Public orthodoxies that diverge from private opinion may be surprisingly stable, but they can also prove remarkably unstable, because they depend on private thoughts to stay private, giving doubters the illusion that they are lone deviants rather than members of a silent majority....
Why is this surprising? It's the familiar story of "The Emperor's New Clothes," which everyone has always easily understood.
Starting around 2015, an orthodoxy on transgender issues crystallized, seemingly out of nowhere....
Once you've said "2015," you've got your answer staring you in the face! Why don't you see it? That was the year gay people won their great victory, a right to marry, in Obergefell v. Hodges. McArdle has "an orthodoxy... crystalliz[ing]" — as if a mysterious disembodied force emerged out of nothing — ex nihilo!
But real human beings were involved and their incentive to acquire a new cause is obvious. The activists had won, but they still needed to work, they still needed contributions, they still needed to push conventional people to move forward into challenging new territory. They couldn't just allow people to become decently accepting and empathetic to the gay people who, after all, are human beings who sometimes love each other and want a home and a family. Remember that moment?
That made too much sense. Ordinary people relaxed. Got comfortable.
By the time I went to the Ivy League swimming championships in 2022 to cover the controversy over a trans swimmer, people I talked to evinced a wariness that seemed more appropriate to a Cold War spy novel than to citizens of a free republic....
What happened?
You should have tracked the change, not waited for a lawsuit by someone injured as a child to create a big economic incentive for the experts to adjust their position. McArdle says:With more of these suits in the offing, malpractice insurers will ask that same question. If they don’t like the answers, that may ultimately mean the end not just of surgeries for minors, but of hormones and puberty blockers, even in states where they are legal. If that happens, opponents of those interventions will no doubt cheer. Though I have questions about whether pediatric medical transition works, I won’t. For one thing, I’m not opposed to pediatric transition. I simply believe we need better evidence before making it standard medical practice. For another, as I’ve stressed in this column before, a courtroom is the worst place to resolve questions that should have been answered long before.
It's the worst place except for all the other places.
Posts
58 comments:
Sigh. Yes. From the people who screamed "trust the science!" a few short years later, except principles of pharmaceutical science and basic biology. I wonder if one driver of the trans-craze was parents who preferred a cutting edge trans child to a garden variety gay child. I suppose we will never know.
Pro-trans is (maybe safe to say "was" since this is from the WaPo's liberaltarian weathervane) socially acceptable homophobia.
“For one thing, I’m not opposed to pediatric transition. I simply believe we need better evidence before making it standard medical practice.“
She needs to be challenged to explain this. We don’t let children make life altering decisions, as a rule. Better evidence doesn’t change the fact of it being life altering.
The Global Warming scam destroyed any deference to alleged experts for half the country, the half not invested in using climate scaremongering to gain political power and get rich quick. Then the censorship of opposing views started and alleged journalists joined in with “there is no other side” to this existential threat.
Then with COVID the same globalist power grabbers used a manufactured flu virus to crank up a new climate of fear and crisis “power consolidation” and rolled out the same censorship industrial complex to silence opposition to that power grab and hoax. Experts destroyed their own credibility and reputations. The crushing weight of government control was used to force an untested “vaccine” on a scared public and more people were red-pilled by the shock at how quickly peaceful government institutions had turned coercive and suffocating in scope and intent.
Nothing was accepted based on expert opinion now. The transmania was doomed by its own contradictory nature and people were just fucking tired of being told how to think what to think and the idiotic pretense that answering “what is a woman?” is somehow a difficult question.
Body, mind and spirit. Crush a child’s Spirit by saying the world is dying quickly. Teach them to hate the Body they were “assigned” by malevolent parents. Then control their Minds by constant propaganda and censorship to stamp out wrongthink.
This has been and is the Progressive plan for “the children” over the last century and remains so today. Only the current “issue” changes but the plan and its techniques remain unchanged.
WAIT A MINUTE!
are You Saying? that OTHER People Also think that it's Wrong for a mom for castrate her son.. Just Because SHE Wants a daughter?
