Climate change, transgenderism, and accepting reality

[DreadPirateLuna]

Sorry if this post comes across a bit muddled, it's really an amalgam of ideas in my head at the moment.

I've been following the journey of Greta Thunberg, watching the climate protests, listening to people like Naomi Klein and David Attenborough. Their message is consistent: climate change is real and it will have a serious impact on our civilization. Facing this reality may cause suffering, but denying it will cause more in the long term.

And I tried applying this thinking to the transgender movement. Biological sex is real and has serious implications for individuals and society. Facing this reality may cause suffering to some people, but denying it causes more suffering in the long run.

When the Green Party and other environmental groups ask us to "listen to the science" for one issue but ignore it for another, they undermine their message. Especially since most people can easily see the difference between male and female, whereas climate change is more complicated. We are at a point where clear heads are needed, and instead we get muddled thinking.

Thoughts?

Of course there is a difference between the sexes but today’s generations don’t see such big differences or they focus on people’s similarities.

Also the existence of trans people and their transitions isn’t seen as calamitous for the human race. Climate change (potentially) is.

When the Green Party and other environmental groups ask us to "listen to the science" for one issue but ignore it for another, they undermine their message.

I totally agree that this a complete mismatch in policy - listen to the science when it suits us, not when it doesn't..

I've found myself really surprised to find the Green Party drenched in woke gender politics - I'd have thought it should be the last thing they should be getting involved with. Gender identity politics is completely frivolous IMO. Not to mention all those extra synthesised hormones in the ecosystem.

Although perhaps that is outweighed by all the sterilised children?

I've thought this too, OP.

To a large extent, climate change is a problem arising from our economic system - continuing to chase growth is incompatible with reducing our emissions. The tech - clean energy etc - to grow the economy while reducing emissions simply doesn't exist yet, and won't for decades (if it ever does).

Of course giving up economic growth is, itself, fraught with difficulties. For one thing we'd need to redistribute wealth far more than we do. Degrowth and steady state economics have a lot of problems that need to be sorted out. BUT the economy really is socially constructed (god how I now hate that phrase) and we can change it, even if it is difficult. We can't change the laws of physics and make growth compatible with avoiding serious climate change.

No politician wants to admit this, so they tell us what we want to hear, and witter on about compostable straws.

Likewise, sexist stereotypes will be difficult to get rid of, but at least it's possible. We can't get rid of biological sex.

It's a huge issue.

Climate disaster means that governments might have to make drastic, radical decisions. Yet all of our major parties have proved they are willing to lie, publicly, to appease powerful lobbyists pushing trans ideology. They have happily been complicit in effectively silencing and othering a huge number of mainly women simply because the truth the women speak is not what these lobbyists want to hear. How do we trust our governments not to back pseudo science about the climate or be swayed by oil firms etc who also have powerful lobbyists? How do we know they won't find a way to silence and other people speaking an inconvenient truth?

Secondly, climate change does /will hit vulnerable groups hardest worldwide. Of course nobody is suggesting the existence of trans people affects the survival of humanity . However the erosion of women's rights at a time of global scarcity and increase of climate events is a very frightening prospect for women and children worldwide. When things are bad, women and children pay a high price. See rape as a weapon of war, life for women in refugee camps etc.

When the Green Party and other environmental groups ask us to "listen to the science" for one issue but ignore it for another, they undermine their message.

Green Parties in most countries have form on this. They oppose genetic modification and water fluoridation against scientific consensus.

Interesting thread, I've been meaning to try and form such a discussion in my head for a while.

I feel very disappointed with the green movement and political parties and their seeming disjointedness from reality, with the exception of DGR (deep green resistance), I really wish that movement had gained more traction in the face of the impending crisis. It is the only group to have a radical feminist analysis underpinning its values. When you look at the founding roots of XR, many of them seem to have been pickled in queer theory GB often goes on little BDSM tangents in her speeches However, it has never arisen as an issue within the meetings and actions I've been to, and I think it is too broad of a movement to impose a value structure based on gender, beyond "respect each other", which I'm willing to do, as I don't want to jeopardise the bigger picture when so much is at stake. I hope anyway... I do find myself monitoring for clues about any direction in gender policy.

I think on a wider level our deep malaise in our culture comes from our disconnect from nature, including our own bodies, hence why a lot more people are feeling they are transgender, or at least identifying with the concept of gender and away from their somatic bodies. We are whole beings... body, mind and soul are inextricable from each other, they are the same "substance", the interplay between matter and energy. Same for us within nature, we feel the sun on us, we eat the berries, we drink from the river. When we forget that through our modern economic and subsistence systems... agriculture, offices, glowing screens, water pipes, supermarkets etc, we forget the connections and we feel atomised and fragmented, both within our psyches and in our communities.

"When the Green Party and other environmental groups ask us to "listen to the science" for one issue but ignore it for another, they undermine their message.

Green Parties in most countries have form on this. They oppose genetic modification and water fluoridation against scientific consensus."

I would say on this point that is possible to be pro-science in the sense of understanding the world and its empirical phenomena, such as sexual dimorphism in humans, atmospheric chemistry, radioactive decay etc, without necessarily being pro- the technical applications of it, such as GM crops, nuclear power stations, lithium mining for batteries etc.

