person to say "if it was up to me I'd send all those fuckin crackers to the gas chamber" in the way it would be if the boot was on the other foot. The debate about "punching up" vs. "punching down" in standup comedy may seem innocuous and trivial, but it leads directly to people defending Hamas for gang-raping Israeli women.
So we aren't entitled to punch Richard Spencer in the face because of the things he said: we're entitled to punch him in the face because of the things he said and because he has power.
"What do you mean Richard Spencer has power? He's never been elected to public office, the membership in the organisation he founded is vanishingly small, he was so broke he had to move back in with his parents." Well, who has "power" and who doesn't (who's punching up and who's punching down) are intentionally defined in a manner which is fuzzy, opaque and prone to being gamed. It's practically a defining characteristic of leftists/woke people that they see themselves as always and forever supporting the oppressed and downtrodden, which means that whenever a leftist/woke person supports Alice over Bob, they must find (or invent) a reason that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob.
Israel and Palestine is a relatively straightforward case, in that it's hard to deny that Israel is the stronger of the two belligerents - technologically, economically and militarily superior, backed by the US, nukes etc. - but you will often find murkier cases, wherein the claim that Alice is disempowered relative to Bob seems a lot more contrived than this. For example, I've seen woke people argue that wealthy black people making fun of homeless white people is "punching up", because the homeless people are still beneficiaries of "white privilege". The whole "punching up" vs. "punching down" framework has so many degrees of freedom that it will almost always be possible to find some reason why the person you like is actually disempowered relative to the person you don't.
If it was done in a systemic way, we would aggregate all of the relevant characteristics of the two individuals or parties ("Alice makes €50k, is myopic, is a lesbian, speaks English as a second language and is a recent migrant; Bob makes €40k, wears hearing aids, is straight and suffers from pronounced PTSD") and then make a determination of who is allowed to crack jokes at the other's expense/beat the other one up/steal the other's shit. (This was probably the idea behind "privilege walks", in which you take a group of people, a series of statements are read out, and each person moves one step forward if the statement applies to them and one step back if it doesn't. I haven't heard much about them for years, probably because the technique's objectivity meant that it could easily show that a female person is more privileged than a male, or a POC more privileged than a white person - and we can't have that, can we?) In practice, all you need to do is find one axis on which Alice is considered to be worse off than Bob, and then claim that her position on this axis negates whatever positions she might occupy on any other axes which might be relevant to the debate over who has more power in an interpersonal or political debate. (Hillary Clinton may be white, cis, straight, fabulously wealthy, well-educated and extremely powerful in the literal sense of having held numerous high-ranking government positions in a career spanning decades - but she is a WOMAN, therefore all criticism and jokes directed at her are unacceptable punching down.)
This is one reason woke people get so hostile and defensive when people bring up class, education and income as axes of privilege: on some level they are well aware that almost all woke people are well-educated middle-to-upper-class people whose salaries are well above the national average, and that many anti-woke people are none of those things. It must be profoundly discomforting to simultaneously think of yourself as someone who always sticks up for the little guy, while also being aware that you routinely express sneering contempt for people who are poorer and less educated than you. Their preferred strategy for defusing this cognitive dissonance is to insist that they don't hate poor white people because they're poor but rather because they're racist and sexist and etc.; that race matters more than class; that if you're white and poor in a white supremacist society then that means you must have squandered your white privilege ("why can't you just pull yourself up by your Klanstraps?").
As a person who thinks, fundamentally, that what's good for the goose is good for the gander, I was never going to feel at home in woke spaces. I've read tens of thousands of words trying to justify the claim that it's okay for black people to express seething hatred for white people but not vice versa (and by extension that it's okay for Palestinians to gang rape Israelis but not vice versa). Dozens of people have tried to explain to me in person why they believe it to be so, or treated it as so self-evident that they're honestly baffled why I don't accept it face value (like I didn't understand why 2+2=4). It's obviously an assertion that makes a great deal of intuitive sense for a large proportion of the population - I'm just not one of those people and I don't think I ever will be.
FtttG
7mo ago
He shouldn’t have said he wouldn’t pardon him but that’s not actually what he said, was it
The president's decision to pardon his son is a sharp reversal from months of vows from the White House and Biden himself that he would not use the power of his office to benefit his family. After his son was convicted in his gun case, the president said he would "abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”
FtttG
10mo ago
They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism.
I was onboard with this post, but this came a bit out of left field and seems largely unrelated to the main thrust of your argument.
Yes, Hollywood is disproportionately controlled by Jews, so it's strictly true that Jews are responsible for recent trends in Hollywood slop.
But Hollywood has been disproportionately controlled by Jews for as long as Hollywood has been a thing. From Goldwyn to Wilder to Spielberg, Jews were responsible for some of the most beloved films in the American canon.
Whatever the underlying cause of the downturn in quality in mainstream American cinema, you can't just point to the religion or ethnicity of the people in charge. They have the same religion and ethnicity as the people who were in charge when Hollywood was good.
FtttG
2yr ago
A senator has spoken out against the new hate speech bill.
I went to a protest today organised by the Irish Freedom Party. (I've never voted for one of their candidates in a general election before, but given that every major party, including the Greens for whom I usually vote, has backed this piece of legislation, I may have no choice come the next general election.)
The more I hear about this bill the more it draconian it sounds. Literally any police officer, regardless of rank, can tell a judge "I believe so-and-so possesses materials likely to promote violence or hatred against a person or group on the basis of their protected characteristics" and the judge can grant a search warrant. This search warrant gives the police license to search the person's home (using force if necessary), search the property of any person present in that person's home, force the person in question to hand over the passwords for any electronic devices in their possession, and seize anything they so choose from that person's home.
What I find most frustrating about this is that I'm quite confident that if I told an Irish person, in 2019, that Trump was trying to pass a piece of legislation intended to grant sweeping powers to the police to anyone suspected of collusion with Islamic terrorist groups, they'd say it was grotesquely Orwellian insanity. But because this legislation is being proposed with the ostensible goal of combatting racism and transphobia, the response has been a collective shrug (there were a mere ~500 people at the protest today). "Just don't be a cunt and you'll be fine" according to one denizen of /r/ireland.
This afternoon, an Algerian man who'd been resident in Ireland for years approached a crèche in the Dublin city centre and stabbed a teacher and several children, all of whom have been hospitalised. A man intervened and tackled him to the ground (I've heard unconfirmed reports that he was Brazilian, making this something of a wash from an anti-immigration perspective).
In a remarkable display of striking while the iron is hot, an anti-immigrant group organised a protest outside the Dáil (lower house of parliament) later this afternoon. Protesters clashed with police officers at the scene of the crime. Before long it escalated into a full-scale riot, the likes of which I've never seen before in Dublin. A bus was set on fire, as was at least one police car and a Luas (the light rail system serving Dublin). A Holiday Inn was set on fire. Shops have been smashed up and looted. I had to get a taxi home as the public transport has been suspended. Walking through the streets is eerie, they're largely empty aside from riot cops carrying riot shields very forcefully redirecting me. Helicopters are still circling overhead.
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst. On the other hand, I have heard a lot about the alleged "rise of the far right" in Ireland over the course of the last few years, and the fact that it happened so soon after Geert Wilders' election is certainly odd timing.
EDIT: See also @Tollund_Man4's more detailed write-up in the transnational thread.
I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.
In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her out bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).
That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports, rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffs etc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)
So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.
Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).
And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:
I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.
See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.
FtttG
7mo ago
NYT putting a Trump victory at 89%.
Assuming he wins, all of the people who've spent the last few weeks posting blackpills in the main threads about how the election is rigged and the Democrats are just going to pull "another" 2020 - I expect to see some mea culpas out of you. You know who you are.
The other day, I saw a screenshot of this tweet on Instagram:
American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything.. not scared of immigrants, crime, using public transportation, cities. I’m interested in other people and like talking to them. Even if someone is weird it doesn’t really bother me.
I commented that I found it very strange to assert that you're not scared of crime. Crime is bad. All things being equal, no one would choose to be a victim of crime. Of course some people are more scared of crime than they really should be, but that's a far cry from saying that any amount of fear of crime is wholly unjustified. I may have compared the tweeter to Bike Cuck.
People in the comments clowned me. "Admitting you're afraid of general crime and calling someone else a cuck is a bold stance for someone so pathetic." "If you live your life in constant fear that 'someone' is gonna suddenly commit a crime against you every time you go out in public, you have agoraphobia and should get therapy." "Do you want the powice offiew to tuck you in and wead you a night night story?"
Nowhere in the comment did I claim that I live in constant fear of being a victim of crime: I merely stated that it's silly to claim to not to be afraid of crime at all. It's a weird non sequitur: "you assert that it's not unreasonable to experience some degree of fear of crime - ergo you are a bootlicker who worships police officers." It's also strange to be accused of agoraphobia by someone who I can only presume was an enthusiastic supporter of lockdowns.
I found the tweet strange, in its conception that "being afraid of crime" is a trait unique to (American) conservatives. Many of the canonical beliefs associated with American liberalism also entail fear of particular types of crime (perhaps even fear vastly out of proportion to their likelihood of occurring). Rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment (including on college campuses) are all types of crime. School shootings are crimes. Hate crimes are crimes (the hint is in the name). Revenge porn and certain kinds of cyberbullying are crimes in many jurisdictions. If you're afraid of any or all of these happening to you, you are afraid of crime, by definition. This sort of reminded me of the finding Scott cited, that most American are opposed to Obamacare, but in favour of every individual component of Obamacare.
Moreover, it makes far more statistical sense to be afraid of crime in general than to be afraid of any particular subtype of crime. A woman's likelihood of being raped in a calendar year cannot be higher than her probability of being raped or mugged or having her car stolen etc. If you are X% scared of being a victim of a specific type of crime, you should be >X% scared of being a victim of any kind of crime, as there is no circumstance in which the former is more likely to befall you than the latter. This is just basic statistics. (Thank you to several commenters for reminding me of the conjunction fallacy, whose name was on the tip of my tongue while initially writing this.)
Back in the real world, I know why people react this way, in spite of how illogical it is on its face. Generations of Blue Tribers have internalised the idea that politicians who talk about being "tough on crime" are engaging in "dog-whistle politics", and that "crime" is being used as a code word for "the kinds of crimes that black people (or more recently, immigrants) engage in"; using the word "crime" in a vacuum is a signal of Red Tribe membership. Conversely, a person who expresses concern about being the victim of a hate crime, a school shooting, rape or sexual assault, cyberbullying or having their nudes leaked without their consent is signalling Blue Tribe membership.
This leads to a curious situation in which a black man who expresses concern about being the victim of a hate crime will result in all the white people around nodding deferentially, whereas if he expresses concern about being the victim of a crime (a category which includes all hate crimes), the same white people will roll their eyes and call him an Uncle Tom. In part, this state of affairs came about because many of the people who express these concerns believe (erroneously, in many cases) that these specific crimes are disproportionately likely to be committed by members of their out-group. The idea that white men are responsible for a disproportionate share of hate crimes or active shooter-style school shootings is a myth that stubbornly refuses to die.
But I hate the idea that ordinary common-sense words are being ceded as tribal shibboleths so readily. "Crime is bad" (a category which includes all Blue Tribe-coded crimes such as hate crimes, school shootings etc.) should not be a politically polarising statement, any more than "being sick is bad" or "dying prematurely is bad". It seems our culture has now reached the point at which one cannot say "crime is bad" without half of your hypothetical audience immediately responding "lmao, okay whatever you fascist MAGA bootlicker". And this is far from the only ordinary common-sense word which inspires such a bizarre polarised reaction. The most politically loaded question of the last five years was "what is a woman?", for fuck's sake. If this trend continues, I fear that in ten years' time, anyone who uses the word "the" in a tweet will have people in the replies mocking them as a Definite Article Enjoyer which, per this NPR column and Vox explainer, is a dog whistle for... something.
(This is still probably Freddie's best work.)
In my limited experience their personalities seem to not just be male, but hyper male. Like take for instance the prevalence of trannies in the speedrunning community, it is hard to think of a more hypermasculine activity than speedrunning.
