Ilana Redstone: America By Gaslight

link

A main point: combining "the settled-question fallacy" with social punishment for wrongthink generates resentment. 

I don't care so much about the resentment part--but it seems right.

What I guess I'd say is: it'd be bad enough if we took an open question and prohibited people from accepting or endorsing one of the possible answers.

That's certainly what's going on in some cases--and in the case of the question How much racism is there in America? The most likely answer--but at least a reasonable one--is: not a massive amount. But that answer has been decreed not only impermissible, but racist. 

But Redstone's example of transgenderism isn't a good one to illustrate that problem.

What's happened in the case to transgenderism is that an actually settled question was deemed, by diktat, to be an open one...and then the actual, true, not-actually-in-question "answer" was deemed impermissible. 

A woman, to take the central case, is an adult, female human. One can--as is often done in philosophy--undertake to cook up doubts about it by focusing on distant logical possibilities. But such "doubts" aren't real doubts, and the issue isn't really in question. The "doubts" are pseudo-doubts. The gender-ideological position on the "question"/"dispute" is wildly implausible. It's more on the order of a skeptical "doubt": maybe woman has--somehow...unbeknownst to anyone for thousands of years--been a non-biological kind or concept all along... That idea is interesting only because it's so wildly implausible.

If the idea remained confined to seminar rooms, it would be a mere waste of time.

But that's one of the main characteristics of the postmodern progressive left: abstruse philosophical ideas are introduced into practical affairs. It's as if we had suddenly begun worrying about whether we were brains in vats when we were trying to make budget decisions or allocate resources to the military.

Sure, China seems like a threat...but maybe it doesn't exist at all...

To make matters worse--which, prima facie, one might have thought impossible--the crazy, philosophical, pseudo-doubt is declared true...and, worse: unquestionable.

So, in actual fact, the situation is often much worse than Redstone describes.

And this is political correctness: the declaration that obvious facts are fictions, and obvious fictions are facts--and the mass, rabid punishment of those who do the equivalent of refusing to "admit" that 2+2=5...