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Just how far does agreeing to respect someone's identity go? Let me introduce you to a strange case that I read about over the weekend, of a Jewish woman named Daryln Madden. Darlyn is much more violent than the typical woman, having murdered at least three people, with the most recently discovered one being the horrifying cold case of Bill Newton:
Now, if dismembering gay porn stars doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that you typically expect Jewish ladies in Southern California to get up to, there's certainly a good reason for that, and you've probably already guessed the explanation - Daralyn was Darrell at the time that "she" was gruesomely butchering men for fun and profit. Here's where things get weirder though:
...
Indeed.
So, which of Ms. Madden's identities are to be respected? Is "she" truly an Orthodox Jew, entitled to the superior kosher diet instead of standard prison slop? Well, if a man can become a woman, surely a Nazi can become a Jew, I suppose. Still, even by the standards of trans-in-prison debates, the level of cynicism or true belief (there can't be any in between, right?) to acknowledge Ms. Madden as an authentic Jewish woman boggles the mind. Point deer, make horse.
Are we taking a principled stand to force a particular form of slop on prisoners rather than letting some get kosher slop? Who cares if prisoners suddenly decide they are Jewish or vegetarian or something? Let's not strain ourselves too hard in an attempt to stop such petty tricks.
The Kosher meals are superior and valued in prisons. They can be traded for other goods.
That said, prisons shouldn't be doing custom diets. Prisoners can eat what they're given. If they're given the choice to do that or starve, their clergy can direct them on the proper course of action including providing them alternatives paid for by their ministry.
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I think we are overfocused on identity and have an impoverished shared/folk understanding of what it is actually like to 'be a self'.
While this was true previously it is particularly true now, with the internet, which creates I argue a sense of disembodiment.
Being a self is much more than just having an identity. A self is the space that our separate, overlapping identities arise in. It contains something ineffable that can't be captured by propositions around 'who one is'
Now we obviously need to operate with others which is where identity/persona is relevant. But we should enrich our vocabulary of what it means to 'be a human's, with all its attendent existential anxieties so that we don't mistake ourselves and each other as identities, as well as helping young people understand their experience.
I know I'm a bit late, but that reminds me of a thought I often have, which sadly I'm not able to properly put into words:
A year ago I was telling my father about people I met and their identities(mostly a few strangely similar depressed feminists) and about me struggling with having no real identity I can think of. And he was extremely annoyed with the way people today emphasize their identities and with me feeling like I needed one. I on the other hand wasn't sure whether anything really changed or whether most people were always this way and their identities just were different to today. Maybe being transgender/woke/MAGA/PUA-adjacent is similar to how being an officer at the royal navy in the mid 19th century felt. Probably there was also a lot of behavior which was unnecessary for the fulfillment of their duties, but which helped to sustain one(or a few) coherent identity. My father thinks, that this is maybe true, but in the 70s and 80s and more generally after WW2 people in western countries actually started having less and less strict identities and we were kind of at peak individualism when it comes to identity construction and now have regressed a bit.
Anyone any intuition on whether the "strict/normed identity" vs "plain/naked individual" actually changes and if in what way historically?
It would be interesting to look at what people find salient, what identities they inhabit, in different times. I imagine a colonial governer in India would draw on that tradition of 'Great Englishman'. All of these kind of identities, nationhood, ancestry identities seem to have a strong component of fortifying myth, while other identities are perhaps just closer to roles, eg engineer, internet troll etc. Which is not to contrast or make any particular point except to try to tease 'identity' out a bit.
My point was more around how we don't typically have good language to describe our moment by moment experience as a Self and what that encompasses. From religious traditions and phenomenological philosophers, cognitive science, we actually have a rich model and language of direct experience, but this hasn't made it into the public space.
I mean existence is actually pretty weird. For example it's possible to find yourself in fairly uncertain states about what is actually happening in moment to moment consciousness and life and our interactions with others can be coloured by a certain weirdness. While we can often retreat to a sensible perspective of ego, or small self, with our identities, beliefs, and homoncular experience, we also may be plunged into existential anxiety and shifting reality.
I think the failure to communicate this reality underequips young people to appreciate that they might have difficult, uncomfortable experiences where they don't feel like a coherent whole. They might mistake this as a kind of mismatch, where something is wrong with them, and search for a path of certainty by over attaching to an identity they can perform.
