There’s a significant degree to which the sex vs gender debate feels like Groundhog Day. I’ve been called the same silly names, marvelled at the same scientific and logical illiteracy, and made the same rebuttals, hundreds of times. But now and then, somebody comes at the issue from an angle that’s at least
That conversation seemed too much like trying to nail jelly to a tree.
Your correspondent seemed to be jumbling up concepts of objectivity and subjectivity in a mush, rather than having a coherent concept to promote or defend. I admire your patience in seeking from them some substance with which to agree or disagree, but I don't think the attempt was very successful.
I thought the confusion between subjectivity and objectivity was, itself, fascinating. For me it cuts right to the heart of the confusion about whether trans women are women.
If you start from the belief that your observations and intuitions are objective facts, everything else follows from there.
Your “truth” is genuinely just as true as anybody else’s. And there’s no external, objective standard that can override your feelings. Not even your biology. So if you “feel” as if you’re the opposite sex, what standard could there be to say otherwise?
Of course, if you’re intellectually consistent, you also need to believe that other people’s observations are equally objective. So if their observations conflict with yours, you have a real problem on your hands. Which is why this discussion so quickly devolves into good vs evil, victim vs bigot dynamics.
There’s no way to talk it out and arrive at the truth. You already *know* the truth. And that means the other person is either lying or some kind of evil weirdo, living in a separate reality to yourself and all the “good” people who affirm you.
My own observation is that many of the prescriptions of CSJ would immediately fall apart if we applied mutuality or reciprocity - or simple "treat others as you would want to be treated"; their only use is for differential advantage in seeking power-over.
"My subjective truth trumps your objective truth" is one of those.
"You have to call me whatever I want" is another
"Microaggressions" comprise yet more
"Only whites can be racist" is another example
Actually, it's hard to come up with a CSJ prescription which IS symmetric.
At some level I understand this. Their worldview is oppressed vs oppressor/privileged, and their goal is to give advantage to the oppressed and pull down the privileged, using any means necessary. What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win, except in their own heads as the morally superior ones. Guilt trips justifying institutionalized discrimination will never create a stable, peaceful and prosperous society, there has to be something in it for both/all sides, not just the self appointed moral high ground side. The CSJ mindset thinks that a slight easing of guilty feelings is enough to give in return, but that will not work.
" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can understand the argument that you can't go straight from discrimination to equality, otherwise the effects of the discrimination are never addressed. But there's so little of that in practice. It's almost always just a vindictive game of "it's our turn to be the oppressors now."
And if there was overall a sense of wise balancing, of surgical application of temporary evidence-based interventions with a feasible and limited goal, I could support it.
However, it's hard to find such sentiments in the movement. Instead the CSJ advocates seem to be institutionalizing systemic "counter-oppression" as a perpetual right and entitlement.
I sometimes want to ask "if in 2124, 100 years from now, there was still a perceived need for substantial positive discrimination to rebalance the books, would that be a success or a failure in your worldview?". I have NEVER seen any time limit supported by advocates. (I think a supreme court justice in the 90's was talking about giving it another 25 years before it should not be needed). According to many advocates, the world is as bad for POC today as it was before Rosa Parks, they are extremely resistant to conceding any progress achieved by over half a century of positive discrimination, yet they want to continue the same policies "as long as needed" - as long as there are any disparities.
My view is: "If the unilateralist policies are objectively and measurably working to reduce the gaps, then we should be able to project how long until sufficient parity is achieved and continue on course towards that time; if they are not moving effectively towards a parity goal after decades, we should rethink the policies.".
In a democratic society, I see positive discrimination as similar to chemotherapy - inherently dangerous and unhealthy, but potentially helpful in specific cases in well calculated limited doses for limited periods with close monitoring and based on solid evidence. But I see nearly zero inclination towards that latter approach. Instead it's framed as a morality based entitlement, without regard to actual outcomes.
Alas, I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations. Not everybody, but a substantial subset. Societies need to beware of institutionalizing perverse incentives, no matter how well meaning.
“ I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations.”
I don’t think this is what’s going wrong. I don’t think black kids, for example, are holding themselves back in school so they’ll get “extra power or considerations.” Nor, in fact, do I think they HAVE extra power or considerations.
I think a selection of people, white and black, get a great deal of money and power from peddling a particular narrative on racism. This narrative has the advantage of being true in some cases. But its effects are smaller than they pretend and the causes are more complex than they pretend and they benefit from hiding this fact (I’m currently writing about Roland Fryer and his research on police violence, which is a case study in this phenomenon).
Black people in general don’t benefit from this narrative. And they don’t want to prevent themselves from healing and succeeding. Even if they received benefits, which again, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don’t, those benefits wouldn’t be worth the downsides. But the narrative is a powerful thing. And there’s a great deal of effort and money put into spreading it. Again, people of all colours are convinced by it.
We are not disagreeing, actually. The dynamics of not wanting to admit any progress and gaining power by claiming victimhood are manifested largely by a subset of the population - who nevertheless have an influence on others.
One of the things I got from recently beginning to read Dalrymple is that the concepts and framings of academia filter down to ordinary people in distorted forms. So it would not be that black school kids are weighing the benefits and advantages of claiming victimhood in their identity for themselves, but that they inherit the results of opinion leaders who are making those choices, consciously or unconsciously. For example, very few grade schoolers are comparing Roland Fryer's research with BLM's framing of society and choosing the latter for conscious advantage. But that doesn't mean that the embrace of victimhood as the path to power is not filtering down to grade schoolers. Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not.