I thought *i* was the only one that thought that!
I read McArdle regularly before she disappeared behind the WaPo paywall. I'll die before I add to Jeff Bezos' fortune.
Once you've said "2015," you've got your answer staring you in the face! Why don't you see it? That was the year gay people won their great victory, a right to marry..
Progressives gotta Progress!
They're like sharks, if they're not Moving Forward; they die.
This raises the scary question: What would have been next?
IF Trans made it.. And Then Kiddy Trans made it..
What would the Progressives have pushed NEXT?
Polygamy? Child Brides? Banning Pork? Banning Music?
WHERE will our Progressive Leaders take us NEXT?
Every now and then you run across someone who washes their hands per the official orthodoxies except it's to remove the evil spirits.
Trans, homos and sims. The phobic reaction of the politically congruent was clearly evident in the rush to socially distance homos from sims. That said, civil unions for all consenting adults. #NoJudgment? #NoLabels? #LoveWins? #ProChoice
Sodomizers tend to be naturally skilled at glorifying sodomy as opposed to other things, just like con artists tend to be good at conning. Their victims, the sodomized, which I suppose trans people more tend to be, aren't likely to be naturally thus skilled, unless they have natural sodomizing tendencies; the sodomized are likely to have a natural sense of embarrassment and shame (the tendency to feel this way is a natural defense people have evolved as a defense against being taken advantage of by evil) that exhibits itself at times, possibly contributing to a public image of sodomy that is inconvenient to sodomizers. Forcible sodomizers also in a way tend to belittle sodomy by calling those they want to sodomize gay (if male) or a slut (if female), so after ass raping them they can more easily pretend that the person ass raped naturally wanted it.
a courtroom is the worst place to resolve questions that should have been answered long before.
Outside of a courtroom, questions were not entertained, answered, or even permitted.
We know what happened with Trans ideology and with Covid. How do we keep it from happening again?
"Shut up", he explained.
That old meme is informative. If the public orthodoxy can't be discussed, debated, explained or questioned, then it may be bullshit.
The side that is censoring and scowling, is probably wrong.
All the righr people believe it, meghan when did she start to speak up
I’ll add to Ann’s and MJB Wolf’s comment by noting that once real air pollution was fixed that crowd needed to have carbon dioxide declared as pollution and harmful to human life. Justice JP Steven’s wrote the 5-4 opinion based on expert opinions.
The CAGW scam has created the Green-Industrial complex and I remain astounded about the money it has created. As a lawyer, I’m trying to stop three Green Energy projects which will cost over $2b. And I think I am going to win all three!
Trenchant observation about the trans movement hatched immediately after Obergefell, Anne. Per Alinsky, the issue is never the issue, the issue is the Revolution. Win gay marriage, immediately fill the trenches with new cannon fodder, arms, etc, consolidate and attack the next weak point.
The Red Army from 1944 until victory.
I used to wish for the end point in pronouns, aberrant views, progressive orthodoxies, to get to rest for a year or two. Get to the endpoint, relax into my age.
Never going to happen.
Lie after lie, crazy stacked on crazy, never are the crushed norms re-examined. One more sickening mass destruction of civilization.
Like Akhenaten killing the established religious/cultural/social order, the French restart at Year Zero, the Maoist revolutionary destruction, the German nihilistic leaders slaughtering East and West fronts, sending the agent of German nihilistic philosophers (Lenin) to spawn the regime to destroy the next European generation, in response to Hitler mandating churches to replace crosses and religious art with his picture.
This is the current goal.
Stay steadfast. They will never relent.
Who pushed the envelop of chimerism.a sex predator from australia
The trans movement progressed with homos. The sims thought they could piggyback on political congruence ("="), but the orthodoxy rejected them and invented a novel brand of banners and rhetoric to socially distance sims from homos. This was a logical progression from reproductive rites demanded by feminists on the heals of Diversity (i.e. class-disordered ideologies) favored by most Democrats as religious dogma.
