Tag Archives: New Yorker

Peter Singer and the TERFs: We Know You Better Than You Know Yourself

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And we want to make pejorative, exclusionary and — in Singer’s case — homicidal* decisions based on our superior knowledge of your inner state.

I had just written my random thoughts on the importance of trans* [**], Autistic and other former others rejecting the default setting, and my view that this made it easier for all of us “to be who we are and find or create our own cubbyhole, or none, or multiple,” when the New Yorker published “What is a Woman?” by Michelle Goldberg, an article describing the anti-trans* faction of “radical feminism” called, variously, Radfems or — more pejoratively but accurately — “trans-exclusionary radical feminists” (“TERFs”).

But what truly reminded me of Peter Singer was the TERFs’ certainty that they know the inner life of trans women and trans men. One Sheila Jeffreys has written a book, “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism,” in which she proclaims her knowledge of and judgment on the inner life of trans men and trans women by seeing them entirely through the political prism of male-dominated society. A man, per Jeffreys, can never appropriate the experience of being a woman. Accordingly, Jeffreys “insists on using male pronouns to refer to trans women and female ones to refer to trans men.” To her, trans men are simply trying to “raise their status in a sexist system” while trans women, well, “when trans women ask to be accepted as women they’re seeking to have an erotic fixation indulged,” or — according to the psychology professor on whose work she relies — trans women have “‘autogynephilia,’ meaning sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as female.”

So Jeffreys and other TERFs — cis women all — have decided that they know the inner life of trans people better than trans people themselves do, and not only pontificate about this in writing, but ultimately reject trans women as women, refuse to use their preferred pronouns, and in some cases exclude them from women-only spaces.

This is rank Singerism. Peter Singer is a Princeton professor who believes that, well, I’ll let Harriet McBryde Johnson describe it:

Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone-chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.

In other words, privileged white male Princeton professor asserts that he knows with such certainty the inner life of people with disabilities that he advocates killing them as infants. To me, Singerism means making policy — usually negative — based on the facially impossible premise that you can know and pass judgment on someone else’s inner life. Singer can never know how happy any particular person is or will be, much less disabled infants he’s never met. Jeffreys and the TERFs have no idea how trans women experience their lives and their identities.

Where the fuck do they get off deciding to kill, insult, and exclude people based on these arrogant and patently impossible judgments?

Jeffreys claims that cases of “regret” — people who have physically transitioned and later regretted the move — “undermine[ ] the idea that there exists a particular kind of person who is genuinely and essentially transgender and can be identified accurately by psychiatrists.” Well, it might undermine that idea for the person experiencing regret but how it undermines the self-knowledge — often hard-won — of everyone who has ever transitioned is hard to see. More Singerism.

The New Yorker article describes one TERF group, Deep Green Resistance, as holding the view that “a person born with male privilege can no more shed it through surgery than a white person can claim an African-American identity simply by darkening his or her skin.” I suppose that may mark the far outer boundaries of my “Free to Be You and Me” approach to identity, that is, that we should credit people with knowing themselves and defer to the identity each asserts. Could a white person declare himself black in the same way a person born with female parts can declare himself to be male? Can I decide to be disabled without actually having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities? When does the assertion of identity become appropriation? I think we avoid Singerism by saying (1) we don’t know; and (2) we have no business killing, insulting, or excluding people based even on identities that push the boundaries of credibility.

It is reassuring that TERFs find themselves marginalized in feminist and academic circles, though frustrating that Singer is not similarly ostracized. It is apparently more acceptable to mainstream academia to advocate killing disabled infants than it is to advocate excluding trans women from all-female music festivals.***

I conclude with this quote from the New Yorker article:

Older feminists . . . can find themselves experiencing ideological whiplash. Sara St. Martin Lynne, a forty-year-old . . .

Hold on! “Older” and “forty-year-old” do not go together!  But assuming that “older feminist” would accurately describe this 54-year-old, I experience no whiplash, but only a deepening appreciation for each way we let people be themselves, and each mind-opening step we take away from the default setting.

Update: Here is an excellent response to the New Yorker article, in Bitch magazine.****  TERF War: The New Yorker’s One-Sided Article Undermines Transgender Identity by Leela Ginelle.  Lots of good points about the the TERF problem, though I disagree that the original article undermined transgender identity.  I thought it was fair, and that the TERFs were portrayed as the narrow-minded troglodytes that they are.