I agree with your description of the dynamics, for example of exaggeration and minimization of some underlying kernel of truth, but I see those dynamics as being partly empowered as a manifestation of the forces I was describing, rather than as being opposed to or independent of what I am suggesting.
Hard to tell when you're being sarcastic; I may be somewhere on the spectrum in this regard.
But my belief is that truth has an existence independent of the observer, I even reject the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Schrödinger's Cat with it. I believe in MWI and I have reasons I will not mention in public.
And when a tree falls in the forest with nobody to hear it, it does make a sound, because it creates sound waves, alternating regions of compression and rarification in the air.
So there. Phooey.
Oh, by the way, thanks for this column. Although it's probably my least favorite of all your writings thus far, it kicked my ass to get me writing on my own 'stack, finally.
I am going to do another, an anonymous 'stack not connected to my identity because there are some experiences I need to get into print before I die. I will disclose to a very few people.
I think questions like these are occasionally interesting and generally a waste of time because they don't often lead anywhere useful. Quantum mechanics being an obvious exception. There's lots of room to debate what truth is and what objectivity is and even "who's to say." I think your outright rejection of these concepts is limiting.
But when it comes to practical matters, like women's rights or children's safeguarding, for example, my lack of patience for abstractions is much more similar to yours.
Not many realize how profoundly unsettling QM was to not just physics but to the philosophical foundations of scientific method.
I read one paragraph in a book by Karl Popper comparing intractability with the ultimate unknowability dictated by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; it was some of the clearest thinking in my experience.
It was not all that long ago that to claim to, or even to seek to, understand how things actually worked (“realism”) was regarded as conceit and unscientific.
Yeah, exactly. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one of the clearest assaults on the concept of objective truth. Of course, we aren't living at the Planck scale. I don't think we need to apply QM to our understanding of daily life and especially of law.
But relativity, too, has lots of interesting things to say about how changes of reference frame can produce two, equally valid interpretations.
I want to note that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't really invalidate there being objective truth, it only affects the outer limits of the measurability of same. There is a tradeoff at quantum scales between the precision with which we can measure position and the precision with which we can measure momentum.
It would be a solid counter to an argument that objective truth is always measurable to infinite precision, but who makes that assertion?
The proponents of CSJ sometimes argue against "objectivity" by pointing out that humans cannot reach absolute objectivity (thus, in their minds, objectivity can be discarded entirely in favor of their favorite subjectivity, to be imposed on others coercively).
However, that misses the point, which is that we can be relatively more objective or more subjective, and that there are real world benefits to developing the former end of the spectrum.
More like the latter. I will not go into any detail online save to note that I have adamantly disbelieved in everything supernatural and paranormal since I was about 12, and then around 20 I started having experiences. Not coincidences. Reliably repeatable experiences, culminating in one that made my skepticism ridiculous.
If you want to read it after I'm done, and it will be quite long, please email to my burner account solonaquila431@gmail.com and include your pledge to not reveal my identity to anyone you refer to the article.
WRT the discussion, Jane seemed to think that just because something like vision is subjective, that any statement of fact based on seeing something is subjective. But I may not know what you really see when you see red (maybe it looks like blue does to me), but if you blow through a red light in front of the police, that's not going to get you out of a fine.
Even somewhat subjective experiences can lead to statements of replicable facts. If you run a red light, you're breaking the law and might get a ticket. If you see a rocket explode on takeoff, it's gone.
Now, if you're going to argue that everyone sees a completely different reality, well, that's a subject for a Philip Dick novel.
Haha, no, I'm not arguing that we all see a different reality. The keys point is how we treat subjective experiences in science and law.
If you were to tell me you're a woman, or a vampire, or a Martian, it doesn't affect me one way or another. I'll have my suspicions about it, but in the end it doesn't matter. You feel whatever you feel, I can never know what you're feeling or whether it's "valid," so I shrug my shoulders and we all carry on with or lives.
But if you claim that your feelings need to be recognised in *law*, that society needs to grant you rights that nobody else has on the basis of your feelings, well, now we need some evidence that your feelings are real and not a delusion. And if you can't provide that, then there's no way to enshrine them in law.
This is the problem with legislation that invokes "gender identity". Gender identity is nothing more than a subjective feeling. Absolutely nothing. It changes all the time, even among true believers, nobody can even describe it, never mind observe or verify it. And we can't even agree on soothing about it in the way we can at least agree that you stop when the top light on a traffic light is illuminated, whether you're seeing red or blue.
I could believe in souls before I could believe in gender identity.
Even before the "trans" fad I believed gender itself to be a largely useless concept, but since its descent into pure gibberish I would favor its complete removal from psychology, science, and law, if not from language. To the extent that it means anything, there are eight billion genders.
The most interesting part of this column was where you summarized the thoughts of some teenage girls interested in transitioning. I'm really curious where you heard/read their discussion.
"I'm really curious where you heard/read their discussion."
This wasn't one conversation but the accumulation of many. Some of them totally unrelated to trans people. As a male, I think it's easy to miss how puberty feels for some (most?) females. Sexualisation, periods, the sudden physical differentiation from boys in terms of size and strength, stigma about sex and fears about pregnancy. All of this stuff passes men by. It's always interesting how many trans women are oblivious to this stuff too.
This discussion sounded a little like Plato’s cave in that it was the idea of the chair that became real - either that or Neo saying ‘there is no spoon’. Deeply confusing and confused. Like objective and subjective really are the central tenants of conversations about gender….really?
