Sunday, November 19, 2017

The Transgender Agenda: The War on Truth

Peter Hitchens is the brother of the late lamented Christopher Hitchens. While Christopher happily promoted leftist theories, especially those of the atheist variety, Peter represents the more conservative side of the sibling spectrum.

Today, writing in the Daily Mail,  Peter Hitchens takes aim at the latest appalling piece of leftist dogma. That being the transgender agenda. He points out that a vanguard of revolutionary fanatics are using the transgender agenda to take control of your thought. They are making themselves the final and ultimate arbiters of truth... thus relieving reality and objective facts of the burden. And they are of course using their superior wisdom to mutilate innocent children. If you cannot throw in a little human sacrifice, what good are you?

Hitchens writes:

I once thought the same about the transgender issue. But the idea that people are whatever sex they think they are is a terrifying weapon in the hands of modern Thought Police. Whatever you say, you cannot possibly be right about this. 

Express any opinion (apart from total submission), and within minutes you will be besieged by condemnation. It will be cleverly based on the idea that you are somehow being cruel to some troubled person, even though you aren't doing this at all.

Indeed, you are going to be attacked as a bigot, no matter what you think and no matter what you say. Whatever you say anything you are going to be wrong. It's not about right or wrong. It's about belonging or not belonging to the Party.

Even if you say that right thing the thought police will denounce you for not being sufficiently sincere. Hitchens explains that the transgender agenda is attacking biological realities, the realities of chromosomal sex difference. If your ideas supersede reality, they can no longer be tested. They must be accepted as transcendent truth:

But that is just a pretext. In reality, a whole moral and social system is being destroyed, and traditional ideas of male and female are the next target, now that husbands and marriage have been done away with. For once you begin down the road of sexual revolution, there's no end. There will always be someone more militant than you.

Hitchens suggests that it goes back to the French Revolution and to its corollary notion that human nature could be changed into whatever we wanted it to be. All great Revolutionary dictators, from Lenin to Stalin to Hitler to Mao, believe this. As did Marx, Freud and Heidegger. I discussed the point at length in my book, The Last Psychoanalyst:

Since the French Revolutionaries set up the guillotine, the same thing has been true. Revolutions are all based on the false idea that humans and their nature can be changed.

And once changed, they will fit neatly into the Utopia that is planned for them. Utopia, as we find every so often in Russia, China and Cambodia, can only be approached across a sea of blood, and you never actually arrive.

Today the thought police have taken out after a schoolteacher. The poor man slipped up and called a transgender girl a boy. He is going to be disciplined for his bigotry:

And that is why The Mail on Sunday's exclusive story, that a teacher has been disciplined for failing to respect the transgender gospel, is so important. His slip was small, and momentary. One of his pupils, who would once have been called a girl, has decided to be male. He called this person a girl. So he must suffer.

In the vanished world of absolute truth, the student's sex would not be a matter of opinion. People might (and I would favour this) treat the person's view of their sex with sympathy and try to go along with it. Who would want to hurt somebody on a matter of such delicacy?

But in the new revolutionary world, truth is what the revolution says it is. This works in many ways.

In a world where people respect facts and understand the difference between true and false this would not be an issue. In today’s politically correct world, it is a thought crime. And no thought crime can go unpunished.

Have you noticed that the people who constitute the Thought Police are up in arms when Donald Trump stretches and bends the truth? They refuse to pledge allegiance to the flag but they proclaim, for all to heat it, their eternal allegiance to fact. If, as has been definitively shown, transgender children and adults have no biological basis—aka fact-- for their belief—called delusional by some—they you are obliged to accept it unthinkingly, facts be damned.

If you think that Trump plays a bit loose with the facts, the transgender agenda seeks to obliterate reality on the bonfire of an ideology. Once reality has been erased those who hold the purest and clearest view of the dogmatic truth will be able to impose it on everyone. Power to the intellectual elites, even if they can’t think straight:

This leads down a very dark staircase. Reality must increasingly be forced to fit the beliefs of the new elite. Teachers must be punished for speaking the truth, so schools are no longer places where truth is respected or dissent allowed – which means they are dead to all intents and purposes.

As has often been noted on this blog, the transgender agenda tries to convert people during childhood, before the onset of puberty. It attempts to brainwash children into believing that they are transgender, then to subject them to puberty blocking treatments… leading up to gender reassignment surgery. One is constrained to note that the United States military, to its eternal disgrace, has chosen to pay for such surgeries-- in defiance of a presidential order-- and thus to legitimate the transgender agenda.

Hitchens writes:

And perhaps most grievous of all, teenagers are placed on a medical conveyor belt which leads to powerful body-changing drugs and possibly to surgical alteration.

It is not just crabbed reactionaries such as me who fret about this. In an eloquent article in The Times, the far-from-conservative commentator Janice Turner recently warned: 'But in a decade, when our adult children turn to ask, 'Why did you let me do this? Why didn't you stop me?' we may wonder if this was progress or child abuse.'

