Is It? The Mess We're In Ep. #114: The beginning of the end

[EmbarrassingHadrosaurus]

Glinner and guests discuss whether this is the beginning of the end. Is it? Is this premature optimism or does it feel right?

Is this the collapse part of preference falsification? Are we seeing a gaggle of minor events suddenly hitting the public consciousness at the same time and shaking some foundations?

Or will this all fade away from public attention and the structures survive? Are our organisations all so Stonewalled and entrenched that they can survive any amount of public outcry as long as it's not sustained?

Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one’s wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies, Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities.

A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change.

In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency.

www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674707580

I think people like me have become really hard line on this…
I said that people should within reason live how they like but surgery turns a person into a kind of visual facsimile of the other sex, nothing can change internal organs, skeleton, socialisation

We have come to a place where legal fiction is substituted for reality and where we're socially or even legally coerced into accepting someone else's immersive fiction as if it's our shared reality.

Barracker's full comment/prediction about people who have obtained GRC under GRA 2004 is as follows (made in thread where many matters were discussed with a TW who reserved the right to self-select to use women's single-sex facilities).

The landscape is changing. I can't say how long it will take, but people are starting to assert absolute boundaries and reject the legal and ethical principle that a person can change from male to female and vice versa. This will not reverse. It will grow, and it will reach an inevitable conclusion. The UK is looking very likely to be the fulcrum of change, and then the balance will shift back everywhere.

You can't stop this. All you can do is look to the future. It would be in your best interests to view this short period of history where we as a society mistakenly allowed a lie to temporarily be forced upon others, as a short-lived and unsustainable 'faux-solution' to a problem. That faux solution will be replaced with something else based upon a real and ethical foundation, and society will no longer accept 'sex changes' in any way.

Your best bet is to align yourself with what is coming. That so called [legal fiction] sex changes are a finite blip in history, that they obstruct a real solution to inequality, and that they should be self limiting, and should be drawn to a close. If you support the end of this era of forced pretending, and work with those who are ushering in a new era of real women's rights, then I think it is possible that the few individuals who have already gained legal recognition as the opposite sex will continue to be honoured as their legal status. A grandfather clause is a real possibility, one that accepts those men are a product of their time, but draws a line behind them and does perpetuate the problem further. [Italicised words are my addition.]

the end will take a long time, because it's been going on for a lot longer than I realised…I realised in early/mid 2018 but I felt late to the game then. This is long term.

This is a good overview that reveals the origins of the trans umbrella date back to the 1970s with a major uptick in the 1990s as a prelude to GRA 2004.

womenspeakscotland.com/2021/06/23/the-trans-umbrella-is-older-than-you-think/

I think it's fair to say that there were a number of posters on FWR (that's anachronistic as it didn't exist as a subforum then - that's how long ago it was) who correctly anticipated a fair amount of what has come to pass.

A number of people saw the probable outcomes but were told it would never happen. I think Whittle et al have acknowledged that they managed to get so much through in the background and without full consultation. The HoL had some fascinating discussions but they were told to stand down on the grounds that their apprehensions were noted but they were assured that such things would never happen.

Thread of extracts from Hansard: twitter.com/HairyLeggdHarpy/status/1052160108489334785

We can see what those assurances were worth.