I have an acquaintance who came out as a trans woman a few years ago, and the irony of her situation has not escaped my attention. She claims to be a woman trapped in an "assigned male at birth" body, and yet the number of cis women I know personally who
- compose angsty math-rock
- have logged 1,000+ hours in League of Legends
- spend a great deal of time in Games Workshop
- consume so much pornography that they've actually had to confront the ethical dilemma of whether or not they should pay the "content creators" for it
are zero, zero, zero and zero, respectively. Likewise the recent micro-scene of bedroom black metal solo projects whose members identify as trans women (most famously Liturgy [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liturgy_(band)], but it seems every other band on this label meets that description exactly): does anything scream "socially awkward man with some autistic traits" more than starting a bedroom black metal solo project?
What you're describing is autistic traits, and many feminists have argued that autism is "extreme masculinity" (men tend to be high-systematising, and autistic men are almost totally systematising). I'm sure you're already aware that the correlation between autism and gender dysphoria is extremely strong and seems to be becoming stronger with every year.
I have always suspected that I am in the "at-risk for AGP" demographic, even though I've never felt it myself.
I'm a man who several people have independently suggested might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum, high-systematising, bookish, socially awkward, didn't fit in at school (as a result of which I retreated into social media and anonymous online chatrooms), love video games enough to have done a master's in game design, listened to black metal obsessively as a teenager, passively interested in anime and manga as a teenager. If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now. (At least then my enormous ass would have been more of an asset in my dating life.) By the same token, had my aforementioned acquaintance been born five or ten years earlier, I think the chances of them coming out as trans at the age they did would have been somewhere around nil. Anyone who thinks social contagion plays no role in this phenomenon must be blind.
What I found really conspicious was that in virtually all the articles there was absolutely no description of the perpetrator of the stabbing other than 'man' or at best ' older man', which was the spark that cause the protest/riot (depending on your political persuasion). You'd be forgiven for thinking that the crime was committed by an Irish native.
The same here, only the tabloids and alternative media specified that the attacker was Algerian; "respectable" outlets like The Journal, the Times and the Independent don't consider his nationality or ethnicity worth mentioning at all. Whenever there's a horrible unprovoked crime like this, you can practically smell the "please let the assailant be Irish" energy emanating from broadsheet journalists and the PMC types on X and Reddit. I saw a comment about the stabbing on the /r/ireland subreddit, some dude said something to the effect of "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
Some years ago (probably on the old subreddit) I pointed out that this journalistic approach has a limited shelf life. Sooner or later, every reader will cotton on to the fact that whenever the MSM report on a violent crime committed by a white native man, his skin colour will be mentioned prominently (either in the headline or the lede); ergo, if you see an article about a violent crime which doesn't mention the assailant's skin colour or nationality, the only reasonable assumption is that he is black or Arab or Eastern European (optionally Muslim). (See also Scott's post, section IV, about how banning employers from asking interviewees about their criminal record actually decreased the rate at which employers hired black candidates.) They're going to have to come up with a different method for routing around this problem sooner or later. Perhaps five years from now, news articles will read "an assailant stabbed a victim" without mentioning any identity characteristics about either person at all.
Do they think by merely mentioning the background of the stabbing perpetrator they will give creedance to the 'hateful far-right riot', like invoking a spirit?
Well this is the thing: for modern broadsheet journalists, contempt for the common man is built into their psyche. If you've fully internalised the idea that any uneducated person can become radicalised overnight by exposure to far-right disinformation and "fake news" - well, imagine how much more potent an effect information and real news might have. The average journalist no longer sees their job as one of informing the public but educating it, and if that means selectively leaving the reader in the dark about certain pertinent facts, so be it. (Perhaps I'm being rather rose-tinted about journalistic standards in the past and this is all one big "always has been" meme.) Many journalists seem to think that even informing their readers what the Bad People believe is tantamount to signal-boosting their opinions, so they resort to this circuitous approach of informing the reader that Alice has transphobic™ opinions (or quoting a woke person who thinks Alice has transphobic opinions i.e. "delegated defamation") without actually telling the reader what those opinions are and allowing them to draw their own conclusions as to whether "transphobic" is an accurate characterisation.
Look at this meme.
It was made in the 2000s, an era in which it was totally legit for liberal people to make fun of fat people and their motivated reasoning and mental (certainly not physical!) gymnastics. Nowadays body positivity is the order of the day and liberals can only make fun of fat people if they're wearing MAGA hats.
The point of the joke, obviously, is that the fat woman in the photo claims that the shape of her body is entirely genetic in origin while ignoring the obvious dietary choices she makes which contribute to her body shape.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of modern progressivism is a wide-ranging assertion that social influences shape people's identities and desires. Men aren't naturally more interested in STEM than women, they've just been socialised to want to pursue careers in STEM, and were it not for this we'd see them going into childcare and education at the same rates as women. Men aren't naturally stronger and faster than women, it's just that women are systematically discouraged from playing sports. Most people aren't straight because that's their natural inclination, they've just been brainwashed by the heteropatriarchy and in the state of nature we'd all be bisexual. Stereotype threat, power posing, "internalised" Xism etc. etc. The apparent goal of many progressives is to undo the cultural conditioning (borrowing here from Marxist "false consciousness") which causes women to believe that they're more interested in childcare than computers. This false consciousness is unidirectional: a man can mistakenly believe that he's more interested in computers than childcare, but not vice versa; a repressed gay man can be in denial about his sexuality, but no straight man can mistakenly believe he's gay.*
This is the worldview underpinning the fury and rage surrounding the ROGD/social contagion model of transgender identity. I used to (by which I mean, at the time I started writing this comment) think that the tenets of gender ideology made for odd bedfellows with the rest of woke ideology. When I first heard about it, I was like "why are you guys so mad that social influences affect one's gender identity? You think social influences affect everything!" I thought that woke people had made a weird little carve-out for trans people, whose gender identity is assumed to be unresponsive to social influence in the way that their career aspirations or physical fitness might be.
But now that I think about it further, it makes sense from the false consciousness perspective. A trans person who mistakenly believes that they're cis until the moment their "egg hatches" is like a factory worker in Victorian England who, in a horrifying epiphany, realises the extent to which he is the victim of exploitation and alienation at the hands of his boss: they are to be commended, praised, welcomed with open arms. But a cis person who mistakenly believes they're trans: that's like being a strike-breaker. It's no accident that trans activists have nothing but contempt for detransitioners: they're traitors to the cause, scabs. This is one reason they resent the term "groomer", as that's not what they see themselves doing. If you're in a trans subreddit and you find yourself thinking that the list of "possible signs you might be trans" is so exhaustive that everyone alive must have at least one - that's a feature, not a bug. They don't think they're persuading children to be trans - they think that every child is already trans (and queer, and interested in topics associated with the opposite sex, and feminist etc.) and has simply been brainwashed into believing otherwise - if they lived in the state of nature then no "grooming" or education would be required.** Just like Marx thought that every proletariat already supported communism and had simply been tricked into thinking otherwise.***
So no, gender ideology and sexuality aren't carve-outs from the general woke assumption that social influences affect who you are (but only in one direction), they're central examples. But such a carve-out does exist within the woke framework. For whom, you ask? Look up top! Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.
*People talk a lot about how Friends "aged poorly" and so on, but more than anything I think the B-plot here from which the episode derives its title would make woke people furious if it came out today, not least because it's still funny and more relevant now than at the time of release.
**Hence the historically tenuous claims that the gender binary is a recent artifact of Western capitalism and ancient civilizations had a more fluid conception of gender - "two-spirit" etc.
***This can get kind of Gnostic the more you think about it. It's not revisionist of the Wachowskis to claim that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor - the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.
FtttG
1yr ago
I'm so sick of the word "violence" being used in this figurative manner. Pestering someone with messages when they've made it abundantly clear that they're not interested - call it "harassment" if you like, or even "cyberstalking" if you must. It's certainly not "violence".
It was bad enough when it was just woke academics and activists (but I repeat myself) describing the act of someone disagreeing with you or calling you by the wrong pronouns as "violent" - now it's making its way into legislation too.
Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post
Substituting a common-sense statistical metric for a less obvious and intuitive one is almost always a red flag for deceit and obfuscation
With the introduction of its Notes feature, Substack appears to be making a pivot towards being a Twitter X competitor, the management perhaps having detected a gap in the market following the Elon Musk takeover. While one can question the wisdom of that decision, I commend them wholeheartedly for differentiating themselves from X in one key respect, namely avoiding the echo chamber dynamics which plague it and essentially every other major social media platform. Given how social media algorithms usually work, one would expect my Notes feed to be a nonstop deluge of gender-critical posts and anti-woke one-liners. On the contrary: in addition to plenty of nature photos and boomer dad jokes, I see the full spectrum of political opinions represented, from beliefs I wholeheartedly endorse to ones I would never consider in a lifetime. This is good, because being exposed to contrary opinions is healthy (“he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” and all that), but also because I'm an argumentative, pedantic “to play devil's advocate” type by disposition, and find it hard to resist the opportunity to pull someone up on a weak argument or erroneous factual statement. (In a previous post when I described leftists as “ornery, confrontational types”, I meant it as a sincere compliment. It's possible, even common, to get so good at “reading the room” that you forget how to write.)
One such Note shared the graphic below, which claims that there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community in schools across the United States, and that states with “anti-LGBTQ” laws have seen larger spikes than states without. The graphic was accompanied by a couple of paragraphs expounding that such an increase was both foreseen and intended by the homophobic, transphobic lawmakers behind the legislation.
The graphic itself is based on an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago. It features interviews with LGBTQ teenagers and their parents, describing the bullying and harassment they’ve experienced at their hands of their heteronormative peers, and contrasting these anecdotes with public statements from conservative politicians and lawmakers. The journalists more or less explicitly claim that LGBTQ people living in states with these kinds of legislation are at greater risk of being victimised because of their identity than LGBTQ people living elsewhere in the US.
I have a lot of thoughts on this article. The number of column inches dedicated to implying that Dagny “Nex” Benedict died as a direct result of transphobic bullying is unseemly (even if the article begrudgingly acknowledge that Benedict’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide).1 Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification. Oklahoma passed legislation in 2020 requiring that schools “teach that ‘a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait’ that cannot be changed”: given that this statement is unambigously true, I find the law no more objectionable than bans on public schools teaching creationism or geocentrism. The journalists clearly expect me to be horrified about a Virginia law requiring schools to notify parents whenever the school uses sexually explicit instructional material. Guys, seriously: if you want people to stop throwing the “groomer” accusation around left and right, you’re going to have to meet them halfway.
But my biggest problem with the article is its core thesis, as represented by the graphic above. I’m always deeply suspicious of statistical claims about “fastest growing” or “biggest increase”. Of all commonly quoted statistical observations, it seems like the most susceptible to random noise: if you’re measuring a value that started at a low baseline, some noise within normal variation can be truthfully (but misleadingly) claimed to represent a massive increase when it may be indicative of no such thing.
It also strikes me as a uniquely bad metric for the specific task of comparing which of two regions is the more dangerous. Imagine two neighbouring countries A and B, each with a population of 5 million. Last year, there were 100 murders in Country A and 5 in Country B. This year, there were 110 in Country A and 10 in Country B. It's unambiguously true that Country B’s murder rate increased by 100% year-on-year, while Country A’s “only” increased by 10%. It's also plainly true that you're 11 times more likely to get murdered in Country A than in Country B. If you were planning to book a holiday in either Country A or Country B and you were wondering which was safer, “murders per capita” will tell you far more than “rate of increase of the murder rate year-on-year”: there’s a very good reason that the term “the murder rate” refers to the former metric rather than the latter. In light of the above, if I read an article which tried to make Country B look bad by pointing out that its murder rate had increased by 10 times as much as Country A’s, I’d immediately wonder if the journalist had any undisclosed financial ties to Country A’s tourism board.
