Supercute

I’m going to comment on this post:

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/3727

Now, let’s set aside the bigoted way he uses Lana’s previous (male) name and then puts the pronoun “her” in scare quotes…

I’ll set aside the usual bigotry of his slippery slope argumentation…

And here Steve’s bigotry can be made even more apparent.

Keep in mind that Carrier espouses naturalistic evolution. So he’s an ape, calling me a bigoted ape. Why should one ape’s opinion of another ape matter? And assuming that I’m a bigoted ape, does that violate the simian code of conduct?

No, I think he’s repulsed by the idea that I’d find a transsexual woman cute because that implies to him sexual attraction and that’s supposed to be perverse.

Anyway, what he really seems to be frightened of is not transgenderism as such but transsexuality in particular.

Carrier has a habit of projecting psychological states onto his opponent. However, my argument wasn’t based on whether or not transgenderism is “repulsive” or “frightening,” but whether it’s patronizing for a self-styled feminist like Carrier to say Lana is “super-cute.”

Maybe he wouldn’t go so far as to concede that men could dress and act like women if they want to (and women like men); that might still be too “gross” for him. But I’m speculating.

Another example of Carrier projecting. Actually, there’s a tradition of tough guys dressing in drag for comedic effect. That’s comical precisely because it goes against type. It presupposes heteronormative standards. Macho men can get away with that because their masculinity is unquestionable. It only works for a he-man. And it’s just a gag.  If, by contrast, an effeminate male dresses in drag, that’s not comical. It’s just pathetic.

Steve, I think, can’t get past that. So he wants to declare her insane and me dishonest. Because that’s the only way he can sleep at night trapped inside his insular, hate-filled worldview.

How is Carrier in a position to know that about me? He’s not.

About six months ago, a Christian blogger on the Triablogue network (a Calvinist creationist inerrantist by the name of Steve) reacted in horror that I would think noted transsexual Lana Wachowski was “super cute” (see Lana Wachowski Is Awesome).

In fact, of course, I said she was “funny, smart, eloquent, and super cute,” but when you’re a repressed sex-obsessed Christian the only thing I guess you would notice me saying about her is that she’s physically attractive (even though those other three attributes I also find sexually attractive in women, and supercuteness is a property of personality as well as appearance, but maybe all that’s a little too advanced for a creationist, way beyond first unit in sexuality 101).

i) What makes Carrier think Christians are sexually repressed or sexually obsessed? Most Christians marry. Have sex lives.

Does he mean Christians are required to practice a degree of sexual self-control? If so, does Carrier think humans should always act on their sexual impulses? Exercise no self-restraint whatsoever?

ii) More to the point, it’s revealing that Carrier uses “cute” as a synonym or “sexually attractive.” So if Carrier says little boys and girls are cute, does that mean he finds little boys and girls sexually attractive? If he says kittens and puppy dogs are cute, does that mean he finds them sexually attractive?

iii) Conversely, suppose I’m watching a Rita Hayworth movie. In her prime, she was an icon of sex appeal, but “cute” isn’t the adjective that leaps to mind.

In a post Steve titled Species Dysphoria (in mockery of the condition called Gender Dysphoria…which used to be called Gender Identity Disorder, so I don’t know if Steve meant this title as a double insult, since the condition had just been renamed in diagnostic manuals earlier that year, downgrading its status from a mental disorder in need of cure to a natural condition in need of acceptance, in parallel to homosexuality in that same diagnostic manual decades ago: see APA Revises Manual: Being Transgender Is No Longer a Mental Disorder).

The APA is highly politicized.

Now, I can excuse someone for not knowing the way the terminology is actually employed in different technical contexts, since words can be used in all kinds of ways and laymen often don’t know much about that. So I’ll just gently correct Steve for not knowing the difference between gender, sex, and sexuality when they are used in contexts of a person’s expression and identity.

To begin with, artificially separating gender from biology advances the sociopolitical agenda of the “trans community.” That’s a tactic of trans activists. Language is power. Manipulate language to further your radical aims.

