Richard, aka Rachel Levine

As you have heard, Twitter just canceled the Babylon Bee for having committed what it called hate speech. The speech in question was a headline naming Richard, aka Rachel Levine, Man of the Year. 

The satirical site was responding to USA Today’s having named Levine one of the top women of the year.

This censorship comes fast upon the controversy surrounding Penn swimmer William aka Lia Thomas, a male being, with male chromosomes and male genitalia who insists that he is a woman. For having asserted his deep conviction-- assuming that he is not simply trolling the world-- Thomas has been allowed to compete in women’s sports. 

Anyway, in the matter of the Babylon Bee, which has been given less consideration than the ayatollah of Iran, whose remarks calling for the destruction of the state of Israel are apparently not hate speech-- because the account has not been suspended-- the problem is that the Bee’s take on Levine is true.

One understands that in the matter of libel and slander and defamation of character, truth is a defense. You cannot libel someone by telling the truth about that person. And clearly, when an individual changes his mind about his gender that does not change a single one of the trillions of his chromosomes that remain XY. 

Besides, no one who looks at the public appearance of Richard aka Rachel Levine would reasonably imagine that he is really a she. The gaslighting is preposterous. Not only that, but America, thanks to this nonsense, is fast becoming an international laughing stock. If it were not bad enough that our president is cerebrally defective and that our vice president is patently stupid, we are showing the world that our so-called democracy is not democratic, does not tolerate differences of opinion and insists that belief supersedes scientific fact. 

But, the powers that be in the culture insist that we must call the transgendered by their preferred pronouns and that we must allow them to use all facilities, like shower rooms and rest rooms, by the gender that they believe that they are. Any objective evaluation of the person’s gender-- you know how to recognize gender-- must yield to the belief.

This reasoning has corrupted public debate about gender. We now have something that we call gender affirming surgery. An astonishing claim, given of course that the surgery in question merely affirms a delusional belief. And gender, last I looked, is not a belief. Besides, no one in the history of the human species has ever claimed that removing the male genitalia, with whatever surgical skill, produces female genitalia. A bad facsimile, perhaps, but certainly male genitalia. See the case of Leanne Mills, reported by the BBC and this blog.

In the past, in the bad old days, men who had their genitals removed were called eunuchs. Thanks to this surgery they were deemed qualified to assist various Chinese empresses. 

And yet, this systematic gaslighting in the matter of gender has become a cause celebre on the left. Why, recently, students at Yale Law School shouted down Kristen Waggoner, a conservative Christian of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) at a public debate. For good measure some of the students threatened her physically-- which is apparently acceptable speech.

The Yale Law School incident drew back the curtain on the thinking at major American law schools and the legal profession. See Aaron Sibarium’s extensive study on Bari Weiss’s Substack.

Anyway, as one federal judge suggested, this madness will continue until some stands up and says that those who war against free speech should pay a price for their zealotry. They should not be hired as clerks for federal judges. In some sense this is already happening, since judges have been taking fewer and fewer students from Yale Law.

But then, since the Law School administration refuses to sanction the students who shut off a speaker they did not like, judges and law firms ought to start refusing to hire clerks and associates from Yale. Dare I say, it will get their attention.

So, to return to the current debate over transgenderism, apparently people who under biochemical mutilation, surgical mutilation and who suffer injections of cross sex hormones are feeling the greatest anguish and emotional pain over the fact that someone called them the wrong pronoun. The reasoning is so faulty that it does not qualify as reasoning.

We might well feel some sympathy for young people who have been seduced into transgenderism, and especially for those who have suffered irreversible damage-- because giving puberty blockers to nine year olds causes irreversible damage. And yet, the rage to mutilate children means only that the advocates of transgenderism want to ensure that children cannot change their minds-- to return to their biological sex. They know, as we all know, that most of the children who think that they were born in the wrong bodies change their minds.

Anyway, the argument for censoring content that does not correlate with leftist prejudice has long since been based on the notion that hate speech produces hateful actions. Apparently, there would be no more bad behavior if only we could shut down bad speech. 

Obviously, this is an exercise in mind control. Evidently, its proponents have never imagined that they might promote good behavior by promoting good behavior and by not trying to gaslight a nation. That is, by not trying to tell them to ignore the evidence of their senses and the workings of their rational faculties.

In the meantime, the Quillette site has published an extensive study of the influence of hate speech on hateful behavior. As you might have imagined, the connection is not as obvious as the enemies of free speech would have it be.

In truth, as the argument used to have it, censoring speech forces people to seek more radical and more drastic ways to express themselves. With their speech censored people are more likely to think that their notions of conspiratorial oppression are correct. Ergo.

Here are some of the research reports:

Big Tech censorship policies can be expected to cause a migration of information from large-scale platforms (where feedback from a general population may serve to counter and moderate extreme views) to smaller platforms, where extreme beliefs can be reinforced by others who have also been banned by larger platforms. This creates powerful echo chambers in which controversial ideas are reinforced and then carefully reworded for reintroduction into mainstream social-media spaces.

Moreover, enhanced efforts to police large-scale platforms promote further narratives of censorship and victimhood, and can thereby increase the commitment level of those who have already invested in the extremist message.

In short, shutting down speech you do not like causes the ideas to migrate elsewhere. Forcing people to act as though biological science does not count and that objective reality is a mirage that can be changed by changing your mind is more likely to anger people and to make them more hostile. When we arrive at the point where we feel that we are being forced to sustain someone’s delusional belief, to pretend that it’s true, then we open the door to every other form of delusional belief. At the least, we take our leave from objective reality and enter a totalitarian world defined by the thought police and the ministry of mind control.