Update 2:  Julia Serano, who is mentioned in Goldberg’s article, has an informative rebuttal in The Advocate.  Here is my comment:

This is an excellent rebuttal to the New Yorker piece, but reading this & the rebuttal in Bitch made me wonder whether we read the same original article. First, though, I agree that Julia Serano has every right to feel personally pissed. But while Goldberg clearly skates over the surface of a complex issue, and probably did sensationalize the feminist catfight angle, I thought the TERFs came off in her article as deeply misguided, insular, and hateful. Specifically the reference to “autogynophilia” seemed to me like a self-evidently hysterical use of scientific-sounding Greek word roots to disguise abject quackery. All that said, Serano’s response adds a great deal of useful detail; would be great if The New Yorker published it.

*******

* I was going to say “life-threatening” but Singer doesn’t just want to threaten the lives of disabled infants, he wants to permit people to kill them. Let’s call it what it is.

** “Trans*” is a way of indicating a wide variety of trans ways of being. As Slate explains, “the asterisk stems from common computing usage wherein it represents a wildcard—any number of other characters attached to the original prefix.”

Image: Graphic that reads, "Trans*. I recently adopted the term 'trans*' (with the asterisk) in my writing. I think you should, too. If it's new to you, let me help clarify. Trans* is one word for a variety of identities that are incredibly diverse, but share one simple, common denominator: a trans* person is not your traditional cisgender wo/man. Beyond that there is a lot of variation. What does the * stand for? *Transgender, *Transsexual, *Transvestite, *Genderqueer, *Genderfluid, *Non-binary, *Genderf**k, *Genderless, *Agender, *Non-Gendered, *Third gender, *Two-spirit, *Bigender *Transman *Transwoman" Poster created by online LGBTQ educator Sam Killerman.This can get confusing here, in light of the fact that the ThoughtSnax Style Manual calls for asterisks for footnotes.  We’ll muddle through.

*** The article noted that violence and threats have been directed toward TERFs, which is of course deeply offensive and wrong . . . except the graffiti “Real Women have Dicks,” which is just the sort of smartass, mind-opening civil disobedience I love.

**** Of course I read Bitch Magazine — it’s my trade publication!

 

Paul Ryan is not pro-life

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Three things before I start.

1.   The title is pretty misleading, but I’m a partisan and did not feel like titling the post “Adam Gopnik is wrong about Paul Ryan.”  It’s my blog — I get to do that.  And there’s plenty of Ryan-bullshit-calling, too.

2.  Adam Gopnik is one of my favorite writers.  Seeing his byline on a New Yorker article means it will have a wealth of interesting information and delightful prose.*  You are going to find this hard to believe when (if) you finish reading this post, but I really do like his writing.  How can one resist a writer who understands — and deftly conveys to the rest of us — that this year’s election is like a 70s comedy:

Romney seems like the smug country clubber in a hundred National Lampoonish movies, the one Chevy Chase takes the girl away from, while Paul Ryan … seem[s] exactly like the authority-pleasing, solemn student-body president who either gets pantsed midway by the stars of “Porkys” or else blissfully turned on to grass in the final reel by Bill Murray.

Gopnik is a fantastic and entertaining writer.  He just went seriously off the rails in the post I’m posting about.

3.    Paul Ryan is not pro-life.  However devoted he may have been to the “bean” that would someday be his daughter and to the right of all similarly situated beans to develop for at least the first nine month of their being, his policies — taken together — will lead to far more death than life.  His Medicaid cuts alone will leave millions of children, adults with disabilities, and older folks without necessary medical care and equipment. Many of them will die as a result.  Ryan is the poster child for the brilliant Barney Frank insight that Republicans “believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

That out of the way, this Adam Gopnik New Yorker blog post is seriously misguided.  I have three major problems with it:  First, that it treats religious faith differently from the other sources of moral reasoning that inform people’s lives; second, that it ridicules sincerely-held pro-life views; and third, that it isolates abortion from the sort of moral and political reasoning that has brought great liberal progress to our country.

FIRST

Gopnik tees off the following Ryan quote from the vice-presidential debate:

I don’t see how a person can separate their public life from their private life or from their faith. Our faith informs us in everything we do.

Gopnik believes

That’s a shocking answer—a mullah’s answer . . .

For the purposes of this post, I’m going to take Ryan’s comment on its face.  As such, no, it’s not a mullah’s answer; it’s a human answer.  Ryan stated that “our faith informs us in everything we do.”   Ryan’s faith is an integral part of who he is and how how he thinks about the world.  I’m guessing that Gopnik would not object if a woman explained that her gender “informed her in everything she did,” or similarly, an African-American, a gay man or lesbian, a person with a disability, or an immigrant to this country from another.

Ryan’s faith informs his views on abortion.  Gopnik does not explain the sources of his opposing views on that subject, but let’s call it his philosophy — of the appropriate balance of the rights of the mother and the developing child, or of the appropriate role of government.   And let’s give both men credit for having seriously thought through their opposing views and holding them sincerely.  It is not fair or appropriate to ask Ryan to put aside his faith, while those whose views develop from non-religious sources are free to bring them to bear on political discourse.

