Matt Taibbi: The New Yorker, "Andrea" Long Chu, and "The Dumbest Cover Story Ever": "Freedom of Sex"

I haven't read this New Yorker story...but, then, I don't have to. I know all the arguments and they are, indeed, stupid.

   One thing you have to realize about the left: it's an incoherent mish-mash of negative, intentionally destructive arguments. Its goal is not to say something coherent about the status quo--it's not even clear how much of the left even believes in coherence, nor how much that does believes it to be a desideratum. The contemporary left is an incoherent mass of individually incoherent quasi-literary, quasi-philosophical theories that aims to destabilize the status quo. Queer theory is one component of the left that openly admits this. At its heart, queer theory is not about non-heterosexuality--it's about undermining the intellectual foundations of society--Western civilization in particular. Capitalism, of course, is always Public Enemy Number One for them. Followed closely by the nuclear family. As Larry Correia has said, approximately: it's about destroying everything that works and replacing it with an imaginary utopia made of unicorn farts.

   If there were really such a thing as sex changes, or if the pseudo-sex-changes we can currently perform were reversible, fewer people would object to them. If people could take a pill and genuinely transform into the opposite sex--and especially if this were similarly reversible--there wouldn't be much to object to. We might even permit this for kids. But that's not what's happening. What's happening is that children are being brainwashed with incoherent, leftist, postpostmodern bullshit--brainwashed into undertaking life-destroying and semi-destroying medical procedures that that they simply are not in a position to really understand. "Gender" has become an incoherent pseudo-concept to obscure what's really going on here. (And don't get me started on the phrase "gender-affirming care"...) And "sex changes" are not sex changes at all, but sexual mutilation. And the left is insisting that children be allowed to make these decisions.

   Another problem with the left is that, in order to support their first-order policy preferences, they commonly have to presuppose a boatload of insane, pseudo-philosophical meta-positions--e.g. reality is socially constructed, truth is relative or subjective, language cannot refer to non-linguistic objects, natural kinds are not real, women, indigenous people and other allegedly oppressed groups have special "knowledges" or "ways of knowing" that evilstraightwhitemales cannot fathom, capitalism is the source of Western science and metaphysics, etc. etc. etc. To defend their first-order positions, they have to dump a whole truckload of unsupportable, generally unintelligible philosophical views onto the debate. This means, in reality, they cannot support their positions--their arguments require that they first be able to win intractable debates by defending incoherent positions. Chu can defend his conclusions only if you basically grant him premises like Capitalism created the sexes. As soon as you realize that, you should decare the debate over. It's obviously false--in fact, insane--and such arguments have no place in policy discussions. It's as if you refused to acknowledge the property line between your land and your neighbors' on the grounds that Marx questions the legitimacy of private property. Even aside from the obvious point that the burden of proof is on you (and you can't carry it), this is an egregious violation of the presuppositions of ordinary reasoned discussion. You might as well take my lawn mower and then argue that it's not really mine because we're in the Matrix and none of the physical objects we see are real...

   The left would never let the right get away with such a thing--and rightly so. If the right made another push to get creationism or intelligent design theory taught in schools, and if their alleged justifications required the acceptance of a bunch of heavy-duty metaphysics about God and the creation and original sin or whatever...or if they explicitly made appeals to faith or direct religious experience in their arguments...progressives would laugh them off the stage. As well they should. But that's exactly the sort of thing the left is doing on basically every front in the culture war.