“To repeat, Hillary Clinton – that’s Hillary ‘basket of deplorables’ Clinton – has quite carefully and deliberately said that women have ‘legitimate’ concerns about transgender issues and those concerns should be recognized.
There are those, in the UK and US, who refuse to accept that questions and critical thinking about this issue are legitimate, and who refuse to acknowledge that those concerns are felt across the political spectrum. Even though the organized campaigns to raise those issues, especially A Woman’s Place UK, are mainly driven by women on the traditional left of the Labour party, there are trans rights activists and progressive campaigners who persist in claiming that this is all a confection of the wicked right.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the fact that Hillary Clinton is among those who say there are indeed legitimate questions here will quieten those claims, and maybe even prompt more people to start listening.
Or perhaps Clinton will simply be treated like all those other women who have dared to question transgender orthodoxy and find herself consigned to the ‘wrong side of history’ with the other witches and heretics.”
Time to examine trans ideology and what it means in society, the sooner the better.
I’m fairly new on Twitter but have already had the displeasure of witnessing the fury of faux-progressive backlash against feminism and feminists attempting to speak their mind in public places… in Canada. Canada?? The easy going, live and let live notions we like to believe in the more sensible regions of Canada seem to dissipate in our larger cities. Queer rights activists and trans activists have mounted a vigorous assault not on the arguments of gender critical feminists, but rather their character, the venues that host said feminists, and a rather hyperbolic set of straw assertions/mantras that serve as conversational dead ends/thought terminating cliches.
This is not the left that I grew up with, nor do I intend to ever associate with. These individuals seem to believe that their individualistic solutions to systemic social problems will somehow win the day. Not gonna happen.
“But politics as religion invariably comes with a cost. There is, naturally, a constant hunt for heretics. Public denunciations followed by ‘cancellations’ are de rigueur. Rigid adherence to doctrine is celebrated, while those who err are pompously told that they are on the “wrong side of history”. Political spats focus on the moral character of a person rather than the content of their arguments. Public arguments in which, as Swift phrases it, “identity leftists spend a great deal of time expending venom… at fellow leftists with whom they have some minor disagreements” are ubiquitous on Twitter and other social media.
All of this takes the Left further into the echo chamber, away from the people it is supposed to represent. Attitudes which are held by the vast majority of Britons — that there should be some upper limit on immigration, that sex differences exist, that gender isn’t entirely a social construct — are enough to get a person ‘cancelled’ by today’s hobbyist Left. Moreover, the slippery equation of words — or even thoughts — with violence creates a censorious climate where activists feel justified in hounding people from public life completely.”
See the transactivists haranguing women and trying to disrupt two public (in Toronto and Vancouver respectively) gatherings that featured Meghan Murphy and other feminist speakers was solid proof for me of the parallel.
When the topic of post modernism comes up, I always brace for the onslaught of adherents who sorta miss the point of what PoMo thought is all about. It’s been so long since I’ve dealt with an actual post modern argument, and not just people who want to replace authoritarian definitions with their own authoritarian definitions.
So perhaps we are arguing against a pale imitation of what a post modern argument actually looks like, because at least in this explanation of PoMo theory, it doesn’t sound as beyond the pale.
So, hopefully, this at least establishes the urgent need to abandon the very concept of objective truth. Objective truth is anti-democratic. There is no such thing as an unbiased statement that has not been shaped by elements of power or hierarchy. There is no such thing as a random statement, and there is no such thing as a true statement. In fact, a random statement and a true statement amount to the same thing, and it is only by connecting them that we can give meaning to either.
I can hear the grumbles now. Saying truth is the same as randomness is actually saying nothing! Really? Then why on earth react to it at all? If this statement really said nothing, wouldn’t a more adequate response be: ‘what do you think?’ or even, just in case ‘can you speak up?’ No, but truth, in how we arrive at its exact conclusions, can only retain any meaning if we acknowledge how arbitrary it is to get to that exact spot of perfection. It is only then that we can begin to unpack the biases that got us to that spot, which of course aren’t random at all, and link throughout history, sociology, geography, physics and biology. It is only after we unmask the assumption that is in authority that we can dethrone it and restore democracy.
Now, there is nothing true about democracy either. Each person operates within their own distance from the truth but at least, to borrow Marx, implies ownership of the production of truth, rather than the blind following of it. Does such a philosophy naturally imply the free market, rather than Marxism? Not necessarily. The distribution of goods, the control over the means of production, those sorts of things are not the same as ideas, let alone people. It could be very possible to have a centralized form of economics that thrived for diverse ideas and people. In fact, such a neutral form of economics—pure in its democracy and lack of discrimination—would imply absolute blindness to differences and a replacement of this hierarchy of difference with universal human rights. That doesn’t mean that each difference wouldn’t get a say, it is to say that each would have a right, no matter their say.