But there’s another problem. As Carrier is forced to concede later on:

Finally, on everything I’ve said above and all to follow there are still many disagreements in the trans* community, particularly as they are still trying to develop a culture and a vocabulary to describe their experience in the face of often intense hostility and bigotry. For example, the Trans* Awareness Project is reluctant to nail down a precise distinction in the meaning of transgender and transsexual because their community hasn’t reached agreement on that. So when I say that “transsexual” most commonly means someone who takes any physiological steps to alter their assigned sex (which can just be HRT, for example, producing a male or female biochemistry, or any degree of SRS) while “transgender” indicates a broader category encompassing anyone who identifies or expresses a gender different from their assigned sex (even if they take no physiological steps in that direction), it should be understood that “commonly” does not mean “always,” and debates about distinctions like this can still be had.

For instance, at TAP, that distinction is avoided with the following argument:

    The argument has been made that the difference between transgender and transsexual lies in making a distinction between gender (culture/performance) and sex (bodies/biology). On the contrary, Transgender rights activist and lawyer Dylan Vade claims there is no “meaningful difference” between sex and gender and any definition “that pit biology against psychology or the body against the mind…denigrates transgender peoples self-identified genders.”

So by his own admission, the terminology is fluid.

I’ll set aside the usual bigotry of his slippery slope argumentation (implying we’d give transsexuals a pass if they stalked and killed children, thus further implying transsexuals would do that…no, Steve, transsexuals aren’t pedophiles any more frequently than anyone else is, and no, we won’t let transsexuals rape or kill children any more than we let anyone else do).

i) To begin with, I didn’t use a slippery slope argument. I didn’t suggest that mainstreaming transgenderism will likely or inevitably lead to transsexuals raping or killing children. Rather, I used an argument from analogy to draw a logical comparison. Doesn’t Carrier know the difference?

ii) But since Carrier raises the issue, let’s not forget that the pedophilia scandal rocking the church of Rome involves LBGT nuns and priests.

However, there’s a deeper problem. For Carrier goes on to say:

We should be free to choose the lives we want. So even if gender was all just a happenstance choice, that shouldn’t make any difference. Who we like to have sex with, for example, should not be an issue any more than what our preference in desserts or sports happen to be.

People should be free to choose their lives and not have to prove they were forced to make their choices just to get their choices to be respected. And honestly, that should be obvious. Most of what we now do in life is both unnatural and freely chosen (ever fly in an airplane?), and even the Christian widely accepts almost all of it as moral or okay.

So what’s wrong with LBGT types raping or killing children? Isn’t that just another lifestyle choice?

This is reinforced by something else Carrier says:

For example, we are naturally born with violent tendencies. Yet we neither regard that as moral sanction to be violent nor as an excuse to “choose” to be violent, as if being born that way made it okay, simply because our propensity to have those urges was installed in our brain against our will. Most of human culture involves regulating, altering, advancing beyond or overcoming our natural tendencies. It does so by in turn drawing on other natural tendencies (such as make us social and empathic animals, for example)…

So why should we suppress our violent propensities in favor of our empathetic tendencies, rather than vice versa? From a secular perspective, why is that not okay? Isn’t Carrier’s preference arbitrary?

Of course, fundamentalist Christians perhaps tend to be insular and less frequently study foreign or historical cultures and just assume everything has always been the same. I don’t know. But how a Christian could not notice that gender expression is a cultural construct is a bit astonishing.

I attended public school K-12. And, by definition, when we study the OT and the NT, we are studying foreign historical cultures.

Well, I have some scary news for him. He might be shocked to know this isn’t so simple as creationism would have it. If God wanted everyone to be consistently a boy or girl, he wouldn’t have created hermaphrodites. But more commonly, a significant number of women are actually XY chromosomed (and thus genetically male but almost entirely physiologically female), the result of a condition called AIS, or Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, in which they genetically lack sufficient receptors for androgens and thus do not develop as men in the womb but as women (only lacking certain internal developments, like a uterus)…

What on earth does a creationist do with that information? If by genetic accident you can be XY (and thus genetically a “man” by Steve’s standards) and yet still a woman (anatomically, biochemically, and legally), why can’t you be XY and a woman by personal preference? Why should it matter?

One wonders if Carrier is really that ignorant of basic Christian theology. Not only does Christian theology have a doctrine of creation, it has a doctrine of the Fall. Due to the Fall, humans are liable to genetic defects.

