The Skeptic Community's Blind Spot for Gender Theory

[Mermoose]

One of the most disappointing aspects of the gender debate has been the response of the skeptic community. Apart from a few - Maria MacLachlan, Andy Lewis, Gia Milinovich - prominent skeptics have either been silent or supportive of gender theory. Which would be fine, if they could offer cogent arguments for it, but they can't. Robin Ince, who scoffs at people believing in homeopathy, disappears off Twitter when asked to explain his belief in gender essence.
I have a theory as to how this has happened.
I think I'm a skeptic but it's fairly common (and it's always annoyed me) to find skeptics not only debunking fallacies but sneering at those who believe them. One reason it annoys me is that I once believed in a lot of that stuff, and even though I've now changed my mind, I remember how it felt and why I believed in it. I don't think I was stupid, and likewise I don't think people who still believe in it are stupid. Also because I was wrong once, I know I will probably be wrong again, so I'm never 100% sure of my opinions.
Do a lot of skeptics - skeptics like Robin Ince, who can be quite condescending (albeit in a funny way) - believe that only stupid people get things wrong? That they, being clever, are sure to be right? Is that why they haven't put gender theory - something they want to believe in - to the same test they'd put some quack medicine?

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.

@Goosefoot but the Church of England are enthusiastically supporting it. www.halsteadgazette.co.uk/news/north_essex_news/17668869.vicar-the-rev-john-parker-resigns-over-trans-ideology/

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 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 just can't even begin to imagine what her reasoning is. Some people are intersex, therefore male = female. Also male and female are now states of mind, not descriptions of physical bodies. Because intersex. Which is a group of physical conditions.
AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahYou'reThePresidentOfTheHumanistSocietyNotAStonerStudent...

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.

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.

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

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.

Great post, btw, Always

Ah thanks TalkingintheDark!

The point yourself & AlwaysComingHome made - that it's so painful to be an outcast - that's exactly it, that's at least one motivation for people ignoring the flaws in gender theory. I know, because when I first realised that I couldn't go along with it, that's the thing that really disturbed me - knowing that if I was honest I'd be seen as a bigot and a horrible person. It's just one of the worst things.

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?

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.

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.

TalkingintheDark I began by talking round it, or posting about it and then deleting the posts. But eventually, the unfairness, absurdity, and misogyny of it all just made me so angry about it that that outweighed my fear of speaking up. I still felt really anxious for ages, but I don't now. I'm actually quite glad when a friend disagrees with me on this but is open to talking about it (which has happened - I take those discussions slowly, and I don't push it if they want to stop). Anyone who's decided I'm a terrible person because of this - I've stopped really caring. It's possible at some point I'll find myself in a sticky situation, work-wise, if it's known generally that I'm GC (I haven't kept it secret but have only discussed it in my personal life). I don't know how I'll deal with that. But I know that I don't have the stomach to lie and go along with this any more.

Jux about trans people being mentally fragile, was that in response to a particular post?

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

Jux can you define “living as a woman” for me? What is it specifically that all women do, but that no men can do?

It’s sometimes the simple pleasure of seeing the phrase ‘begging the question’ used correctly that gives me hope. Just learnt something new there, Always and ByGrabthars. Every day’s a school day. Thanks!

Even some serious academic discussion begs the question. I read an essay recently by Talia Bettcher the philosopher and she did just that. Paraphrasing 'if you start from the position that Trans Women Are Women ...' without daring to interrogate that assumption. In fact a letter by a philosophy student demanding that all philosophical discussion of gender starts from that premise, has recently been shared lots of times by professional philosophers.

The other thing I wondered about the dualism inherent in born in the wrong body etc - Britain is a very secular country in comparison to many (eg America, Ireland). And it's here where (probably) fewer people accept the existence of a soul, that the whole thing is beginning to stall.

But neither of those points really help us understand why sceptics/atheists would be so enamoured of the idea.

Britain is a very secular country in comparison to many (eg America, Ireland)

I'm tempted to think that Ireland's acceptance of Self ID is down to underlying religiosity and unconscious belief in dualism. Mostly because I know that this idea would drive the self-satisfied beardy blokes I know crazy (I'm Irish).

But, two things: one, Britain did introduce the GRA in 2004. Two, while you guys are lagging behind with introducing Self ID as law, culturally, it already has been introduced, and it's prominent and having effects. Here in Ireland I'd say most people are still only finding out about it. We don't have a Karen White (our prisons are, for now, still sex-segregated) and we don't really have any trans celebrities. Granted that doesn't hold true at all for Canada or the US.

The other thing that's hampering Irish GC women is numbers. In the UK, groups like A Woman's Place had an uphill struggle but they had (from what I can find with a quick google) 33.4 million women to recruit from. We have 2.4 million. It's kind of like trying to find a vegan restaurant in a tiny town - you need a certain threshold population to sustain what is currently a marginal grouping.

It will be very interesting to see how Irish society reacts when the implications of gender theory are fully comprehended.

also think that a lot of people are very susceptible to "begging the question" fallacies

Yes, and in my experience many can't really see what the problem is even when it is pointed out.

I'm tempted to think that Ireland's acceptance of Self ID is down to underlying religiosity and unconscious belief in dualism.

I'm not so sure. A lot of people are dualists unconsciously, including Christians, but Christianity explicitly rejects dualism and Catholicism more so than many of the Protestant forms. It does seem to be a strong thread in American Christianity though even there I don't think many groups would explicitly support that. Maybe the Mormons and JWs and those sorts of groups.
My thought is that human beings are particularly drawn to dualism and it tends to be found unless there are very strong cultural beliefs or practices that guard against it. Maybe it has something to do with the way we experience our will and our body being disconnected at times?

Christianity explicitly rejects dualism and Catholicism more so than many of the Protestant forms
I don't understand. I was raised Catholic, in my experience Catholics absolutely are dualists.

I don't understand. I was raised Catholic, in my experience Catholics absolutely are dualists.

In Catholicism or Christianity generally there is no real separation of form and matter, they are a unity. It's very much like Aristotle's view. You can talk or think about them separately, in the same way you could talk about a table or the measurements of the table or the atomic structure of the table - but those things are not actually separate from the table.
It's why they have teachings like the resurrection of the body, which says a person is not whole as a disembodied soul, or why the view of the physical body is quite different compared to some of the religions which are dualistic, where often death is seen as escaping a kind of imprisonment of the soul (the real you) in a body that is a sort of shell. A lot of the teachings about sacraments are also about this kind of unity of the physical and formal or spiritual. The physical world is really real, its' existence is not some kind of illusion or error or manifestation of evil.

This is a big reason you see a lot of Catholics suspicious of the idea of someone being in the wrong body, it makes no sense if your soul and body are simply different aspects of one unified thing.

Well, in Ireland, in school and in church, what we're taught is that you have a body and soul. And the fact that you can talk of a disembodied soul is really my point - it doesn't much matter if the official teaching is that souls and bodies can't be separated, the fact is that Catholics believe in a soul and a body. I literally don't know anyone who believes in physical bodies being resurrected.