Gopnik continues:

Our system, unlike the Iranians’ . . . depends on making many distinctions between private life, where we follow our conscience into our chapel, and our public life, where we seek to merge many different kinds of conscience in a common space. Our faith should not inform us in everything we do, or there would be no end to the religious warfare that our tolerant founders feared.

Gopnik is correct that we all have to come into the common space understanding that our views are not the only ones – not the only correct ones – and to seek to merge different kinds of conscience into a working set of laws and policies.  He would be correct about Ryan, then, if Ryan had used the verb “dictate” instead of “inform.”  If this is what Ryan meant – that his faith doesn’t just inform but dictates unwaveringly everything he does in his role as congressman or vice-president – it is deeply wrong and unAmerican.  Taking the words as spoken, though, Gopnik is wrong that “there would be no end to the religious warfare that our tolerant founders feared” if faith informs the moral decision-making of some part of our nation.  Indeed, what of the large number of liberal Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other religious folks whose faith informs – even dictates – a position of tolerance and mutual respect.  Is that, too, to be left outside the realm of civic discourse?

Which brings me to SECOND.

Gopnik moves (at dizzying speed) from denying the role of faith in public discourse to ridiculing opposition to abortion to a sort of reductio ad mullahrum** that compares anyone who would oppose abortion to those who would support the worst of radical Islamism.

The ridicule.  Gopnik notes (correctly) that deciding what is a “life” is tricky, then adds:

It is this double knowledge that impacts any grownup thinking about abortion: that it isn’t life that’s sacred—the world is full of life, much of which Paul Ryan wants to cut down and exploit and eat done medium rare.

Seriously:  “grownup”?  There is so much packed into that one adjective, including intolerance for the sincerely-held views of a large swath of the grownup population of this country (that is, the sort of intolerance Gopnik is writing against); and exactly the sort of arrogance that makes people hate liberals.***

Would it also be over the top to point out that this is also its own bizarre reductio?  And all I can do is apologize for this but let’s call it reductio ad steakum.  Because your ribeye was once alive, you are not permitted to value any sort of life that is not a fully-conscious adult human?

Here’s the reductio ad mullahrum.  Gopnik accuses Ryan of oversimplifying the question of what is life:

The cost of simplifying this truth is immense cruelty . . . This kind of cruelty—cruelty to real persons, killing the infidel in order to hasten him into heaven, stoning the fourteen-year-old girl in pursuit of some prophet’s view of virtue, forcing the teenager to complete her pregnancy to fulfill a middle-aged man’s moral hunches—is the kind of cruelty that our liberal founders saw with terror.

One of these is not like the other.  Requiring a woman or girl to carry a pregnancy to term is not remotely like killing an infidel or stoning a fourteen-year-old.  We can disagree on whether it is the preservation of potential life or an unconstitutional imposition on the rights of the woman.  It is not, in fact, the taking of life in the name of religion.

And THIRD, Gopnik’s overall point demeans the sort of moral reasoning that opposed (and still opposes) slavery, Jim Crow, homophobia, totalitarianism, and other oppressive systems.  Why was it OK for Martin Luther King to lead us out of Jim Crow, informed by his faith, and speaking in explicitly religious terms, but not for a modern-day believer to speak in those terms about his or her pro-life views?  For Jim Wallis, Carrie Ann Lucas, and other progressive Christians to work for social justice informed by their faith, but not conservative Christians?  We may disagree about the conclusions – and call bullshit when faith-based moral reasoning turns into hypocritical hot air –but it is deeply misguided to exclude faith from public political discourse.

Finally, however, speaking of hypocritical hot air:  if faith is to participate in the arena of public discourse, it has to be able to hold its own.  It cannot be hermetically sealed from criticism and bullshit-calling.  And it is pure bullshit to believe in life from conception to birth.  If Ryan’s Catholic faith informs his pro-life views on the question of abortion, he should answer for why his faith does not similarly inform his views of the budget.

*********

* Apparently not everyone shares this view.  Perhaps Wolcott does not like competition in the delightful prose department.   Personally, I think delightful prose is one of the few things you can *never* have too much of.

** Like it?  My attempt at a modern-day “Reductio ad Hitlerum”:  “a term coined by conservative philosopher Leo Strauss in 1951. According to Strauss, the Reductio ad Hitlerum is a logical fallacy that consists of trying to refute an opponent’s view by comparing it to a view that would be held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.”

*** Have you ever walked into a Whole Foods and wanted to commit ritual suicide by organic carrot?  Me too.  That’s why people find us annoying.  Not sure what we can do about it except point out that (1) we’re right; and (2) conservatives are even more annoying.
UPDATE: Edited for typos.

