'The right side of history' = 'God is on our side'?

[RainWithSunnySpells]

I'm sure that this isn't an original thought (it's probably been suggested before) however once I thought about this it made a lot of sense of the weird phrase TRSoH.

I always wondered how anyone can be on TRSoH in the present. Surely it is the people in the future who will judge that when they look back at the past? Therefore, does TRSoH essentially mean or is an equivalent to 'God is on our side'?

Yep. Trans people deserve not to be discriminated against as laid out in the EA. They rightly have legal protections.

This does not afford males the right to override women's rights.

Another parallel with some aspects of religious thought is the need to create and maintain an 'other '.

Non-believers and heretics must be othered. The unspoken implication of TRSOH is that non believers will be cast out, and/or damned.

Can you give some examples of the rights that you think we want to remove from people who identify as trans or rights that you believe they don't already have?

As far as I am aware, people who identify as trans have the same rights as everyone else in the UK. They also have protection under the EA with the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

Thinking about the religious side, to me as an atheist I don't see religion as the organising factor identifying an 'other', I think creating or identifying others/ enemies is one of the things that humans do, and religion is also one of the things that humans do. I wouldn't even say that religion makes that tendency worse, as the religions I know all accept that not everybody is part of the same religion, and engage with that in some way.

There is a strong patronising element though. That if you aren't a member of that religion it must be because you haven't heard the Good News, or because you can't read the Book. Or because you haven't met any trans people.

Personally I would actually remove the right to change your legal sex because I think it is bad law.

I think that it would be very surprising for a gender critical feminist not to have a few "Are we the baddies?" moments when the entire political left and centre is saying that we are indeed the baddies, and that not accepting that trans people are what they say they are is bigoted and denying their right to exist.

But it is precisely the fact that these people don't appear to be having any "Are we the baddies?" moments themselves, even as they back male rapists in women's prisons and women not having access to any single sex rape crisis support, that makes me think their judgement isn't what I thought it was.

So to be honest, I'm now at the stage where I've moved on from wondering whether we are the baddies and I'm now wondering what else "the right side of history" is actually wrong about.

With Christianity, or traditional forms of it, I understand its viewpoint as moving towards a goal in history. Although this isn't exactly "human progress", but a dramatic and radical supernatural intervention in history.

So history may continue, but in a quite different way, and even with transformed rules of nature, if that's a good way to put it.

There are a bunch of different eschatology views in Christianity, for exactly how it's all supposed to play out, and Protestants mostly tolerate differences without calling people a heretic over it. Although it's part of the creeds to believe in future eschatology I think, so you can be called a heretic for denying this.

One view which does involve more of a "human progress" side to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmillennialism

"Postmillennialism expects that eventually the vast majority of people living will be saved. Increasing gospel success will gradually produce a time in history prior to Christ's return in which faith, righteousness, peace, and prosperity will prevail in the affairs of men and of nations. After an extensive era of such conditions Jesus Christ will return visibly, bodily, and gloriously, to end history with the general resurrection and the final judgment after which the eternal order follows."

@MargotBamborough

I think that it would be very surprising for a gender critical feminist not to have a few "Are we the baddies?" moments when the entire political left and centre is saying that we are indeed the baddies, and that not accepting that trans people are what they say they are is bigoted and denying their right to exist.

Yeah good point.

And surely what matters, is not whether some GC women have ever had doubts about their position because of the social pressure or the psychological conflict of being outside the good graces of the left-wing; but rather what is important is whether they can rationally explain why the "trans rights" case is comparatively weak, or open to various objections that wouldn't apply to previous civil rights progress.

Protected characteristics do sometimes overlap and come into conflict with each other. We’ve seen a few court cases where “Religion or belief” has conflicted with “Sexual orientation”. In most of these cases, “Sexual orientation” has “won”, but not in the case involving a Northern Irish bakery, where it was ruled that in this instance, gay rights did not overrule protected beliefs and freedom of speech.

I just wish that trans rights activists could acknowledge that in a minority of situations, the protected characteristics of “Sex” and “Gender reassignment” do come into conflict. They might believe that “Gender reassignment” should always take priority over “Sex” and they’re welcome to argue their case. But some trans activists deny there is any conflict at all, which is so blatantly untrue that I can’t take them seriously at all.

@Cattenberg

But some trans activists deny there is any conflict at all, which is so blatantly untrue that I can’t take them seriously at all.

I don't know who comes up with all their slogans on the trans activist side, but it's like they never expected them to be challenged in the real world, and they didn't put the time in to think whether they made sense or not. And then everyone on their side just mindlessly copies them.

To say that there is no conflict with women's rights, they either haven't bothered to think about it for a second, or they are just trying to beg the question that the claimed women's rights are always wrong and the claimed trans rights are always correct.

@GodessOfThunder

It’s just a phrase expressing a prediction for what the person saying it hopes/believes is likely to happen in the future.

No, it's more than that, as it has moral content. It's not merely, "this position will be successful in the future". It's basically a moral condemnation of opponents.