I liked your point about this all really being about personality. Heck I was a ‘tomboy’ climbing trees, wearing ripped blue jeans way before it was a thing, learning how to replace a Weber carburetor because that highly tuned piece of equipment made my car sing. Didn’t stop me from finding and loving my husband and thrilling to being a mom.
In all our beautiful complexity and difference, we are human.
People like your correspondent seem to want to control how we express our personalities in all their delightful variation. What a sterile and sad world to live in, filled with rigid labels.
"Deeply confusing and confused. Like objective and subjective really are the central tenants of conversations about gender….really?"
Haha, yeah, I did wonder if this one got a little too philosophical. I enjoy getting deep into topics like this from time to time. Especially when the person seems sincere, as Jane did.
The central point is that we don't enshrine unverifiable feelings into law. You can feel any way about yourself that you want to. Your freedom to do that is important. But you have no right to make me pretend that *I* feel the same way. You can't claim new rights based on those unverifiable feelings. And you certainly can't undermine ~50% of the population's rights to privacy and dignity and safety based on those feelings.
If you want to even have a conversation about any of the above, you need some kind of objective standard. And you need evidence that you meet it.
Yes, that cuts to the chase very nicely. I fully support you acting on your feelings in whatever way you wish - unless and until you demand I believe it too, and that you use the power of government to enforce my compliance. Hell to the no.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this whole gender concept. On the one hand, I agree with the idea that no one knows what it is like to be anything other than him- or herself. I am an adult male human, but I do not know what it is like "to be a man" in the general or categorical sense; I only know what it is like to be me. So it is meaningless for me to say that I feel like a man, or that I feel like a woman. (Thomas Nagel addressed this idea more broadly in his paper "What It Is Like to Be a Bat".)
On the other hand, I am not persuaded that there is nothing more to the idea of gender than stereotypes. I cannot help but wonder whether there is something deeper going on, perhaps along the lines of an archetype, and whether this is something more deeply seated in the psyche. However, whatever gender is, I don't believe it can negate the objective reality that there are only two sexes. No one is born in the wrong body; they are born in their own body (albeit a body that might have something wrong with it). I have no problem believing that some people very strongly feel that they are or should be the opposite sex from their biology; but what one feels does not change the biological facts. Rather, I believe that the gender dysphoria is a simplified self-interpretation of feelings which are associated in some manner with ideas of gender.
I am not dismissing the feelings, which I don't doubt are very real. And perhaps in some cases it is easier to change one's body to smooth over this kind of dissonance than it is to rework one's mindset and mental models. If an adult makes that choice, who am I to say they are wrong to do so? But the thing about feelings in general is that they need to be taken seriously, not necessarily literally.
"On the other hand, I am not persuaded that there is nothing more to the idea of gender than stereotypes"
My sense of this just comes from the hundreds of conversations I've had where people were unable to define the concept of gender in any terms other than stereotypes. Not to mention the countless articles I've read on the topic that, if they went beyond dresses and makeup, went directly to the most bizarre, misogynistic, sexual cliches.
But yes, the wider point is that it doesn't matter if it's just stereotypes or some as yet unseen internal archetype. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real condition in the same way that I believe Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a real condition. I don't need to understand it for it to be real. But I do think there should be a serious and rigorous system of evaluation before people start chopping of body parts. And I do think, in the case of gender dysphoria, that there should be an equally serious and rigorous effort to weed out people who aren't genuine before allowing them into *any* female spaces. And I think that there should remain certain female spaces that they *never* get access to because they aren't female. No matter what their feelings might be.
As I've pointed out before, there used to be a serious and rigorous process of evaluation to be legally recognised as a trans women. And while it was in place, vanishingly few people had any issue with trans inclusion. It's only when people abandoned any attempt at objectivity that it quite rightly became an issue.
Everything you said above should reference "gender identity disorder," not "gender dysphoria."
The latter has no diagnostic criteria and accepts even the most frivolous self-reports as sufficient to commence hormonal treatment that very day, even when the patient is severely mentally ill, as many are.
Most people I talk to, even medically educated people, believe that treatment doesn't begin until after a rigorous diagnosis and a year living as the opposite sex. Neither has been required since 2013.
* A trans woman: is not a woman, the modifier is required.
* A trans person: is a person.
At this point in time, perhaps personhood is what should be acknowledged for trans persons, rather than a false claim of a sex behind the thin veil of the now meaningless word gender.
Yeah, this is just linguistic sleight of hand. Once upon a time, trans women were called transwomen (no space) to avoid exactly this kind of confusion. But the ideologues actively *want* confusion. So they declared that omitting the space was bigotry and hate and blah blah...
The "trans" in trans woman serves exactly the same purpose as "fake" or "wannabe." It doesn't denote a type of woman but the absence of womanhood. As others have noted, a more accurate term would be trans identified male or maybe some other word altogether that differentiated them from men.
"Trans woman" is a polite fiction. A kindness used to respect a desire we know isn't quite true. We do this kind of thing in lots of areas of life and I'm fine with it. Again, the issue is just enshrining it in law.
Manipulation of language is insidious. I think we should pointedly refer to them as "trans-identifying" men and women, using that noun of actual biological sex.
Though my own preference is "men impersonating women," and vice versa.
The invocation of subjectivity is one of those arguments that, as with "who gets to decide," leads me to stop reading.
Yes, there is a place for both, but it is statistically defensible to presume the invocation is dishonest and that it is a waste of my rapidly dwindling life expectancy to read any further. And in settled matters like biological sex, the possibility of an honest argument approaches zero.
Daryl Davis did a wonderful thing and he deserves our unmitigated admiration. Note however that it took him years to change the mind of one man. His success was also extremely improbable to succeed in generality.