I very much agree with the weirdness of human experience. I sometimes find it so strange, that I seriously wonder whether reality is really all that real.
I am glad that I know that my family understands this and I will try to show my future children that having even unsettling weird experiences is a normal part of human condition.
I am formulating a post on this. I'm thinking that the branding, or framing, of strangeness or weirdness might not be a great draw, but nonetheless there is a great potential uniter in a better description of how we actually experience reality. Of course religious people are already playing in this space, but this always requires some extra beliefs.
For me, this sense of reality, which as you describe can include a feeling of unreality, has been the starting point to a notion of God, but a God akin the Spinoza's God, ie God as the 'other' or the universe. The universe is somehow unfolding in front of us and while quite strange is also magical. It takes me out of the plain scientific frame of my specific beliefs and thoughts running around my brain and into some other space.
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If an institution gives preferential treatment to individuals based entirely on their identity, it’s absolutely understandable why someone would fake it if all it takes is self-declaration.
It’s completely the prison’s own fault if Nazi inmates are pretending to be Jewish so that they don’t eat the standard prison slop, and I have little sympathy for the abusive, violent institution that is the US justice system. If they wanted to “fix” the problem, they should make the kosher food as unpalatable and inconvenient as the rest of their offerings, not test inmates for Judaism.
Personally, my preferred solution would be to limit or remove the circumstances where individual identity matters at all. For instance, my preferred solution to the pronoun issue would just be to remove gendered pronouns completely; in languages like Hungarian or Turkish for example, they don’t exist and people communicate just fine, while romance languages go further than English and have almost every single noun and adjective be gendered. Obviously this is not always practical but the general goal should be towards less identity politics, not more.
Reshaping the entire English language in order to deal with a novel form of identity politics doesn't seem as practical as simply refusing to recognize that novel form of idpol at all. It seems to create a pretty bad set of incentives.
It seems to me that "less idpol" means not chasing after the compromise point between the status quo and whatever new idpol (including the ludicrous notion that a man imprisoned in a prison with men - I assume you want to keep it this way - is somehow so not-a-man that we need to play this pretend game of eliminating gender distinctions...while maintaining the central distinction that keeps them in that jail in the first place) has now been spun up.
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Or, they could make their regular food better.
Hahaha. More seriously, the kosher food is explicitly noted to be prepackaged meals that may have more calories, probably because they’re prepackaged. This is probably also not great food, and prisoners prefer it because it’s packaged, not because it’s better.
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Given what I know of Ashkenazi food, this is much easier done than said.
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No, it's the court cases taken to force the prison system to cater to such extremes instead of being allowed to judge on a case-by-case basis of "Okay, Shlomo here really is Jewish but Darrell is just taking the piss".
Remember our dear friend Demi Minor, the 'woman' who got two women pregnant when transferred to a women's prison? In compliance with the law suit taken by the ACLU New Jersey (who are all about that decarceration) to force the New Jersey Department of Corrections to allow self-identified trans people to be jailed in the 'appropriate' prison:
Funnily enough, Tess and ACLU NJ had nothing to say when contacted about the Demi Minor case. Odd, that.
There's not much a prison governor can do even if they think "this is damn stupid" when informed "yeah well the judge ruled we gotta do this, oh yeah and make sure the wardens use 'Mx' when addressing the violent drug addict rapist murderer, you have to respect their feminine dignity".
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The counter argument here is rather simple. Edge cases don't need to be the basis for how we construct our society.
Yeah, it's hard to even imagine a more fitting example for the case against 'respecting someones identity' than what you just gave. But if we contrast that with the case of a harmless shut in depressed teenager who has tied their ego to their identity... What's the argument? Are walking contradictions like Madden's more or less common than the teenager? Obviously the teenager is more common and drastically so.
It's not a bridge too far to say that we can respect people on the basis they wish to be respected. We do that all the time. Baked into your example is a whole bunch of protected identities. Jew. Woman. Gay. How far should we go to respect those? And what is the view people generally have towards those identities, and why? Well, the punishment for not respecting these identities is jail time. On the flipside there are special events to celebrate them and belonging to them can offer a variety of special privileges. I mean, women who torture and kill children get a comfy womens prison to go to. Men who can't pay child support get locked in a cell with an AIDS riddled rapist.