Watching that Miranda missive, I started hearing the chorus "She's lump, she's lump / She's in my head / She's lump, she's lump, she's lump / She might be dead", from the 1995 song "Lump" by The Presidents of the United States of America.
The other thing that happened was that suddenly trans rights were civil rights. Once that happened there was potential harm to those who dared speak the truth. By that time, medicine was well into being corporatized so that the majority of physicians were employees answerable to corporate bosses rather than independent practitioners. Corporations are especially sensitive to avoiding accusations of civil rights violations, so they made sure their employees toed the line.( I think this is why public schools went in so strongly for the trans ideology, too, by the way.) With the successful malpractice lawsuit, they now have another legal threat from the other side, so it's no longer safe just to keep their head down and hope the insanity doesn't touch them. If you are threatened no matter what choice you make, you might as well choose the truth, which is that interfering with children's natural biological development is harmful.
their incentive to acquire a new cause is obvious. The activists had won, but they still needed to work, they still needed contributions, they still needed to push conventional people to move forward into challenging new territory.
After the first Black president, they started talking about Brown people.
Evil find a way, at first it was merely madness
As an aside, I've noticed fewer and fewer people have their pronouns listed in their LinkedIn profile, and a couple of colleagues who've removed theirs.
Official orthodoxies persist even when few people believe them because we live in an age when adherence to the preferred narrative trumps the truth.
Too many people have their self worth tied to their preferred narratives. When the truth conflicts with that they literally cannot handle it.
People who knew better should have slapped down this pagan abomination
Said AMDG without irony, I guess.
But here are, once again back to Totem and Taboo, which addressed this very issue, and served as the scientific foundation of the manipulation of electorates via propaganda.
The madness of crowds, Bertrand Russell also addressed this issue, though he was more interested in the fact that language, rhetoric, is not really logic, but can be used to make people believe that they are reasoning, when they are really just at the effect of the fear of being thrown out of their in group by having an unpopular opinion.
Kak talked about "private mutterings" coming to the fore, it was projection on his part, I believe, but the whole purpose of propaganda campaigns is to keep those "private mutterings" bottled up. Maybe the happy day has come when the edifice collapses.
So the emperor has no clothes? Who knew?
Russell didn't believe that it was really possible for a human being to reason completely outside of the frames created for us by the culture, but still one should try as hard as possible to do so. But rewards for freethinking are few, and the social and political drawbacks are many.
It's the failure of the Vocal Minority, and I for one am heartened to see it, and want to see it harder. I feel like we're emerging from a kind of mini Dark Age, where it would appear that humanity has correctly perceived the tangible threat to the principles of free speech, and decided rather adamantly that they are going to have it, and will not accept it being taken away. That's a good thing. The institutionalized hustles of the past few decades - the Climate Change hoax, the Gay and Trans manias, the immigrant flood, the persecution of ordinary and political figures through cancel culture and lawfare - these are societal poisons. Get thee away !
Christianity and Western Civilization in the USA is evaporating. Sometimes the left is stopped, but its only temporary. There is zero, I repeat zero, desire for any counter-revolution. Pretty soon 200 lbs. "Women" competing against females will be the "new normal" and all the conservatives who are all aghast now, will accept it and move on.
Change only comes from the Left. The Right just reacts. Its the controlled opposition.
The same people who used to be against gay marriage, are now running round claiming "Nobody hates homophobia more than me". Pretty soon it will be the same with Trans people and their weird nonsense.
It's like children opening Christmas presents.
Gotta fill that rice bowl, bucko. And if you cut off the naughty bits and then the cuttee regrets it, it's the cost of doing bidness.
Homos transition near viability where babies are aborted under Planned Parenthood umbrella corporation.
Baby "=" burden to accommodate social, clinical, criminal, political, and climate progress
Couple "=" couplet to accommodate homos
Male "=" female to accommodation sims
Individual "=" collective to accommodate Diversitists (i.e. class-disordered ideologues)
Weather "=" climate, drivers "=" converters to accommodate Green schemers
All homos are trans. Some trans are sims. The rest are boys and girls who are confused or dissatisfied with their selfies while passing through puberty. Some trans exhibit progressive conditions and will entertain abortive ideation of selfie or others.