"And in settled matters like biological sex, the possibility of an honest argument approaches zero."
That's what I found interesting about this conversation with Jane. I think she was being absolutely sincere. She was just confused. And the fact that she was wiling to admit that she'd gotten objective and subjective confused was a rare sign of good-faith in discussions on this topic.
"Daryl Davis did a wonderful thing and he deserves our unmitigated admiration. Note however that it took him years to change the mind of one man. His success was also extremely improbable to succeed in generality."
I suspect all great successes seem improbable before they happen. The Civil Rights Act was improbable. Obama's two-term, no assassination presidency was improbable. One doesn't try because they're guaranteed to succeed. They try because they're attempting something important.
And more to the point, Davis has changed the minds of hundreds of people. Not one. And some of them have gone on to change the minds of hundreds more. The ball definitely starts rolling slowly. He had to put in time and effort to get things moving. But the momentum will carry on even without him now.
Very happy with this correction, I wish you'd said it before.
It's just that in all my years online, I have only seen two conservatives drop their ideology, out of thousands.
By the time LBJ signed the CRA the immorality of what it sought to correct had become irresistible. It was not a miracle, it was capitulation to reality.
And when he said he'd given the south to Republicans for 20 years, face in hands, his estimate was generations too low.
"Very happy with this correction, I wish you'd said it before."
I mention it in the piece.
And sadly, immorality never becomes irresistible on its own. Slavery went on just fine for longer than segregation did. Even while many Americans opposed it. Heck, it still survives today in certain parts of the world. The CRA was viciously opposed by many Americans. And it still took blood and courage and military intervention to force institutions to uphold it. A lot of very heavy balls had to get rolling before their momentum seemed "irresistible."
Perhaps my perspective is skewed, I grew up in an extremely anti-racist family. I was 10 when we moved to Virginia and I was absolutely appalled at the attitudes I encountered there.
Yes, racist attitudes persist and they will probably never go away, just as a century from now there will still be people who believe that same-sex marriage is wrong.
At least now the racists have to speak in code; Republicans can't use the N-bomb in speeches anymore, they have to talk about "quotas," my father became a Democrat in response to the Willie Horton ad.
America has a Heart of Darkness that came over on the Mayflower and which still beats in the chests of too many people, something that the most vile of us, like Trump, know how to appeal to. American slavery was just about the cruelest in history and went on a generation longer than elsewhere in the world.
What is conservative ideology? I've always thought that conservatism was resistance to (sudden) change in societal norms. If the change is not well considered, gender ideology for example, the resistance is justifiable. Of course some of the changes they oppose are changes that should be made.
Is racism, a frequent accusation, an attribute of conservatism while the self styled allyship of low expectation lower standards for black people and it's implicit, they are inferior, is not?
I do think that in the them vs. us conflict the is a bit too much of the monolithic idea that if some of them are something, all of them are something.
This goes in both directions. As a liberal, no doubt you resent the idea that all of the current illiberal traits of self proclaimed liberals should be assigned to you.
Some liberals think I'm conservative and some conservatives think I'm liberal, depending upon my thoughts on different issues. My deck is shuffled, rather than stacked red and black.
But back to my original question, what do you think conservative ideology is that is uniquely different from liberal ideology? Not shared attributes with different ratios, but defining characteristics that are different?
I've wondered if the distinctions Haidt described in The Righetous Mind have been shifting since progressivism and liberalism have been to substantial degree conquered by Critical Social Justice.
In particular, I think I have observed an increase in Sanctity/Degradation dynamics, and in Loyalty/Betrayal framings, within CSJ influenced people. For example in cancellation dynamics.
Like the case of the immigrant businessman whose teenaged daughter had posted some bad posts many years ago while in a phase of trying to be edgy, so now the business needs to be boycotted because of a supposed moral taint (regardless of whether the business or father had ever had questionable approaches, and of the daughter's subsequent development). And then their friends want to avoid them, to avoid being associated with taint and getting some on them. Barry Weiss covered this, but I've heard of many other cases which sound like religious or superstitious magical thinking about moral taint.
And I've seen loyalty to the progressive tribe emphasized in ways the exceed my old experiences in liberalism.
If there is anything to my perceptions of a shift in the 6 moral foundations of the CSJ based left compared with the more traditional liberals being studied when those foundations were first described, maybe it's connected to the illiberalism of CSJ being different than traditional liberalism and borrowing some framings from traditional Christianity.
Thanks. I read that book and it resonated with me. I may seem a bit schizophrenic in that while I am on board with much of what is associated with liberalism, I also see value in order.
An example would be that I'm not so crazy about atonal music because it has no home and seems chaotic. The idea just popped into my mind that musical taste may have quite a bit to do with that.
Short answer ... at one time it had some principles; fiscal restraint, personal responsibility, strong defense. Since Burke it's gone through more redefinitions than a word for odor.
Now? I regard it as a synonym for cruelty. Period.
That conversation seemed too much like trying to nail jelly to a tree.
Your correspondent seemed to be jumbling up concepts of objectivity and subjectivity in a mush, rather than having a coherent concept to promote or defend. I admire your patience in seeking from them some substance with which to agree or disagree, but I don't think the attempt was very successful.
"trying to nail jelly to a tree."
Haha, I like this.
I thought the confusion between subjectivity and objectivity was, itself, fascinating. For me it cuts right to the heart of the confusion about whether trans women are women.
If you start from the belief that your observations and intuitions are objective facts, everything else follows from there.
Your “truth” is genuinely just as true as anybody else’s. And there’s no external, objective standard that can override your feelings. Not even your biology. So if you “feel” as if you’re the opposite sex, what standard could there be to say otherwise?