My suspicions thus raised, I decided to carry out a deep dive to check how accurate the narrative presented by the journalists was. Conveniently, the journalists based their statistical claims on FBI hate crimes data, which is a publicly available dataset. I downloaded the data and filtered it to only include hate crimes targeting the LGBT community and which occurred in the years 2015-22 (excluding 2020, as the journalists did). I then sorted these hate crimes based on whether they took place in a school or elsewhere, and whether or not they took place in a state with restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues.3 Armed with the necessary data, I was ready to jump in and test the article’s key claims and suggestions.
It will come as no surprise that what I found departs from the narrative presented by the article rather sharply.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools
To back up its claims, the article divides the fifty states of the union into those which have restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues and those which don’t, which I shall hereafter refer to as Restrictive States and Non-Restrictive States, respectively. While you could be forgiven for assuming that all the Restrictive States are Republican strongholds (a misconception the journalists do little to discourage), the category includes a number of states with Democratic governors, including North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona, the latter two of which voted for Biden in 2020.
The article then sorts anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools (hereafter referred to as School Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes or SALHCs) based on whether they took place in Restrictive States or Non-Restrictive States. This is where they derive their headline claim that Restrictive States have seen a larger increase in SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States since 2015
That specific claim appears to be true. But at a glance, you’ll notice that Restrictive States report significantly fewer SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States in absolute terms, in both 2015-19 and 2021-22. (The authors are honest enough to acknowledge this, with caveats, which we’ll come back to later.)
I presumed that the higher rate in Non-Restrictive States was an artifact of the differing population sizes between the two regions, and that the two regions would have similar rates of SALHCs once you controlled for population; I even thought that Restrictive States might have more SALHCs per capita. But apparently not: according to the 2020 census, the two regions have a conveniently symmetric share of the total US population, with a difference of less than three million people. When taking this into account, not only are there more SALHCs in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States in absolute terms, but Non-Restrictive States have significantly more SALHCs per capita as well: 0.052/100k versus 0.037/100k, or about 40% higher in the former than the latter.
But maybe this is a population artifact of a different kind. Intuitively, I would expect that a higher proportion of the population openly identifies as LGBTQ in Non-Restrictive States when compared to Restrictive States. If anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are only reported as such if the victim openly identifies as LGBTQ, it stands to reason that regions with a large LGBTQ population will see higher rates of such hate crimes than regions with a smaller LGBTQ population, all things being equal. The journalists themselves gesture at this interpretation: “In addition, it’s possible more kids are public about their identities in more liberal states, creating more targets for bullies, said Lanae Erickson…”.
To check this, I looked at this report from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which estimates the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) living in each state. This is an imperfect metric, as SALHCs includes anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and therefore most likely includes some number of hate crimes in which the victim was under 13. It’s also likely that that some of the people who were victims of hate crimes in a school were not themselves children or young adults (e.g. an openly gay schoolteacher’s car gets vandalised by homophobic students). The report is also from September 2020, and I imagine the number of young adults openly identifying as LGBT has changed significantly since then. These caveats aside, I think the estimate is good enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately for the journalists, not only do more LGBT young adults reside in Restrictive States than in Non-Restrictive States (a difference of about 50,000 individuals), but Non-Restrictive States still report more SALHCs per capita than Restrictive States. The gap is even wider than in our previous table: 8.866/100k versus 5.969/100k, a difference of 49%.
I really don’t know that I’m saying anything terribly controversial here. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of an LGBTQ child. Obviously you’re going to be concerned about your child getting bullied in school, and would prefer to send them to a school where they won’t be bullied on account of their sexuality or gender identity (or at all, for that matter). When assessing which school to send your child to, which of these two metrics would be most important to you: the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying at the school per capita, or how big an increase the school has seen in the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying over the last few years? I find it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a sensible, caring parent would prefer, all things being equal, to send their child to a school which had a high rate of homophobic bullying over a school which had a dramatically lower rate of homophobic bullying, but which had recently seen a significant increase.
In fairness to the journalists, the article isn’t quite as one-sided as I’m making out, and they were balanced enough to include one interview with a California teenager who’s been bullied because of their gender identity. But there’s something so dishonest about including this anecdote alongside paragraph after paragraph of editorialising about how cruel the legislation is in Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi - without even acknowledging that California reports about three times as many SALHCs per capita than Virginia, Oklahoma or Mississippi.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes more generally
Zooming out from SALHCs to hate crimes against the LGBTQ community generally is no more favourable to the journalists’ position, and here we veer sharply from the realm of “claims which are technically true, but misleading” to “claims which are outright false”. The journalists write “The FBI data shows serious incidents against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, particularly in the more than two dozen states that have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ students or education.” The word “particularly” implies that the states which have enacted legislation saw steeper increases in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes than the states which did not. Note that, unlike the section above, this sentence refers to serious incidents against LGBTQ people in general, not just incidents in K-12 schools.
My analysis of the data shows the exact opposite: between 2015-22, states without restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws have seen a steeper increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than states with such legislation. This isn’t just a statistical fudge, this is an unambigous falsehood.
For completeness’s sake, I will also calculate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita in the two regions. In 2021-22, Non-Restrictive States reported more than 4 times as many anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita than Restrictive States.
… and per capita LGBTQ.4
To sum up:
When comparing states with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education with states without such legislation:
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people have significantly increased in both regions of the US from 2015 to 2022, but have increased far faster in the latter region than the former
- However, hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people which took place in schools have increased faster in the former region than the latter
And what is the reader intended to take away from all of the above? That it’s uniquely difficult to be a young LGBTQ person living in a state with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education.
Conclusion
I feel more than a little resentful for having to go to the trouble of carrying out all this statistical analysis, because I know I’m double-jobbing. I’m extremely confident that the journalists who wrote this story have already carried most or all of the calculations listed above. They pitched this great story to their editor about a surge in hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people following the passing of anti-trans legislation. They went into this dataset with high hopes, confident that it would back up their thesis, plain as day. Then they dug into it and found, to their horror, that the data painted precisely the opposite story. I can almost see their brows furrowing in confusion and panic as they go down their wishlist of statistical metrics in order of preference, discovering that none of them paint the desired picture. Hate crimes more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes in schools more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes rising faster in Restrictive States - nope.
But they can’t just kill the story, not when they’ve already written hundreds of words and secured interviews with an impressive collection of intelligent, articulate teenagers. Without hard data to back up the testimony of the interviewees, the story is relegated to mere anecdote - it’s not serious political journalism, it’s just a culture piece, a human interest story. So instead, they spent ages digging through this dataset, twisting it, contorting it, pleading with it to give them any relevant-ish metric which would back up their narrative. And this was the best metric they could find. Stories like this don’t exist because of honest mistakes: they only come into being through deceit and manipulation.
As I mentioned above, the journalists were honest enough to acknowledge that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools are more common in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States, in absolute terms. They’re quick to explain away this inconvenient finding by claiming that it’s a reporting artifact. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people are more common in Restrictive States, they argue, but are more likely to go unreported because of a culture of silence, whereas LGBTQ people who’ve been victimised because of their identity in Non-Restrictive States are more likely to report it to the relevant authorities.
I’m sure this is a contributing factor to the differing rates of hate crimes reported in the two regions (although I very much doubt it’s sufficient to explain the disparity on its own). At the same time - come on. Does anyone really doubt that if the data had told the story that the journalists wanted it to tell - that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are more common in Restrictive States than Non-Restrictive States - they wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops? No way in hell would they be claiming that a higher rate of reported hate crimes in a region is good, actually, if the shoe had been on the other foot. But the data didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so they’re forced to play this tiresome game of “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are higher in blue states than in red states - and that’s a good thing.”
Why does this article exist? Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!” I doubt that even the journalists really think that any kind of causal relationship exists between legislation like this and the incidence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, so why use such a weak argument when the data don’t support your conclusions? I suspect that they’re practising what Scott Alexander calls fake consequentialism. The journalists obviously think that trans girls should be allowed to compete in female sporting events, but this is a very difficult policy to defend: doing so requires one to deny the very concept of sexual dimorphism and differences in strength and speed between males and females (something which is obvious to toddlers) - the denial of which makes you look like a crazy person. Instead, rather than getting into a debate over whether males competing in female sporting events is fair (which they’re sure to lose, because it isn’t), they shift the conversation to the consequentialist claim that banning male students from competing in female sporting events causes a spike in hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. But as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, even this argument doesn’t check out.
Maybe I’m mind-reading, maybe this isn’t what the journalists are doing at all. But regardless of their motivations, they made at least one provably false assertion and a batch of true-but-misleading ones. This article is an insult to their readers’ intelligence, it’s bad, and they should feel bad.
1 A police officer interviewed Benedict in the hospital after the bathroom fight which was initially cited (erroneously) as the cause of death. The bodycam footage reveals that a) Benedict admits to having started the fight; b) Benedict freely responds to the name “Dagny” and seems entirely at ease being referred to with female pronouns; and c) Benedict never requests to be addressed as “Nex”, or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This bodycam footage was released several weeks prior to the Post’s article, making the journalists’ decision to use Benedict’s death as an example of the harms wrought by transphobic bullying all the more distasteful (particularly given that certain journalists working for the Post almost certainly knew that Benedict’s father is currently serving time for repeatedly raping her as a prepubescent child).
2 The journalists know full well that their readers will hear about laws which “restrict trans student access to sports” and will think “oh my god, trans high schoolers in Mississippi are actually banned from playing sports!” as opposed to “male students in Mississippi may not compete in female sporting events, regardless of how they identify”. No matter how many times I encounter “respectable” journalists brazenly attempting to hoodwink their readers like this, I never feel any less insulted or disgusted. Truly, have they no shame?
3 To ensure I was looking at the same basic dataset as that on which the journalist based their findings, I performed a quick sense-check by comparing the total number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in schools according to my dataset and according to the figure cited in the article: the two figures were almost identical. Why “almost”? Well, the Post article asserts that 251 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2022. According to my dataset, the figure was 245. I don’t think the discrepancy is an error on the part of the journalists, and assume the figure of 251 was accurate at the time of writing. I think what happened is that the FBI’s database is constantly being updated, and some crimes are either removed from the dataset (e.g. the victim withdraws their complaint) or reclassified as something other than a hate crime (e.g. further investigation determines that the perpetrator of the crime was not motivated by homophobia). In other cases the figure in my dataset matches the figure cited in the article exactly e.g. I found 114 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2018, just as the journalists did.
4 The figures in the third column are the sum of the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) in each state, and the number of LGBT adults in each state. The latter figures are drawn from a separate report by the Williams Institute, which was published in December 2023 and is hence likely more up-to-date than their report on LGBT young adults. This report contained some surprising findings, particularly that, as a share of the population, more adults in the South identify as LGBT than in any other region of the US. Not surprisingly, California has the largest adult LGBT population of any state, so we don’t need to retire those jokes about San Francisco just yet.
The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?
Wikipedia receives money via fundraising campaigns which appeal to end users to donate. The copy these campaigns use is notorious for being misleading or deceptive about the company's financial position, something that people (even seasoned members of the Wikipedia community) have been complaining about for years. As others below me have noted, only a tiny fraction of Wikipedia's operating expenses go towards keeping the site online, and most of the editing done on the website is done pro bono rather than by its hired staff. I, personally, think it's dishonest for a nonprofit to misrepresent itself as being on the precipice of going under without an immediate influx of charitable donations, and to imply that said charitable donations are going directly towards keeping the site online (when in truth, for every dollar you donate, something like 6 cents are going towards server costs).
Elon's companies receive money either by selling products or by soliciting investments. If you think his products are shoddy or overpriced, say so (I can't comment, having never sat in a Tesla and barely using Twitter, before or since Musk's takeover). If you think he's only securing investments by knowingly misleading investors, say so. Otherwise I'm not even sure what "Elon, I think you deserve less money" really means.
CW: an explicit condemnation of gender ideology, an assertion that trans people are deluded.
At the tail end of 2014, Scott published a pro-trans article called "The Categories were Made for Man, Not Man for the Categories", arguing that there's nothing intrinsic about the words "man" and "woman" that means we have to define them based on chromosomes or gamete size, any more than there's any intrinsic reason that the word "fish" excludes mammals. He argues that there's substantial evidence that affirming trans people's claimed gender identity is an effective tool for attenuating their distress, and that therefore we should be kind* to trans people and redefine the words "man" and "woman" to take these "edge cases" into account. He concluded the post with a link to the “heartwarming” story of Joshua Norton, a man in (where else, for there is nothing new under the sun?) San Francisco in the 1870s, who declared himself “Emperor of these United States” and whose delusion was “kindly" indulged by all and sundry in the city.