The activists had won, but they still needed to work, they still needed contributions, they still needed to push conventional people to move forward into challenging new territory.
But, but, we were promised by the Gay Marriage Advocates that there was not, and never would be, a "slippery slope!"
Gender (i.e. sex-correlated attributes) can be simulated, or groomed through medical, surgical, or psycho therapy, or social corruption. Political congruence ("=") leveraging liberal license was the wrong choice to socially transition couplets.
"But real human beings were involved and their incentive to acquire a new cause is obvious" Real progs, acquiring a new cause, as predicted by Obergefell opponents, not taking the win and fitting into the bourgeois order with SS marriage, instead subverting normie norms just a bit more, imposing their orthodoxy at children's expense.
"need better evidence" Even at this late date even the McArdles are not thinking clearly. Exactly how does one get better evidence on irreversibly harmful procedures the sexual and psychological effects minors cannot possibly gauge or informedly consent to? What RCT design does she have in mind?
Althouse exposes the neverending culture wars. And if we want to end them we must not only stop this trans horseshit, we must roll back gay marriage and gay rights. Not because gays don’t deserve rights, including the right to marry, but because we have to make it hurt to indulge in the neverending culture wars.
McCardle spewing the Conventional Contrarian Wisdom.
The price of civilization is psychological repression.
Unfortunately, such repression is not always for the good of the civilization. It would be nice if our love of war were repressed, for example, but it's not repressed, it's denied; and in this particular case, it's our common sense that has been repressed by social pressure that may or may not have been purposely manufactured.
Why manufacture it? Well, let's just say that there is a global cabal of wealthy elite—sheer nonsense, I know—who think that there are too many of us proles, that we continue to outbreed them dangerously?
Miranda the terrorist (faln) supporting lout
On Sept 6?, McArdle had a long tweet about how so many of her journalist/ruling class friends wanted to assert women's rights as Rowling has but were terrified of the peak WWT mob. I pinged her on not letting people know at the time. Not much bravery amongst our betters.
“How can official orthodoxies persist …?” Tolerance. The country is in a death spiral fueled by Marxist and Islamist orthodoxies and tolerance fueled by useful idiots including the leftmedia and Congress. Trump and his cabinet are the last bastion of resistance. Hence, the Marxists, Islamists and useful idiots vilify them.
“Official orthodoxies persist even when few people believe them because we live in an age when adherence to the preferred narrative trumps the truth.
Too many people have their self worth tied to their preferred narratives. When the truth conflicts with that they literally cannot handle it.”
Exactly and obviously. I call this Cracker’s Lia Thomas Test.
Does that look rational? Fair?
If you say yes, then there’s no need to take anything you say about culture or politics seriously ever again.
If you want to say no but can’t because of your social orthodoxy, then there’s no need to ever take the beliefs of that orthodoxy seriously ever again.
The rise of the transgender orthodoxy was very simple: the ACA/Obamacare required coverage, and in the Trump 47 era the blue states still require coverage.
The money grubbers of the AMA say, per extreme conflicts of interest:
https://www.ama-assn.org/system/files/transgender-coverage-issue-brief.pdf
The Dr. Mengele protege Shayne Seybold Taylor of Vanderbilt said care was "a huge moneymaker":
https://www.dailywire.com/news/huge-money-maker-video-reveals-vanderbilts-shocking-gender-care-threats-against-dissenting-doctors
@RMc. I didn’t realize she was still working…which illustrates the business issue with putting your opinion writers behind a paywall.
Though I have questions about whether pediatric medical transition works, I won’t. For one thing, I’m not opposed to pediatric transition.
It's sad to see she's still either being a moron, or intimidated into silence.
There is not the slightest shred of evidence that "pediatric transition" EVER makes things better. There's not even one scientifically valid study out there that supports the proposition.
"I'm glad I did it" is only evidence that brainwashing, and the sunk cost fallacy, both still work.