For example, people vary in “adventurousness” regardless of their sex, but put those people in a culture that strongly identifies “adventurousness” as feminine and you’ll see them call having a well-developed “adventurousness” center of the brain as having a “female” brain.

Is there really a “brain center” for adventurousness?

But the outcome in practice is that some men will feel more at home living and acting more like women and some women will feel more at home living and acting more like men, and some cross far enough in that direction to be uncomfortable living as women or men altogether, because what our culture has chosen to call “feminine” and “masculine” just happens to align better with the way their brains and personalities have developed. Since brains and personalities can develop differently than the cultural ruts we try to force them in, it makes no sense to keep trying to force them into those ruts. Because those ruts are human fabrications. They don’t track human biology at all, or do so only weakly (and a sensible Christian would listen to their own Jesus here: they ought to follow God’s ruts, not the ruts carved by the traditions of men: Mark 7:8-9). Whether your brain and personality “fit” being a woman or a man is all just a happenstance of what culture and time in history you happened to be born in. But your brain is not a happenstance of that; and your personality, not altogether.

The Bible would be the first to grant that decadent societies can misalign biology, gender, and sexual expression. Both the OT and NT condemn that in pagan culture.

Indeed, with hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and sex reassignment surgery (SRS), a man can effectively resemble a woman with AIS in every relevant respect. And since AIS exists in different degrees, men who identify as women but don’t get surgery or take HRT can still resemble women with milder cases of AIS. Perhaps the creationist would insist AIS is a “disorder,” and no one should want to emulate a “disorder,” but in fact it’s not a disorder. It’s just a natural genetic outcome, which presents few to no problems. If people are happy being who they become, what business does the Christian have telling them they’re doing it wrong?

If it’s just a “natural genetic outcome,” then why, by his own admission, do some undergo hormone replacement therapy or even sex-change operations?

But let’s put that aside and focus on the real gist of Steve’s analogy, that a woman who claimed she belonged to a different species (and acted like it) is exactly the same as a man claiming he’s a woman (and acting like it). This silly analogy has already been refuted, in many incarnations, by Zinnia Jones in Being a Woman Also Isn’t Like Being Napoleon. All genuinely interested parties should read that. Because it’s short and to the point and illustrates the very crucial mistake the Steves of the world make, born largely of never actually talking to a transsexual (or listening to one) before declaring conclusions about what they think or why.

Picture of Lana Wachowski smiling and sitting in her simple black belted dress and colored hair (in a spectrum of reds and blacks) at the Human Rights Campaign awards.I doubt Lana believes she is a woman by Steve’s narrow standards, as if she delusionally thought she has an XX chromosome if she doesn’t or that she has a womb if she doesn’t or anything else you want to cling to as your definition of “being a woman.” That’s simply not what’s going on here. Lana is not delusional about any real facts of the world. She well knows what her DNA, biochemistry, and body is really like.

Yet Carrier also said: “Identity is generated by the brain.”

So what if your brain self-identifies as lycan? Are you delusional to think you’re a werewolf if your brain self-identifies as lycan? By parity of argument, wouldn’t that make the transgendered delusional?

But the major premise of this argument is also false: the notion that what nature has done to you is good and any deviation from nature is bad. Artificial hearts pretty much kill that premise outright. So do corrective lenses (contacts or glasses). So do artificial hips and legs. So do telescopes and microscopes and airplanes and helmets, all of which allow us to defy nature by seeing better than nature “intended” and flying contrary to nature’s “intention” and “fixing” nature by making our heads harder to break and our eyes less naturally defective. Indeed, we correct nature all the time: corrective surgery and prosthetics improve the lives of people born with missing or deformed body parts (or who suffer missing or deformed body parts through injury or illness); computers and books and pencil and paper correct for our “imperfectly designed” memories…

This piggybacks on his earlier bungle. Due to the Fall, humans are subject to illness and senescence. To some extent medical science is able to restore proper function. Indeed, it’s because humans were designed by God that there’s a way in which our body parts are meant to function. By contrast, if naturalistic evolution is true, then it’s not possible for a body part to malfunction, for the eyes weren’t made to see, ears weren’t made to hear, hearts weren’t made to pump blood, &c.

…logic and mathematics and the scientific method were invented to correct for the naturally slipshod “design” of our brain’s abilities to reason. Nature screwed up almost everything important to us. So we invented an advanced civilization to correct for all of her mistakes. (And the fact that we had to do that, entirely on our own, is pretty much argument number one against creationism.)

