It’s no surprise that both sides of the discussion still cannot get their shit together. Those on the left can’t seem to stop screaming “bigot” at anyone who questions their codified accepted doctrines, and those on the right can’t seem to stop being actual bigots. Why is it so impossibly difficult for somebody to simultaneously accept that there is likely a social contagion effect causing kids who are not trans to identify as trans, and also accept that genuine transgender people exist and deserve to be socially accepted as the gender they internally experience. It’s not that hard people.
The Chappelle controversy about his comedy special The Closer came and went, and despite the fact that he clearly isn’t transphobic, it is fully accepted on the left that he is a transphobic bigot. This played out again with the comedy special from Ricky Gervais, SuperNature. At the beginning he explicitly calls out people who can’t seem to understand what irony is, and recognize why it is funny for a person (him) to joke as if they believe something they clearly don’t. In the special he jokes about masturbating to pictures of Hitler, weening pedophiles off of children by using dwarves, punching disabled children, says Eskimos are basically just “Chinamen” covered with dead seals, and yes, joked about trans people with penises. Despite that the trans jokes were only a small percentage of the jokes and were certainly no more offensive than the jokes on disabled children and dwarves, the comedy special is now universally known on the left as Ricky Gervais’ transphobic special. The irony was in fact lost on people knee-jerking on his jokes.
One argument often used against Gervais is that his jokes are harmful to trans people and directly lead to violence against them. That is stupid. Nobody who was not already an anti-trans bigot is going to hear Ricky’s trans jokes and decide they now hate trans people. Yeah, some inept right-wingers may also miss Ricky’s irony and enjoy the jokes as if he was serious. I don’t see how that translates into violence against transgender individuals that wouldn’t already have occurred. This whole perspective, however, parallels another insidious left-wing proclivity; rejecting inconvenient facts.
For example, it is standard procedure on the left to reject the notion of the social contagion leading some people who are not trans to identify as trans. Bess Marcus, dean of Brown’s School of Public Health, criticized a scientific study on the transgender social contagion because she believes the study’s conclusions “could be used to discredit efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate the perspectives of members of the transgender community.” That is one of the most anti-science perspective I can think of. How a fact might be misused by a bigot is completely irrelevant; what matters is whether it is true.
Desistance is another such topic inconvenient to far-left zealots. The existence of people who used to identify as trans realizing they were not transgender and desisting from identifying as such is very inconvenient to the left. Indeed, the left often ends up being quite hateful to people who publicly discuss their desistance. It is true that bigots on the right try to use the existence of transgender desistance to claim that no real trans people exist at all, and this is a legitimate problem. But given the seriousness and irreversibility of transition, desistance cannot be ignored. Transitions should not be hastily undertaken, and they shouldn’t be based exclusively on the self-diagnoses of an individual. In no other context would a doctor just accept the self-diagnoses of a patient and prescribe treatment based on that basis.
Another avenue where those on the left go off the rails is failing to acknowledge that there is a legitimate concern with transgender individuals in sports. It does not make someone a bigot to notice that trans women might have an unfair physical advantage when competing against cis women. Moreover, it’s hard to ignore that it is almost exclusively trans women wanting to compete with cis women and not trans men wanting to compete with cis men. Trans men don’t seem to be in a hurry to compete with people who have physiological advantages over them.
Don’t get me wrong, right-wingers constantly seize on situations of legitimate concern, like that with trans individuals competing in sports, and going full bigot with it. Actual transphobes hate transgender people and they make no attempt to meet half way or try to resolve the problem in a way that is empathetic to transgender individuals. I know I’ve spent most of this discussion attacking the left, but it is my position that the political right is definitely the more wrong of the two sides. Right-wingers are doing their damndest to codify anti-trans bigotry into law. That is a whole different level than people on the left just trying to socially cancel somebody. Bathroom bills, attempted military bans on transgender servicemen, Texas enabling prosecution of parents who provide gender-affirming care to their children; the far-right is going theocratic totalitarianism with the topic.
Against Unreason 