Tag: 1984

Do trans people exist?

There’s this video clip currently making the rounds where Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) confronts a crazy-eyed law professor from Berkely and gets called out for, among other things, saying that trans people “don’t exist.” It’s a highly partisan exchange that I’m sure will be used by both sides to rally the base, but it also gets at the fundamental incoherence of the modern LGBTQ+ movement, which I find absolutely fascinating.

First of all, it’s worth examining the accusation that Hawley doesn’t think that trans people “exist.” What exactly does that accusation mean? It can actually mean one (or both) of two things:

  1. The category of “trans” is not (or should not be) a legitimate identity for legal and societal purposes.
  2. People who identify as “trans” should be un-personed and deprived of all their basic human rights.

It’s extremely disingenuous of the professor to conflate those things, because it is entirely possible to believe the former without believing the latter: that is, to believe that “trans” as a category is illegitimate while also acknowledging that people who identify as “trans” are still people and deserving of basic human rights. Also, it’s disingenuous of her to argue that denying “trans” as a category causes people who identify as “trans” to commit suicide, as the suicide rate for transgender people is the same after they transition as it is before they transition. But I digress.

The thing that makes this interesting, at least to me, is that if you follow the professor’s logic to its conclusion, it actually undermines the fundamental premise of the gay rights movement: that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals didn’t choose to be gay, but in fact were “born this way.” Allow me to explain.

At first, the argument was “I didn’t choose to be gay, I was born this way.” Thus the concept of sexual identity was born, with categories for heterosexual, homosexual (gay/lesbian), and bisexual.

Then, the argument was “I’m a man/woman who was born in a woman’s/man’s body.” In other words, that gender and sex are separate things, and it is possible to identify with a gender that is different than your sex. Thus, the concept of gender identity was born, and with it the category of transgender.

At this point, it’s important to point out that the “born this way” argument still held sway. The idea wasn’t that trans people choose to change gender, but that they were, in fact, born in the wrong body. Thus the distinction between sex and gender.

But once the trans category was added to the movement, transforming it into LGBT, that created a major epistemological problem for its members: how do you know which category you belong to? That is, how do you know whether you’re actually a gay man, or really a woman in a man’s body? You can’t be both. You were either born one way, or you were born the other. So which one is it, and how do you know?

This is where the movement began to fall apart, because there is no objective way to tell the difference between gay/lesbian and trans. It’s entirely subjective. And once we allowed that, suddenly we got a bunch of people saying things like:

“What if I feel like a man today, and a woman tomorrow?”

“What if I don’t feel like a man OR a woman?”

“What if I feel like I’m actually a cat, or a wolf?”

“What if I feel like I’m a totally different gender/sexual category that none of y’all have imagined yet?”

And suddenly, just like that, the “born this way” argument was completely undermined, because if gender and sexuality are subjective, then it can be whatever you want it to be. Which is how we got personal bios like this one:

Serah Eley is a software developer and former podcaster who once produced a weekly science fiction podcast called Escape Pod. It’s since gone on to become somewhat successful. She strangely mispronounced her name as Steve Eley at the time; she’s since realized that life is much more fun as a woman, and came out as transgender last year. Serah lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her two wives, Alison and Cat.

So if there were ever any betting pools on what happened to Steve: changed sex, joined a committed lesbian love triangle is the dark horse winner. She is, obviously, still Having Fun.

So gender is something you can change on a whim because it’s “more fun”? That doesn’t sound at all like Serah was “born this way.” It sounds a lot more like “reality is whatever I want it to be.”

But if sexuality and gender are all subjective, the entire premise that the movement was originally built upon—that LGBT people are “born this way”—is completely false, and the “born this way” argument is outdated at best, and at worst was a Trojan Horse for the LGBTQ+ agenda from the very beginning.

Either way, by the standards of this Berkeley professor, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals “don’t exist.”

Just like man and woman “don’t exist.”

Just like objective reality doesn’t “exist.”

Because biological sex, “born this way” arguments, and objective reality itself are all fundamentally transphobic.

