Transgender Chronicles: "Lesbian Feminist Defends 'Misgendering': 'It's Not Inhumane To Tell The Truth'

The battle-lines get rotated weirdly in this disagreement so that conservatives often end up agreeing with radical feminists about transgender ideology--and seemingly agreeing with then about a bunch of anti-male views they'd normally deride.

   It's also, as I keep saying, a sign of our current insanity that only radical feminists are allowed to criticize transgender ideology. And, of course, they mostly do that according to the contemporary progressive rules of debate: merely arguing that transgender ideology is false is verboten; arguments are only permissible if they conclude that TI causes harm to some other group high in the progressive stack--e.g. (actual) women.

   So this is notable in that at least the falsehood of TI plays an important role in the case.

   Repeating myself yet again: this whole debate could be had in a sane way by (a) jettisoning the patently false claim that "transwomen" are women (and "transmen" are men), and (b) asking whether / when segregation by sex is permissible. This would be made easier if we cleared away progressive efforts to obfuscate the old-school, true-and-conceptually-useful sex/gender distinction. But TI would have a very hard time surviving without obfuscating that distinction. 

   IMO there's some pretty bad news for progressivism and transgender ideology here. I'm inclined to think that its rhetorical / social victory was largely predicated on a kind of blitzkrieg that tried to shut down all open disagreement before the opposition even knew what was going on. They nearly won--after all, they control all the cultural salients. But some radical feminists (especially: lesbians) refused to be silenced--and they were hard to attack openly given the prevailing progressive rules of debate. And the longer there is actual discussion of this insanity, the greater the odds that open questioning will spread from conservatives and radical feminists back to respectable, consequential parts of the culture.

   All rational people ought to be worried by this even if the tide is ultimately turned. Because what we see here is a completely insane story about people changing sex by simply saying so. And progressivism threw its entire weight behind this daft tale. And the rules of inquiry and debate progressivism have imposed on the culture via sheer force of will and power and shrill insistence are anti-rational in the extreme. And even if the tide turns against TI, those rules of debate remain in place. And there's no guarantee that sanity will win out next time. Nor, again, that it will do so this time...