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Transgender – The Inability To Distinguish Facts From Wishes
Matt Taibbi opines on the latest piece of transgender nonsense:
The Dumbest Cover Story Ever – Racket News, Mar 13 2024
New York Magazine's "Freedom of Sex" is the ultimate example of the lunatic nihilism that's consumed America's intellectual class
New York Magazine has a new cover story, by the trans writer Andrea Long Chu: “The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies.” A jeremiad in support of the idea that children must have absolute political agency, it makes the Unabomber manifesto read like a Shakespeare sonnet. The money passage:
We must be prepared to defend the idea that, in principle, everyone should have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history.
A lot of the piece is standard-issue woe-is-me fuck-everything cartoon nihilism you’d hear from any laptop-class liberal arts product, arguing for a generalized smashing of the patriarchy, among other things by attacking the biological conspiracy to produce those units of material labor value known as babies. Complete abolition of norms would be an “impossible task,” Chu notes sadly, but that doesn’t preclude their “collective reimagining” by an alliance of intersectional victims working toward a Marxian paradise free of “oppressive systems,” which of course include the nuclear family.
The nihilism Taibbi points to is also the major theme the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd takes on in his book "The Defeat of the West".
From its New York Times review:
This Prophetic Academic Now Foresees the West’s Defeat (archived) – New York Times, Mar 9 2024
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
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Mr. Todd is not a moralizer. But he insists that traditional cultures have a lot to fear from the West’s various progressive leanings and may resist allying themselves on foreign policy with those who espouse them. In a similar way, during the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s official atheism was a deal-breaker for many people who might otherwise have been well disposed toward Communism.
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Mr. Todd does believe that certain of our values are “deeply negative.” He presents evidence that the West does not value the lives of its young. Infant mortality, the telltale metric that led him to predict the Soviet collapse half a century ago, is higher in Mr. Biden’s America (5.4 per thousand) than in Mr. Putin’s Russia — and three times higher than in the Japan of Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
Back in January Todd expanded on the inability of distinguishing facts from fiction, which is also the basis of trans-genderism, during an interview with Le Figaro. From its English translation:
Q: Over time, haven't you become a bit of a reactionary?
I was brought up by a grandmother who told me that, sexually speaking, all tastes are part of nature, and I'm faithful to my ancestors. So, LGB, welcome. For T, the trans issue is something else. The individuals concerned must of course be protected. But the fixation of the Western middle classes on this ultra-minority issue raises a sociological and historical question. To establish as a social horizon the idea that a man can really become a woman and a woman a man is to assert something that is biologically impossible, it is to deny the reality of the world, it is to assert the false.
Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality. But, once again, I am in no way overwhelmed here by indignation or emotion. This ideology exists and I have to integrate it into a historical model. In the age of the metaverse, I can't say whether my attachment to reality makes me a reactionary.
The intentional denial of reality, as it is currently practiced in the West, is not a new phenomenon. It is the basis of neo-conservatism from where it has crept over to the progressive side.
As Ron Susskind wrote in his portrait of the first years of the Bush junior presidency:
Faith, Certainty And The Presidency Of George W. Bush (archived) – Ron Susskind / New York Times, Oct 17 2004
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Karl Rove, the Bush advisor Susskind had quoted, displayed the same lunatic nihilism that is represented by those who argue that children, teenagers or people generally should can freely chose their gender. It is an attempt of "creating other new realities". It represents a total denial of actual reality and of the common values derived from it. The Bush administration failed in its endeavor to create new realities in Iraq. The current regime in the West will fail likewise with regime change in Russia. So will others who deny realities.
The author of the Todd book review, Christopher Caldwell, adds:
Fighting a war based on values requires good values. At a bare minimum it requires an agreement on the values being spread, and the United States is further from such agreement than it has ever been in its history — further, even, than it was on the eve of the Civil War. At times it seems there are no national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.
