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Sterilize any other group to prevent them having children, it’s genocide. Refuse to sterilize trans people, and they call it genocide. …Not because genes won’t be passed on, but because presumably they’ll commit suicide. but the pithy observation stands for a different reason.
Today I learned two new words:
memocide: the deliberate and/or systematic elimination of an idea (a memetic unit).
memorcide: the elimination of a people’s history or the memory of a people, often a part of ethnic cleansing.
The culture war is a memocidal total war between modernism (the gaining and use of objective knowledge, the rights of individuals, the identification and shunning of bias, and the creation of a unified narrative) and postmodernism (the rejection of objectivity, universalism, and individualism).
The culture war has seen the weaponization of narratives, knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, anti-knowledge, bias, anti-bias, and pseudo-bias. (The latter includes objective observations about statistics which resemble bias.) This is one of the reasons Alex Jones called his show InfoWars.
Is this just about driving trans people to suicide, though? I'm not sure this is the only, or the most important aspect of the argument. Would encouraging desistance in FtM teens, assuming that it does not increase their suicidality (or indeed brings it down in the long run), still kinda count as a genocide? I'd expect that most activists will bite the bullet and say it does. What about a drug or other intervention that'd prevent children from being born trans (assuming this is a thing) – would that be moral, seeing as the condition of transgenderism predicts such a massive hit to quality of life? No, and I believe there's no research being done in this direction precisely because it'd be associated with genocidal intent.
Speaking of genocide and body modification of children... This reminded me that Jews sometimes argue that various things are akin to Holocaust: notably, assimilation – and, more to the point, the ban on male circumcision.
ADL uses a more diplomatic phrasing:
(Curiously, the counterargument also mirrors the transition debate «Its a human rights violation. Only the consenting adult owner of the genitals may rightly decide»).
The logic is sound enough, if circular: as per the definition of Raphael Lemkin, the word «genocide» is
The annihilation is often assumed to ultimately take physical form, with all those stratagems being mere groundwork – as a case in point, consider Uighur genocide, which atomized Westerners mainly identify with purported fertility suppression and mass sterilization, as opposed to attacks on Uighur culture and ethnoreligious assabiyah. The thing is, Lemkin's definition doesn't work like that! The terminal goal, the annihilation of a group, is not the same as the extermination of its members::
So, Jews are a people, a national/ethnic group. Denying them the practice of infant genital mutilation that they – for reasons other people, me included, may find frivolous or inane – steadfastly assert is crucial for belonging to their group, can be construed as an attack on the group's continued existence, at least within the borders of the polity; thus, genocide. Trans people argue that denying children the body-modifying practice that is crucial for becoming a full-fledged trans person is genocide. The parallel is clear to me. Now the problem is, who are trans people as a group?
They are not an ethnos nor a genos, but a community built around an identity which is downstream of a differentiating trait.
We've heard similar rhetoric with regard to deaf people, bearers of other disabilities (the geneticist Kevin Bird, a disabled person himself, speaks very cogently on the matter of how defining disabilities to be undesirable is a eugenicist framework) – and of course abortion of fetuses with Down's is a genocide too. The whole eugenics-genocide rhetoric is obviously cribbed from racial rhetoric which is, in turn, heavily inspired by reflections on Holocaust after WWII; it's all the same words, and sometimes even the same activists.
We can discuss this as a postmodernist issue, as a memetic process, as a problem of hyperindividualism, but eh... Contra @Tanista, I think this is not toxic individualism but precisely misapplied tribalism, tribalism of people who have only found community through the commonality of their alienation.
In principle, the innate human drive toward tribalist behavior is a potent tool for coordinating collective negotiation in individualist societies, and this is the bulk of what we call politics. In practice, collective identities can hold their bearers hostage and demand investment in their own proliferation; unlike some run-of-the-mill meme like an ideology, this is a very specific mechanic – it cuts to the core of human social instinct, of helping those most similar to yourself (and, the intuition goes, more related) in the competition with alien groups. A trans person who weaponizes the genocide rhetoric is defending not only their own right to exist, but rights of the Trans Tribe as a whole - both its extant members and its historical perpetuation... Which unfortunately has to be outsourced to other tribes on the pesky biological side of things.
If assimilation into American white culture is genocide then the big problem with the idea of “whiteness” is as much the disappearance of ethnic Europeans as it is the oppression of blacks. Which seems absurd.