@zackmdavis, an admitted autogynephile who by his own account was driven to the brink of a full-blown nervous breakdown by Scott and Eliezer’s evasiveness and hypocrisy on the trans issue, wrote a response to Scott called “The Categories were Made for Man to Make Predictions”. His main argument is fairly self-explanatory per the title: it may be “kinder” to various penised individuals to include them in the category “woman” (and vice versa), but defining these words as such has strictly worse predictive power than defining them based on biological reality - and predictive power (making your beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences) is supposedly the only thing rationalists really care about. Zack doesn’t think the story about “Emperor” Norton is heartwarming at all:
I want you to imagine yourself as a resident of 1870s San Francisco, someone who Norton trusts as one of his chief imperial advisors. One day, you encounter him at his favorite café looking very distressed.
"What's wrong, Your Highness?" you inquire, pulling up a chair to his table.
"Ah, my trusted—advisor. I've been noticing—things that don't seem to add up. Most of my subjects here in the city seem to treat me with proper respect. But the newspapers still talk about Congress and the President, even though I abolished those years ago. That seems like something I would expect not to see if my reign were as secure if everyone tells me it is. What if, what if—" his voice drops to a terrified whisper, "what if I've been mad? What if I'm not actually Emperor?"
"The categories were made for man, not man for the categories, Your Highness," you say. "An alternative categorization system is not an error. Category boundaries are drawn in specific ways to to capture trade-offs that we care about; they're not something that can be objectively true or false. So if we value your identification as the Emperor—"
"What?" he exclaims. He looks at you like you're crazy—and with a hint of desperation, as if to communicate that he's trusting you to be sane, and doesn't know where he could turn should that trust be betrayed.
And in that moment, caught in the old man's earnest, pleading gaze, you realize that you don't believe your own bullshit.
"No, you're right," you say. "You're not actually Emperor. People around here have just been humoring you for the last decade because we thought it was cute and it seemed to make you happy."
A beat.
"Um, sorry," you say.
He buries his head in his arms and begins to cry—long, shuddering sobs for his lost empire. Worse than lost—an empire that never existed, except in the charitable facade of people who valued him as a local in-joke, but not as a man.
For my part, I agree. If I found out that no one in my social circle really believed in the beliefs I was spouting off, but had collectively agreed to pretend to do so in order to protect my feelings, I would feel profoundly condescended to, insulted, disrespected, infantilised - perhaps I'd even go so far as to say dehumanised. If all of my friends knew my girlfriend was cheating on me behind my back but enthusiastically agreed with me when I told them about how trusting and faithful our relationship was, "kind" is just about the last word I'd use to describe their behaviour. I wouldn't think this behaviour bore even the most tenuous relationship to the "rules of human decency".
In the short-term, perhaps it is kinder to play along with trans people’s beliefs about themselves and affirm their claimed gender identities, if failing to do so makes them sad and upset. But in the long-term, you are actively encouraging them to engage in magical thinking, the fantastical idea that declaring that something is so thereby makes it so. It is not just likely but inevitable that they’ll start wondering to what other domains this magical thinking might apply: if declaring that something is so can change your gender, why couldn’t it change your species, or the behaviour of one or more of your paraselves elsewhere in the multiverse? If there's nothing intrinsic about the category "woman" that means it can't include certain penised individuals, why couldn't the category "lemur" include certain featherless bipeds with broad nails? Scott would be the first to recognise that false beliefs cannot sit in one’s model of how the world works in isolation: they are destined to spread and multiply throughout one’s network of beliefs, infecting everything in sight. Phil Platt said "Teach a man to reason and he’ll think for a lifetime". Well, teach a man that magical thinking is acceptable in one context, and he’ll quickly find that it’s acceptable in lots of contexts.
Encouraging someone to engage in magical thinking is probably not so terribly harmful if that person is an incurious dullard with no tendency towards thought of any kind. But it strikes me as uniquely dangerous if that person is an exceptionally curious and reflective person who spends a lot of time in his own head, as most first-generation "rationalists" were: the kind of person who gets "a sort of itch... when the pieces don’t fit together and [they] need to pick at them until they do". By endorsing and affirming one of that person's obviously false beliefs, you are condemning them to believe in and/or generate other false beliefs, if (as a curious person does) they want their model of the universe to be internally consistent.**
Ziz and his cohort had beliefs about themselves which were false according to the ordinary definitions of the words (“man”, “woman”) on which those beliefs were based. They were ensconced in a social milieu of people who invariably described themselves as no-bullshit facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings truth-seekers. And all of these people (with the possible exception of Zack himself), rather than trying to gently steer Ziz and co. into recognising that their beliefs were false, enthusiastically endorsed and affirmed their delusions, using all manner of tortured motivated reasoning which they would never have lowered themselves to in any other context. The lesson being imparted, the perverse incentive being set up, is "if this specific batshit insane belief can be compatible with rationalism provided it’s justified using a sufficiently high density of ten-dollar words, then any such belief can also be, provided you do the legwork of writing out massive inscrutable screeds with the appropriate nomenclature to justify it". Can anyone really say they’re surprised that Ziz and his mates ended up believing a bunch of other crazy bullshit in addition to gender ideology, when their adherence to gender ideology was so enthusiastically affirmed by all the supposedly logical, rational people in their immediate vicinity? If you believed that the act of saying “I am a woman” can overwrite biological reality, why wouldn’t you believe that you can hence manipulate reality to your every whim?
(I’m not saying Ziz wouldn’t have ended up leading a violent abusive cult if he wasn’t ensconced in a trans-affirming milieu - gender ideology is obviously not a prerequisite for leading a violent abusive cult, as evidenced by the fact that the Zizians are probably the first known violent abusive cult of the gender ideology era. But I’m definitely saying that having his declared gender identity affirmed with tortured motivated reasoning by everyone around him certainly didn’t help.)
A few years ago, the FTX scandal forced Scott to confront the fact that were components of the effective altruist worldview which could result in some very unsavoury behavior if followed to their logical conclusions. I hope the Zizian debacle triggers a comparable reckoning, in which Scott and his ilk consider the possibility that indulging the delusions of the trans people in their midst wasn’t anything like as "kind" or harmless as they might have once thought.
*There is perhaps no two-word phrase which inspires more disgust and revulsion in me than "be kind", especially when used in the context of the transgender debate (Scott didn't use it in this specific article, but Freddie DeBoer has). It is the essence of a smarmy thought-terminating cliché, in the sense of the term popularised by Gawker.
**I feel reasonably confident that it was the most curious and intellectually scrupulous young-earth creationists who came up with pseudoscientific nonsensical contortions like c-decay, not the least.
The McGregor verdict and modus ponens
Hypocrisy goes both ways
If you know anything about mixed martial arts, I’m sure you’re familiar with the name Conor McGregor. He’s a titan in the field, perhaps the single most famous sportsperson from this island since George Best, and a rare sportsperson who can honestly claim to have achieved the status of international household name, right up there with Cristiano Ronaldo, Venus Williams or Michael Jordan.
If you only know him from his MMA career, you may be unaware that he is scum. Scum of the lowest order: a narcissistic, immature, pathologically thin-skinned, emotionally incontinent, short-tempered, bullying, coke-addled, vicious thug and rapist. Despite having made a name for himself through his career in MMA, the “controversies” section on his Wikipedia page is nearly 500 words longer than the “professional mixed martial arts career” section, and includes such charming anecdotes as the occasion on which McGregor assaulted a man in his fifties in a pub, prompted by the outrageous provocation of the man politely declining a glass of whiskey McGregor had offered him. Until very recently, his laundry list of well-documented episodes of violent assault, sexual misconduct and general scumbaggery have done nothing to slow down his career, as he pivoted into the film industry with this year’s remake of Road House, and recently announced his intention to run for President in next year’s election.1
It need hardly be said that I think he would be just about the most atrocious ambassador for the nation imaginable, and after running through the list of Irish citizens I most despise, I’m honestly struggling to think of one I think would be a poorer fit. Leo Varadkar? Gerry Adams? Marylou McDonald? Maria Bailey, of Swing-gate fame? Barry Keoghan? Ryan Tubridy? Aisling Bea? Bono? Bob Geldof? The 2 Johnnies? Jacksepticeye? One of those interchangeable (and insufferable) post-punk “musicians” clogging up the airwaves? Jedward? Dustin the Turkey? Any of these, I believe, would represent the nation far better than McGregor.
And what unnerves me most is that I don’t think this is some far-off hypothetical: I think that McGregor has a decent chance of being elected. For anyone who thinks that such an outcome is preposterous, the fact that known gangster Gerry “The Monk” Hutch recently came within a hair’s breadth of being elected to the Dáil should prompt some earnest (and alarmed) reconsideration.
Within Ireland, McGregor is particularly well-known for his mistreatment of women, having been accused of rape and sexual assault on multiple occasions in Spain, Corsica, the US, and of course in his home country. Criminal charges have never been brought against him, owing to lack of evidence (an unfortunately perennial problem in cases of this type); but one complainant, Nikita Hand, was brave enough to sue him in a civil action, and the jury has recently found in Hand’s favour. Now that the trial is over, the injunction on the media has been lifted and they are permitted to disclose various details about the case, including the fact that Hand alleges that, after she filed the civil action, masked men broke into her home and stabbed her partner. McGregor finally appears to be facing some meaningful repercussions for his misconduct as, in light of the ruling, various brands (including IO Interactive, Musgraves and Wetherspoons) have announced that they are cutting their professional ties with him and/or refusing to stock his licensed beer and whiskey.
One reaction to the outcome of the trial I found particularly sharp was from Waterford Whispers News, a satire website which aspires to be sort of like the parochial Irish equivalent of The Onion. Between 2013-16, the website would reliably have a wittingly biting take on virtually every major news story in Ireland (this one was a particular favourite). After that golden era, the website kind of fell off and stopped seeing nearly as much traction on social media. Much like their main source of inspiration, they dropped all pretensions to neutrality and pretty much openly announced that their satire would only be a means to advance a socially progressive worldview, to the point that, earlier this year, they were literally selling merch with the dictionary definition of the word "woke" printed on it, defined as "1. Alert to prejudice and injustice 2. Not a prick" - what is this, 2014?
But occasionally, WWN can still knock the ball out of the park, as with this post:
"Keep Women Safe": Hundreds of Far Right Nationalists Protest Outside Rapist Conor McGregor's House
The joke is sharply observed. There are many working-class activists who are opposed to inward migration into Ireland, and who will often justify said opposition on the grounds that they are concerned about immigrants sexually assaulting Irish women. With very few exceptions, such people tend to be fervent admirers of Conor McGregor. It would not surprise me if at least one of the men who allegedly broke into Nikita Hand’s house with the goal of intimidating her into silence subsequently attended an anti-immigration protest at which he chanted the slogan “keep women safe”. The hypocrisy is indisputable: either such people only get up in arms about Irish women being raped when it’s foreigners doing the raping (but turn a blind eye when it’s one of their own); or their opposition to immigration is driven entirely by racial animus, and the ostensible concern about sexual assault is a fig leaf. Sharp take, no notes.
Well, maybe one.
Are you familiar with the phrase “one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens”?
This is a concept in formal logic that it took me awhile to get my head around. A modus ponens argument takes the form “if A, then B; A; therefore B”, while a modus tollens argument takes the form “If A, then B; not B; therefore not A”. In other words, if someone is saying you should believe B because A is true, the success of that argument hinges on whether or not you believe A is true; if you don’t believe that A is true, their argument immediately backfires. The concept is best illustrated using examples (all of which are sourced from this article):
- Spencer Case explaining what finally caused him to leave the Mormon church
I continued to discuss my doubts with my dad and with my new bishop, Bishop Olson, both of whom admonished me to go on a mission. At that point my departure would have been imminent. I recall one phone conversation with Bishop Olson in which he inadvertently nudged me to part ways with the church. He said the fact that I was still in the church having these conversations with him, seeking the truth, was proof that I really did know that it was true. Otherwise, what was the sense in my still going to church? Why would I continue seeking? He had a point. He ended the phone call with “See you in church this Sunday.” I never went back.
