Triumph of cowardice
I used to be a True Believer in social justice. I mean, it sounds nice: a brighter world being possible through something as simple as guilting people to consume the correct cultural products and stop using naughty words. And even as I became separated enough from the theoretical end of the movement to realize that there was no way in hell it could possibly work; even as a I saw, in undeniable terms, how sociopathic and hypocritical the movement’s purveyors were–how it seemed, in fact, to reward such traits; and even after I realized that these people were just straight-up making shit up, I still stuck with it. Partially out of idealism. But mostly out of cowardice, because I knew if I pissed one of these people off they could very easily ruin my career.
And now that I’ve seen this moral and intellectual cowardice spread into the broader culture and become all but mandatory, I think it’s important to push back. Even if my impact is minimal, I couldn’t live with myself if I stayed quiet.
Today I was reminded of a panel session I attended around 2011 or 2012. It was a big conference with an established, well-known and respected professor giving a speech about trans issues. I remember following along with the usual arguments–woke people tend to say the same few things over and over with no variation whatsoever (which is why the constant rejoinder to JUST LISTEN is so infuriating, because the fact that everyone is forced to listen provides speakers with little incentive to say anything worth listening to).
Anyhow, one line jolted me out of complacency. The speaker said that “trans women are hunted down like dogs,” a crisis condition so intense that our usual standards of logic and evidence should be suspended while we address it. “Just last year,” she said, “over 30 thousand trans women were killed in this country.”
The crowd gasped. But that–that was simply not plausible. Afterward, I connected to wi-fi and found that the year before there had been fifteen thousand murders, total, in the entire US.
The common response here is that we’ll never know the true rate of violence against trans people because it often goes unreported (an assumption that has recently been stretched out to dismiss any demands for concrete evidence of this supposed epidemic of violence). But even if we assume that to be true, the entire country’s murder rate would need to be more than twice of what was reported, and every single person who was murdered would have had to have been trans.
The speaker’s statistic was a lie. Plain and simple. And this was from an established academic in a formal, professional setting. And no one pushed back in the slightest.
Now, that was forgivable, I guess. An emotional speech, a pressing topic, etc etc. The figure could have seemed plausible enough in the moment–I mean, how many people know the murder rate off hand? The people in the room could have been forgiven for taking it at face value.
I brought my concerns up to the people from my program who had attended the panel with me. One person’s response was about what I would have expected if I had repeatedly screamed the n-word while explaining how the holocaust never actually happened–the act of looking up the statistic was violence, this is exactly why white men should not be in our field, expressing any incredulity was how fucking genocide happened and why am even bothering to explain this to you, you white male piece of filth.
After this woman stormed off I was left with people who were friends of mine. They were nowhere near as apoplectic, but agreed with the overall gist of the psychotic woman’s outburst: it’s simply not right to nitpick over statistics, even ones that are implausible to the point of being outright lies, when those stats are being deployed to express a greater truth. They knew me and therefore knew I didn’t want to genocide trans people, but I needed to realize how bad and hateful outsiders would think me to be, were I express these opinions around them.
“Besides,” one said, “maybe [the speaker] just misspoke.”
Shamed, I didn’t pursue the issue any further.
But it gnawed at me and I dug deeper. I found several transcripts and interviews the speaker had given regarding the subject. In each one, a murder figure was cited, but it was never consistent. They were all wildly implausible, but one day she would say 20k, the next 35, etc. And the academics who read and edited these–people who supposedly value rigor and attention to detail–never mentioned the inconsistencies.
This was disheartening but I rolled with it long enough to get out of the program. But then an even more disturbing development started to occur: people began citing correct statistics that completely contradicted the point they were trying to make, and those citations went unchallenged.
A famous one is that there is an “epidemic” of trans people being murdered, that leaving the house is a matter of life and death for every trans person and therefore you’re a hitler if you disagree with anything they say. The number they use to prove this? Twenty-six. Not 26 thousand. Not 26 hundred. 26, two digits all by themselves.
Now, even if we take underreporting into account and even if we think the number of trans people is much lower than what their advocates would have you believe, this statistic would still suggest that trans people are murdered at a significantly lower rate than the general population.
I can’t think of a parallel for this doesn’t sound laughably insane. It’s like if I said “yesterday was hotter than today. Yesterday it was 95 degrees out, but today it was 105” or “the dog is bigger than the elephant because the elephant is larger and contains more mass.” The data presented herein is a direct, obvious contradiction of the point that’s being made and yet everyone just goes along with it.
This type of madness does not occur in a functional milieu. This is the result of bullying and paranoia becoming the status quo on the left, of a movement that’s so sure of itself that it’s abandoned all pretenses of truth and decency. And we just let it happen. We don’t even push back.
Yeeeeah, it reminds me of when, at a missions conference, someone described a common piece of stage magic as a miracle, apparently sincerely believing it to have been a miracle, and nobody in the audience objected. Granted, I wasn’t crazy enough to stand up and say anything either, but I was a kid and smart enough to know how that would go down.
It was really hard to take anything anyone at that church said seriously after that; either they were gullible enough to fall for a common stage magic trick children bought at Walmart, or they were knowingly ignoring an obvious falsehood that served them. The same problem applies to the blatantly false statistics constantly included in Social Justice material, and at this point, the short term “solution” of smile and nod and don’t admit that you think this is all bullshit because that’s somewhere between social suicide and literal suicide for the time being.
Orders of magnitude more murdered trans people, orders of magnitude more hate crimes, just blatantly made up pulled out of the air numbers, from people who should know better, from people who absolutely had the opportunity to check their numbers.
Just gonna nitpick (lol) and point out that the trans murder statistic is for deaths as a result of an anti-trans hate crime, not the overall murder rate for trans people.
But this points out something very significant going on right now; the abandonment of facts, the notion that facts don’t matter. And now people are preempting rational, factual argument by saying that subjective experience and emotion is just as, or more, important. That if people feel like they are being attacked, it must be true; if people feel afraid, there must be something legitimate to that.
But facts do matter. Of course everyone has feelings, but if their feelings are based on something that’s not factual, that needs to be pointed out.