We are failing to stop this because we are afraid of the intolerant revolutionary mob, which would lock up dissenters if it could, but for the moment contents itself with Twitter storms and witch-hunts.

I can't laugh this off. It is not just a wind-up. It is a threat to free thought and, after many months of staying silent about it, I feel I have to say so.

That faint rumble you can hear is the mob assembling for another heresy hunt.

The war on truth, the war on facts is alive and well. It is even becoming more mainstream.

8 comments:

  1. The answer to 2+2 is whatever the Party says it is. I really wish people didn't think that book was an instruction manual.

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  2. Stuart: If, as has been definitively shown, transgender children and adults have no biological basis—aka fact-- for their belief—called delusional by some—they you are obliged to accept it unthinkingly, facts be damned.

    It seems like the same question arises in the whole issue of sexual expression. You can say "homosexuality doesn't exist because we can't measure it in biology" but people still act on their preferences. We might boldly claim all homosexuals are confused, and with proper conditioning, their homosexual urges can be repressed and redirected towards the same sex, and yet that may also be a delusional belief we're trying to inflict on others for our own comfort.

    The only serious argument I have against transgender is the proposed solution - that they have to take hormones or have reconstructive surgery to transform their appearance to match their self perception. That looks to me to be self-hatred, maybe no different than men who use injections for fake biceps, or women with cosmetic surgery for breast augmentation. All of that looks like self-destructive and dangerous.

    Jordan Peterson's complaint against the trans movement was against the threat that it may soon be a hate crime to not use the gender pronoun a person requests. And identity politics causes part of the trouble, where every self-identified oppressed group categorically supports without question the delusional beliefs of other self-identified oppressed group.

    Carl Sagan said "Science has taught us that, because we have a talent for deceiving ourselves, subjectivity may not freely reign." but this candle the dark is necessarily weak if done honestly.

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  3. AO: You can say "homosexuality doesn't exist because we can't measure it in biology"...

    Who said that?

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  4. TW: Who said that?

    Have we discovered a scientific test for homosexuality of an individual? I didn't think there was. Certainly it would make some people feel better if an objectivity test could tell them there feelings are real. It might also be very helpful for bigoted societies who want to isolate the freaks from access to power.

    I do recall there was a statistical correlation of male birth order, so a first born male was least likely to be gay, but no determinism here.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male_sexual_orientation
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    According to several studies, each older brother increases a male child's naturally occurring odds of having a homosexual orientation by 28–48%. It has been estimated that approximately one in seven homosexual males owe their sexual orientation to the fraternal birth order effect. There seems to be no effect of birth order on sexual orientation in women.
    ---

    Here's a possible epigenetic source, chemical markers that can change how genes are expressed, but no clear determinism.
    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/10/homosexuality-may-be-caused-chemical-modifications-dna

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  5. That's a very interesting disqusition (complete with handy links!), Ares, but - assuming you responded to my question since you led with it - I'm still wondering... who made the statement you quoted?

    To cut this short, I'm thinking the answer is: "Nobody."

    After all, you can say "Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe..."

    In this case, someone actually did. :-D Care for a link?

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  6. Jordan Peterson problem with the transgender movement is their control over the language. He studied totalitarian movements and has said the first thing they do is try to control the language and in doing so make all the people live a lie. He quotes Solzhenitsyn frequently saying that what the Soviet system did was demoralize everyone by making them say what is false is truth. Solzhenitsyn said that If one person had said the truth the whole system would have fallen

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  7. And another thing that the transgender movement is good for is Munchausen Moms. They can abuse their children with impunity

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  8. Whitney, thanks for the summary of some of Jordan Peterson's thoughts.

    I saw he also just released a 90 minute interview with Jonathan Haidt, and includes Haidt's attempt to get universities to sort themselves by a mission for Truth or for Social Justice, asserting these missions are contradictory and can't exist together.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IBegL_V6AA The Perilous State of the University: Jonathan Haidt & Jordan B Peterson

    Haidt gives an example of his own experience where he played a video to his class of someone who said homosexuality felt repulsive, and a student called his class homophobic and forced him to apologize, which was not accepted and then complained about him to the university.
    http://sternoppy.com/2014/02/on-jonathan-haidts-homophobic-comments-an-open-letter-to-dean-henry

    This is the organization Haidt help found, to encourage political diversity within university fields to reduce the threat of Group Think among like-minded researchers.
    https://heterodoxacademy.org
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    Heterodox Academy members are all professors who have endorsed this statement:

    “I believe that university life requires that people with diverse viewpoints and perspectives encounter each other in an environment where they feel free to speak up and challenge each other. I am concerned that many academic fields and universities currently lack sufficient viewpoint diversity—particularly political diversity. I will support viewpoint diversity in my academic field, my university, my department, and my classroom.”
    ---

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