If you don't like trannies just say that. Because respecting someones identity goes all the way and no one disagrees with the notion that their ingroup should be respected and protected. If you want to engineer a social norm that says trannies are not kosher, then talk about that. But currently the powers that be are working overtime making trannies into a protected identity just like jews, women and gays are. One schizophrenic jew is not going to stop them. We've paved over far worse to get to where we are today.
The principle that it's never to the long-term benefit of the subject to affirm the "importance" of identity. In mental health terms, it's long-term destructive to humor a patient's delusion. In societal terms, it's long-term destructive to stress identitarianism. In individual terms, it's harmful to place so much importance on one unstable factor that puts them in natural conflict with other individuals/groups. And I'm an individualist!
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My argument would be is we can cure those teenagers, partially, by dealing with the Maddens, the Jenners, Levine s,etc and just publicly shaming and laughing at them instead of tolerating and elevating their egregious conduct.
That's sort of a different topic. You're not really respecting their identity by being transphobic about it and maintaining that it's something to be cured, regardless of anything else.
But on that point, marginalizing the already marginalized doesn't, in my view, solve anything. All it does is reinforce the victimary discourse those groups rely on. Sure, it might change the discourse if transphobia wasn't banned to the extent it is now, but how much? For reference, no matter how much fun comedians in the 80's and 90's made of feminists they all have to toe the line today. Society has genuinely changed towards feminist ideals.
Well of course, because I believe it is a false consciousness, taught to them by others who are crazy and/or evil and needs to be treated and cured with reality, not coddled until they turn themselves from depressed teens into sterilized depressed teens.
That is a true description of the feminist victories in the culture war, but we are all the worse for it, these poor confused teens most of all.
Marginalizing the trans advocates solves quite a bit in this frame, because it means that teens are not confused by the message that being trans makes you a special snowflake who will receive unearned accolades (as most trans public figures get). Yes often these kids are marginalized, typically they were before they became trans. The transness is their hope for relevancy. It is no coincidence that trans kids, statistically, almost always have a mother with a mental illness, often severe such as borderline personality. There is a genetic component, likely, to be predispositioned to a mental illness (trans being the newest faddish one) and also the fact that having a trans kid is a status icon for this subset of mothers.
I hope for a return to sanity and we need not have a new age of scientism akin to the lobotomy craze of the mid 20th century, alas I despair we will have another era of quack-psychiatry butchery.
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They are, on the other hand, excellent tests for how we think about things.
The most plainly I can state my position on the matter is that I don't think I should feel morally obligated (less still, be legally obligated) to respect people's stated identities. Instead, I think my obligation to respect someone's identity extends as far as that identity is reflected in the actual reality of the individual and what they seem to wish to gain from using that identity.
I don't have a generalizable problem with trans-identified individuals. I know trans-identified individuals that are personally pleasant, have made an honest attempt to appear to be their chosen gender, and that require nothing onerous from anyone. As the saying goes, they just want to be left alone. I'm more than happy to provide them with the respect and decency that they want (and in my opinion) deserve.
My point is not that no one should have their stated identity respected, it's that there are examples of people who clearly have fake, illegitimate identification, and that this demonstrates that not all stated identities need to be respected by either individuals or the state. Where that line is will be a matter of legal wrangling and personal inclinations, but I reject the frame that allows a literal Nazi human-butcherer to convert to a Jewish woman when convenient.
If I identified as a heterosexual male and spent my weekends in gay bars picking up guys who I would then have sex with, then for people to refuse to respect my identity as a heterosexual male would be absolutely appropriate whether I liked it or not.
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Explain to me how this affects me? Like all the dudes around me pretend I am gay and thus? The ladies all pretend I'm gay even though they know I am not, so they accept my dates and then make out with me at the bar anyways until the best one "pretends" her way through our wedding and kids and we die together as a totally gay man has totally tricked himself into living like every happy straight man ever. Except he lived life on easymode because he could hang out with any woman at all times (even those with boyfriends which he then could steal away if he so wanted because the delusion only can be maintained up until the boner is in your vagina). What is this burden?
Gay men can't marry straight women?
I was alive in 1999. A person who acted entirely like a straight man, but there was a weird conspiracy theory that predominated that he is secretly gay wouldn't be that badly off.