- If it’s wrong for people in Asian countries to kill and eat dogs because they can suffer and are intelligent, does that imply that we shouldn’t kill and eat pigs either? Or conversely, does it imply that we should eat dogs too?
- XKCD’s The Economic Argument. (At some point I’d like to write a post about an implication of this comic which Randall perhaps did not intend.)
Perhaps you’ve guessed where I’m going with this. As I said, it is inarguably true that if you’re up in arms about immigrants assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an Irishman like Conor McGregor does so. But the reverse is also true: if you’re up in arms about an Irishman like Conor McGregor assaulting Irish women, you should be equally outraged when an immigrant does so.
Cast your mind back to January 2022. The country was reeling from the shocking, inexplicable murder of Ashling Murphy, a primary school teacher who went for a run along the Grand Canal near Tullamore, only to be brutally stabbed to death by an unknown assailant. In the week following her murder, social media was agog with insinuations or outright accusations that all Irish men were indirectly complicit in her murder; that her murder was the result of a toxic Irish rape culture which knowingly ignores, downplays or minimises male violence towards women. Both President Michael D. Higgins and then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar offered their condolences to the victim’s family. Rape crisis organisations called on the Department of Education to implement a national policy on sexual harassment and assault in schools.
Then, less than a week later, they arrested the murderer, and he turned out to be a Roma man from Slovakia named Jozef Puska. Everyone immediately shut up about it. Overnight, it went from being the most talked about story in Ireland to being a page four story at best. The silence was deafening, particularly in light of the furore that had preceded it the week prior.
Google Trends chart showing interest in the case over time. As usual, Google Trends bears out my gut feeling recollection of the period.
Ask yourself: in what universe can it be that a murder case is the most talked-about news story in a particular country, and the arrest of the perpetrator results in the amount of traffic it generates falling to 43% of its peak? That should have been the peak of interest in the story: the murderer brought to justice, the heroic denouement. A sharp drop like this is not what it looks like when a news story organically runs out of steam, the conclusion of one news cycle leading into the next. This is a society collectively choosing to ignore the news story while it’s still ongoing, avoiding thinking about it because it makes them uncomfortable.
Before Puska’s arrest, numerous activists on social media had decided, sight unseen, that a crime like Murphy’s murder doesn’t happen in a vacuum: the perpetrator must have grown up in a culture in which men feel entitled to do as they please with women’s bodies, in which male violence towards women is downplayed or minimised. This is not at all an unreasonable presumption to make. Nothing about Puska’s identity or ethnic background should have changed that supposition: it’s still the same guy doing the same crime for the same reasons. So why, after his arrest, didn’t we hear that argument trotted out quite so often in armchair psychoanalysis of Puska’s motivations?2
Oh. Because that would imply that it’s not (just?) Irish culture which is toxic, misogynistic and dismissive of male violence towards women, but Roma culture. Well, we can’t have that, can we? Wouldn’t want to be accused of being racist, or “legitimising” arguments made by the “far-right”.
Lest you think I’m exaggerating, consider the media’s reaction to the victim impact statement Murphy’s boyfriend Ryan Casey made at Puska’s trial. Casey can fairly claim to have been more bereaved by Murphy’s death than anyone, save her immediate family. Regarding Puska, Casey asserted:
It just sickens me to the core that someone can come to this country, be fully supported in terms of social housing, social welfare, and free medical care for over ten years, never hold down a legitimate job and never once contribute to society in any way shape or form, and commit such a horrendous, evil act of incomprehensible violence.
This statement was conspicuously omitted from the Irish Times's and Newstalk’s coverage of the murder trial. When the statement came up on the BBC current affairs programme The View, journalist Kitty Holland (in a real mask-off moment) criticised Casey for his comments, arguing that his remarks had been “not helpful”, “not good” and had been “latched onto” by the far right.
Imagine it. Your girlfriend has been unexpectedly murdered by a complete stranger, but you can take some solace in the fact that not only your friends, family and community have rallied around you, but the entire country. Then it turns out that the perpetrator is an immigrant, and the entire country immediately drops the case like a hot potato. At the perpetrator’s murder trial, you have the temerity to criticise the legislative framework which enabled the murderer to commit his horrific crime (criticisms whose factual accuracy, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet disputed) - and your criticisms are either ignored, or you are smeared in the press as a xenophobe for having made them. It would be funny in a Kafkaesque sort of way if it wasn’t so sickening. Casey is suing the BBC for defamation, and I hope he wins.
Always and ever it’s like this when an immigrant to Ireland commits a serious crime. Three months after Ashling Murphy’s murder, two gay men were viciously murdered in Sligo because of their sexuality. Obviously this is proof of a lingering culture of homophobia among Irish people - whoops, turns out the killer is an Iraqi Muslim, time to shut up about it forever. After the unprovoked, indiscriminate stabbing of a five-year-old girl and a care assistant which prompted last November’s Dublin riots, “respectable” outlets like The Journal, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent refrained from mentioning that the assailant was Algerian-born (something known to the tabloids and alternative media by that stage), although the Independent was plenty keen to tout the fact that the man who intervened was BRAZILIAN, in literally the first sentence of the article. I distinctly recall seeing, on the same day of the stabbing, a commenter on the r/ireland subreddit saying something to the effect of: "Imagine hearing about a horrible crime like this and your first instinct is to wonder what colour the attacker's skin is. Despicable." You mean, exactly like you're doing right now?
Irish Twitter and the r/ireland subreddit a few times a year (artist’s rendition).
The media and the chattering classes will come up with all sorts of sophisticated and self-serving justifications for why they’re so recalcitrant when reporting on these issues, why they’re adopting a clear double standard depending on whether the perpetrator of a crime is Irish or an immigrant. They’ll assert that they don’t want to unfairly tar the entire community of immigrants in Ireland by fixating too heavily on a crime committed by a single member (even if they’re perfectly willing to tar the entire community of, say, UCD agricultural science students with a baseless accusation since acknowledged to have been invented from whole cloth). They’ll say they don’t want to “legitimise” far-right talking points by bringing them up or grudgingly acknowledging that a stopped clock is right twice a day.3 They’ll claim that it isn’t fair to expect a recent Syrian refugee to adhere to the same standards of behaviour that we expect from someone like Conor McGregor, who grew up in Ireland (the soft bigotry of low expectations, as ever).
But at the end of the day, what it ultimately boils down to is wilfully ignoring or downplaying crimes when they are committed by a member of one’s in-group, or someone you see as a member of a political faction whose good side you want to stay on. Which, you may have noticed, is exactly what anti-immigration protesters are doing when they turn a blind eye to Conor McGregor’s sexual misconduct.
None of all of the above is to imply that I agree with any and all criticisms of Ireland’s policy on immigration, or that I am personally opposed to immigration into Ireland - I am not. All I’m saying is: before you lecture anti-immigration activists on their hypocrisy, first ask yourself whether you’re guilty of the exact same hypocrisy in the other direction.
1A clarification for international readers: the President of Ireland is a largely ceremonial role, and the holder wields no actual political power.
2Indeed, why did we hear more armchair psychoanalysis of the perpetrator’s motivations before we even knew who the perpetrator was, compared to after? Isn’t this completely backwards?
3One might reasonably ask: if the act of making a truthful assertion constitutes “legitimising” a complaint made by the far-right, doesn’t that suggest that the complaint might be, you know - legitimate? Either a topic is legitimate to discuss, or it isn’t. It doesn’t simply become legitimate because the “correct” people are talking about it, and remain illegitimate as long as they ignore it. There’s something weirdly nihilistic about this, the idea that the “legitimacy” of a specific grievance or complaint is a purely social matter (like whether or not distressed jeans are in this season), and wholly untethered from any claims of fact or ethical standards.
To what extent should it be presumed that sexless men will become rapists? Certainly we can look at some statistics proving rape exists, that some subset of men will eventually become rapists,
Some subset of men will, but not the men you're thinking of:
Perhaps more surprisingly, research indicates that high-status men are particularly likely to commit sexual assault. Buss writes, “men with money, status, popularity, and power are more likely to be sexual predators.” These results parallel the disconcerting finding that men who use sexual coercion have more partners than men who do not. A popular idea is that men who are desperate or deprived of chances for sex will be more likely to use coercion. This is known as the “mate deprivation hypothesis.” However, studies suggest the opposite is the case. Men who have more partners report higher levels of sexual aggression compared to men with fewer partners. Furthermore, men who predict that their future earnings will be high also report greater levels of sexual aggression relative to men who predict that their future earnings will be low.
One contributing factor may be an empathy deficit—the book reports that high status is linked to lower levels of empathy. Men high on Dark Triad traits are viewed as more attractive by women, are more likely to have consensual sexual partners, and are more likely to engage in sexual coercion.
Your hypothesis that the jock beats up the nerd because the nerd is eyeballing his woman, the jock feels threatened by him, and therefore engages in "mate guarding" behaviour - all of this rests on the assumption that the jock sees the nerd as a credible threat, a plausible sexual rival. Even you don't seem to believe the nerd represents this, so I suggest a more parsimonious representation: the jock bullies the nerd as it's a cheap way to demonstrate where the jock sits on the totem pole, particularly relative to the nerd.
Now available in Substack form!
I think this is an obvious and inevitable result of the rat-sphere growing and expanding, to the point that it includes many people who are "normies" along many if not most axes (a category I'm happy to include myself in). The first-generation rationalists were genuinely weird people (disproportionately likely to be autistic, gay, trans, asexual, vegan or all of the above), for whom maybe polyamory really did "work". But it's misleading to draw conclusions about what works for the general populace from such an atypical, heavily selected sample. As rationalism got bigger and bigger, it started attracting more and more normies, for whom polyamory is far less likely to work.
Within the rat-sphere, one of the most prominent evangelists for polyamory is Scott, who's also asexual. I don't think this is a coincidence. Some poly people like to pat themselves on the back about how romantic jealousy is just a bad habit that they've managed to transcend. But let's be honest: 90% of what we call "romantic jealousy" is just sexual jealousy, and it stands to reason that a person who doesn't experience sexual attraction in the conventional way probably doesn't experience sexual jealousy in the same way either. To reuse one of Scott's own points*, you don't get any Virtue Points for "transcending" an unpleasant emotion if it's an emotion you literally don't feel. I suspect many of the early outspoken advocates for polyamory were asexuals (or at least people with atypically low sex drives) who were inadvertently typical-minding the more conventionally-sex-driven people in their vicinity, assuming that - "well, if I could easily overcome my (vastly lower than typical, if not nonexistent) romantic/sexual jealousy, why can't everyone else? Must just represent a massive character failing on their part." This is a bit like someone who doesn't even like drinking alcohol marching into an AA meeting and announcing "I just stopped drinking, what's the big deal? You guys must be weak - skill issue". Katxwoods's point about "low baseline of jealousy" is exactly what I'm talking about here.
(Alternative/complementary hypothesis: maybe if you literally don't feel at all jealous when thinking about your girlfriend getting railed by another man, it might mean that you don't actually love her as much as you claim to? Perhaps you even have an avoidant attachment style, and you're deliberately seeking out romantic partners who it wouldn't bother you to lose, as a defense mechanism? Just a thought.)
Meanwhile, all of the conventionally-sex-driven people being evangelised to about how amazing polyamory is - they wonder why they're really struggling with feelings of sexual jealousy in a way the low-sex-drive people don't seem to be at all, and feel guilty and ashamed of themselves that they can't overcome this "moral failing", unaware that they're playing a completely different ball game to the asexual/low-sex-drive polys. I mean, Jesus, even puff pieces about what a wonderful alternative lifestyle choice polyamory is still make it sound miserable and even emotionally abusive:
[My girlfriend] started seeing this dude who was an absolute stud, having sex with him and having a great-ass time, and I felt totally lame and inadequate.
