Mick Hartley

Kathleen Stock – forced to resign as philosophy professor at the University of Sussex after harrassment by trans activists – suggests that the trans world involves an immersion in fiction. Normally, of course, immersion in fiction is harmless: something we all move in and out of as we read books and watch TV. It's different when it takes over. You could argue that fascism, say, or communism, are political fictions that can take over and overpower the truth. The world of trans activism provides another case study.

[W]hen it comes to people who aren’t trans, the typical motivations for immersion in transactivism’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 wanting to seem kind because of the social capital it brings you 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.

I just suggested that many of the 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, in this post I want to take a more oblique look at the story leading up to them. For it seems to me that transactivism provides a fascinating case study of what can happen when a political movement abandons truth as a direct aim and pursues fiction instead.

She has fun with those philosophers who decide in advance what conclusions they need to reach on ideological grounds, and then go through contortions to arrive at the correct conclusion:

In the area I’m most familiar with, academic Philosophy, a dedicated band of thinkers seek to provide complex and technical post hoc rationalisations for mantras first expressed by adolescents on Tumblr in 2011. The fact that truth in its traditional sense is not their object of inquiry could not be made plainer.  See, for instance, philosopher Katharine Jenkins, who starts her 2016 article on the nature of womanhood, published in prestigious philosophy journal Ethics, by declaring: “The proposition that trans gender identities are entirely valid—that trans women are women and trans men are men—is a foundational premise of my argument, which I will not discuss further.”  (It’s telling that “valid” is used here in the Tumblr sense of identities being validated like passports or parking tickets, and not in the sense of logical validity more traditional for academic philosophy). The conclusion of Jenkins’ paper, not enormously surprisingly under the circumstances, is that we should use the term “woman” to refer to all and only people who have a female gender identity, whether they are actually female or male.

We've seen this lately with the arguments about trans athlete Lia Thomas, currently smashing all the records for women's college swimming. The point couldn't be simpler: male athletes have no business competing in women's sports. They maintain their overwhelming advantage post-puberty no matter how they identify or what their testosterone level. Yet numerous articles – mostly, it has to be said, in the US – go through all manner of grotesque contortions to arrive at the conclusion they need to reach on ideological grounds: that it's all just fine and wonderful and the critics are just horrible transphobes. The New Yorker effort, taken apart here by Arty Morty, is a good example.

But yes – read Stock's piece in full. It's good stuff.

Update: now at UnHerd.