Saturday, February 24, 2018

Transracialism Update

There aren't a lot of ways to accept transgenderism without accepting transracialism. Barring some scientific surprise, it's both or neither. Which, of course, is the view that got Rebecca Tuvel in trouble. (Though she should have modus tollensed instead of modus ponensing.)
   The inherent instability of the view that transgenderism is real but transracialism isn't is going to make it very difficult even for the PCs to maintain it for long--adept as they are at believing nonsense via the method of tenacity. Here's an indication that the instability is starting to have an effect.
   Needless to say, if one could simply choose one's sex (or gender...whatever that means now...), then one could also choose one's age, height, weight, number of limbs, species, century, the planet one lives on...anything. There's no better reason to think that one can choose one's sex (or "gender") by fiat than that one can choose any other of their real characteristics. If transgenderism, then otherkin. That slope is genuinely slippery.
   The leading error here shows up in the relativism debate as well. It's never articulated clearly because...well...that's how such errors work/survive. But it basically goes like this: x isn't real, so x is really however we think (or say) it is. That's why so many relativistic (including "social constructionist") views so often confuse themselves with skepticism/nihilism: they blur the difference between there aren't actually any x's and there are actually x's, and we made them how they are by agreement. The former is, philosophically speaking, a pretty ordinary kind of view: eliminativism about x's. The latter is a kind of pseudoscientific view that attributes magical powers to human thought, speech, and/or agreement. Note: not, perhaps, when x is something like a social institution...though things get a bit complicated there, and you've got to be more careful than I have any intention of being here. But when x is your sex, race, age, etc....not to mention dinosaurs or all of reality (all of which have been called social constructs)...well...the view that we create such things is basically the most confused idea ever conceived of by humans. (And that's why social constructionism so often tries to argue that physical characteristics (like race) are actually constituted by social roles.)
   So anyway, Dolezal was clearly right from the get-go: if you get to make up your sex, then you get to make up your race. Though, again: modus tollens is your fried there. Eventually, of course, people will stop pretending that you can make up either. But, for the time being, in the midst of ascendant moonbattery, maybe the best we can hope for is for enough people to modus ponens about enough crazy characteristics until the absurdity of it all is no longer deniable.
   Incidentally, I now "identify" as a carcharodontosaurus.*




* Also: remember when your identity was who you actually are instead of what you say you are? But that was way back when there were facts and stuff.

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