I guess I'm not familiar with what's going on with Hershey's. I know plenty of women had issue with the former male Penn swimmer. I know there are plenty of people who have concerns over kids having surgeries and the science behind it. I don't consider it anti-trans that people have these concerns or ask questions.
Here is a great Unherd article I'd suggest that Bartender reads it but I know from past experience that he won't! That's why I hold him in such contempt.
The fictional world of trans activism
When people say things like “transwomen are women”, “transmen are men”, and “nonbinary people are neither women nor men”, what do they mean? In my book Material Girls, I suggested that many of them are immersed in a fiction.
Getting immersed in fiction is a familiar state for most of us. Nearly all of us do it, and some of us do it several times a day. When you dip into a novel, binge on a box set, or even just daydream furiously about succeeding romantically or seeing your enemies fail, you’re doing it.
When immersed in a fiction, your direct aim isn’t to recognise and respond to the world as it actually is. To borrow a phrase from philosophy, your thoughts and behaviour aren’t directly “truth-tracking”. That’s usually ok, because fictions are supposed to be harmless bits of fun, or interesting encounters with possible-but-not-actual scenarios. But what they are not supposed to be are accurate reports of reality as you personally find it now. When immersed, it’s as if many of your thoughts are flying parallel to earth without touching it.
As a trans person, there are different possible motives for immersing yourself in fictions of changing or escaping your sex, such as strong feelings of dysphoria. If you’re highly uncomfortable about the sexed aspects of your body — say, because they fail to fit prevalent bodily norms, or you think they do — you might experience relief to act as if you are of the opposite sex, or of no-sex.
It’s reasonable to analyse the worryingly high rise of girls and young women in this position in the context of the invention of the smartphone, the related spread of social media and pornography, and the over-sexualisation and objectification of young women in our culture generally. A less well-known motive for immersion, specific to some but not all within the male trans demographic and also likely to be influenced by pornography, is the presence of a fetish known as autogynephilia (or “AGP”).
In plain language: AGP is a sexual turn-on for some males to enter into the fiction of being a woman. There’s a huge effort made by trans activists to deny this. And it seems particularly hard for people without much experience of the adult world of sexuality — idealistic young people, say, or university lecturers — to believe it. But numerous sources attest to it, and it’s important we recognise it clearly when it comes to discussing incursions into women’s rights.
See, for instance, this Vice article from 2016, published before progressive media started to pretend autogynephilia could never happen, that frankly describes a club night where men cross-dress as women for sexual pleasure, sometimes also role-playing that they are being “forced” into “feminisation” by a dominatrix. Residual doubters should also read Deirdre McCloskey’s transition memoir Crossing, where the sexual element is cheerfully admitted. Or just look closely at this picture of a transwoman addressing the New York State Democratic Party.
When it comes to people who aren’t trans, the typical motivations for immersion in trans activism’s foundational fictions seem of four main sorts. First, there’s a desire to be kind to trans people, without a lot of further thought about what that might look like. Second, there’s those who want to seem kind because of the social capital it brings these days. Third, there’s a desire to avoid ostracisation, since you know you will be socially punished if you don’t. And fourth, there’s a desire to undo human sexed categories with the power of words, because you heard from some whackjob academic that this was a coherent and politically desirable thing to aim for.
Now many of the fictions in which we immerse ourselves are harmless. But that isn’t the case with trans fictions, when disseminated at industrial scale and coercively maintained by the progressive establishment. At the other end of this particular story arc are unhappily infertile young adults; women prisoners made to share facilities with male rapists; sportswomen crowded out of competition by men they can’t hope to beat; young lesbians guilted into dating males; wives being coerced into participation in the cross-dressing fantasies of their husbands; and trans people with wholly inadequate healthcare relative to their well-being.
Horrific as those plot twists are, though, I want to take a more oblique look at the story leading up to them. For it seems to me that trans activism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead. Maybe all movements pursue fiction some of the time, but few have truth-denial so firmly built into their foundational axioms. So here are four instructive features.
1) Providing a convincing back story
What does a fiction need in order to seem vivid and realistic — to grip your attention and draw you in emotionally? Partly, it needs background detail that looks compelling to the average reader, and is distracting enough that she doesn’t question any plot holes. And what more convincing-looking detail could you find than that supplied by people whose day job it is to be clever and to know things? On this basis, parts of academia have been enlisted, enthusiastically, to furnish surrounding details for the foundational fictions of the trans industry.
A just-published article by philosopher Dan Williams describes a related phenomenon. In today’s world, he argues, “pundits and opinion-producers” provide apparently supportive arguments and other justifications for conclusions that people were already motivated to believe anyway — and they do so “in exchange for money and social rewards”. A marketplace for the rationalisations of desired beliefs has developed, he suggests.
https://unherd.com/2022/03/the-fictional-world-of-trans-activism/