But this isn't a consistent analogy at all. Trans women who are treated like men aren't worse off than normal men, except when they lash out and act crazy in the face of equal treatment.
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I agree it's a good test, but if we are not extrapolating our thinking to the relevant larger things in this context, then what we can discuss becomes limited. I like the people I like and I dislike the people I dislike. There's not much there.
If someone I like has an identity, 'fake' or 'real', in whatever sense, I'm not all that fussed about it. If I like them and it's real to them then it's real to me no problem. Because I like them. If it's fake to the outgroup I don't care. So long as they are not harming the ingroup I'd want anyone I like to have everything they need. Especially if the perception is that what they need is coming from the outgroup in some way. (I mean, tl;dr: I tolerate my ingroup, not the outgroup.)
You made Madden an example because they are so very easily outgroupable. No one wants to own the criminally insane outside of extreme circumstance. But if Madden can be used to harm the prospects of the ingroup in some way then that will get called out. Which is the immediate perceptions trannies have whenever this kind of thing gets brought up. And I'd argue their perceptions are entirely correct.
If this topic is only about our personal likes, then we all dislike Madden and there is nothing more to be said. If this is not about our personal taste then it's about respecting people and their identities and how far one could or should go. The only reason this is a topic in modern discourse is because of trannies. This subject, if anything is to be discussed, can only be understood through the lens of trans-rights. And to that end the matter has already been settled.
Trannies will get ingrouped, they will be placed in womens prisons or an extremely expensive alternative. Some women will be raped as a consequence and that's fine. We already accept mass rape as an acceptable price for others to pay for our modern moral sensibilities. The potential fallout and harm that might be caused by a few women being raped in jail is chicken shit compared to what's already been done and celebrated in the name of ending segregation.
This is true and you don’t even have to go to desegregation for examples- the US largely accepts that lots of people will get raped in male prisons, after all. Extending it to female prisons is just equality of the sexes.
You're right.
My usual spiel relates to rapes, violent assault and murder, all of which are dramatically exasperated by race tensions and desegregation. But I forgot to mention the two latter ones.
On that front the issue of violence in prisons in general is separate to the additional violence added on top of that due to nothing other than desegregation. The amount of violence added due to that policy dwarfs anything trannies could do in a womens prison. So the meat of the argument is the comparison between those two policies.
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Umm, has this Nazi cannibal gay porn star taken any steps towards becoming Jewish? Unlike transgenderism, Jewishness has actual identity standards.
For religious purposes, would a penectomy be considered functionally equivalent to a circumcision (albeit a horrifically botched one)?
/s
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I don't know, the articles I looked at didn't really get into that. The JP one about kosher meals that I linked suggests that the bar is incredibly low though.
The claim that it's easier to determine if someone is Jewish than whether someone is a woman is something I could not have predicted taking seriously just a few years ago.
I mean, it seems like this person’s actual identity is ‘criminally insane’, so I’m comfortable saying they’re neither. Obviously the prison system has other ideas.
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I understand your position, and can sympathize with it as I have seen several examples of people claiming identities in bad faith. It runs into trouble, though, when you have to have a mini-trial to determine who's entitled to what.
Well, you only need a "trial" when the outcome is important, like which prison to send an inmate to. And we already have a trial system for that; seems like the judge is in the best position to determine which prison would be appropriate, alongside all the other aspects of sentencing.
But in normal life, if we just acknowledge that it's not Literal Genocide to occasionally use the wrong pronouns, no trial is needed. Sure, if you're one of the rare edge cases where people genuinely mistake what gender you prefer, then you might have to keep announcing it and correcting people. It sucks a little, but not a lot.
I don't think that's enough. It allows for mistakes, but not differences of opinion--it still allows someone to demand use of a pronoun.
Actually I think invoking mistakes here is a smokescreen. None of the trans issues that people are conerned about involve mistakes.
Well, they can demand it, but it's society's support that allows that demand to have teeth. Like @Walterodim says, we need to get back to the point where you had no moral/legal obligation to comply when somebody else tries to control you.
You're right about the rest of the trans issues. I realize I was being a bit naive - bathroom/changing room access, for instance, is both important and far too common to litigate. Ending cancel culture isn't going to help us find a compromise between the two sides of that debate...
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