Of course, if you’re intellectually consistent, you also need to believe that other people’s observations are equally objective. So if their observations conflict with yours, you have a real problem on your hands. Which is why this discussion so quickly devolves into good vs evil, victim vs bigot dynamics.
There’s no way to talk it out and arrive at the truth. You already *know* the truth. And that means the other person is either lying or some kind of evil weirdo, living in a separate reality to yourself and all the “good” people who affirm you.
My own observation is that many of the prescriptions of CSJ would immediately fall apart if we applied mutuality or reciprocity - or simple "treat others as you would want to be treated"; their only use is for differential advantage in seeking power-over.
"My subjective truth trumps your objective truth" is one of those.
"You have to call me whatever I want" is another
"Microaggressions" comprise yet more
"Only whites can be racist" is another example
Actually, it's hard to come up with a CSJ prescription which IS symmetric.
At some level I understand this. Their worldview is oppressed vs oppressor/privileged, and their goal is to give advantage to the oppressed and pull down the privileged, using any means necessary. What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win, except in their own heads as the morally superior ones. Guilt trips justifying institutionalized discrimination will never create a stable, peaceful and prosperous society, there has to be something in it for both/all sides, not just the self appointed moral high ground side. The CSJ mindset thinks that a slight easing of guilty feelings is enough to give in return, but that will not work.
" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can understand the argument that you can't go straight from discrimination to equality, otherwise the effects of the discrimination are never addressed. But there's so little of that in practice. It's almost always just a vindictive game of "it's our turn to be the oppressors now."
Yes, that rebalancing is the part I understand.
And if there was overall a sense of wise balancing, of surgical application of temporary evidence-based interventions with a feasible and limited goal, I could support it.
However, it's hard to find such sentiments in the movement. Instead the CSJ advocates seem to be institutionalizing systemic "counter-oppression" as a perpetual right and entitlement.
I sometimes want to ask "if in 2124, 100 years from now, there was still a perceived need for substantial positive discrimination to rebalance the books, would that be a success or a failure in your worldview?". I have NEVER seen any time limit supported by advocates. (I think a supreme court justice in the 90's was talking about giving it another 25 years before it should not be needed). According to many advocates, the world is as bad for POC today as it was before Rosa Parks, they are extremely resistant to conceding any progress achieved by over half a century of positive discrimination, yet they want to continue the same policies "as long as needed" - as long as there are any disparities.
My view is: "If the unilateralist policies are objectively and measurably working to reduce the gaps, then we should be able to project how long until sufficient parity is achieved and continue on course towards that time; if they are not moving effectively towards a parity goal after decades, we should rethink the policies.".
In a democratic society, I see positive discrimination as similar to chemotherapy - inherently dangerous and unhealthy, but potentially helpful in specific cases in well calculated limited doses for limited periods with close monitoring and based on solid evidence. But I see nearly zero inclination towards that latter approach. Instead it's framed as a morality based entitlement, without regard to actual outcomes.
Alas, I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations. Not everybody, but a substantial subset. Societies need to beware of institutionalizing perverse incentives, no matter how well meaning.
“ I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations.”
I don’t think this is what’s going wrong. I don’t think black kids, for example, are holding themselves back in school so they’ll get “extra power or considerations.” Nor, in fact, do I think they HAVE extra power or considerations.
I think a selection of people, white and black, get a great deal of money and power from peddling a particular narrative on racism. This narrative has the advantage of being true in some cases. But its effects are smaller than they pretend and the causes are more complex than they pretend and they benefit from hiding this fact (I’m currently writing about Roland Fryer and his research on police violence, which is a case study in this phenomenon).
Black people in general don’t benefit from this narrative. And they don’t want to prevent themselves from healing and succeeding. Even if they received benefits, which again, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don’t, those benefits wouldn’t be worth the downsides. But the narrative is a powerful thing. And there’s a great deal of effort and money put into spreading it. Again, people of all colours are convinced by it.
We are not disagreeing, actually. The dynamics of not wanting to admit any progress and gaining power by claiming victimhood are manifested largely by a subset of the population - who nevertheless have an influence on others.
One of the things I got from recently beginning to read Dalrymple is that the concepts and framings of academia filter down to ordinary people in distorted forms. So it would not be that black school kids are weighing the benefits and advantages of claiming victimhood in their identity for themselves, but that they inherit the results of opinion leaders who are making those choices, consciously or unconsciously. For example, very few grade schoolers are comparing Roland Fryer's research with BLM's framing of society and choosing the latter for conscious advantage. But that doesn't mean that the embrace of victimhood as the path to power is not filtering down to grade schoolers. Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not.
I agree with your description of the dynamics, for example of exaggeration and minimization of some underlying kernel of truth, but I see those dynamics as being partly empowered as a manifestation of the forces I was describing, rather than as being opposed to or independent of what I am suggesting.
That was very good.
Hard to tell when you're being sarcastic; I may be somewhere on the spectrum in this regard.
But my belief is that truth has an existence independent of the observer, I even reject the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and Schrödinger's Cat with it. I believe in MWI and I have reasons I will not mention in public.
And when a tree falls in the forest with nobody to hear it, it does make a sound, because it creates sound waves, alternating regions of compression and rarification in the air.
So there. Phooey.
Oh, by the way, thanks for this column. Although it's probably my least favorite of all your writings thus far, it kicked my ass to get me writing on my own 'stack, finally.
I am going to do another, an anonymous 'stack not connected to my identity because there are some experiences I need to get into print before I die. I will disclose to a very few people.