That was really hard for me, for obvious reasons. I felt like, I’m a hundred percent replaceable. It took a lot of conversations. She was like, There’s nothing wrong with you, this is going to pass, therapy will help. Lots of tears were shed. But medication helped me, talk therapy helped me
Just imagine feeling sad and upset that your girlfriend is fucking another man who's more attractive than you, and thinking "Yes, obviously this is an unhealthy emotional response, I need to dose myself up with antidepressants". I pity this poor man, and hope he realises he's being manipulated and gaslit sooner rather than later.
*Google highlighting doesn't appear to work on this page, Ctrl-F "virtue points".
Mere mention of an idea, even if surrounded by denunciation, can implant it in the minds of readers.
Isn't this the whole reasoning behind "journalistic balance"? You present one side of the debate, the other side of the debate, then allow the readers/viewers to draw their own conclusions.
A healthy journalistic approach to the debate around trans women in prisons would look something like this:
Alice: Given the minimal risk that trans women pose to female inmates (as evidenced by studies A, B and C) and the elevated risk of sexual assault they face in male prisons (as evidenced by studies X, Y and Z), I believe it is appropriate to house trans women inmates in female prisons rather than male.
Bob: I disagree - I believe the risk that trans women pose to female inmates has been vastly understated (as evidenced by studies D, E and F). Furthermore...
Instead what we so often get is:
"Bob has become notorious in recent years for his outspoken views on trans issues, which have been widely criticised as transphobic and demeaning to trans people."
Me: "Wow, that sounds really bad. Shame that the article doesn't tell me what these views are." half an hour of Googling later "Oh. He thinks it's inappropriate to house trans women in female prisons if they haven't transitioned. This is a totally normal opinion that the majority of people believe, which doesn't remotely imply that you hate trans people or wish them harm."
As I said in the linked article, if a journalist tells you that Bob has Bad Opinions but refuses to tell you what those opinions are, that suggests that the journalist has remarkably little faith in their own opinions to win in the marketplace of ideas - on some level, the journalist thinks their own ideas are so weak and unintuitive that even mentioning an opposing view will make a convert of the average reader. Indeed, we already know this is the standard attitude of trans activists everywhere, given that their whole modus operandi is to smuggle in unpopular pro-trans legislation under the guise of gay rights legislation which the average voter actually does endorse.
Columbia protests and the "right side of history"
A tremendously dumb argument, especially when made by woke people
[A tweet reading “Is [sic] is amazing how the protesters are always right 50 years ago and always wrong today.” @Will_Bunch]
In reaction to the ongoing pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, a lot of people I respect have shared the above tweet. I don’t have especially strong opinions about the protests themselves, but I uncritically support the right of political activists to protest for any cause they choose to, and think that the Republicans (such as Greg Abbott) trying to prevent them from doing so are pathetic, cowardly and shamelessly hypocritical.
First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).
[By Will Bunch’s account, heroes unappreciated in their lifetimes.]
No: I’m sure that what Mr. Bunch meant is that all of the protestors from fifty years ago who are currently considered to have been on the right side of whichever political issue they protested were deeply unpopular at the time. This is probably true, but essentially useless when gauging the relative virtue of current political movements, because of survivorship bias. If there were only two sides to every political issue and the less popular one always came out on top in the judgement of the future, one could accurately predict which side of a current political issue would “win” purely based on which one had the lowest approval ratings. But, of course, there aren’t two sides to every political issue, many political activists protested for causes which were deeply unpopular at the time and remain so to this day, and so the category of “protesters who protest in favour of highly unpopular causes” is bound to include political causes which go on to be viewed in a generally positive light and political causes whose popularity never improves from a low baseline. (For a historical example, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists never fielded any successful election candidates and their peak membership was only 40,000 people. More recently, to the extent that the riot in the Capitol on January 6th was a “protest”, most Americans think it was a bad idea, and I hope it stays that way.) A more accurate rephrasing of Bunch’s tweet might read: “Of the people who protested for various political causes 50 years ago, it is amazing how most of them were generally considered wrong at the time and a small subset of them are now looked upon favourably in the popular imagination.” (Not as catchy, but it does fit into the 280-character limit!)
But the tweet isn’t really about historical protests: it was tweeted about the Columbia protests, the implication being that, fifty years from now, historians (and society more generally) will look upon the protests in a favourable light. The tweet is hence just the latest example of that tiresome argumentative trope that woke people trot out for essentially every political issue, the assertion that their support for this or that political movement places them on the “right side of history”.1
All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow. But I’ve always found it especially strange when woke people in particular make the “right side of history” argument. I’ve never been able to put my finger on quite why, until the tweet above got me thinking about it.
The reason being, historical revisionism is woke people’s favourite pastime. There’s nothing woke people enjoy more than taking a historical figure who enjoys a high level of approval in the popular imagination and demanding that we reappraise their moral character, even to the point of completely reversing it: not merely that such-and-such was a more complex and flawed person than is widely believed, but that he was actually a monster. The woke exist to take the wind out of people’s sails, never forgoing an opportunity to remind people around them that Their Fave is Problematic, actually. It’s such a quintessential part of the woke playbook that even The Onion poked fun at it; or think of that wonderful scene in Tár where the “BIPOC pangender person” says they can’t enjoy Bach’s music because of Bach’s unrepentant misogyny. Take just about any historical figure who is widely admired in one or more Anglophone countries, and I guarantee you I can find a woke article in a mainstream publication arguing that he or she actually sucks (usually for reasons relating to the woke faction’s monomaniacal fixation on race and/or sex), e.g.:
-
Abraham Lincoln (consistently ranked one of the top three Presidents in American history)? Check, check, check.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt (likewise)? Check.
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Ronald Reagan (likewise)? I feel like I don’t need to demonstrate this one (even normie Democrats hate Reagan), but for the sake of consistency here you go.
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Winston Churchill (voted the greatest Briton in history in a 2002 poll)? Check.
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Charles Darwin (voted the fourth-greatest Briton in history)? Check.
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Christopher Columbus? I mean, they created Indigenous People’s Day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Peoples%27_Day_(United_States)) for a reason.
(If you really want a laugh, turn this technique back on them. Next time you see some twentysomething university student reeking of weed wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, point out to him that the man in question once asserted “The negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities”.)
I’m not even arguing that the woke revisionist accounts of the figures listed above are factually wrong or uncharitable (I certainly have no interest in defending Churchill from accusations of genocidal white supremacism, or Reagan from accusations of unabashed hatred of gay men). My point is that, once you recognise that morally atrocious people can go on to become near-unanimously revered both by scholars and in the popular imagination, it completely neuters the case for “the right side of history” being a useful guide to the moral virtues of present-day political figures or movements (or lack thereof), even assuming that one could accurately predict how these entities will be viewed in the popular imagination of the future.
To put it more plainly, woke people would have us believe both that:
1)Many historical figures who by popular and academic consensus are currently considered moral heroes, were in reality atrocious people.
and
2)In the future, popular and academic consensus will hold that the woke movement of the early 21st century was morally heroic.
The first premise is unassailably true, the second remains to be seen. But even if both premises are true, this doesn’t even come close to demonstrating that the woke movement actually is morally heroic. So in the future, historians and society more generally will look upon the Columbia protesters in a favourable light. So what? By the moral and epistemological standards espoused by woke people themselves, a popular consensus that Alice was a good person does not remotely imply that Alice actually was a good person. If Winston Churchill was an irredeemable monster who went on to be considered the greatest Briton who ever lived, why couldn’t this also be true of (to pick the first two woke Britons who popped into my head) Humza Yousaf or Diane Abbott? Not to say that either of these people are irredeemably awful, but there’s literally nothing in the woke framework which contradicts the notion that they could be and subsequently go on to be generally considered paragons of virtue.
This is the problem with employing postmodernism as a rhetorical device. Once you’ve done your best to redpill your listener by telling them that a widely admired figure was actually a crypto-fascist pederast Nazi sympathiser and the establishment don’t want you to know about it - following that up with “the establishment will look upon our movement in a favourable light” doesn’t seem like much of an accolade, even if it’s an accurate prediction. “So let me get this straight: you’re saying that history books have always been written by biased historians beholden to special interests, who systematically lionize awful, wretched people and ignore or gloss over their most atrocious moral failings, provided the person in question helped to advance the historians’ own political agenda. But the historians of the future (who by inclination and temperament will be no different from the historians of the present or the past) will look upon your political faction in a favourable light? Wow, what a ringing endorsement of your political faction! Sign me up!”
And this brings me to my final point. Although “the right side of history” sounds like it’s appealing to the listener’s moral sensibility, it’s really little more than a veiled promise and threat. History is written by the winners, so an assertion that supporting this or that movement puts you on the “right side of history” is really just a prediction that your team will win. That’s all it is: “my team is going to win”. Try rephrasing it in your head: “I support gender-affirming care for minors because I predict that my team will win” doesn’t sound half as noble as “I support gender-affirming care for minors because I want to be on the right side of history”, now does it? What the “right side of history” promises is that, if you join our team, historians will write hagiographies about us and forgive all of our worst sins. And if you don’t join our team? We’ll have no choice but to smear your team as depraved monsters with no redeeming features to speak of. Nice reputation among future generations you’ve got there - it’d be a shame if something happened to it.
1I had a feeling that the specific wording of “right side of history” had fallen out of popularity in recent years, and Google Trends seems to bear that out. That massive spike in 2019 appears to be the release of Ben Shapiro’s book of the same name (lol).
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Sensational news from late last week, that doctors amputated two fingers for a 20-year-old patient to alleviate the young man’s mental distress over being able-bodied, contained a buried clue: “He related his condition to gender dysphoria.”
... A 2018 ethics analysis in a Cambridge University Press publication concludes that there is “no logical difference between the conceptual status of BIID and transsexualism”. It goes on to say that, “given that individuals with transsexualism are offered gender reassignment surgery it seems to us that individuals with BIID ought at least to be considered for treatment, including elective amputation in some cases.”
... But what would it mean to accept the amputee identity at scale, the way we have accepted trans rights as a universal humanitarian movement? Drawing exact parallels, we would likely see a total saturation of amputee culture, from amputee story hour to centring amputee voices in DEI training, and doctors warning parents of the very real suicide risks for amputee-identifying children whose parents refuse to accept them as surgically modified cripples or invalids. Advocates would talk of being “assigned able-bodied at birth” to persuade activist teachers and medical associations to adopt the absolutist position that any attempt to talk kids out of amputee surgery amounts to “conversion therapy”.
The journalist Mia Hughes recently asked readers to imagine a society in which amputee advocates enjoyed the same cultural and political victories as trans advocates.
“Imagine there were a sudden 4000% increase in teens identifying as amputees, but we were all forbidden from being concerned. Instead we were supposed to celebrate it,” she posted on X. “Imagine schools teaching children as young as kindergarten that some people have amputee identities, that they get to choose how many limbs they have. Posters promoting body mutilation adorned the walls of many classrooms.”
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
Contra deBoer on transgender issues
I don't think you're merely asking us to be "kind"
I’ve long been a great fan of Freddie deBoer. He’s a consistently thought-provoking and engaging writer, courageous in his willingness to step on toes and slaughter sacred cows, worth reading even when I (often) disagree with him.
One of many areas on which I disagree with Freddie is in our respective stances on trans issues. Some years back, he posted that he was sick of people in the comments of his articles bringing up trans issues even though the article itself had nothing to do with the topic, and announced a blanket ban on this specific behaviour.1 He subsequently posted about the subject in more detail, explaining why (in contrast to his more iconoclastic opinions on progressive issues like racism, policing and mental health) he supports the standard “trans-inclusive” paradigm more or less uncritically. In March of last year, he posted an article titled “And Now I Will Again Ponderously Explain Why I Am Trans-Affirming”.
To be frank, I found the article staggeringly shoddy and poorly argued, especially for such a typically perceptive writer: it was a profound shame to see him fall victim to exactly the same errors in reasoning and appeals to emotion he so loudly decries when progressives use them in other political contexts. I intended to write a response to that article but never got around to it, and then the moment had passed. Last week he published not one but two new articles on the topic, so now I have a second chance to strike while the iron is hot. In some cases I will respond to Freddie’s arguments directly; in other cases I think it will be illuminating to contrast what Freddie wrote on this topic with what he has written on other controversial political issues in the past, to illustrate how flagrantly he is failing to live up to his own standards and committing precisely the same infractions he has complained about at length in other contexts.