It is fairly obvious that an economy that has no such tools to guarantee human rights would naturally create hierarchies to (re) order distribution and create profits. The idea that one must have an objective idea of truth to reject neoliberalism implies that the neoliberalism was a cultural, not an economic counter-revolution. This seems to apply a backward order of operations. Even though the neoliberal has assaulted the cultural and the personal, it a truly perplexing leap for Marxists to make the claim that as soon as the economic theory of their “objective” choice falls out of favor, we suddenly are not talking about economics anymore, but culture that drives the economy. Just dead wrong.
The goal of the lie of objective truth is to establish power for a certain group of people, so that they can therefore profit from and exploit the people whose truth does not fit the proper definition of normality. That’s why Foucalt saw prisons so clearly. What is a prison? And who decides it?
A handy guide to prepare yourself for the onerous task of handling the inevitable arguments that crop up when men and their blue-haired handmaidens make their bullshit arguments.
Narcissism is prevalent here. Same rules as always with narcissists. Do not get embroiled in discussion of their identity, their identity is not relevant to you and outside making clear you do not see yourself reflected in their identity it serves no function but to prevent discussion.
All accusations are admissions. This is a very reliable compass. They will attribute their own motivations and actions to you because their identity is the only thing they can see and they can only see you as a reflection or threat to it. They are accusing themselves. Let them. Loudly.
Take every word at face value. Do not get dragged into debating it. They say women’s consent doesn’t matter? Take it at face value. They say they have the right to redefine lesbian to include them and they have pushed women to assert their sexual boundaries by misgendering? They are telling you they cannot recognise consent, boundaries, or female sexuality. This is an admission. Not a debate.
Do not treat a boundary as a negotiation. It is not/. You set the boundary and when they breach it, gaslighting, coercion, threats, you are receiving an admission of how far they will go to cross your boundaries. Take this at face value.
Do not be derailed from key points or boundaries, and use all admissions made. They will try to derail from the thing that injures them. Usually the reality of their identity and the threat you pose to it. Stick to their behaviour. The words they have used. Do not get embroiled in discussion of their identity. A narcissists identity is always the hill they will die. Accept when they tell you they cannot separate their identity from your reality.
You do not have to debate being a woman. You are one. Your biology, the inequality you lived, the knowledge you have that came from this. You do not need to debate whether you are a woman. Or their definition of woman. Outside being clear you do not see yourself reflected in them, you do not need to debate this. They do.
When you are discussing systems and laws that evolved over 70 years to protect women and girls you do not need to centre their identity in that discussion. It is irrelevant to that discussion. Those systems were fought for and created by women you don’t know, they did that so you don’t have to. You do not need to have arguments that are already done and are reflected in equality legislation.
Do not have arguments you don’t need to have. It is ridiculous to use failure to validate males as an insult. It is ridiculous to treat ‘you didn’t think of males when you thought about inequality so you are a TERF’ as valid. You don’t need to defend the right of women to self assembly without male supervision, it is yours already, they need to explain why they think it should end. If hearing about their male biology is offensive, that is not your fault. They are male. That cannot be altered. You are not required to repeat things you know to be untrue because of the threat of violence and coercion. You are not required to be ‘inclusive’ and ‘nice’ at a cost of your own safety and rights. EVER.
Do not defend yourself from accusations which are not accusations. It is not an accusation or a crime to refuse to ignore abusive behaviour, it is not an accusation that you didn’t orbit a males identity and validate him.
Misgendering and transphobia are insults designed to give men the right to abuse women and claim they are being oppressed. Nonsense. Stick to literal meanings, neither of this things is violent, neither metaphorical or literal and neither of these things warrant a violent response.
Remember what you are responsible for. You are not responsible for managing their well being, not responsible for their threats of violence, not responsible for harm they do themselves or threaten to do themselves to control a situation. You are entitled to boundaries, to define yourself, and anyone threatened by this is telling you something.
Remember abusive behaviour is well understood. It is always a problem. It is legally and socially unacceptable to subordinate women with abusive behaviour. Nothing in the word trans changes this and any trans women suggesting it does is telling you ‘she’ is an abusive male.
Hey folks, the woke internet is doing it’s best to deplatform and silence critical analysis and criticism of gender ideology. Here’s the thing, if your ideology wasn’t shit to start with, it could withstand critique and still be coherent. It isn’t, thus the censorship.
There’s a lot of chat around about pronouns right now. Specifically, ‘preferred’ pronouns. By which is usually meant, the pronouns a person would prefer other people to use when they are the subject being discussed by those people.
‘This is how I want you to talk about me’.
Almost without exception, the people who request, or demand, others talk about them using specific pronouns, are asking for pronouns associated with the opposite sex to their own.