"So there. Phooey."
I think questions like these are occasionally interesting and generally a waste of time because they don't often lead anywhere useful. Quantum mechanics being an obvious exception. There's lots of room to debate what truth is and what objectivity is and even "who's to say." I think your outright rejection of these concepts is limiting.
But when it comes to practical matters, like women's rights or children's safeguarding, for example, my lack of patience for abstractions is much more similar to yours.
Not many realize how profoundly unsettling QM was to not just physics but to the philosophical foundations of scientific method.
I read one paragraph in a book by Karl Popper comparing intractability with the ultimate unknowability dictated by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle; it was some of the clearest thinking in my experience.
It was not all that long ago that to claim to, or even to seek to, understand how things actually worked (“realism”) was regarded as conceit and unscientific.
Yeah, exactly. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is one of the clearest assaults on the concept of objective truth. Of course, we aren't living at the Planck scale. I don't think we need to apply QM to our understanding of daily life and especially of law.
But relativity, too, has lots of interesting things to say about how changes of reference frame can produce two, equally valid interpretations.
I want to note that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle doesn't really invalidate there being objective truth, it only affects the outer limits of the measurability of same. There is a tradeoff at quantum scales between the precision with which we can measure position and the precision with which we can measure momentum.
It would be a solid counter to an argument that objective truth is always measurable to infinite precision, but who makes that assertion?
The proponents of CSJ sometimes argue against "objectivity" by pointing out that humans cannot reach absolute objectivity (thus, in their minds, objectivity can be discarded entirely in favor of their favorite subjectivity, to be imposed on others coercively).
However, that misses the point, which is that we can be relatively more objective or more subjective, and that there are real world benefits to developing the former end of the spectrum.
MWI?
Problem is, most who read it will think, quite reasonably, that I’m crazy.
And how it that a problem? (OK, kidding a bit)
Crazy like a shaman, or crazy like a danger to yourself or society? Like somebody recounting an alien encounter or a ghost?
More like the latter. I will not go into any detail online save to note that I have adamantly disbelieved in everything supernatural and paranormal since I was about 12, and then around 20 I started having experiences. Not coincidences. Reliably repeatable experiences, culminating in one that made my skepticism ridiculous.
If you want to read it after I'm done, and it will be quite long, please email to my burner account solonaquila431@gmail.com and include your pledge to not reveal my identity to anyone you refer to the article.
I'd certainly be interested, if only I knew where to find it.
WRT the discussion, Jane seemed to think that just because something like vision is subjective, that any statement of fact based on seeing something is subjective. But I may not know what you really see when you see red (maybe it looks like blue does to me), but if you blow through a red light in front of the police, that's not going to get you out of a fine.
Even somewhat subjective experiences can lead to statements of replicable facts. If you run a red light, you're breaking the law and might get a ticket. If you see a rocket explode on takeoff, it's gone.
Now, if you're going to argue that everyone sees a completely different reality, well, that's a subject for a Philip Dick novel.
Haha, no, I'm not arguing that we all see a different reality. The keys point is how we treat subjective experiences in science and law.
If you were to tell me you're a woman, or a vampire, or a Martian, it doesn't affect me one way or another. I'll have my suspicions about it, but in the end it doesn't matter. You feel whatever you feel, I can never know what you're feeling or whether it's "valid," so I shrug my shoulders and we all carry on with or lives.
But if you claim that your feelings need to be recognised in *law*, that society needs to grant you rights that nobody else has on the basis of your feelings, well, now we need some evidence that your feelings are real and not a delusion. And if you can't provide that, then there's no way to enshrine them in law.
This is the problem with legislation that invokes "gender identity". Gender identity is nothing more than a subjective feeling. Absolutely nothing. It changes all the time, even among true believers, nobody can even describe it, never mind observe or verify it. And we can't even agree on soothing about it in the way we can at least agree that you stop when the top light on a traffic light is illuminated, whether you're seeing red or blue.
I could believe in souls before I could believe in gender identity.
Even before the "trans" fad I believed gender itself to be a largely useless concept, but since its descent into pure gibberish I would favor its complete removal from psychology, science, and law, if not from language. To the extent that it means anything, there are eight billion genders.
"I could believe in souls before I could believe in gender identity"
Yep. I think they're broadly the same concept.
Small note:
Not too long ago, the word "gender" was either a polite synonym for sex, or a grammatical component of some languages.
Then feminists described "gender roles", which I continue to believe a meaningful concept.
It's the more recent concept of "gender identity" which jumped the shark, IMO.
The most interesting part of this column was where you summarized the thoughts of some teenage girls interested in transitioning. I'm really curious where you heard/read their discussion.
"I'm really curious where you heard/read their discussion."
This wasn't one conversation but the accumulation of many. Some of them totally unrelated to trans people. As a male, I think it's easy to miss how puberty feels for some (most?) females. Sexualisation, periods, the sudden physical differentiation from boys in terms of size and strength, stigma about sex and fears about pregnancy. All of this stuff passes men by. It's always interesting how many trans women are oblivious to this stuff too.
This discussion sounded a little like Plato’s cave in that it was the idea of the chair that became real - either that or Neo saying ‘there is no spoon’. Deeply confusing and confused. Like objective and subjective really are the central tenants of conversations about gender….really?
I liked your point about this all really being about personality. Heck I was a ‘tomboy’ climbing trees, wearing ripped blue jeans way before it was a thing, learning how to replace a Weber carburetor because that highly tuned piece of equipment made my car sing. Didn’t stop me from finding and loving my husband and thrilling to being a mom.