I see a very similar denial of reality, followed by nihilism and a lack of values, at the top of the current European leadership. The loss of the common view of things is splitting societies on both sides of the Atlantic.
However, with regards to transgenderism, some sense of reality is still trying to survive:
National Health Service England stops prescribing puberty blockers, citing 'not enough evidence' – USA Today. Mar 13 2024
"We have concluded that there is not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of (puberty suppressing hormones) to make the treatment routinely available at this time," the publication by NHS England stated.
Puberty is a natural process which often includes a temporary confusion about ones identity. Blocking a kids puberty to further some ephemeral confusion some may have during those time is in my view criminal.
I even agree with Rishi Sunack on this:
U.K. prime minister on gender: ‘A man is a man and a woman is a woman’ – Washington Post, Oct 5 2023
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asserted his stance on gender identity in a speech Wednesday, stating it was “common sense” that “a man is a man and a woman is a woman” — a remark that sparked criticism from transgender rights activists and elicited fervent applause from attendees of the Conservative Party Conference.
I see myself, just like Matt Taibbi seems to see himself, as a progressive striving for a society based on some form of socialism and justice.
To then find myself on the same side of an issue as some staunch conservatives, and getting attacked for it, is mildly disturbing.
Is it really impossible to be reality based and on the left side of things?
‘In terms of which, though, I think one bottom line should be: NONE of that stuff should be presented to minors, especially prepubescent children, not in the media, nor in classrooms, or books, nada. End. Of. Story.
Posted by: Scorpion | Mar 15 2024 6:02 utc | 355
I agree, Scorpion, absolutely. And if you read Plato’s Republic to be about how the youth should be educated, not about how a city should be, this would become clear. It’s hard to see; he’s dealing with a corrupted society as ours is, and he has to say things obliquely, but say them he does. I only see it now, when our society has become like his.”
Posted by: juliania | Mar 15 2024 15:56 utc | 413
You are right on with your analysis of Plato.
Nietzsche an interesting idea of self mastery and culture using Socrates as an example:
“Socrates, for example – on Nietzsche’s account – suffered from poor impulse control, ambivalence, self-doubt, and alienation, and he dealt with these disabilities by over-developing his reason and treating his appetites as the enemy. By appointing reason the ultimate master, he made it impossible to achieve true self-mastery.
“It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists if they believe that they are extricating themselves from decadence when they merely wage war against it. Extrication lies beyond their strength: what they choose as a means, as salvation, is itself but another expression of decadence; they change its expression, but they do not get rid of the decadence itself.
Socrates was a misunderstanding; the whole improvement-morality, including the Christian, was a misunderstanding. The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts – all this too was mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to “virtue,” to “health,” to “happiness.” To have to fight the instincts – that is the formula of decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct. (Twilight of the Idols, “The Problem of Socrates” §2.)”
Signs of decadence include guilt: watch out for people who constantly find themselves doing things they don’t approve of. Take care around those who suffer from suffering: who not only can’t get what they want, but want not to want what they want.
Now, has the culture become decadent?
Nietzsche sometimes talked about decadent cultures or peoples in the more or less ordinary sense of the term: they have lost the discipline required to achieve their values, or have lost interest in the values themselves. Laws are not enforced, standards are lowered, difficult things.” (1)
1.https://fmdolan.com/what-did-nietzsche-mean-by-decadence-has-the-culture-become-decadent/
Posted by: canuck | Mar 15 2024 16:50 utc | 415
I’m certainly no expert on the topic in question, nor in psychology/psychiatry for that matter, but it seems transgenderism might have a wide gamut of etiologies, some of which would psychologically and phenomenologically be remarkably similar to the less discussed and indeed officially censoriously treated transracialism. First of all, it seems the classic example of transgenderism is, who can doubt, not a matter of ‘free will’ at all, quite it’s opposite: the subject at a point, usually beginning in early to late adolescence, begins to experience an acute disappointment regarding their gender manifestation, the product itself of an equally acute longing for the opposite gender, almost in the manner of a deja vu, of running across a phantasm of what was once loved, then forgotten or repressed, then suddenly and most poignantly re-encountered in phantom form. This phantasm of their former self (or someone so intensely beloved that they became seemingly inseparable from their own psyches at some point) produces in them a desire in their newly rediscovered state of ineluctable awareness to pursue the incessant goal of physical transformation and identification with the (self)-beloved: as if pursuing an image of a former self, but also perhaps of a former oppositely-sexed love lost to the entropic forces and dimensions of time, memory, and mortality.