Absurdity Slider

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No, it’s not a small, tasty, metaphysical snack.  It’s a review of a review — big time-saver! — and a digression into the meaning of life.  The slider is explained below.  (Look!  A teaser!)

I minored in philosophy.  At Swarthmore.  You’d think this would have trained me to overthink almost anything.  And honestly, I can overthink important things like the font in my email or whether to get the 90 Shilling or the 1554.  But I recently* read a review in the New Yorker of a book that I think may represent the gold standard in overthinking: David Benatar’s “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence.”  The thesis: since it’s worse to suffer pain than to forego pleasure and since — in the words of the reviewer, “[e]ven the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain” — it is better never to have been born.

Yes, you read that correctly.  As the review notes:

The volume is dedicated to his parents, “even though they brought me into existence,” and to his brothers, “each of whose existence, although a harm to him, is a great benefit to the rest of us.”  (It’s fun to imagine what family reunions with the Benatars are like.)

But I think I’ve found the Rosetta Stone of disability discrimination.  As the reviewer explains it:

Benatar’s case rests on a critical but, in his view, unappreciated asymmetry. Consider two couples, the A’s and the B’s .  The A’s are young, healthy, and rich. If they had children, they could give them the best of everything — schools, clothes, electronic gaming devices. Even so, we would not say that the A’s have a moral obligation to reproduce.

The B’s are just as young and rich. But both have a genetic disease, and, were they to have a child together, that child would suffer terribly. We would say, using Benatar’s logic, that the B ‘s have an ethical obligation not to procreate.

They have a WHAT?

The case of the A’s and the B’s shows that we regard pleasure and pain differently. Pleasure missed out on by the nonexistent doesn’t count as a harm. Yet suffering avoided counts as a good, even when the recipient is a nonexistent one.

And what holds for the A’s and the B’s is basically true for everyone. Even the best of all possible lives consists of a mixture of pleasure and pain. Had the pleasure been forgone — that is, had the life never been created — no one would have been the worse for it. But the world is worse off because of the suffering brought needlessly into it.

Is this guy an android?  Everyone suffers at some point.  In fact, how does life have any meaning without suffering?  Hell, without pain, how do you learn basic things like not to touch a hot stove and not to listen to the Beach Boys?  I suppose if you never existed, you wouldn’t have to go through any bothersome learning processes.  But then, what’s the point?  I guess that is his point.

“One of the implications of my argument is that a life filled with good and containing only the most minute quantity of bad — a life of utter bliss adulterated only by the pain of a single pin-prick — is worse than no life at all,” Benatar writes.

He acknowledges that many readers will have difficulty accepting such a “deeply unsettling claim.” They will say that they consider their own existence to be a blessing, and that the same goes for their children’s. But they’re only kidding themselves.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is not The Onion and as near as I can tell, this dude expects his theory to be taken seriously.  On one level, it merits only derision.  Or this year’s Hitchhiker’s Guide Philosophy Award, an award I just started for philosophical arguments that measure up to my favorite ever, from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, explaining the existence of the Babel Fish:

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The argument goes something like this:

`I refuse to prove that I exist,’ says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.’

`But,’ says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.’

`Oh dear,’ says God, `I hadn’t thought of that,’ and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

`Oh, that was easy,’ says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

But on another level, the concept that it is better to avoid all pain than to experience any pleasure explains disabiliphobia.  It explains why the non-disabled world regularly projects on to people with disabilities a far lower quality of life than the latter actually experience.  This, in turn, leads non-disabled windbags like Peter Singer to opine that it is better for infants with disabilities not to be born or to be killed in infancy.  Benatar’s theory is simply the apotheosis of Singer’s: If it’s better not to be born than to be born with quadriplegia, where do we draw the line?  Better not to be born than to be born and later in life get the sniffles.  Perhaps it’s helpful to imagine this scale as a slider of the type I’m just now learning to use in Lightroom.  We’ll call it the Absurdity Slider:

The Absurdity Slider


Benatar took the Absurdity Slider and dragged it all the way to the right — up to 11 — where not only is it best to euthanize disabled infants, but it’s best that none of us ever have been born.

Given the highly accurate “that’s bullshit!” response most people will have to Benatar’s theory, I think he’s done us a service in placing Singer’s arguments along this all-important scale.  If only I had control of the actual slider.  Any coders out there want to help me develop a working Absurdity Slider, one that could tone down the absurdity in an argument the way you adjust the contrast in a digital photo?

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* Yes it was in the April 9 New Yorker, but it is true that I only recently read it, as I have just now reached that archeological layer in the New Yorker pile next to my comfy chair.