@GodessOfThunder

I’d be surprised though if a few commenters here weren’t secretly concerned about not being on the right side of history.

after all, if you are opposed to minority rights you’re in some pretty awful company historically

So as I said, it's about moral condemnation of opponents.

I did give various examples trying to make the case that it's a little more complex than, "opposing minority rights is baddie stuff".

What we need to look at, is in what circumstances wouldn't we easily accept claimed new minority rights. You presumably don't think that just any "rights" claim should be automatically accepted.

I think I have given a couple of reasonable criteria already: (1) where it creates a conflict with other claimed rights that appear to have a reasonable basis, and (2) where you are claiming "rights" using a new type of justification that would seem to many people to have absurd consequences if applied to other areas like racial identity; or involve false or highly suspect claims to operate. So "TWAW and therefore they should be in women's prisons", can be objected to, as it's starting from a false or highly controversial idea.

As I said, I don't think it matters much if some women sometimes have doubts.

What matters is whether there are good reasons to object to these particular claimed rights.

The thing is that NOBODY who was ever gender critical is going to change their mind and admit that TWAW, or that children and teenagers are competent to give consent for dangerous experimental procedures/treatments on their perfectly healthy bodies, or that men are welcome in our single sex spaces and sports.

There was a MN poster in the last week or two who said they “used to be GC but not any more”, but I find that really hard to believe. Once seen, it can’t be unseen. The mind-changing only goes one way.

No, it's kind of a post-historical scenario. It happens at the end of time.

In Christian theology, the Fall is what gives us a universe that has evil, death, and negative physical change in it. They laws of the universe themselves were in some sense re-written due to becoming separated from the source of their being. So there is no expectation that material history that we live in will be able to overcome that. At a human level we all continue to suffer the effects of death, illness, disaster, living in bad families, having negative mental and physical desires we can't control, and so on. There's no utopia possible within that.

The Last Judgement is seen as part of the remaking of all that, outside of time, and accomplished by God rather than any kind of human effort, or political policy.

@MavisMcMinty - nor, indeed, renege on the fundamental concept of being 'gender critical' - that no one should be bound by regressive gender stereotypes.

Does anyone think 'GC bods' weren't 'onTRSoH' when, as the result of an MN thread, they founded Let Toys be Toys?

Lots of people repeat stupid shit without thinking about where it comes from or what it means.

That does not mean that the underlying social concepts sprang out of nothing or carry no deeper resonances. They have power precisely because they fit in which the underlying sense many political progressives have about the nature of history. A sense that often hasn't been explicitly articulated in their own minds.

Not all cultures have shared this sense that history progresses, and such cultures would never come up with that kind of phrasing or thinking.

Just to add to that in case it isn't clear - the argument some make is that Marx (and others) borrowed that sense of an end of struggle from the Christian worldview, but took God out, and made it a wholly material-historical movement.

So related to the Christian approach but with a very significant difference in terms of how they think about practical politics. A lot can be justified if you think the final just society can be achieved historically and politically.

This is why claims that this kind of id pol movement and gender ideology are wholly neoliberal don't really work. It's certainly a POV that can be used to advantage by people who want that kind of society, but the view of history as progressive comes from the left.

Very interesting, thanks. Is that post historical aspect to be found in scripture, or is it something that's inferred?

Although certainly some sects are expecting some kind of Judgement Day event within their lifetime. I'm thinking of the Rapture, Jehovah's Witness' beliefs, etc.

A lot can be justified if you think the final just society can be achieved historically and politically.

Unnervingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, I first read that as 'final solution'.

I think the concept of "minority rights" is fast becoming meaningless.

Just because you are in a minority, that does not mean you are automatically oppressed or vulnerable or that you need to have specific rights which only apply to you and not to other groups.

Paedophiles are a minority.
The landed gentry are a minority.
The privately educated are a minority.
White men are a minority.

(And some people are in all four of those groups.)

Women are not a minority.
On a global level, people of colour are not a minority.

I think it would be more constructive at this stage to refer to the rights of protected groups, rather than minorities. Because literally anyone could self-identify into a minority group on the grounds of either a made up characteristic or a characteristic which doesn't actually need protecting, and start demanding special treatment.

Trans people should have exactly the same rights as the rest of us, including the right to go about their business free from harassment and persecution. (Unfortunately trans activists do not believe gender critical women should have that right.) I wouldn't even be opposed to the Equality Act including "gender identity" (as opposed to "gender reassignment") as a protected characteristic, meaning that it should be unlawful to discriminate against someone due to their gender identity in the same way that it is unlawful to discriminate against someone due to their religion, even if you believe both are a load of nonsense. But the Equality Act also needs clarifying to make sure that sex definitely refers to biological sex, not "legal sex".

Beyond that, if trans people genuinely believe that they cannot use single sex spaces for members of their own sex in the way that, for example, disabled people cannot use non accessible spaces, it is up to them to argue and campaign for third spaces.