In which case would not the above description, i.e. entailing someone, young and impressionable, who when seeing their heteronormative father and mother chooses B instead of A, when they themselves are empirically the same biological sex as A, (the father), not be remarkably formally and phenomenally similar, to the case of someone, likewise young and impressionable, who is of a visibly particular ‘race’ or ethnicity (or, on the other hand, of no discernible ‘race’ and ethnicity) and sees themselves in the mirror and then sees another particular person, or travels to another country, or simply is exposed to other ‘races’ in the media and experiences a growing and growing form of deja vu till it can no longer be repressed in the subconscious, and after a certain point (the drop that causes the glass to overflow) so leaves them haunted that from that point on, perhaps traversed by the acute experience of first physical and emotional romantic love, they can longer repress the desire to identify and be of that other ‘race’ which they now perceive as always having haunted them to the very core of their being (which only now are the extent of which they are finally getting to know the depths of), so that its un-rectification threatens to make a parody and mockery of their very existence?
Moreso, if the above hypothetical coincides with the ’empiricality’ of a father of one ‘race’ and a mother of another ‘race,’ wherein the child, as though subliminally subjected ineluctably to a choice by the very presence of difference itself (the very Adamic apple of knowledge of choice which is the knowledge of difference and vice versa; as in free will being fundamentally the knowledge of acting and being permitted to act by something called ‘difference’ itself) chooses difference or rather is pushed to choose difference because they embody difference as such, being neither fully like the father, nor fully like the mother in many instances, by vice or virtue of their visible biraciality? Indeed, is not the latter condition and phenomenon the far more common of the two examples, to the point of encompassing the psychologies of vast swathes of people in Latin America, not only because of the highly racialized and racist legacy Euro-plutocratic neocolonial MSM in Latin America, but because of the divide and conquer caste systems established with great psychological adeptness and cunning by the Spanish, Portuguese, and other European empires in the so-called New World?
Posted by: Ludo | Mar 15 2024 18:30 utc | 418
@Scorpion | Mar 16 2024 0:30 utc | 424
And you made a good point, though one not really about what I said which was:
Marx pioneered the perception of Society as an objective phenomenon subject to objective analysis. In other words, he turned the materialist lens, emerging as dominant in Science, on Society and Humanity.
Well, I consider that one of Marx’s achievement. Marx would have never accepted the subjectivization of social studies (let’s not call them science), e.g. the total madness about pronouns.
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@Awoo | Mar 16 2024 11:19 utc | 440
[…] “Identity politics” is just a buzzword for something that has always existed, Lenin fought on the side of everyone that was included in “identity politics” in his day.
Nope. Identity politics, that is modern tribalism, regards, presumed or real, innate conditions, as race, sex, sexual orientation etc., while Lenin’s class struggle regarded an imposed social condition, that of proletarian, regardless of innate conditions. Between the two ideas there is the same difference that goes between an organized church and a sectarian cult. Needless to say, that the sectarianism of identity politics prevents a cohesive struggle against the economic ruling class and its real and effective privileges.
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@Slendy Warlos | Mar 16 2024 5:40 utc | 432
There is no trans ideology. There is no trans movement.
There are just trans people. What you don’t like about them is that they exist.