That’s where you get if you follow the LGBTQ+ logic to its ultimate conclusion. The fundamental premises on which the movement is based are totally incoherent and self-contradictory. It’s remarkable, really, because the language the movement uses is not all that different from the Orwellian doublespeak of 1984.

But hey, I’ve also been reliably informed that reason and logic are all just constructs of white supremacy, so obviously that means that professor crazy-eyes is right and there’s nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.

Trope Tuesday: Sinister Surveillance

secure
This was actually a real poster.

Someone is watching you.  Their eyes are everywhere.  Everything you do, everything you say … it’s all being recorded in a giant database.  But don’t worry–you can trust the ones watching you.  They have your best interests at heart.  They’re only after the bad guys.  You won’t even know that they’re there.

Sinister Surveillance is a hallmark of Dystopia, as essential to the genre as the Crapsack World and the Police Brutality tropes.  Often, you’ll find all three in the same story together.  It’s closely related to Big Brother is Watching, where the government is so powerful, and reaches into so many aspects of everyday life, that they see and record everything you do.  Where Big Brother shapes every aspect of the society, however, down to the language of the citizens and the basic truths accepted as facts, Sinister Surveillance is more about the surveillance itself, and the ulterior motives behind it.

It’s not enough for the government to simply watch you, though.  Even more important in some ways is the idea that you don’t know what they can and can’t see.  The reason for this is the same reason why, in horror stories, we almost never see the monster until the very end–because our imagination makes things a lot scarier than they really are.  If we the bad guys know the limitations of our government surveillance, we they can safeguard our privacy and basic rights game the system.  We’re all afraid of the dark, not because of what’s actually there, but what could be.

The concept behind all this goes back to the Panopticon, a hypothetical prison where the prisoners know that the guards are constantly watching them, but can’t actually see any of the guards themselves.  Proposed by the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham in the 1700s, the idea is to disempower the prisoners and empower the guards simply through the act of surveillance.  If everything you do can be seen, and you don’t know exactly who’s watching, that puts a tremendous amount of social pressure on you to conform.  As Michel Foucault put it:

The Panopticon creates a consciousness of permanent visibility as a form of power, where no bars, chains, and heavy locks are necessary for domination any more.

But if the prisoners are the citizens, and the guards are the government, how can such a system ever be democratic?  How can the citizens of such a society ever give their informed consent?  Well, that’s kind of the point.  The government in dystopian stories is rarely democratic–it’s usually a dictatorship of some kind, or a system that turns well-meaning people into Knights Templar, showing how even the best of us die like animals when the game is rigged.

As benevolent the intentions of the government may initially be, it is nonetheless true that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Just as the Panopticon takes power from the prisoners and concentrates it with the guards, so does universal surveillance grant dangerous amounts of power to the government–not because the act of surveillance is dangerous in itself, but because it brings out the worst in the people doing the surveillance.

In The Road to Serfdom, Freidrich Von Hayek pointed out that self-serving, ambitious, power-hungry people tend to rise in government a lot faster than people who have others’ best interests at heart, especially when so much power is concentrated in the government.  That’s one of the biggest dangers of surveillance–and in stories where Sinister Surveillance is in play, the government has already passed that point.

I wish I could say that this trope is limited mostly to the realm of fiction, but unfortunately, that does not appear to be the case.  These days, it’s impossible to talk about surveillance without getting political, even on a blog dedicated to books and writing.  Because everything these days is online, it’s easier now than ever before for our governments to watch us.  And if Edward Snowden’s claims are even partially correct, that’s exactly what they’re trying to do.  Even more worrying are the indicators that they’re trying to do it in secret, such as this recent letter from Senators Wyden and Udall.  The United States government has lied to us in the past about the extent of the PRISM surveillance program, and it would appear that they’re continuing to do just that.

Wherever you fall politically on PRISM or the Edward Snowden case, I think that Sinister Surveillance is a trope that we should all find profoundly disturbing.  When George Orwell took this trope to its extreme logical conclusions in 1984, he did so to prevent that horrific social order from ever coming to pass.  I wonder: only two or three generations after that book came out, have we forgotten its lessons already?  Or do we need a new retelling to remind us?  I fear that that retelling is taking place, not in the pages of a novel, but in real time on the major blogs and news sites.