The Skeptic Community's Blind Spot for Gender Theory

It’s sometimes the simple pleasure of seeing the phrase ‘begging the question’ used correctly that gives me hope.

I think a lot of people, even skeptics, are on board with it because it essentially confirms what they want to believe, which is that gender and gendered social roles are natural and innate. Also, an awfully large number of people believe in some form of dualism, whether it's a soul, a mind, consciousness, or gender. A lot of people will never give the concept of "born in the wrong body" a second glance because the idea that what-it-means-to-be-us is somehow separate from our bodies, runs very deep.

I also think that a lot of people are very susceptible to "begging the question" fallacies - arguing from a starting position that assumes the thing you're trying to prove is true. I see the constantly with TRAs, this idea that we can prove TWAW by starting from the belief that it's true and then working backwards to find an argument to fit. I think a lot of "skeptics" have started out with what they want to believe, looked for reasons to keep believing it, and then reassured themselves that because they're skeptics they don't need to examine their beliefs any harder.

It's very unusual to have multiple friends and a relative who aren't just trans, but surgically altered. According to recent statistics 4 out of 5 MTFs have not had genital surgery of any kind and do not intend to. For most male-born people who choose to shift to a female presentation, whether they are drag queens or trans, "the knife" doesn't enter into it.

I don't know about trans people being mentally fragile. I have a couple friends and a relative who are trans. All at the end of the journey. They have had to have counselling for years before even seeing the surgeon's knife, living as a woman in a small community when everyone knows you as a man and know your wife and children who have to cope with heaven knows what sort offensive questions for years while you go through the process. Undergoing awful surgery, painful, inadequate that it is while still knowing that actually you're still a man/woman despite everything you are suffering and have suffered to change that.

Those people have really been through the wringer.

Tough cookies all of them. Not mentally fragile in any way.

As Always says, it’s literally tied up with survival. If we couldn’t survive without our social group, or we perceive that we couldn’t survive without them, we will contort ourselves into almost any position to hold onto them.

How did you deal with this, Mermoose, if I may ask?

Great post, btw, Always

Gah! Meant:

Being able to resist the pressures of religion doesn’t mean that you can resist an ideology any more than being able to resist an ideology means you can resist a religion.

And because we are social beings there are things that we perceive to be true because other people perceive them to be true too, and without that shared perception we are outcast.

Yes. I don’t think we can overstate the importance of that, really.

It is hard to be an outcast; for some people in some situations, impossible

We aren’t genetically programmed to see what’s true, we are genetically programmed to see what we need to see to survive, and to reproduce.

We can test what’s true experimentally, and through other tools like maths but we don’t ‘see’ it directly.

We don’t feel that the Earth is round, or that it orbits the sun, and that the sun itself rotates around the galaxy’s core, because that feeling doesn’t aid in survival or reproduction.

We don’t perceive the curvature of space and time the way we sense light or taste or smell.

We notice the seconds and minutes and hours and years roll by but we have no sense of what the billions of years the universe has existed feel like.

But as well as the things we don’t perceive because they have no bearing on survival there are things we do perceive that may not be true but are essential to survival: a coherent sense of self or unlimited free will without which we may be no more than other animals, or machines, just reacting to our environment.

And because we are social beings there are things that we perceive to be true because other people perceive them to be true too, and without that shared perception we are outcast. Things like money and the law and morality that don’t contradict the physical laws of the universe yet only exist because of our belief in them.

And at the more extreme end there are things that do defy the laws of physics or biology that people nevertheless perceive to be true because we are social beings and our survival might be threatened if we deny them. Things like ideologies or pseudoscience or religion that may have begun with a germ of truth and then developed a life of their own.

Those are the things that skepticism are meant to challenge but the pressure to believe them is strong. Being able to resist the pressures of religion doesn’t mean that you can resist an ideology any more than being able to resist an ideology means you can resist an ideology.