A simple politeness. A courtesy.
I’ve heard many people tell me they don’t mind doing this, as a courtesy, although it takes some effort to keep up the mental gymnastics of perceiving one sex, but consistently using pronouns for the other. That’s a personal choice, and I respect the reasons why some people make it.
I’ve also heard many people declaring that anyone who won’t comply (usually directed at a woman) is obnoxious, mean, hostile, and unpleasant. ‘Misgendering’ is hate speech. They say.
But I refuse to use female pronouns for anyone male.
Because pronouns are like Rohypnol.
One of the biggest obstacles to halting the stampede over women’s rights is pronoun and preferred name ‘courtesy’. People severely underestimate the psychological impact to themselves, and to others, of compliance.
Pronouns are like Rohypnol to your brain’s defences.
You doubt this absurd claim I just made, obviously. You have the fortitude of mind to be uninfluenced by such trivia, and I have got this wrong. I understand. Bear with.
It’s a well known “name that colour” psychological phenomenon. A quick and simple experiment where you have to say the colour of the words written in front of you. Simple as that. Except the speed and accuracy of your answers is heavily impacted by any incongruence between the colour you see, and the actual word itself.
Try it HERE, if you like fun interactive tests. It takes less than a minute to complete. Compare the difference in your times between part one and part two of the experiment.
You’ll find you have to consciously fight the conflict of input to your brain each and every time. And it leaves you confused, distracted, slower, frustrated and fatigued.
Forcing our brains to ignore the evidence of our eyes, to ignore a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us.
USING preferred pronouns does the same. It alters your attention, your speed of processing, your automaticity. You may find it makes you anxious. You pay less heed to what you want to say, and more to what is expected of you. It slows you down, confuses you, makes you less reactive.
That’s not a good thing.
The cost of HEARING or READING preferred pronouns from others:
Experiment 2.
For a week, re-translate all the transgender articles and comments you find, back to sex-based pronouns, nouns and original names. Rewrite them back to the blunt truth and then read them again. Doing this exercise solely in your mind will do just fine, but editing on a screen is better.
Convert female pronouns back to male; use surnames instead of first names, and convert terms like transwoman back to just ‘man’.
Better yet, if you know the original name of the subject, use it, be it David, or Rhys, or Ashton, or Jonathan.
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, yes? It shouldn’t matter. No-one else will be hurt or affected by this private experiment. It’s entirely between you, and your own resilient mind.
(Try not to get banned from anywhere during this experiment)
Read your translated version again.
If those small acts of preferred pronoun compliance are truly meaningless concessions, (although, see above banning potential for contradictory evidence of import) given as a courtesy to others at no cost to you or to other women, then this private exercise will change nothing, cost nothing, affect no-one. You’ll walk away thinking, yep, as I thought, fuss about nothing.
After all, nothing *should* change, should it, simply with the alteration of pronouns and names? You already know the actual sex of the subject you’re reading about. Pronouns, male or female, add no incremental information. How can they in any way alter your perception, or influence you when you already know all the facts? They’re an irrelevance, the easiest concession to make. Not worth consideration, inconsequential. Right?
Cognitively, you should be immune to the effects of such linguistic cross-dressing. Pronouns are irrelevant, so you concede them easily, because they have no power to influence you, since you already see clearly. Yes?
[And you can confess here, it’s OK. You may already think that the minority of women who refuse to comply with pronouns are just awkward buggers, who can’t think strategically, don’t know when to let it go, probably are extremists. Do themselves no favours, damage their own ‘cause’, even. Unreasonable.]
But try the experiment. Translate pronouns and references back to male. Insert ‘dead-names’ or use surnames. (No-one will know but you) Read it a second time. And be honest with yourself.
Do you feel differently, on reading it this way?
Do you react differently?
How’s your anxiety?
Are you angrier?
Do you feel more scared?
Is your sense of injustice alerted?
What level have your natural defences armed to?
You may discover that, despite yourself, you have a viscerally different reaction to what is before your eyes.
Same story, same players, same core knowledge.
Different pronouns, different reaction.
Pronouns are like Rohypnol.
They dull your defences. They change your inhibitions. They’re meant to. You’ve had a lifetime’s experience learning to be alert to ‘him’ and relax to ‘her’. For good reason. This instinctive response keeps you safe. It’s not even a conscious thing. It’s like your hairs standing on end. Your subconscious brain is helping you not get eaten by the sabre tooth tiger that your eyes haven’t noticed yet.
Oscar probably didn’t intend the instinctive female response his words provoked
Incongruent pronouns also make your brain work much harder; not just when you are using them, but when you are receiving them as information. You are working constantly to keep that story straight in your head. Male or female? Which one, again? Concentrate harder. Ignore your instincts, ignore your reaction.