In all our beautiful complexity and difference, we are human.
People like your correspondent seem to want to control how we express our personalities in all their delightful variation. What a sterile and sad world to live in, filled with rigid labels.
Awesome Rowling quote too.
"Deeply confusing and confused. Like objective and subjective really are the central tenants of conversations about gender….really?"
Haha, yeah, I did wonder if this one got a little too philosophical. I enjoy getting deep into topics like this from time to time. Especially when the person seems sincere, as Jane did.
The central point is that we don't enshrine unverifiable feelings into law. You can feel any way about yourself that you want to. Your freedom to do that is important. But you have no right to make me pretend that *I* feel the same way. You can't claim new rights based on those unverifiable feelings. And you certainly can't undermine ~50% of the population's rights to privacy and dignity and safety based on those feelings.
If you want to even have a conversation about any of the above, you need some kind of objective standard. And you need evidence that you meet it.
Yes, that cuts to the chase very nicely. I fully support you acting on your feelings in whatever way you wish - unless and until you demand I believe it too, and that you use the power of government to enforce my compliance. Hell to the no.
That Rowing quote is the one that got her hundreds or rape and death threats.
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this whole gender concept. On the one hand, I agree with the idea that no one knows what it is like to be anything other than him- or herself. I am an adult male human, but I do not know what it is like "to be a man" in the general or categorical sense; I only know what it is like to be me. So it is meaningless for me to say that I feel like a man, or that I feel like a woman. (Thomas Nagel addressed this idea more broadly in his paper "What It Is Like to Be a Bat".)
On the other hand, I am not persuaded that there is nothing more to the idea of gender than stereotypes. I cannot help but wonder whether there is something deeper going on, perhaps along the lines of an archetype, and whether this is something more deeply seated in the psyche. However, whatever gender is, I don't believe it can negate the objective reality that there are only two sexes. No one is born in the wrong body; they are born in their own body (albeit a body that might have something wrong with it). I have no problem believing that some people very strongly feel that they are or should be the opposite sex from their biology; but what one feels does not change the biological facts. Rather, I believe that the gender dysphoria is a simplified self-interpretation of feelings which are associated in some manner with ideas of gender.
I am not dismissing the feelings, which I don't doubt are very real. And perhaps in some cases it is easier to change one's body to smooth over this kind of dissonance than it is to rework one's mindset and mental models. If an adult makes that choice, who am I to say they are wrong to do so? But the thing about feelings in general is that they need to be taken seriously, not necessarily literally.
"On the other hand, I am not persuaded that there is nothing more to the idea of gender than stereotypes"
My sense of this just comes from the hundreds of conversations I've had where people were unable to define the concept of gender in any terms other than stereotypes. Not to mention the countless articles I've read on the topic that, if they went beyond dresses and makeup, went directly to the most bizarre, misogynistic, sexual cliches.
But yes, the wider point is that it doesn't matter if it's just stereotypes or some as yet unseen internal archetype. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real condition in the same way that I believe Body Integrity Identity Disorder is a real condition. I don't need to understand it for it to be real. But I do think there should be a serious and rigorous system of evaluation before people start chopping of body parts. And I do think, in the case of gender dysphoria, that there should be an equally serious and rigorous effort to weed out people who aren't genuine before allowing them into *any* female spaces. And I think that there should remain certain female spaces that they *never* get access to because they aren't female. No matter what their feelings might be.
As I've pointed out before, there used to be a serious and rigorous process of evaluation to be legally recognised as a trans women. And while it was in place, vanishingly few people had any issue with trans inclusion. It's only when people abandoned any attempt at objectivity that it quite rightly became an issue.
Everything you said above should reference "gender identity disorder," not "gender dysphoria."
The latter has no diagnostic criteria and accepts even the most frivolous self-reports as sufficient to commence hormonal treatment that very day, even when the patient is severely mentally ill, as many are.
Most people I talk to, even medically educated people, believe that treatment doesn't begin until after a rigorous diagnosis and a year living as the opposite sex. Neither has been required since 2013.
Your patience in conversation is the stuff of legend.
Is a word still true if it has no modifier?
* A black woman: is a woman.
* A homosexual woman: is a woman.
* A trans woman: is not a woman, the modifier is required.
* A trans person: is a person.
At this point in time, perhaps personhood is what should be acknowledged for trans persons, rather than a false claim of a sex behind the thin veil of the now meaningless word gender.
"A trans person: is a person."
Yeah, this is just linguistic sleight of hand. Once upon a time, trans women were called transwomen (no space) to avoid exactly this kind of confusion. But the ideologues actively *want* confusion. So they declared that omitting the space was bigotry and hate and blah blah...
The "trans" in trans woman serves exactly the same purpose as "fake" or "wannabe." It doesn't denote a type of woman but the absence of womanhood. As others have noted, a more accurate term would be trans identified male or maybe some other word altogether that differentiated them from men.
"Trans woman" is a polite fiction. A kindness used to respect a desire we know isn't quite true. We do this kind of thing in lots of areas of life and I'm fine with it. Again, the issue is just enshrining it in law.
> Again, the issue is just enshrining it in law.
And perhaps coercive organizational policies and regulations, even if they are not strictly laws.
Manipulation of language is insidious. I think we should pointedly refer to them as "trans-identifying" men and women, using that noun of actual biological sex.
Though my own preference is "men impersonating women," and vice versa.
My mischievous side wants to show up at a demonstration with a sign:
Fool's Gold IS Gold!!
Justice for Iron Pyrite!