As Žižek put it: there is nothing inherently revolutionary in transgenderism, i.e. it has nothing to do with the left. What I do not like about transgenderism is the fact that my society, including me, has to waste good money and time on issues that have no social value whatsoever (and could be actually harmful): gender transition and gender therapy paid by the national health system, special housing and social shelters etc.
There is one thing that is good about transgenderism, though. It exposed some of the demented implications of its sibling, militant feminism, as, for example, the battle for equality (i.e. equal payment) in sport between men and women.
Posted by: SG | Mar 16 2024 12:10 utc | 442
@canuck
Your entire premise is wrong, you misunderstand the material base of gender. You’re obsessed with it having a biological base but this is incorrect. A properly informed materialist must see this by looking at historical societies and seeing that gender has been so different within different societal structures. To quote a rather excellent manifesto on this topic:
Gender is produced primarily by the division of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is any labor that helps to produce the next generation, including sex, birth, childcare, and homemaking, and gender is defined by how this labor is divided up, with the different genders being distinct classes which are expected to perform specific sorts of tasks regarding reproductive labor.
The way gender differs between cultures is determined by how these tasks are divvied up between the genders. The particular characteristics that this produces are what is known as the superstructure. So, while gender is produced by this material base, it also involves an amalgamation of various stereotypes, ways of dress, formal speech, etc in its superstructure which differ how we experience our gender.
And this applies to all cultures. The Bugi people of Indonesia, rather than the two genders of our society, have five genders in total. Calabai and calalai people have biological characteristics that have been gendered as male and female respectively, but they adopt the reproductive labor tasks typically assigned to makkunrai (roughly equivalent to women) and oroané (roughly equivalent to men) which provides them with a different social class. More interestingly, however, are the bissu, the fifth gender, which fills a role distinct from the other four. They fill special ceremonial religious practices and are said to be a mixture of the four other genders. Whereas makkunrai and calabai take on typically feminine reproductive labor tasks, such as homemaking, and oroané and calalai take on typically masculine ones, such as providing support for their spouse, the bissu transcend this and engage in their own tasks.
The Bugi gender system shows how malleable gender can be, but it also provides us with an excellent example of the material base to gender. The five genders of the Bugi are distinguished by how reproductive labor is divided among the Bugi people. Everything else is produced by this division.
Our culture is different from theirs but both are based upon the same sorts of divisions of reproductive labor. What produces gender is how these tasks are divvied up and all else follows from this.
This talk of material relations so often come down to naming capitalistic relations as the base of things, but this does not hold with gender. While gender and capitalism work together and are a part of the same social order, they do not share the same material base. This isn’t to say that the material base of gender has no relation to capitalism; reproductive labor is required for producing new laborers for capitalistic production and capitalistic production tends to define the exact nature of male reproductive labor.
[…]
So how does biology play into this? Gender forms the basis of sex. We are not born with sex already within us. We have penises, vaginas, breasts, beards, chromosomes, etc, but these things are not sex on their own. They are features of our biology, but we group them into sexes. When we call penises boy parts we are creating and imposing gender upon the body.
What this means is that sex is the gendering of our biological features. We assign gender to our biology and claim them to be innate. This is used to present the gender class system as a natural thing that just exists rather than a social system that gets imposed upon us. By gendering our bodies, we act as if gender just is rather than it being something that we’ve created. As such, sex serves to reinforce and defend gender.
Gender is the oldest class system. In some societies it was a binary, while in others it was 3, 4, even 5 clearly defined genders.
You must start your analysis of the system from its material base, not from the pre-assumption that the existing system we have evolved into via european colonialism and religion systematically destroying all competing cultures and different forms of society.
This is the correct analysis of gender, if you apply a materialist analysis to the topic and analyse it properly through history. A historically materialist gender analysis, if you will. If you apply this rule of gender construction as a division of reproductive labour holds true to every single instance of differing societies that produced different outcomes historically and it holds true to our current society also, which is going through changes as we speak as a result of the divisions of reproductive labour being drastically changed in the last 50 years. Caused by numerous crises of capitalism creating revolutionary shifts in the conditions of women through concessions, granted either through struggle or the wartime crises created by imperialism.