And that’s just you. You’re already aware of all the pertinent information, already alert, you know the score, no flies on you.
And you’re still affected emotionally and instinctively by incongruent pronouns, nouns, and names. Despite your efforts to be immune. You’re not immune to this effect. You can know perfectly the actual sex of a male person, and yet you will still react differently if someone calls them she instead of he.
So what then, is the impact on everyone who isn’t even aware yet, hasn’t fully comprehended yet what’s going on?
Pronouns are Rohypnol. They change our perception, lower our defences, make us react differently, alter the reality in front of us.
They’re meant to.
They numb us.
They confuse us.
They remove our instinctive safety responses.
They work.
If you do this experiment you may still decide to accept or use female pronouns for male people, perhaps a little wiser, but cognisant of their influence on you and others. That’s a choice you may make. At least now you understand that you may be voluntarily suppressing your own natural response. Your eyes are more open.
Maybe you’ll continue to mentally translate ‘preferred’ pronouns and names in your head back to reality, every time, as I do. We give ourselves the best chance to understand the reality of the situation before us. It becomes easier with practice. I want my instincts as intact as possible.
Maybe you shrug. You can live with this little phenomenon. Or it didn’t work for you, you don’t see it.
But please. Don’t judge so harshly those of us who refuse to submit, refuse to comply with preferred pronouns. There are good reasons why we might be doing that, for our own sakes, and for the sakes of others.
Pronouns are Rohypnol.
I want to be alert. I want others to be alert. I want people to see the real picture, and I want those instinctive reactions that we feel when something is wrong, to be un-blunted, un-dulled by this cheap but effective psychological trick. I feel like I owe this to myself, and I absolutely owe it to other women.
And more than anything, I owe this to girls. I don’t want to play even the tiniest part in grooming them to disregard their natural protective instincts. Those instincts are there for a reason. To keep them safe. They need those instincts intact, and sharp.
Not really surprising, but its nice to see fact emerging past the babble of his rabid dudish fanbase.
“In summary, even though the political function of Enuma Elish is obvious and important enough to have been mentioned by three of Peterson’s own sources — Heidel, Campbell, and Neumann — it only figures into Maps of Meaning in the form of a dismissive footnote that appears to miss the point of what it dismisses. In 12 Rules for Life, that dismissal resurfaces as a straw man argument that utterly fails to engage with the history all three of his sources were referencing. By Peterson’s own admission, his interest lies not in accurately grasping the historical context of myth, but in using myth to support preconceived notions about archetypes as “eternal ‘categories’ of imagination.” And yet his evidence for the primacy of those categories comes from the myths themselves, leaving us with a tail-biting bout of circular reasoning that calls to mind the illustration of the ouroboros that Peterson uses to illustrate the concept of chaos.
If Peterson effectively demonstrates anything with his reading of Enuma Elish, it’s that his personal philosophy regarding the entire nature of human consciousness maps neatly onto a patriarchal myth cobbled together from disparate sources in order to justify a power grab. He’s wrong about mapping the universe of human experience onto this story for the same reason fundamentalist Christians often have incorrect notions about the Bible—he completely ignores how the stories got here, and imagines instead that they are simply evidence of some cosmic, eternal truth that just so happens to line up with his politics.
[…]
It is not chaos, but our fear and visceral disgust toward the idea of chaos undermining civilization — often stemming from a lack of familiarity with what we fear — that drives us to build prisons, wage wars, and develop weapons which are the embodiment of all-consuming fire. Because we do not conceptualize the earth and its natural cycles as sacred, we disregard treaties made with the Indigenous peoples whose lands we have colonized and arrest those who designate themselves “water protectors.” Peterson’s philosophy, while it may inspire motivation at the individual level, is a deadly engine of status quo maintenance and self-justification at the cultural level. It is an ideology that denies it is ideology; hissing insults and flinging lawsuits at those who challenge its god-like powers of complacency.
All of that said, I do not believe that everyone who has found himself helped by Peterson’s fatherly counsel is totally deluded, at least not insurmountably. There is value in standing up straight with your shoulders back; it just can’t necessarily be read as a primal decree from ancient Mesopotamia. The cult of capitalism dictates that competitiveness is hard-wired into us to the exclusion of all other virtues, but there is also evidence that our ability to share and cooperate has played a formative role in our evolutionary development. One of Jordan Peterson’s strengths is that he seems to understand how confirmation bias and unconscious motivations structure our belief systems, at least in theory. When he fails, it’s because he has forgotten to turn this wisdom on himself.”
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Exploring best practice and research in sexual violence. A loud voice in the fight against victim blaming. Written and Managed by Jessica Eaton, Doctoral Researcher in Forensic Psychology
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