Environmental sciences are my field by education and to be honest the environmental movement has always be full of cranks and dreamers who don't have the first clue what they're talking about.

Trans nonsense is right up their street frankly.

Green Parties in most countries have form on this. They oppose genetic modification and water fluoridation against scientific consensus.

In some cases this have issues that go well beyond the immediate scientific question, though. With fluoridation for some people they are concerned about the idea of adding anything to the public water system. Greens have typically tended to take an approach of a community based sort of socialism, as opposed to one that tends to push decisions to a high level. While I think the benefits of fluoride are strong enough to balance that, I can see that some feel we could supply fluoride in another way rather than in so basic a service as water.

And similarly with GMOs - they raise all kinds of questions about who owns information from nature, centralisation of food systems, and there are real concerns about effects of pesticides. I think you could even say that history has shown that science is not always good at predicting effects in very complex systems and so interfering with them should be done with a strong sense of the cost of hubris.

It's true those aren't all scientific recommendations, but I think they are rational.

The Green support for gender ideology I think is coming from a different place altogether. But it also IMO has been confused by the seeming support of the medical establishment, which many people think means it is scientific. And I can understand why.

I can see that some feel we could supply fluoride in another way rather than in so basic a service as water.

I live in an area that does not have flouridated water and small children are offered flouride supplements to make up for this.

Many parents either don't use them or do so erratically.

As a result we have really crap teeth on a society wide basis.

Not flouridating the water supply is a typically middle class failure to understand the stresses and pressures on less well off/well informed people's lives that is all too typical of the green movement historically.

I think that applies to some extent to the anti vaccination people as well.

And similarly with GMOs - they raise all kinds of questions about who owns information from nature, centralisation of food systems, and there are real concerns about effects of pesticides.

But in India, for example, the BT aubergine was developed to avoid high use of pesticide. By all means, we should regulate what we do with GM technology, but we can do that without throwing the baby out with the bath water. Greens talk about GM as though it is intrinsically bad; it's not.
I agree with concerns about intellectual property, but the reason that the Royal Society, for example, is pro-GM is that it's a necessary tool to ensure food security given increases in droughts and other extreme weather.
royalsociety.org/topics-policy/projects/gm-plants/

ArnoldWhatshisknickers

As it happens I agree that it makes a lot of sense to fluoridate water, for the reasons you say. If my city had a municipal vote on it, I'd vote yes.

I also can see why, that when that's the water everyone has to drink, people are hesitant to use it as a delivery medium. If nothing else, they may wonder, what else might the people decide would be a good thing to deliver by such a convenient method, if there is a precedent for that sort of thing, and no real mechanism to opt out other than buying bottled water - which the poor also can't afford. It sets a precedent that the state can deliver things, for the public good, without the agreement of individuals.
Most political viewpoints tend to either favour power being held at higher levels and being pushed down, or power being held at lower levels and pushed up. It's a spectrum but I think most people are weighted in one direction or the other. If you tend to the latter, you'll tend to be against setting that kind of precedent even if the science says it is effective. Which is all it can say, that it is effective, not what we ought to do.

Mermoose

I have real doubts about whether GM is possible without centralisation. But my opinion on GM food isn't really what I was getting at. It's that in many cases, science can't really give us a political answer, and so it's not reasonable to expect that other factors or concerns or values won't be important in political decision making. And that's particularly true about technological applications, which isn't the same as science.

I get you, OP. If we can't even trust out leaders to deal competently with a question as basic as "can people change sex?" then how can we possibly trust them to tell the truth about emissions, pollution, what needs to change to avert disaster, what it's all going to cost, and what step are or are not being taken? They've already proved that they'll lie like cheap rugs if it suits them.

If we can't even trust out leaders to deal competently with a question as basic as "can people change sex?" then how can we possibly trust them to tell the truth about emissions, pollution, what needs to change to avert disaster, what it's all going to cost, and what step are or are not being taken? They've already proved that they'll lie like cheap rugs if it suits them.

Exactly. It completely undermines public trust. I feel personally betrayed by the left, tbh. I've already seen several climate change deniers use transgenderism in arguments. "Trans ideology is the second biggest modern hoax, climate change is the first!' It won't surprise me if they win converts. Modern society seems determined to destroy itself. Sorry to sound so pessimistic.

DreadPirate - I've been having similar thoughts: mainly on why political parties founded to fight for the environment have embraced such a nature-denying cause.

Goosefoot
I agree with you that there is a scientific and a political dimension to these issues. My point about the Greens is that they misrepresent the science on both the issues.

I think on a wider level our deep malaise in our culture comes from our disconnect from nature, including our own bodies

I think you've hit on something important here. Whether it's urbanisation or living our lives increasingly online or something else, we've stopped seeing ourselves as physical beings in a biological ecosystem.

Which raises the question of how to roll this back, particularly for the next generation. Encourage unstructured outdoor play? Set limits on screen time? Allotments and nature trips at school? But none of these things sell products to our children, and the powers in charge are more concerned with making them good consumers than making them happy in their own skins or protecting the planet they'll inherit.

Good points as well about the GP being caught up in middle class niche issues, whereas climate change will disproportionately hurt the poor.

I listened to Greta's speech in the UN. She's angry. We all should be.