The amount of really bad studies out there is in fact strong evidence that not even one of the motivated reasoners pushing this child abuse has been able to come up with any way to torture the data that would actually make "pediatric transition" look valid.
The Left are psychotic Nazis, monster willing to destroy kids' lives in order to have a political agenda to push
Steve Sailer (like him or not, the dude gets a lot of stuff right) called “World War T” (T for trans) as the new cause du jour back around 2015 or so. What Steven Pinker calls the Utopian Vision (the counterpart is the Tragic Vision, and both are based on the great Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained and Constrained Visions in “A Conflict of Visions”) requires the holy good to be defined, and the righteous have a duty to wipe out all that is in the way of the holy good. Where else to go from gay marriage to “trans rights”? But there are a LOT more really despicable people in the so-called “trans” community than in the gay community, e.g., child sexual abusers and those who enable them, so it was pretty obvious there would eventually be a pushback, as most social hysterias die out after some years.
As far as McMegan (her handle before joining the WaPo) goes…it’s been obvious for several years now that she has become far more interested in getting invited to the desirable cocktail parties than in being intellectually rigorous and morally courageous. Sad to see Jane Galt disappear into vapidity, but hope her thirty pieces of silver sustains her materially; it won’t do so morally.
And thus McMegan completes her transition..
Politically congruent ("=") are Pro-Choice and homophobic. Sims are a minor subset of the trans spectrum, but aside from homos in social liberal club, are sustainable sources of revenue, albeit at the costs of permanent dysfunction, and still a disposition to entertain abortive ideation of selfie or others. That said, women were long ago betrayed by Diversitists, and girls are next in pedo progression. Safe and rare indeed. Boys, too were/are the target of select couplets and groomers. Then there are the womb farms where homo "farhers" selfie-indulge with misogynistic pride and prejudice.
The term most often used to describe sudden changes in public stated perceptions as opposed to privately held perceptions that were really thought is "preference cascade". The newly stated perceptions are what most thought all along but were afraid to state because they thought, mistakenly, that everyone else thought the lie. Or bought the lie, take your pick.
Rush Limbaugh acknowledged that he didn't influence his audience, all his callers (most, anyhow) said outright Rush was speaking what they thought- the only media personality doing so. His voice started many of the early preference cascades.
We are seeing more and more frequent public turnings because the heavy hand of censorship has been lifted. Particularly on X after being purchased by Elon Musk. MSM was always part of the heavy hand of censorship while "officially" opposing it. The NY Times' real motto was- "All the news we want you to read, and no other." And evening newscasts took their cue from what the NY Times and/or Washington Post was covering.
The internet broke that model. And each free speech platform opened up soon felt pressure to remove "bad influences". Until Musk purchased Twitter that "free speech" platform had one of the heaviest hands of censorship.
Substack seems to have so far resisted censorship efforts, or rather efforts to "combat misinformation". The real news about covid has come from independent sources there. Facebook immediately censored any departure from "the narrative" during the covidiocy. BTW- spellcheck now seems to accept "covidiocy" as a word and doesn't try to suggest otherwise... No squiggly red line under it- there is one under substack...
People don't believe they can be the stupid people in the Emperor's New Clothes. It's all those other people that are stupid. It is especially hard for people who just know they are the smart good people, like Democrats.
Considering the state of the WAPO, McArdle may have done better over the long term by remaining independent of it.
In 2015 many people knew that a court victory for gay marriage was bound to move the question further down the slippery slope, to transgenderism or polygamy or worse. Was it illegitimate to oppose gay marriage because one couldn't prove in advance which dire alternative society would choose?
Trans couplets in "marriage".
Couplets in marriage.
Post a Comment
Please use the comments forum to respond to the post. Don't fight with each other. Be substantive... or interesting... or funny. Comments should go up immediately... unless you're commenting on a post older than 2 days. Then you have to wait for us to moderate you through. It's also possible to get shunted into spam by the machine. We try to keep an eye on that and release the miscaught good stuff. We do delete some comments, but not for viewpoint... for bad faith.