Going back upthread a fair bit, but I just wanted to say how very, very spot on I think this is, Mermoose:

I think that a lot of skeptics have never really dealt with the fact that people have false beliefs because those beliefs give them something. (It may be that what you get from a belief is, in the long run, unhealthy, but it still gives you something). The problem is not people's incapacity to work out what's true, it's their motivation to continue believing what's not true. If skeptics really kept that to the forefront of their minds, they'd be better able to identify when they're doing the same thing.

I think this is true across the board with a lot of the people who sign up to TRA ideology generally, not just skeptics, and we can’t underestimate the power of this.

Why are so many otherwise sane, decent, rational people so deeply invested in believing something that’s so patently untrue, so unjust and irrational? Why are they so utterly impervious to all rational counter arguments? Why do they invent such ridiculous, blatantly false equivalences with real social injustices to try and paint males who identify as women as the most oppressed, marginalised, vulnerable group in the whole world ever, etc etc?

They must get something out of it. Things like, I guess, the reassurance that they’re a “good” person, being on the “right side of history”, peer approval, needing to fit in - and also this level of denial acts as a barrier against a very painful truth, ie that the world we live in is (still) so saturated with misogyny that women (still) really aren’t safe or equally valued at all; that women still have enormously less power, voice, clout, status than men.

As long as those psychological motivators are still in place, people will con themselves into believing just about anything.

We are all being groomed, in a sense, practically from the day we’re born, into believing whatever it is we need to to survive, socially. The question is, I suppose, how to challenge the grooming and make it psychologically safe for people to work out what’s true for themselves instead of continuing in the blind denial. Helluva job.

Oh, and you’re spot on Mermoose too about the fact that because skeptics discount this as a phenomenon, they don’t realise when they themselves are doing the same thing. Great observation.

I like that some posters have tweeted the first page of The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being back at her

I have just googled that, and it is her own book. I have read the first paragraph.

She has definitely taken leave of her own senses.

I am sad to say the CofE and their affiliates checked their minds in a few decades ago. They rarely produce anything worthy of intellectual consideration and when anyone does it is largely ignored. They prefer to spend their time writing puppet sermons.

They do still, at least officially, teach in schools from a set of defined beliefs which they can point to. That is really a requirement to be able to understand your own thought processes and criticise your own logic. The difficulty in a secular institution is that often they don't want to define those things.

I’ve read Alice Roberts thread on Twitter. It’s fucking depressing. I like that some posters have tweeted the first page of The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being back at her. There’s none of the crazy in that book that she’s spouting now.

I'm very grateful my DSGC attend a Catholic school. My DSD hopes this will reduce any genderist nonsense. The Pope has said people can't change sex, so Catholics can refer to him.

..doesn't need to

I am having problems with language today.

This is a woman who wants to take religion out of schools. But only the religion she doesn't like

Not to go all conspiracy theory, but I have wondered if there is an agenda there.

The nice thing about a religious school is they are up-front about their belief system. Not only with others but with themselves.

Secular schools believe they don't have a belief system, somehow the things they teach are all objective. Of course that is completely false. There is no such thing as an objective system of thought with no assumptions.

If you wanted to inject your own agenda into one of these two types of institutions, where would you have the most luck? The one who will examine it in terms of their own coherent system, or the one that thinks it doesn't need too?

What people who are all into rationalism sometimes fail to remember is that you can logically support any idea so long as you start with the right premises. Empiricism doesn't save you from that, facts have to be connected together to make a theory and how you do that depends on what questions you ask.

Meanwhile Prof Alice Roberts is tweeting Guardian articles about how sex isn't binary.

twitter.com/theAliceRoberts/status/1141091857193156608

Arrgh just been reading twitter. I can see why I don't have an account, this stuff makes me cross.

The Natural History Museum are busy doing the "sex in humans isn't binary because intersex and clownfish" thing.

twitter.com/NHM_London/status/1140263163247636480