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So...there is a court case in the UK going on about the trans issue that I think will determine whether the fever is breaking or not
Basically: Mermaids, a pro-trans advocacy group is suing to remove the charity classification of another charity - the LGB Alliance. Mermaids alleges that LGBA (focused on gays and lesbians and against gender ideology) isn't a legitimate charity and will undermine Mermaids' work...and this apparently provides grounds to strip other charities in the UK?
What's fascinating is how bad Mermaids' showing during questioning is. A few of its members admit to not reading the full Cass Report that was so harsh on current gender affirmation in the UK and led to the Tavistock institute being shut down. Stuff like the following is common (TribunalTweets is covering the trial):
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that you cannot specify that you only want to meet female bodied people you are being denied service by the dating site based on your sexual orientation.
No real answer, just willful ignorance and obfuscation on basic topics and leaning on dogmatic phrases ("well, if transwomen are women").
Mermaids' simultaneously tries to hold the laughable position that they're not medical experts when questioned, despite all of their advocacy on sensitive issues like puberty blockers the rest of the time, including during questioning.
They also have no ability to reconcile their new beliefs with old progressive dogma (e.g. that men pose a significant threat to women due to their size and aggressiveness - hence the push for single-sex spaces for women under stuff like the Equality Act in the UK and Title IX in the US), which I think is why they want to shut down progressive critiques like LGBA.
I'm not surprised. Trans activists themselves have noted that they have more success if they can directly appeal to elites and make them feel as if this is the inevitable next move in progress. When you strip them of any aura of morality and just try to get basic answers things go harder for them cause they demand absurdities.
It's a shame that this isn't being televised because I believe some of these answers would quickly turn off not just normies but even median progressives. Especially last night where, upon being asked if a male with a penis could be a lesbian, the LGBA rep being questioned apparently go so emotional they had to adjourn.
From a purely strategic level, crying women (especially crying minority women) may be exactly what's needed to wake some people up. Men are just too easily written off as aggressive and hateful. People seem to care about female and minority concerns more. Presumably the fear of this is exactly why Mermaids is trying to crush the LGB Alliance in the cradle.
Thanks for this writeup. I've been following the Tribunal Tweets account periodically over the course of this case - and others. I'm a big law nerd and always posting about SCOTUS here when they're relevant, so from that perspective it's fun for me to be kind of an observer and see the differences in a system outside my own.
But it's not all fun - as a woman I do feel this broader sex vs. gender debate has real implications for me and others, even if this specific case will not affect me in any way. I came away with the impression that the case against LGBA seemed pretty weak overall, and they put on a good defense. I was particularly struck by some of the exchanges like the one you highlighted. But, again I'm an outsider so it's interesting to hear you saw it similarly.
What I'm not clear on is to what extent the ruling here, whatever it may end up being, will or will not set a precedent that effects other charities, and if so how much that will play into the thinking in the decision. So if anyone has any insight on that end, I'd appreciate it.
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I don’t think it indicates any kind of vawe breaking, this is intra-progressive infighting.
As such, disagreement is fundamentally to be resolved by who can cry the hardest. Or in more rational terms, about who can claim oppression status, women or ‘women’. Find out who gets to join the ranks of ordinary cis men as oppressors, cis women for oppressing the trans, or trans women for still being men?
The LGBA lawyer goes for the M&Ms argument that is the mark of a racist when applied to blacks. Mermaids counter with word games. The opponent’s riposte is to start crying, checkmate. I forgot which pigeon I was rooting for.
Absolutely, crying one's way to victory is not a legitimate strategy. It certainly shouldn't be effective.
I saw a video the other day of some Louisiana senator and some climate-NGO woman 'debating' the issue.
This is half of it, it then skips to the conclusion where AOC and a bunch of other people are insinuating that he abuses women.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j3JHV8jAxEs
"Everything we make is derived from petrochemical products. What would you have me do, what would you do if you had the power?"
"Uh well I don't have the power! I'd ask you to feel it within your heart to do something."
He then asks about what they'd do with large ocean-going ships if fossil fuels are shutdown. Again she doesn't have an answer, she just tells him to feel it within his heart to do something!
This is an abominable way to make decisions: baiting men into getting frustrated with women who dodge factual, policy questions and then tar them as sexist. Policy should not be made by feelings within the heart but thoughts within the mind.
Yes, it feels (ha) like there is an increasing war on meritocracy, and truth. And it also seems like it's having consequences, making the world worse for everyone.
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Feelings trump facts. That is the reality of people in my experience. Whether it should be or not, emotional manipulation is a legitimate strategy. It's fundamentally one of the most basic strategies we have. Our kids learn it early. And they learn it because it works. Because adults do it to each other all the time. People are not rational in my experience. Emotional policy is just as valid as rational policy. Especially as most rational policy is influenced by emotion and feelings anyway, that's why we are so good at rationalizing our beliefs. So they appear to be factual but really are not.
Of course it can work, that’s not the question. It’s all about the should. Debates shouldn’t be settled by who can cry the most, has the best rhetoric, shows the most apparent devotion to God, accuses the other of the most digusting things, censors most thoroughly etc. Those things decouple the winner of the argument from his correctness. They lead us down the wrong path.