You mixed quickly on from trans people to ethnic groups, which is a movement from something that doesn’t exist to something that does exist and has existed historically.
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Perhaps neologisms would fit these observations? In the vein of “parthenogenesis”:
Memogenic: created from memes/the mind
Identigenic: created from an identity/similarity - the prefix is literally sameness
Laliagenic: created by talking
Genogenic or cisgenic: created by genes/created normally
Memoethnic, identiethnic, genoethnic, etc.: a people/tribe created suchly
Identicide: killing an identity / killing a sameness.
I suspect, were we to start using these, identigenic and genogenic would be the winning memes, along with identicide. Transgender people would be, from a gender essentialist POV, part of a memogenic pseudoethnos. There would be genogenic Jews, identigenic Jews, and pistiethnic Jews (faith-originating) comprising a meta-tribe.
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Memocide sounds like a word someone made up so they can claim that anyone who corrects their BS is "literally Hitler".
Because from the definition as written, striking geocentrism out of the textbooks is a flavour of genocide.
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I can see this argument for say...all of the various group rights being snuck into liberalism (e.g. affirmative action)
I don't see how the trans issue specifically is about the rejection of individualism
If anything, it is individualism run amok, totally unbounded by anything.
The progression seems to be:
You should be free from government tyranny and able to decide your own life.
You should be free from social restrictions when making choices about your life
You should be free even from biology and basic evolutionary inheritances. It is not enough to take what you want, you must be able to choose what you are, and damn society if it stands in your way. And, in fact, society has a responsibility to play into your delusional belief in your infinite malleability.
This seems to me like "toxic individualism" - individualism taken to an insane degree.
Forcing individuals to accept outside group cultural norms out of some moral imperative seems very communal, not individualistic. We should note that almost all of the debate about trans issues are their ideological normalization in society. If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence. I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children) Almost all the debate is over forcing people to take part in their image of themselves.
99% of transgender"ism" is all the things trans people actually do - gender dysphoria, hormones and surgery, dressing and acting and speaking and looking like a girl. 1% of it is "forcing conservatives to use the right pronouns". that may be the part you're objecting to, but that doesn't make transgenderism communal.
Well, hormones and surgery are required to be subsidized by insurance plans. Where I live it's illegal to perform conversion therapy, which has been interpreted to mean trying to dissuade trans people from being trans. And public schools are conspiring to make teenagers trans against the wishes of their parents, and often without their knowledge.
That's communal, and it's way more than 1%. I don't think you're very honest here.
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I'm not sure if I wasn't clear, but that 1% (which definitely extends far beyond just forcing the use of pronouns and includes conforming to all sorts of norma) is basically the whole political disagreement. As I said,
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Why would I expect that? Or do you mean the anti-individualist side?
Yes, the anti-individualist argument would be against allowing them to take hormones, dress up, etc. I'm not aware of any significant cohort who wants to do that in North America.
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I think there's some of both "toxic individualism" and rejection of individualism going on, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. As you write, it's easy to see it as individualism run amok, heightening one's own arbitrary choice of identity, unbounded from physical or social reality, as the one standard to force everyone to submit to. At the same time, so much of the political agitating seems to be based around erasing individualism, by grouping all trans people together as one community with shared interests. For instance, trans murder rates are often invoked, which rely heavily on the murder rate of transwoman prostitutes, using it to justify policies for the ostensible benefit of wealthy transmen and transwomen. Or the aggressive grouping of LGBTQ+etc. as one bloc, where everyone in that group, down to the individual person, shares something in common with everyone else in that group for being oppressed sexual minorities in the hegemonic heteropatriarchy.
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Should be noted that Finland recently passed trans self-id (limited to adults) and the specific issue that started the whole process was the trans demand to stop requiring sterilization for the legal confirmation of new gender.
Did they at least put in something that'd stop sociopath sex pests from getting self-id and abusing it ? Because they will.
There's a coordinated push to pass these self-ID laws throughout Europe at the moment. None of them have any such safeguards.
Gender identity is absurd but self-ID takes the biscuit. I believe that disabled people exist and are due some rectification from society - mobility impaired people get preferred parking spaces, there is ramp access to buildings.
however all of this is useless to the disabled if anybody could self ID as disabled. Clearly bad actors will identify as disabled if we did this, and take over the assigned spaces.
Everybody would understand what would happen there, so why does a significant proportion of the population not understand what would happen with trans self ID.
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