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In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.
I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?
Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.
And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.
Kind of low effort for this forum, but I watched a news clip on twitter where CNN interviews Natalee Bingham, a friend of one of the victims, commenting on the suspect claiming to be nonbinary, saying: “That's really really offen[sive] especially being a transgender woman myself, that a male, which it was obvious with the mugshot, that's a man, that's not a nonbinary person, because in no way, shape or form could they appear as a woman the next day, it's really offensive to even hear that, that they're playing that role."
I was just blown away by the hypocrisy. According to standard leftist rhetoric, a person's gender self-identification is sacrosanct, denying someone's chosen gender identity is transphobic, and the the idea that someone might identify as transgender or nonbinary for personal gain is rightwing fearmongering and something that never happens. Never mind the fact that Bingham based her judgment solely on how the suspect looks in his mugshots (while Bingham herself looks and sounds “transgender” at best); I thought making people's gender recognition dependent on well they “pass” was another faux pas to the LGTBQ+ community.
I want to avoid making this all “boo outgroup”; I know that Bingham doesn't speak for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and maybe others disagree with her views. Still, it's baffling to hear her say so casually the same things that would get a cishet male or radfem woman cancelled. I can somewhat respect the leftist view that self-identification is always valid, even if I personally disagree with it, but if the real rule is more along the lines of “we can question other people's gender identity but you can't”, then I have even less respect for the people pushing this ideology.
Transgender people are not, as a rule, exempt from being "canceled" for saying the wrong thing about other trans people. (See Contrapoints' video on her own experiences of being canceled.) I would hope for some mercy in this specific instance, not because the identity questioning is justified but because she's talking about someone who quite literally just killed her dear friend; expecting her to be perfectly charitable isn't really fair. I would not, however, generalize from this case in determining leftist norms in general.
There is a discussion that often comes up around alcohol and inhibitions. Does being drunk make you act like a different person? Or does it reveal who you truly are behind the mask?
The glaring issue with this example is that "charitable" is even a frame to come up. It's that, in a vulnerable moment where the mask is off, this person clearly does not genuinely believe in the doctrine of self-identification.
Maybe she will suffer social consequences for it. It would be tactically sound, if nothing else. Because opponents of gender ideology are going to be linking to that clip for a decade.
Tactics or no, I hope people don't harass this bereaved person. I'm sure opponents of gender ideology would find plenty of ammunition anyway, from somewhere or other.
Many transgender people don't believe in the doctrine of self-identification. Quite a lot of them have strong feelings about precisely what it is that defines their own gender, and would like the rest of society to adopt their specific theory even if that means excluding people who don't fit in with that definition. Self-ID wins that internal battle because, amongst the available options, it's the one that can unite the most people within the community. Every other definition is forced to turn away potential allies by its very nature.
And yes, ultimately, self-ID is a matter of charity. I think most of the people who subscribe to it as a notion would privately concede that a person can, in theory, falsely claim to be transgender. For example, if an evil genie told me I'd have to go and tell people I was a man or they'd kill a hundred babies, and I went out and told people I was a man, that would not, in itself, make me a man. But, if people didn't know about the evil genie and thought I really meant it, then "self-ID," as a norm, says that trusting me on that would still be the right thing to do in most situations.
We might ask, what is it that distinguishes a false claim to be trans from a true one? Many activists wouldn't ask this, of course, because they'd rather not start a massive internal fight. But I suspect that the closest thing the "self-ID" camp would have to an answer to this question -- provided they felt safe enough to consider it in the first place -- would be something along the lines of, you're really transgender if (a) you want a different gender identity and (b) that want is intrinsic rather than instrumental. I'm reaching, on that second one, because I have never actually seen it articulated that way, but I think it fits. Wanting to be female because then you can get scholarships reserved for women would not make you trans; wanting to be female because there is no same-sex marriage and you want to marry a man would not make you trans; wanting to be female (or male/neither/a mixture) because you just want it is the thing that counts.
Unfortunately, "because I just want it" can be very hard to describe, let alone prove. Thus: charity.
I wonder where that places Iranian trans women. Infamously, Iran has a very high rate of transwomen, because it's the legal alternative to homosexuality. However, this is clearly an instrumental motivation, even if it often coincides with significant efforts to present and live as women.
It's also an interesting definition, because much of what is driving opposition to the rise of gender ideology is the belief that social pressure, contagion, and misdiagnosed mental illness are the primary drivers trans-identification right now, and these are seen as extrinsic motivations that are often misunderstood as intrinsic by those who temporarily self-identify as trans. If the activists truly believe as you say, but then they pretend otherwise for politically strategic reasons, then they are fundamentally untrustworthy on the very important factual question of what is actually driving increasing rates of trans-identification.
You bring up some interesting issues. I think it's worth clarifying that my use of the word "intrinsic" doesn't preclude social influence on desire. So, if someone sees a trans person, and they never had a desire to be trans before that and never would have without having seen it and known it was possible, but they do still want to change their gender now that they know that they can, just as a want-in-itself, then that would still count as an "intrinsic" desire, in the sense in which I am using the word. The cause of the intrinsic want is not relevant, provided that the desire for a particular gender is a desire for that gender rather than wanting the gender as a tool on the way to something else.
So, for example, if some of those Iranian trans women would never have wanted to be trans if they could have simply been homosexual, but, over time, they've adopted their female identity and now it feels like their own and they've come to like that identity in and of itself, then that would count as a socially-mediated intrinsic desire, by my definition. Whereas, an Iranian who is living as a trans woman but who would transition back to male in a heartbeat if they could just be homosexual does not have that intrinsic desire, and indeed I think many people who generally support self-ID as a measure would still concede that such a person is not "really trans" -- because they don't really want to be, not for itself.
If you want to be trans solely in order to make your friends accept you, then that's not an intrinsic desire for a gender. But are there really people who would transition solely for that reason? It seems far-fetched. On the other hand, people can sometimes manufacture genuine desires, in order to fit in. Kind of like the difference between wearing jeans because that is the socially acceptable costume and you don't want to be questioned, on the one hand, and wearing jeans because you have absorbed that you feel socially comfortable in them and now they just feel "comfortable" in themselves, even when no-one is watching. The former is not an intrinsic desire; the latter could be.
Yeah, this is an interesting one. If you think that transitioning will improve your mental health, but you don't actually want to be the other gender as a thing in itself ... yeah, could happen, some mental illnesses make people latch onto solutions indiscriminately.
I think some people would want to say that a person like this is still close enough to "really trans" if the transitioning does actually help. I'm not sure that I would, though. Honestly, the more I explore these edges, the more I find myself feeling like "intrinsic desire" actually does describe something important about what it means to be trans. Mind you, I am not, myself, transgender in any way, and I hesitate to present myself as an authority on a subject that hinges so closely on the personal experiences of others.
In and of itself, none of this addresses the question of whether we should attempt to reduce the prevalence of an intrinsic desire to be another gender, of course. Whether or when to police the existence of such intrinsic desire is also a separate question; proponents of self-ID would say "don't ever," but some might be willing to move to a different standard if they still believed that intrinsic desire itself would be respected under that standard.
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