Posted by: Awoo | Mar 16 2024 16:28 utc | 461
Late to the party.
Sometimes we need to separate out the personal, from the political.
Individual transfolk, on a PERSONAL level we can feel compassion for and ‘live and let live’, and in my long years, many of this rare group of troubled individuals were able to find Peace as adults.
I didnt have a problem, and I dont think society had a problem, until it became POLITICAL and laws kept changing
all over the place.
Originally, it was known as fact in law and science, that it is not possible to change sex. But trans-sexual individuals, with full post-op medical transitions, were able to have their documents like drivers licences changed to make their lives easier.
As mental illnesses go, genuine trans-sexuals are fairly harmless, but the explosion of other not so harmless fetishes including criminality has sky-rocketed by pulling up the medical gate-keeping.
So why were laws changed to allow ‘Self-ID’? And legal sex-change for any who just self-declares? Some never take hormones, never undergo any medical transition at all, and a significant number of these men, are sexual predators. Look at the prison statistics.
Check out autogynephilia as a common sexual fetish of biologically intact heterosexual males, who insist on being called lesbian, dominate lesbian dating sites etc.
It is now illegal for lesbians to hold events as lesbian only.
There was no discussion of the dangers and risks to other vulnerable groups in the adoption of these laws, or of even putting in clauses to punish those who seek to abuse the law, by enabling any Tom, Dick or Harry with a conviction record of sexual offences, to “identify” as a woman, and transfer to the womens prison.
And all they can say is “nobody would do that”.. well, they are “doing that”, and you have the insane situation of female rape victims being forced to say in court, statements such as “her” penis.
Then they often say, “its just a few bad apples”, well.. there werent so many before somebody felt it was a really good idea to LEGALLY let the freaks and pervs have a “progressive” loophole to enable and promote their criminal behaviour.
And the humiliating mockery of womens sports, but thats OK, there has never been a moratorium on sexist humiliation of women and girls.
It doesnt matter if its 1 or 20 or thousands. Only takes one obvious physical male on the podium to publicly display the insult to all women and girls.
And even with toilets, changerooms etc… the insult continues. What about women who come from cultures of strict sex segregation, I guess those women can be insulted as “right-wing” or as “bigots” too ..
Being “inclusive” of males with delusions (real or adopted for nefarious purposes) is just “exclusive” of large numbers of women. Women with small children who dont want them exposed to full adult male penises in public spaces.
Older women going for a swim at the public pool, shouldnt have to be confronted with it either.
So, in short, no drama with the old-school ADULT trans-sexuals who needed medical/psychiatric help in transitioning knowing all the health risks, and were able to get their documents sorted without feeling the need to sue 27 people for getting their pronouns wrong. And they did this for decades. Given my age, those that I know are old-school too, feel the contemporary younger generation of “fake trans”, are cultists and do more harm than good.
And many lesbian and gay activists, groups and organisations, have “divorced” the TQ+. There was a meme running around a few years ago, that connecting LGB to TQ+ was a “forced marriage”. The International LGB Alliance is back to its grass-roots finding itself lobbying for amendments to legislation that in reality, in fact, has forced gays and lesbians in particular, back into the closet.
As for children, plenty of parents are anti-gay, and worried about their gender non-conforming kids, they would rather have a trans-kid, than a gay kid. And again, kids who cant legally buy booze, or check out a library book from the ‘adult’ section, or legally consent to sex, drive or vote, are legally allowed to consent to physical and mental life-altering drug treatment? And parents who do not buy into it, can legally lose their children? Insane… there isnt a shred of evidence that early transition does any good, but a large and ever-growing body of scientific medical facts that it causes enormous irreversible harm.
Posted by: Rain | Mar 17 2024 7:53 utc | 491
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