Because saying that you, as a male person with a gender identity, cannot possibly be expected to share single sex spaces with other male people with or without gender identities is one thing. Saying that the solution is you being permitted to share single sex spaces with members of the opposite sex instead makes no sense. You're saying, "I cannot share single sex spaces with other male people even though I am male, so female people should be forced to share single sex spaces with male people like me even though they are female." There is no logic to that at all. However you want to argue it, all you're really saying is that what you want should trump what they want because they're just (cis) women, and therefore unimportant.

The fact that trans women are a minority and women are the majority does not mean that it is the trans women who need protecting and the women who are oppressing the poor trans women by not wanting to share their spaces.

Let's be clear about this. "Trans women" is a minority that they have created and self-identified into. If they are genuinely worried about their safety when they present as women, if they feel that, for example, they will not be safe using men's toilets when wearing women's clothes, they have a choice to present as men. They have a choice to simply take their makeup and wig off, take their skirt and heels off, put some trousers and flat shoes on, and blend in.

Now I'm not saying that they should present as men in order to escape oppression. They should be able to wear whatever they like as long as it is appropriate to the situation (i.e. not bondage gear in Tesco's) without being persecuted for it.

The point is that even if they believe themselves to be women, they can disguise themselves as men very easily, given that they, like men, are adult human males, and all the rest is window dressing.

Women do not have the ability to identify out of sex based oppression. And this is something that female people who identify as trans men or non binary people will discover. They do not look like men and the world does not see them as men. They look like women and the world sees them as women. And they are affected by feminist issues such as sex discrimination, abortion, endometriosis and lack of woman-centred research in medicine. Not a single one of us has the ability to disguise ourselves as men and escape sexism by going around wearing men's clothes.

And women as a sex class intersect with many other groups, particularly where race, religion and disability are concerned. Being a woman who is also from one of these minority groups usually makes you even more vulnerable than the average woman.

So I'm not interested in "minority rights". I am interested in identifying groups of people who actually need specific rights, and protecting those. Whether that group is a minority shouldn't come into it.

The Scriptural question is tricky, because it doesn't spell anything like that out. I would say that if you read the parts that are understood to be talking about this, it seems pretty clear that you are no longer in any kind of normal historical situation, you have heavenly thrones with angels full of eyes and all the patriarchs and such singing around them and it's rather surreal.

The orthodox interpretation has been something like, you come to the end of time, when there will presumably be some actual people who are alive and experience this, the final judgement happens for them and also for the dead, and those who don't want to be in the new, perfected world are cast out, and then you have a kind of re-creation of the universe as it would have been had the Fall not occurred , though some would say that actually even better than that. The lion lays down with the lamb, and there is no death, or entropy, and so forth.

This new world is not just spiritual, but a perfect union of the spiritual and material (because in the Christian worldview the material world is fundamentally good.) So the old history will be included, not lost, and perhaps it will have a kind of new history of its own, but that is quite speculative. Lots of theologians did speculate on it, questioned things like how many would be saved and such, but it was seen as stuff that could not be known.

There are Christian sects that have a very materialistic interpretation of this, which is why I was careful to say this was the orthodox interpretation. So the Catholics, Orthodox, the Oriental Orthodox, and many of the main historical Protestant groups believe something like this. In modern times there have been quite a number of American sects from the early modern period in particular who take a more material historical view, interestingly they also tend to have a rather modern form of literalism about the Bible. The JWs and Mormons fall under that, and in fact in some academic treatments of Christianity they might not even be considered Christian as such, but more like off-shoots of Christianity. Their theological differences are seen as being significant enough that you can't really consider them together.

That's really interesting, thank you.

Where does 'heaven' and 'hell' come into all this, are they also outwith history?

In modern times there have been quite a number of American sects from the early modern period in particular who take a more material historical view, interestingly they also tend to have a rather modern form of literalism about the Bible.

I think that the American Dispensationalism position should be respected for using literal interpretation, which of course doesn't mean everything should be taken "literally" but rather you use ordinary standards of language and consider the genre when interpreting texts.

Other Christian views will just make a complete mockery of the Hebrew Bible, to get it to fit with Christian theology. Maybe Dispensationalism still has that problem to some degree, but at least they are trying.

And while their pre trib rapture beliefs are very questionable as to whether that's really in the Bible, there is support for pre mill in early Christianity I think, or some liberal scholars (non religious) may agree with their interpretation.

Yes, both outside time and space.

That's not a normal way to think about those kinds of texts though, within their period. It's a modern way to think about them.

It's not just a language issue either, it's also about what the stories are seen to be about. It's also not particularly Christian thing to look at the religious texts that way, you can hardly accuse Jewish scholars over the centuries of trying to stick to a kind of modern literal approach to the texts, and avoid metaphorical or symbolic ones!

There were different views in the early Church about the timing and nature of all of this. Some of these were abandoned over time, others remained as acceptable views within the tradition. But within the context of the OPs question I don't know that any of them are very relevant. They all, even the very unorthodox ones, involve a kind of special action by God into the historical timeline, rather than something like the Progressive-Marxist view of history.