Transmania

Matt Taibbi calls it the dumbest cover story yet. One cannot help but agree. New York Magazine, which used to be a respectable publication, has published an article by trans writer Andrea Long Chu wherein he argues that children should have a constitutional right to tell physicians to mutilate their bodies. 

Chu dismisses the notion that transgenderism might consist of a psychiatric condition. And yet, given that what is falsely called gender affirming care does not change the nature of any one of a body’s trillions of chromosomes, one must conclude that we are dealing with something akin to a delusional belief. 

Worse yet, as I noted in a previous post, another aspect of the issue tends to be ignored. You might believe that you are a different sex, but if you are constantly interacting with people who either refuse to accept your new sex or simply ignore you, you are not going to be very happy for very long.

We should never get into the business of telling people that they should make themselves social outcasts.

Chu is obviously not a serious thinker, so we do best not to pretend that he is. And yet, Judith Butler, the godmother of this nonsense has a chair at the University of California, at Berkeley, so we should expect something resembling coherent thought from her. We are shocked and dismayed to discover that Butler confuses the concept that grounds her analysis, that of performative utterances.

You might or might not know that the concept was bequeathed by British philosopher, J. L. Austin. He was arguing that certain sentences do not mean something, but do something.

When the minister declares you to be husband and wife, he is doing something. When the duchess christens the boat she is doing something. 

And yet, consider Long’s presentation of Butler’s confusion: 

For Butler, gender was performative, a term they [she] borrowed from the philosophy of language, where it referred to sentences that seem to do things: “I promise,” for instance, a phrase that literally makes a promise. Gender, too, was a kind of promise — “It’s a girl” — one that, because it was not anchored in biological sex, had to be constantly reaffirmed through performative acts, thus allowing the dominant norms to be renegotiated or even subverted. Butler’s example was drag performance, which, by exaggerating the normal rules of gender, acted as an allegory for the way everyone performed gender every day.

And Long continues:

The sentence “I am a girl” is performative speech in the classic sense: It performs an action. She is not only declaring her intent to exercise her freedom of sex in the future; she is, by uttering these words, already exercising it. She is working the weakness in the norm. She is not afraid of sex — she is against it. That is not nothing. There is, in fact, a very important population of Americans who do want trans kids to exist. I am told they are small but growing.

Obviously, this is idiotic. When you say, “it’s a girl” the statement is not divorced from biological reality. Only a fanatical ideologue would argue the point. When you say, “I am a girl” you are not making yourself a girl. 

The best-known performatives, the ones introduced by Austin, involve social actions. Speech is a social action; it is not an expression of something welling up in the depths of your psyche. When the pastor pronounces you man and wife, when he marries you, he most often does so in front of your friends and family. 

If the marriage ceremony includes the phrase: With this ring I thee wed, it is as an adjunct to an action performed by the pastor or minister.

Similarly, when you make a promise to another person you are not redefining your sex. You are engaging in a social transaction, not imposing your delusion on other people.

If you declare yourself to be a girl or a boy you are stating a fact. Your statement is descriptive, not performative. It has everything to do with reality and nothing to do with your illusions.

By Austin’s definition, performative utterances cannot be affirmed or denied by referring to anything real. 

When a drag queen struts and frets like a woman he is only performing in a narrow sense of the word, the sense wherein an actor on stage performs a part and a role. But, he does not become a woman. He pretends to be a woman in order to trick people into believing that he is. If that is what floats your boat, go for it. But, do not imagine that the world will come to an end if people do not accept your lies as truth.

Similarly, when a child is growing up and plays with dolls, wears dresses, puts on makeup these are not performative gestures, even if Judith Butler thinks they are. 

Unfortunately, the misinterpretation of performative utterances has been used as a means to attack social norms. It has especially been used to create the absurd construction called gender. And to insist that gender is real. Long writes:

 If gender really is an all-encompassing structure of social norms that produces the illusion of sex, critics ask, why would the affirmation of someone’s gender identity entail a change to their biology? 

As for the numerous actions that constitute growing up male or female, they are not performatives. They do not make you a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. They place you in society and define your relations with others in your society. They affirm your membership in society and provide you with the ethical bearings that make you a member in good standing of the society. 

Human beings are not Silly Putty. You cannot contort them in any shape you wish, bounce them against the wall and expect that they will become whatever you want them to become.

As for the other deception, this time philosophical and metaphysical, children who are brainwashed into become trans gendered are not discovering who they really are. The notion of being who you really are is another aberrant concept, one that pretends that you can be radically different from your biological constituents.

In truth, recent studies suggest that adolescents who want to transition are often attracted to members of the same sex. Transmania is a modern form of homophobia.

More importantly, these children are being sacrificed to a lesson in advanced brainwashing. We as a civilization are hard at work trying to see if we can not just mutilate bodies, but can mutilate minds, to persuade them to take as true what we say is true. It represents a descent into totalitarianism.

Transmania is a delusional belief. Normally, people who suffer from delusions are considered to be mentally ill. Now, we are working to produce delusional beliefs in children, the better to exercise complete control over their minds. It is a horror, one that cannot be mitigated by the pretense that it is science.

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