“No one is saying” and what a strawman is
Freddie repeatedly asserts that various complaints that gender-critical people might have about trans activists are completely unfounded and invented from whole cloth, that no trans activists are saying what gender-critical people accuse them of having said, and that if any trans activists are saying these things then they’re only a small radical fringe and they don’t matter.
In 2021, Freddie wrote an article titled "NO ONE SAYS" & What a Strawman Is", describing a rhetorical trick in which a person opposing him on some political issue will insist that “NO ONE SAYS” a thing Freddie disagrees with, Freddie will cite examples of people saying that exact thing - but rather than concede the point, the person will simply move the goalposts:
Freddie might claim that no one is trying to obliterate the distinction between men and women; no less than a once-august publication like Scientific American argues that sex is a “spectrum” and that the idea of there being “only” two sexes is “simplistic”. Freddie might claim that no one in his experience has ever scolded him for saying “birthing person”, but that is the official language advocated for by the UK’s National Health Service. Freddie might insist that no one wants you to stop calling your kids boys or girls, but here’s a fawning article in the New York Times about parents doing exactly that, and another from the BBC.
Note also Freddie’s claim that linguistic prescriptions like “birthing person” and “chestfeeder” are largely confined to “the parts of our culture that have aggressive HR departments”. This might come as a surprise to Freddie, but some of us actually have to work in companies with aggressive HR departments - we aren’t all lucky enough to be self-employed freelancers pulling down six figures a year, beholden to no one but ourselves. It’s very strange for a self-identified Marxist who expresses such profound outrage about the capitalist exploitation of the proletariat to be so blasé about the obnoxious ideological hoops that ordinary working people are made to jump through as a condition of continued employment in a precarious economy.
For emphasis: Freddie, someone is in fact saying! And in many cases these “someones” are far more powerful and have far more influence on our culture than you or anyone in your circle of like-minded Brooklyn activists. When the fifth-largest employer in the entire world is demanding that its staff exclusively use “birthing person” in place of “mother”, what some Brooklyn activist believes is beside the point.
Female sporting events
I also find it hard to square Freddie’s claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female altogether with his apparent belief that trans women competing in female sporting events is entirely fair and legitimate. How can such a policy possibly be justified without ignoring the indisputable biological reality, consistent across time and space, that the average male person is stronger, faster and more resilient than 99% of female people? No less of a once-respectable institution than the American Civil Liberties Union describes the claim that “Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes” as a “myth”. When a respected organisation like the ACLU, with an annual budget exceeding $300 million, asserts that male people are collectively no stronger than female people - the only way I can describe the claim that “no one” is trying to obliterate the distinction between male and female people is that it is a shameless insult to the reader’s intelligence.
Scepticism for me, but not for thee
A recurrent problem throughout the article is Freddie assuming that any criticism of trans-inclusive policies is a criticism of trans people themselves. No matter how many times a gender-critical person might assert “I’m not worried about trans people using this policy to hurt people - I’m worried about bad actors who are not themselves trans or suffering from gender dysphoria taking advantage of this policy to hurt people”, Freddie continually insists that criticising policies intended to be trans-inclusive is functionally the same as criticising trans people as a group. This is precisely the same kind of facile reasoning he’s so elegantly skewered in other political domains - the notion that opposition to this or that policy necessarily implies hatred of black people, or the mentally ill, or what have you. But he’s guilty of it himself, admitting elsewhere in the article that certain trans-inclusive policies pursued by the radical fringe of the trans activist lobby are short-sighted and counterproductive. So we find ourselves in the curious position in which Freddie can criticise this trans-inclusive policy without that bringing his support for trans rights into question - but if gender-critical people are sceptical or uneasy about that trans-inclusive policy, the only reasonable explanation is that they’re crypto-conservative fundamentalist Christians motivated solely by disgust and hatred of trans people.
For example, Freddie admits to scepticism about outré neogenders (“I suspect a lot of those people will probably adopt a more conventional gender identity as they age”), that a lot of the linguistic prescriptions trans activists make are preposterous and counterproductive (“I think making people believe that you want to get rid of the term “mother” is about as politically wise as punching a baby on camera”), that it’s wrong to act like medically transitioning will solve all of a trans person’s problems (“And I worry, for young trans people, that they’ll find transitioning to be just another of these human disappointments - things will be better, no doubt, but as we all tend to do they’ll have idealized the next stage of their lives and then may experience that sudden comedown when they realize that they’re still just humans with human problems”) and even that some medical practitioners are being overly aggressive about pushing minors to transition (“Can I see understand [sic] some concerns with overly-aggressive medical providers pushing care on trans-identifying minors too quickly? I guess so.”) These topics, apparently, reside within the Overton window: one is entitled to raise concerns about them without being accused of being motivated by malicious hatred of trans people as a group. Why are these concerns legitimate to express, and not: the unintended consequences of abolishing single-sex bathrooms and changing rooms; male rapists with intact genitalia being incarcerated in female prisons; convicted sex offenders coming out as trans and changing their names in order to evade child safeguarding policies - or any other of the litany of reasonable-sounding objections gender-critical people have raised over the last decade or so? No idea.
The bathroom question
A large chunk of both articles is dedicated to the question of whether it is appropriate to allow trans women to use women’s bathrooms:
I personally am not a diehard advocate for sex-segregated bathrooms, and can see the merit in making all bathrooms gender-neutral. Of all the components of trans activism going, gender-neutral bathrooms is perhaps the one I find least objectionable. That being said, I find the argument for sex-segregated bathrooms easy to understand (even if I don’t necessarily share it), and admit to being surprised that Freddie doesn’t get it, so I will try to aid him in understanding it.
A blanket policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is intended to minimise the risk of female people being raped or sexually assaulted by male people in bathrooms. While a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms is enforced, a person who sees an obviously male person enter a women’s public bathroom could reasonably assume that that person was up to no good, and take appropriate steps to rectify the situation (such as notifying a security guard). Under a trans-inclusive bathroom policy, one is no longer supposed to assume that a male person entering a women’s bathroom is up to no good, because they might identify as a trans woman.
While Freddie is correct that, under a policy of sex-segregated bathrooms, there is nothing stopping a male rapist from simply walking into a women’s bathroom, a trans-inclusive bathroom policy makes it dramatically easier for such people to get away with committing an opportunistic rape, as bystanders will be less likely to intervene if they see a male person entering a women’s bathroom for fear of being accused of being transphobic. The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
If a woman is in a public bathroom and an obviously male person walks in, there is no reliable way for her to tell if that person is a harmless trans woman just minding her own business, or a rapist exploiting well-meaning inclusive policies for malicious ends. The fact that the person has a penis is not dispositive in one direction or the other (as Freddie acknowledges not all trans people may wish to medically transition); nor that they are bearded and wearing jeans and a T-shirt (because “trans women don’t owe you femininity”, and a trans woman presenting as male does not in any way undermine her trans identity).
[image in original post]
For the reasons outlined above, there is no way to reliably distinguish between trans women and cis men on sight2. Hence, there is functionally no difference between “bathrooms intended for women and trans women” and “gender-neutral bathrooms”. Like Freddie, I am not aware of any hard evidence that making bathrooms gender-neutral in a particular area resulted in an increase in the rate of rape or sexual assault. I understand the gender-critical opposition to gender-neutral bathrooms without necessarily sharing or endorsing it. Even if the concerns about how this policy might be exploited by bad actors are in fact unfounded, I don’t think it’s fair to accuse everyone expressing those concerns of being transphobic. I think it’s especially unfair to accuse a gender-critical person of saying they think all trans women are rapists when, in my experience, gender-critical people go to great lengths to emphasise that they are concerned about bad actors who aren’t trans taking advantage of these policies for malicious ends, rather than trans women doing so.
Overstating the importance of the issue
In his second article from last week, Freddie complains that gender-critical people have vastly overstated the significance of the trans issue, elevating it to the status of “the most important social divide of our time, apparently beating out crime and education and the collapse of the family etc” when trans/NB people make up at most 2-3% of the American population. I agree that, in the scheme of things, trans issues receive a vastly disproportionate share of column inches relative to their import. Where I differ from Freddie is placing the blame for this state of affairs solely at the feet of gender-critical people.
As noted by Wesley Yang, there are 39 separate days3 in the American political calendar specifically dedicated to celebrating trans people (and an additional 77 days dedicated to celebrating trans people as a subset of LGBTQ+) - in contrast to Black History Month, which famously falls on the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar, despite black Americans making up 13-14% of the US population. President Joe Biden gave a statement on Transgender Day of Remembrance, while Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren made the frankly bizarre campaign promise that her pick for education secretary would have to be personally vetted by a transgender child. There has hardly been a single political issue in the last ten years that hasn’t been framed as “how might this affect trans people?” or “what does this mean for the struggle for trans rights?” in the popular media, no matter how tangential the connection - everything from Black Lives Matter to the war in the Ukraine to gun violence in schools to the cost-of-living crisis to Covid to AI to the Israel-Palestine conflict to Brexit and even climate change (“[exposure to secondhand smoke] can exacerbate the respiratory stress that LGBTQI+ populations may experience from air pollution and chest binding, which is a common practice among transgender men to achieve a flat chest”)
It’s a bit rich to demand that Americans spend more than one-tenth of the calendar year celebrating trans people, “centring their voices” and putting their trials and tribulations at the forefront of their consciousness - only to then turn around and say “umm why do you even care about this, it’s such a tiny issue lol” when some of them offer even the mildest pushback. You brought it up.
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Medical transition of minors
Social contagion via social media
On the controversy over underage trans people discovering a transgender identity and/or undergoing medical transition, Freddie writes:
It’s fascinating contrasting the passage above with an article Freddie published in 2022 about the recent phenomenon of social media-addicted teenagers suddenly “discovering” that they suffer from dissociative identity disorder (“DID” for short, popularly known as “multiple personality disorder”), an exceptionally rare condition in which a person has multiple distinct personalities (called “alters”). Freddie unequivocally asserted that most or all of these teenagers are either mistaken (honestly confusing the symptoms of some relatively banal personality trait or mental illness for an exotic psychosis) or actively lying; that this is bad for the teenagers themselves; and that the adults who ought to know better but indulge these teenagers anyway should be ashamed of themselves. He even went so far as to argue that dissociative identity disorder may not even exist, citing as evidence (among other things) that certain people only “discovered” they had it after being charged with a crime. How this observation ties into the transgender debate is left as an exercise to the reader (but here are a few hints).
I really cannot fathom how Freddie can reconcile his position in the DID article with his position on trans teenagers: the cognitive dissonance is simply astounding. Freddie insists that gender-critical people need not be concerned about teenagers receiving hormones or surgical interventions, as the rates at which these are occurring are “low” and “vanishingly rare” respectively - but I would be very surprised if the number of teenagers claiming to suffer from DID (even if they aren’t receiving any medical treatment for same) is greater than the number coming out as trans, which does not in any way alter Freddie’s opinion that the former is a concerning trend. He talks about “a notoriously controversial and historically extremely rare disorder… suddenly bloom[ing] into epidemic proportions among teenagers with smartphones and a burning need to differentiate themselves” and does not accept for a moment the explanation that “expanding public consciousness about such illnesses reduces stigma and empowers more people to get diagnosed with conditions they already had” - but simply refuses to connect the dots with the other thing that awkward teenagers with smartphones and burning need to differentiate themselves started “discovering” about themselves en masse all over the Western world about ten years ago (which resulted in an over 5,000% increase in referrals among female minors to the UK’s centre for transgender children - in the space of less than ten years). And the standard explanation offered for why so many female teenagers are coming out as trans is word-for-word the same as the standard explanation for why so many teenagers are claiming to suffer from DID!
Imagine, if you will, two female teenagers:
Alice is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she has dissociative identity disorder and multiple “alters” (having given no indication that she experienced like this at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a therapist, and perhaps later to a psychiatrist who will prescribe her powerful antipsychotic medication which comes with a host of side effects.
