Thread by @WomensLibFront

It’s disturbing to see so many secular humanist men come out for sterilizing children, and then portraying the broad opposition to it as being the partisan tool of their traditional political enemies. Here’s where unthinking tribalism leads:

https://twitter.com/jolyonmaugham/status/1313884072394010625

Women also didn’t need people of any political persuasion or faith belief to know that we are real human beings, and not a costume that a man can wear. It has rather been increasingly alarming to watch secular humanist men keep doubling down on denying our existence.

Indeed, that broad class of men who’ve spent the last several years marking themselves most likely to say, of themselves, “This is what a feminist looks like,” have become the most likely to endorse child sterilization and deny the existence of women as a sex class.

The general group of men who most often pat themselves on the back for skepticism, for rationality, for trusting science, for supporting universal human rights, have somehow ended up forming the largest vanguard of modern sex denialists. How did this happen?

It’s always worth considering, if we’re people who come from that political home, and the majority of our members are, what it is about the strain of political thought and activism we might share, or might have accepted without examination, that’s contributed to such a dire turn.

Have we fostered a cultic attitude of self-righteousness? Have we insisted on a narrative of world history that excludes a testimony of experience that challenges our ideas? Have we put partisan or team loyalty ahead of addressing problems that go against our stated ethos?

These are not simply questions to direct outwards towards others, but ones that we’ve had to direct inwards, towards ourselves, through the process of trying to build a nonpartisan coalition in opposition to gender identity policies.

They’re questions that have come up as we’ve watched gender identity engulf aspects of popular culture that many of us have enjoyed nearly all our lives, and turn the movements we supported, or the fiction that we enjoyed, into bastions of sex denial.

Was this tendency always there? What was it? What is it now? What could be done to inoculate ourselves and our society against this sort of madness?

So while working this out, we come to a new set of questions.

What if everyone acted in a particular way that we’ve justified before, but are seeing turned against us in bad faith, as it becomes common? How do we justify our own good faith to people who broadly disagree with us?

These are bigger problems than us, and bigger problems than our main focus, though they’re interconnected in ways that affect women’s ability to engage in the public sphere.

This is not a finished thought, and the conversation has barely begun.

But one place to start is the subject of what we take as being metaphorical vs. what we take as deadly serious from people whom we mistrust.

It’s never a joke when *they* say it, but our friends, whom we’ve known for years, surely you know they’re harmless, meant nothing by it?

More, what do our friends say that is extreme, that is off-putting, that alienates people from different cultural backgrounds, & that’s said in all earnestness? What happens when we carry those attitudes to places where people aren’t inclined to give us the benefit of the doubt?

This is not against humor, or exploration of ideas, but about how anyone can get caught up in bubbles where everyone agrees with them and can no longer hear how they sound to ordinary people. This was said to one of us just this week, about why we shouldn’t talk to conservatives:

This was tucked in the middle of a comment to us about why working with conservatives is dangerous: “And revolution is both good and any major systemic change, for better or worse, requires violence. Change does not come at the ballot box.”

That was said by a woman who apparently identifies as a leftist, gender critical feminist, who seems concerned that we might associate with dangerous extremists.

Well, we *are* concerned that we might inadvertently get mixed up with dangerous extremists, as it happens.

We’ve never heard any of the conservatives we’ve worked with directly say something so extreme as that the country needed a violent revolution. There obviously are such people on the right, and there are many news stories about them, no matter how obscure they may be.

But the US is large, and there are many different opinions represented in any political movement big enough to capture between 60-70 million votes, or, about as many people in total as presently live in the entire United Kingdom.

So, for perspective, both of our major political parties have a voting constituency that’s roughly as large as the entire UK, and altogether the parties encompass constituents from an expanse of geography roughly comparable to all of Europe. Any generalization is too simple.

But it’s worth asking, is the problem that’s led to widespread adoption of sex denialism (& other critical theory irrationalism) among secular humanists and progressives, broadly defined, across many countries, something whose roots went ignored and could have been seen earlier?

What irrationality, what illiberalism, what extremist uncaring for a dehumanized class of others in opposition, has gone unremarked upon? The answers to this line of inquiry may be very important.

If a man will say, in public, with a straight face, that it’s a positive good to sterilize healthy children for cosmetic purposes, and dismiss all opposition to this stance as irrational partisanship, this is almost certainly not the only wrong turn he has taken in his thinking.

As it’s asked of people who’ll simply come right out with overt, widely reviled racial slurs: What are your ordinary, private conversations like that this seems normal to say?

There has been too little reflection, for too long. Not struggle session performances, but real thinking on our own as members of various liberal, left, and progressive movements, about how we ought to relate to the world. It shows in the results.

And an inability to recognize the profundity of recent changes in the nature of the movements we’ve been part of is simply going to catch us wrong footed.
areomagazine.com/2018/08/23/no-…

If danger has only one name to us, one team, and we’re sure of who that is, what happens when we wake up and someone on our own team is calling for children to be sterilized, or for violent revolution, or for eliminating women’s sex-based rights? Will we let ourselves see it?