The invocation of subjectivity is one of those arguments that, as with "who gets to decide," leads me to stop reading.
Yes, there is a place for both, but it is statistically defensible to presume the invocation is dishonest and that it is a waste of my rapidly dwindling life expectancy to read any further. And in settled matters like biological sex, the possibility of an honest argument approaches zero.
Daryl Davis did a wonderful thing and he deserves our unmitigated admiration. Note however that it took him years to change the mind of one man. His success was also extremely improbable to succeed in generality.
"And in settled matters like biological sex, the possibility of an honest argument approaches zero."
That's what I found interesting about this conversation with Jane. I think she was being absolutely sincere. She was just confused. And the fact that she was wiling to admit that she'd gotten objective and subjective confused was a rare sign of good-faith in discussions on this topic.
"Daryl Davis did a wonderful thing and he deserves our unmitigated admiration. Note however that it took him years to change the mind of one man. His success was also extremely improbable to succeed in generality."
I suspect all great successes seem improbable before they happen. The Civil Rights Act was improbable. Obama's two-term, no assassination presidency was improbable. One doesn't try because they're guaranteed to succeed. They try because they're attempting something important.
And more to the point, Davis has changed the minds of hundreds of people. Not one. And some of them have gone on to change the minds of hundreds more. The ball definitely starts rolling slowly. He had to put in time and effort to get things moving. But the momentum will carry on even without him now.
Very happy with this correction, I wish you'd said it before.
It's just that in all my years online, I have only seen two conservatives drop their ideology, out of thousands.
By the time LBJ signed the CRA the immorality of what it sought to correct had become irresistible. It was not a miracle, it was capitulation to reality.
And when he said he'd given the south to Republicans for 20 years, face in hands, his estimate was generations too low.
"Very happy with this correction, I wish you'd said it before."
I mention it in the piece.
And sadly, immorality never becomes irresistible on its own. Slavery went on just fine for longer than segregation did. Even while many Americans opposed it. Heck, it still survives today in certain parts of the world. The CRA was viciously opposed by many Americans. And it still took blood and courage and military intervention to force institutions to uphold it. A lot of very heavy balls had to get rolling before their momentum seemed "irresistible."
Perhaps my perspective is skewed, I grew up in an extremely anti-racist family. I was 10 when we moved to Virginia and I was absolutely appalled at the attitudes I encountered there.
Yes, racist attitudes persist and they will probably never go away, just as a century from now there will still be people who believe that same-sex marriage is wrong.
At least now the racists have to speak in code; Republicans can't use the N-bomb in speeches anymore, they have to talk about "quotas," my father became a Democrat in response to the Willie Horton ad.
America has a Heart of Darkness that came over on the Mayflower and which still beats in the chests of too many people, something that the most vile of us, like Trump, know how to appeal to. American slavery was just about the cruelest in history and went on a generation longer than elsewhere in the world.
What is conservative ideology? I've always thought that conservatism was resistance to (sudden) change in societal norms. If the change is not well considered, gender ideology for example, the resistance is justifiable. Of course some of the changes they oppose are changes that should be made.
Is racism, a frequent accusation, an attribute of conservatism while the self styled allyship of low expectation lower standards for black people and it's implicit, they are inferior, is not?
I do think that in the them vs. us conflict the is a bit too much of the monolithic idea that if some of them are something, all of them are something.
This goes in both directions. As a liberal, no doubt you resent the idea that all of the current illiberal traits of self proclaimed liberals should be assigned to you.
Some liberals think I'm conservative and some conservatives think I'm liberal, depending upon my thoughts on different issues. My deck is shuffled, rather than stacked red and black.
But back to my original question, what do you think conservative ideology is that is uniquely different from liberal ideology? Not shared attributes with different ratios, but defining characteristics that are different?
I really enjoyed Jonathan haidt’s ted talk on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives as an attempt to answer your question. https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_the_moral_roots_of_liberals_and_conservatives
I've wondered if the distinctions Haidt described in The Righetous Mind have been shifting since progressivism and liberalism have been to substantial degree conquered by Critical Social Justice.
In particular, I think I have observed an increase in Sanctity/Degradation dynamics, and in Loyalty/Betrayal framings, within CSJ influenced people. For example in cancellation dynamics.
Like the case of the immigrant businessman whose teenaged daughter had posted some bad posts many years ago while in a phase of trying to be edgy, so now the business needs to be boycotted because of a supposed moral taint (regardless of whether the business or father had ever had questionable approaches, and of the daughter's subsequent development). And then their friends want to avoid them, to avoid being associated with taint and getting some on them. Barry Weiss covered this, but I've heard of many other cases which sound like religious or superstitious magical thinking about moral taint.
And I've seen loyalty to the progressive tribe emphasized in ways the exceed my old experiences in liberalism.
If there is anything to my perceptions of a shift in the 6 moral foundations of the CSJ based left compared with the more traditional liberals being studied when those foundations were first described, maybe it's connected to the illiberalism of CSJ being different than traditional liberalism and borrowing some framings from traditional Christianity.
Thanks. I read that book and it resonated with me. I may seem a bit schizophrenic in that while I am on board with much of what is associated with liberalism, I also see value in order.
An example would be that I'm not so crazy about atonal music because it has no home and seems chaotic. The idea just popped into my mind that musical taste may have quite a bit to do with that.
Short answer ... at one time it had some principles; fiscal restraint, personal responsibility, strong defense. Since Burke it's gone through more redefinitions than a word for odor.
Now? I regard it as a synonym for cruelty. Period.
Burke?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Burke
yeah but how many fairies can dance on the point of a pin dude?