Getting Hawled over the Bridges

As part of some Senate hearing on abortion (bit hazy on the details here) the whole gender/trans/woman thing came up again. Why wouldn’t it? After all, the abortion issue obviously will impact trans people every bit as much as, if not more than, mere women. Just like climate change affects gender non-conforming people more severely.

The witness here is Berkeley Law Professor Khiara Bridges and the questioner is Senator Josh Hawley. I haven’t heard of either of these individuals before and knew nothing about their politics or viewpoints.

What was fascinating was the divergence of opinion over who “won” the exchange and who came off looking like a sentient bag of custard.

I would like to say I’ll just post a few quotes and let you all make up your own minds - but I can’t. It’s such a bizarre exchange. The clip I saw opened up with a question about trans rights. Hawley wants some clarification on what ‘rights’ are being fought for, what ‘rights’ are missing for trans people.

Hawley: your view is then that the core of this right is about what?
Bridges : So, I want to recognise that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence

When Hawley expresses surprise that he is opening trans people up to violence she responds by saying that 1 in 5 trans people have attempted suicide.

There’s no attempt at all to actually answer the question that is being asked. Instead, we go straight to DEFCON 1 (cocked pistol - maximum readiness, immediate response) with the accusation of transphobia. The law professor is signalling that whatever is asked or said it’s transphobic (with the implication that it can, therefore, be dismissed). After playing the transphobia card she follows by dealing the violence card - that by merely asking the questions the Senator is “opening up” trans people to violence. I suppose, technically, one can describe suicide as a kind of self-violence, but the law professor is being stretchier than Reed Richards here.

Bridges winds up her attack and starts asking the Senator a question or two :

Bridges: "Do you believe that men can get pregnant?"
Hawley: "No, I don't think men can get pregnant."
Bridges: "So, you're denying that trans people exist."

This is the well-known Cathy Newman attack. Several years ago, Newman, a TV journalist, interviewed Jordan Peterson and deliberately misconstrued his arguments with the pretence of ‘clarification’ by prefacing her questions with “So, what you’re saying is that . . .”

Much of the Newman/Peterson interview can be summarized like this:

Peterson : I love cats
Newman : So, what you’re saying is that you hate dogs

Newman was hoping for some sort of gotcha but she was intellectually outclassed by Peterson in every respect.

Bridges goes full-on Newman here with the “denying existence” attack. No one is “denying” anyone’s existence - but lots of people do have some rather pertinent questions about the alleged properties of those existent beings.

I think the whole question of properties is where I come unstuck with the whole gender ideology stuff. As a physicist I’m used to thinking about stuff we can’t see. We know an ‘electron’ exists because it has measurable properties. An experiment on an electron in New York will determine the same properties as an experiment on an electron in New Delhi (within experimental error).

I don’t know what the properties of ‘gender’ are. I don’t know how an independent impartial observer would be able to determine the gender of someone without asking them. The very notion of gender is inextricably entwined with the notion of gender identity.

Which leads to things like the gender known as xenogender which Wikipedia describes as

a gender identity that references “ideas and identities outside of gender”

It just seems like these gender ideologues are just taking the piss. I wouldn’t mind too much if these weirdos would just play amongst themselves and sit in their own little corner of weird and invent new genders to their heart’s content. You do you, as the saying goes. I actually quite like weird. It’s a really good thing we have people outside of the ‘norm’ - although the price we pay for that benefit is that there are people who are outside of the ‘norm’ in a harmful way (like psychopaths, for example).

And not everyone can be weird, because there has to be some normative ‘non-weird’ to measure against.

The issue is that if I don’t accept and support a given “gender” choice, or say mean things about it, I could land myself in hot water. I have to accept that these “genders” actually exist in some meaningful objective sense. I mean they certainly ‘exist’ as concepts inside someone’s head, but I’m expected to fully participate in someone’s individual self-image and accept it as ‘reality’ in some sort of objective way.

Of course it doesn’t work that way for other categories which have a far lower claim to biological legitimacy than sex. No matter how ‘black’ someone might feel themselves to be, or want to be, for example, transracialism is a very, very definite no-no. You can become a woman, but you can’t make yourself black.

The issue boils down to quite a simple one. Genders are invented, not discovered. There’s no sense in which an electron is “invented”. The ideas and conceptualizations we have about an electron, the theories and models, might not be 100% correct or accurate, but there’s no doubt there is such a thing we call an electron.

When we talk about gender we’re not talking about a thing in the same way that an electron is a thing. We’re talking about some abstract idea that does not have an independent existence outside of our imaginations.

The list of genders is not grounded in any external reality, but in an internal one. The reality of sex has been demoted. Some people even deny the existence of sex claiming it to be a social construct (this is a genuine denial of existence). This promotion of subjective ‘reality’ over any objective reality is, of course, very familiar to anyone who has an acquaintance with post-modernist thinking. Objective reality is seen as “oppressing” a more valid (or perhaps equally valid) subjective reality. Rational thought, the scientific method, are seen as “tools of oppression” and not, as they should be seen, as the only viable tools for understanding the physical reality of our world and the universe.

We absolutely need get back to “following the science” - we need to be grounded in reality, and less concerned about what people feel about that reality, or how they feel reality should be different.

I really do think it’s time we burned some Bridges (obviously not literally if there are any sentient bags of custard reading this)

---