Barbara is a socially awkward thirteen-year-old with some autistic tendencies. Having trouble fitting in at school, she retreats into social media, becoming immersed in communities of like-minded individuals on Tumblr and TikTok. Six months later, she announces to her parents that she is a trans boy called Brandon (having given no indication that she was dissatisfied with her gender identity at any point prior), and demands to be brought to a physician who specialises in gender issues who will prescribe her hormones (which come with a host of side effects) and recommend that she undergo top and/or bottom surgery.
Freddie looks at Alice and says: this is concerning, and Alice will suffer as a result - I don’t care that I’m not Alice’s parent or healthcare provider, I still think it’s concerning and I’m entitled to say so. Freddie looks at Barbara/Brandon and says: nothing to see here - it’s a private matter for Brandon, Brandon’s parents and Brandon’s healthcare providers, “I don’t understand why this element of medical science has become everyone’s business to a degree that is simply not true in other fields”, and if you think this is concerning then you’re a bigot. No matter how much a gender-critical person might insist that they are motivated by concern for Barbara/Brandon’s welfare which is just as authentic as Freddie’s for Alice - no, they’re really just a closeted conservative Christian consumed with hatred and disgust for trans people. I truly do not understand why Freddie is entitled to his opinion on Alice (despite not knowing her personally), but no gender-critical person is entitled to their opinion on Barbara/Brandon.
Let’s take it a step further:
What reasonable person would look at the scenario described above and not immediately conclude “Alice has erroneously come to believe both that she is trans and suffers from DID because of her social media consumption”? But Freddie would have us believe that the two phenomena are entirely unrelated. The fact that Alice discovered that she was transgender and had DID at exactly the same time, that she did so immediately after spending far too much time in online communities in which both DID and being trans are glamorised - this is all just a big coincidence. Freddie absolutely reserves the right to say that Alice will suffer as a result of her erroneous belief that she has DID, but anyone (outside of Alice’s parents and healthcare providers) who does the same of her belief that she is a trans boy has outed themselves as a cruel, malicious bigot.
Some of the passages from Freddie’s DID article are almost painfully on-the-nose:
Incidentally, the scenario described above (in which Alice comes to believe that she is both trans and has DID) is not an armchair hypothetical. I took a quick scan of the #dissociativeidentitydisorder tag on TikTok and noticed that many of the individuals posting content under that tag describe themselves as transgender in addition to claiming to have multiple alters. Transgender patients who also claim to suffer from DID is apparently a sufficiently common scenario that it was discussed at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in September 2022. What to do in the event that there is disagreement among the “alters” about whether or not to undergo medical transition? WPATH’s elegant solution: use a smartphone app to allow the alters to vote in turn and come to a collective decision.
Self-regulation of medical bodies
Stories like the above are precisely why so many gender-critical people don’t share Freddie’s optimism in the ability or willingness of the “medical community to change their standard of care as new data comes available”. By asserting that “I am certain… that I don’t want the government getting involved in these medical decisions. Ron Desantis does not get a say, sorry”, Freddie is committing himself to a position in which the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to effectively self-regulate and will never require outside interference from governmental bodies.
That’s a remarkably high level of confidence to have in any medical body governing any kind of medical treatment. Of course we would all love to live in a world in which medical bodies can self-regulate and no outside interference is necessary, but - well, medical scandals happen, and sometimes the government getting involved is an act of last resort after self-regulation fails. I’m not saying that the bodies governing healthcare for trans minors are any worse at self-regulation and course-correction than the average medical body (whether in oncology or orthopaedics or whatever); but I’m definitely saying I don’t think I have any good reason to believe that these medical bodies are better than average, and certainly not so much better that Freddie’s unshakeable confidence in them can be rationally justified.
To use an example of how medical bodies’ self-regulation can and does fail, the Irish surgeon Michael Neary conducted unnecessary hysterectomies and other surgical procedures on over a hundred women over a thirty-year period. Several nurses blew the whistle at various points in his career, to no avail; an internal investigation conducted by three consultants found no evidence of wrongdoing and recommended that Neary continue working in the Lourdes Hospital. It was only after a judicial inquiry brought by the ministry for health and children (i.e. the government) that Neary was finally struck off the register, five years after the internal investigation found he’d done nothing wrong. If the government hadn’t gotten involved (as a measure of last resort, the ability of the medical bodies in question having demonstrably failed to self-regulate and course-correct), it’s entirely possible that Neary would have ruined dozens of additional women’s lives before retiring on a tidy pension. Or consider the more recent example of Lucy Letby, a serial killer working as a nurse who murdered at least 7 newborn babies: the NHS Foundation Trust attempted to handle the matter internally (even forcing doctors who’d raised the alarm about Letby to personally apologise to her) and were extremely resistant to involving the police. It was only after alerting the police (i.e. the government) - nearly two full years after members of staff had raised the alarm following Letby’s first confirmed victim - that Letby was finally removed from her position and later arrested, charged and convicted.
To clarify: I’m not saying that governmental intervention into transition for minors is currently necessary. However, the suggestion that we can confidently assert that no such intervention will ever be necessary is preposterous. I don’t think we have any good reason to believe that the medical bodies governing medical transition for minors are invulnerable to the kinds of social dynamics and institutional failures that have afflicted every other kind of medical body,4 and doctors as a profession (as the examples above illustrate) are notorious for closing ranks and circling the wagons at the first whiff of a potential scandal. To simply declare by fiat “the medical bodies governing transition for minors will always be able to self-regulate and course-correct, governmental oversight or intervention is not necessary and never will be” is shockingly naïve. He touched on a similar point in his article from March of last year:
All true. The difference being that, in my experience, whistleblowers who call attention to substandard practices at dialysis centres, radiology labs and pharmacies are not generally accused of lying, being right-wing agitators or being bigoted against marginalised members of society - all accusations hurled at Jamie Reed, even well after her claims of misconduct were largely substantiated by no less than the New York Times.
This unqualified confidence in a class of medical practitioners is all the more baffling coming from Freddie, considering he himself found it entirely credible when one of his readers described how her therapist used their sessions as an opportunity to hector and guilt-trip her about her white female privilege in the style of racial grievance politics popularised by Robin diAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi. If therapists are vulnerable to allowing their faddish political opinions override their duty of care to their patients, why not endocrinologists, surgeons and so on?
But I suppose the mere suggestion that endocrinologists who work with trans teenagers are just as fallible and prone to ordinary human error as anyone else makes me a cruel, malicious bigot who hates trans people.
Parental input into their children’s transition is more controversial than Freddie seems to think
As an aside, do you know who besides gender-critical people is a cruel, malicious bigot? If we were to be even a little bit consistent about this, Freddie himself. I’m not the first person to note that perfectly reasonable and level-headed individuals with impeccable progressive bona fides (such as Jesse Singal) have been smeared as bigots by no less an insitution than GLAAD simply for arguing, as Freddie does, that the parents of trans children should have some input into what medical treatments their children do or don’t undergo. The official stance of many pro-trans organisations is that “trans kids know who they are” and that any attempts to gatekeep their access to “gender-affirming care” (including by their parents) is denying them lifesaving medical treatment, no different from denying insulin to a diabetic.
If you think I’m exaggerating, consider this bill in the state of California which would make a parent’s decision to “affirm” their child’s gender identity (or not) a factor in custody disputes (at the time of writing, it has passed both houses but not yet been signed into law). In the eyes of the state of California, all other things being equal, a parent who expresses misgivings about their child’s desire to medically transition is a strictly worse parent than a parent who uncritically and enthusiastically endorses that child’s desire. See also the publicly-funded British charity Mermaids, who were caught sending a chest binder to a journalist posing a 14-year-old teenager, even after being explicitly told that the girl’s mother had forbidden her from wearing one.
Obviously, Freddie, you would be very insulted if you were to be smeared as a bigot for expressing the “standard, not-particularly-interesting progressive” opinion that parents should have some say in what medical treatments their children undergo. Please recognise that this “not-particularly interesting” opinion of yours is in fact very controversial in the trans activist space. Please try to understand how gender-critical people feel when you smear them as bigots for expressing what seem to them “standard, not-particularly interesting progressive” opinions, such as “it’s bad when sex offenders falsely claim to be trans women so as to serve their sentences in women’s prisons”.
Detransition
In his article from March, Freddie had this to say about detransitioners:
For the record, the existence of detransitioners does not undermine my respect for trans people. I have trans friends who I respect. If they decided that they wanted to revert to being cis, I would support them in that decision absolutely. The existence of people who transition and then come to regret their decision does not challenge my belief that adults are entitled to transition in the first place, any more than (to use a banal example) the existence of people who undergo tattoo removal challenges my belief that adults can get tattoos if they want to.
The detransition phenomenon is important to highlight in the interests of informed consent. If an adult is considering undergoing an elective medical procedure (or series of medical procedures), their healthcare practitioner should proactively make them informed about the statistical outcomes of that medical procedure, which includes the proportion of people who undergo that procedure and later come to regret it. This goes double for surgical procedures which have a high risk of complications. It goes double-double for highly invasive procedures which will irreversibly change large parts of a person’s body and permanently sterilise them. And it goes double-double-double when you’re proposing to do the above on minors.
If our collective attitude towards medical transition was sensible and depoliticised, the paragraph above would be a complete no-brainer. Instead we find ourselves in a culture in which medical transition is routinely presented as a silver bullet which will erase a trans person’s problems in one fell swoop; in which even the expected downsides of successful transition are downplayed and minimised by healthcare practitioners; and in which distressed parents are browbeaten with emotionally manipulative slogans like “Would you rather have a live daughter or a dead son?” In this environment, it’s perfectly reasonable to push back on the soft-pedalling of medical transition by pointing out that a significant proportion of those who transition later regret their decision, and that prospective transitioners ought to take that fact (among others) into account when making their decision.
If anything, the term “detransition” downplays the severity of the situation. A “detransitioner” has not simply pressed Ctrl-Z and reverted their body to factory settings - the changes they have made to their body are generally irreversible and will completely change the course of their life. Michael Neary’s victims were furious upon realising that they were denied the ability to have further children for no good reason at all - the idea that medical professionals would downplay the magnitude of the decision to transition is unconscionable.
The “Fox News Fallacy”
In his article about multiple personality disorder, Freddie described what he called the “Fox News Fallacy”. I will quote from it at length:
And what does Freddie have to say about gender-critical people who are (among other things) concerned about trans teenagers for many of the same reasons that Freddie is concerned about teenagers claiming to have DID? Well, he
One might think the breadth of criticisms directed towards trans activism and the range of people expressing them might give Freddie pause - surely not all of these people are just bigoted lapsed Christians motivated by animalistic revulsion of trans people? But no - no matter how many people express reservations about this or that component of transgender activism; no matter how measured, restrained and thoroughly researched their criticisms might be; no matter what point on the political spectrum they may reside on (including no less than the Communist Party of Great Britain, who in another world Freddie might consider fellow travellers); even if they are atheist materialists who object to gender ideology specifically because they consider its quasi-mystical dualistic character something of a cultural regression - everyone who is even a little bit more sceptical on the trans issue than Freddie must in fact be a closeted Christian who thinks that trans people are “wicked” and “against God’s plan”. There’s no other possible explanation that merits serious consideration, apparently.
__
1 For the record, I don’t blame him for finding this behaviour tiresome, I think the people melodramatically accusing him of hypocrisy for “censoring” them should chill out, and as it’s his Substack, the moderation decisions he enforces on it are entirely his prerogative. To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
2 To better disambiguate between genuine trans women and cis bad actors was the root of my proposal to make incarcerating trans women in women’s prisons conditional on their being first assessed by a psychiatrist experienced in gender issues. Freddie doesn’t even touch on the prison issue at all, I suspect because he recognises a losing battle when he sees one.
3 Not including the unofficial “Trans Day of Vengeance”, which coincides with April Fool’s Day.
4 To bring it back to another of Freddie’s older posts: medical bodies are institutions, which means they are exactly as subject to the Iron Law of Institutions as any other institution.
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