What’s your plan to get out of the woods? Trust in our feelings of sadness, disgust, hate? Let the best actor and showman guide us? And if someone tries to engage him on a rational level, dismiss the critic because they must be rationalizing anyway and ‘feelings are natural’?
In most of these situations, there is no "correctness". Should we treat a trans woman as a woman? It's a values question, there is no factual answer. So the best answer is the one that makes us feel best. Trust our intuitions. We have evolved a complex series of emotional responses to living in groups. We shouldn't ignore those non-rational signals. We developed them for a reason, because they allow us to work through social situations and influence our peers.
So yes, we should let our feelings of disgust and hate flow. They exist for a reason. And they are arguably at the heart of why we then hold the political opinions we do. Why should those be disregarded for rationality? If such a thing could even be attained, should it? Why tear down the Chesterton's fence?
What do you say if the majority wants to commit genocide ?
And that reason was replicating our genes, in an environment that has nothing to do with the present. Dog puts his paw next to the fire, experiences heat, then pain, backs off. His pain, disgust, dislikes, like ours, just a crude control system. We can do, and have done, better.
Because it works better, eg science. Conflicting feelings cannot be valued against each other, whether internally or between people. What good would it do for me to express disgust at your worldview? Conflicting ideas can be tested, filtered, harmonized through dispassioned discourse. That's the only way out of the jungle.
There is no way out of the jungle. We are the jungle. And changing that would arguably turn us into something not human. If you have disgust at ym word view, you should influence people to feel the way you do. Facts do not change opinions. The facts that people choose to acknowledge is downstream of their feelings.
Our socially evolved emotions and herd instincts are absolutely vital, they should not be ignored. Science is a slightly different matter, but in social situations there is no rationally correct outcome.
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Perhaps someday some genius will invent a way to propel ships with wind power.
ARRR! I see what you did there, matey!
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I swear, one time I saw one of those "I fucking love science" type videos where someone stuck a few wind turbines on a CGI cargo ship. Wanted to troll you with it, but I can't find it for the life of me. Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me.
I personally feel like nuclear power would be better, but every ship having a nuke on it might be too pricey/challenging.
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Trans activism advances in part by always trying to claim the mantle of progress and by demanding in-group loyalty from progressives as the next iteration of gay rights- their last culture war win. Especially in places like the US where things are so polarized that a criticism merely being raised by a conservative at all seems to taint it in the eyes of some of the more conformist progressives.
Shattering the false consensus would be valuable on its own.
Ultimately, if the LGBA makes its case against things like self-ID or gender affirmation of kids on the grounds that it opens women up to potentially dangerous males or cause it's "gay conversion" (as opposed to "it's just bad medical ethics") OR even just weakens the unjustified respect groups like Stonewall have for allegedly representing the entire "queer" nation (which they've leveraged with incredible success, as the BBC have reported) it still counts as a win in my book.
To quote an old meme: let them fight.
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Much like the Kentaji Brown-Jackson confirmation hearing, I can't really tell what the strategy or motivation is here. It comes off as just pretending to be really stupid, but are there actually people that sincerely believe that they don't know what "woman" means due to a lack of university-level biology education? Or that are sincerely unsure about whether there is any biological difference in the average size and strength of men and women? I'm not trying to be sardonic, I really can't tell if there's a dishonest ploy going on or if people have actually become confused about these remarkably simple topics as a result of political conditioning.
My position can probably be accused of being uncharitable but I think it's multiple strands of bad thinking/maneuvers coming together:
An absolute refusal to ever "validate" the opposing side by granting them anything. You see this in how progressives rage at saying the right thing at the wrong moment (e.g. David Shor being fired for citing research that showed riots were bad for Democrats) and their constant demands to "read the room" So, if your opponents are right, just never answer the question or you will be "validating" their position
People actually telling themselves this stuff enough to the point of believing it. Or, if not believing it, enough to silence the incredulous parts of themselves in the name of "being kind".
Most importantly (for us) It's a gambit of false humility; by stating that they're not qualified to define "woman" they're also implicitly saying that their opponents are not qualified to do so either. Who is qualified? Well, professionals whose institutions are at risk of political capture (or have already thoroughly been coopted)..
I would argue that there's an even more sinister upshot to the last point: the expansion of leftist elitism and managerialism. Sex is one of the most basic, most salient things in any society. We all have opinions on it, rightly so. This position implicitly robs the average person of any right to claim a reasonable opinion except insofar as he parrots the opinion of supposedly-but-manifestly-not-unbiased "experts". Given the absolute salience of sex to so much of life, this would be ceding your intellectual independence and discernment on a bunch of fronts; dating, child-rearing, social interaction, basic speech and so on, to whoever is declared an "expert" (highly influenced by progressive activists and media). We've already seen how this ideology is being used to weaken the rights of parents.
Of course, the most important part is that it's just a lie. They are involved in trying to shape medical opinion. Full document here
Yup, rhetorical tactics 101.
I don't think that's the implicit point. I think it genuinely just cuts to the point about "only credentialed experts can define these things". It does follow from the broader "trust science" rhetoric we hear.
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