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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

Why I Left the Left - Kiyah Willis

3 replies

TheColourOutOfSpace · 18/06/2024 17:48

I found this video / blog post interesting. Her story as a young woman touches on a number of related issues, but what's fascinating is that her personal experience of the conflict between gender ideology and women's rights helped kickstart her critical thinking.

Video

Transcript of her video
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/why-i-left-the-left

Snippets from transcript

One of the craziest things that I believed during that time was that I was non-binary. For one thing, I wasn’t a very stereotypical girly girl, and I had (and still have) some traditionally masculine traits. I tend to prefer leadership positions, and I was told that if I didn’t identify as non-binary, I would be invalidating the people who did because I shared similarities with them in the way that I acted and behaved. But honestly, there was a second, subconscious reason: I knew, on some level, that if I identified as non-binary, I would gain more oppression points in the hierarchy. I wouldn’t feel so paranoid about my words offending people.

......

But things changed when I got sick and was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. At 18, I ended up in the hospital with half of my body paralyzed, the youngest person in the adult ward of the hospital, in need of 24/7 care.

Even though I identified as non-binary, I was still biologically female. Needing a female nurse for my safety and personal comfort conflicted with my identity as non-binary and the fear of offending someone. To ask for a female nurse—to acknowledge a difference between male and female—meant invalidating my own non-binary identity. More importantly, I wondered about the hospital’s definition of “female.” What if I got a nurse who identified as a woman but wasn’t what I was asking for? In that case, I’d have to clarify what I meant by “female” or “woman,” which might offend someone. Offending someone (I thought at the time) meant harming them, which was the worst thing I could do.

So I’m sitting in the hospital, and I’m weighing these two alternatives: Either (1) I prioritize my safety, which means I have to give up everything that I think is moral, or (2) I do what I think is right, but that means putting myself potentially in a more dangerous situation. I decided to put my safety first. I asked for a female nurse. I was ready to specify what I wanted, but I was in Texas at the time, and this was 2018, so it was not an issue. Gender ideology wasn’t very widespread; they knew exactly what I was talking about, and I ended up with a nurse who was a woman.

But this led to a moral crisis. What I believed to be moral and what I believed to be true were at odds. And it wasn’t just this dilemma—I’d discovered a serious flaw in my entire path of thinking, a deeper philosophical issue. Were reality and morality incompatible? Surely, that couldn’t be right.

Returning to school, I had a lot of questions: Is it true that hurting someone’s feelings is the worst thing that we can do and is actually the equivalent of physically harming someone? We are pretending that “man” and “woman” don’t have definitions, but this conflicts with biological reality. Why are we doing this? Is it healthy to constantly live in fear and be paranoid about being a bad person when nothing that you’re doing or saying has any bad intent?

Why I Left the Left

Hear me speak at LevelUp 2024 about "The Roots of War and the Path to Peace": https://objectivestandard.org/conferencesRegister with code Kiyah50 and save 50...

https://youtu.be/TzF_1_bhD6s?feature=shared

OP posts:
TheColourOutOfSpace · 21/06/2024 00:14

Bump!

OP posts:
lcakethereforeIam · 21/06/2024 00:44

What a lovely young lady. Smart and eloquent. Obviously speaking mostly to an American audience but there definitely something there for the Brits too.

And only 20-ish mins 😊

Thank you OP

BigBadaBoom · 21/06/2024 07:17

Either (1) I prioritize my safety, which means I have to give up everything that I think is moral, or (2) I do what I think is right, but that means putting myself potentially in a more dangerous situation.

That's the whole debate in a nutshell isn't it? Protecting vulnerable people vs conforming to an inflexible, black-and-white moral ideology.

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