If logic is a human invention, then illogic is a human invention. Equivalent inventions. Carrier reduces logic to a social convention. But in that event, his arguments have no normative force.

Likewise gender expression and identity. It is the Christian (or more broadly the whole Judeo-Christian-Islamic complex of religious thinking) that has singled out sex and gender as somehow special and thus different from preference in desserts or sports. For no objectively valid reason whatever. Only when people realize this will they be on the path to freeing themselves from the slavery of the real delusion that exists here, that of the religious believer (as I’ve explained in Are Christians Delusional?). The sad thing is that these delusions bleed over even to infect atheists who don’t even realize they have internalized purely religious notions about sexuality and gender (as I’ve noted in my article Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!)).

I appreciate his candid admission that his fellow atheists are delusional.

Creationists, of course, obsess over what is natural, because they believe God made us, so if our bodies are born a certain way, for them that entails God’s endorsement, being the one who made us that way, and against our will to boot (ironically, considering how much Christians are usually obsessed with God’s need to give us free will…although Steve is a Calvinist, so maybe he doesn’t even believe in free will, much less that God would want us to have any). The problem, of course, is that things like AIS and chimerism put the kibosh on that kind of thinking. God clearly endorses some men being women and women being men.

From a Calvinist standpoint, God predestines some humans to be saints, and others to be sociopaths–to cite two extremes. That’s not a divine “endorsement.” Rather, the existence of sociopaths serves a purpose in God’s overall plan for world history–just like a novelist might include villains as well as heroes and heroines in his story.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the cultural expression and trappings of gender, the Christian cannot claim divine guidance at all. God (even the Christians’ own god, by their own account: again, Mark 7:8-9) could not plausibly have endorsed any one human tradition, and cannot honestly be imagined to have endorsed any concept of gender. Unless you are still living and dressing as the Old Testament God had commanded–in other words, as an Orthodox Jew–you’ve pretty much abandoned any notion of what could ever have been called “God-sanctioned culture.”

Obviously this behavior is not delusional any more than preferring broccoli to carrots, or reading to sports, or cowboy culture and attire to goth or steampunk or yuppy. When women like Dita Von Teese and Paloma Faith make themselves up in 40s or 50s hairstyle and clothing, they are creating an identity for themselves, that’s who they want to be. That’s a preference, not a delusion. And forcing them to be someone they don’t want to be would almost universally be deemed wrong, indeed bizarre (why would you even care?), at least in free communities in modernized democracies.

That fails to distinguish between culturebound dress codes and creational ordinances.

Which leaves us with brain biology. Which leaves us with no objective reason to claim God did not want Lana Wachowski to live and identify as a woman.

That’s like saying a novelist wanted a villain in his story. In a simplistic sense that’s true. Yet he doesn’t want the villain for the sake of villainy, but to place evil in a moral context.

But alas, since many Christians are obsessed with various forms of creationism and exaggerate the importance of free will, we can get more effect on them sometimes by using those irrational levers to convince them to finally treat their neighbors decently for a change.

Calvinists aren’t routinely accused of exaggerating the importance of freewill. But I guess there’s a first time for everything.

But this shouldn’t have to be the case with atheists, who, not being creationists, don’t believe in this naturalist fallacy (that all that is natural, and only what is natural, is moral), and who, by and large not being indeterminists, regard free will as nothing more than the expression of human desires, desires that can be good or bad whether free or not.

i) Actually, many atheists do buy into the naturalistic fallacy when they espouse evolutionary ethics.

ii) Conversely, natural law ethics is not a naturalistic fallacy for Christians inasmuch as God commands us to do what he made us to do. That’s not comparable to the byproduct or end-product of a mindless, amoral process.

Although fundamentalists do get their panties in a bunch over almost any conceivable cultural deviation anyway. The rest of us find it’s perfectly acceptable for someone to “choose” to be Goth or Cowboy or Steampunk or Yuppy or Preppy or Hippy or anything they like, conforming to any clothing, mannerisms, dialects, interests, that belongs to any sub-culture they prefer. No one challenges them by asking whether they were genetically predisposed to want to be that. No one condemns their choice because it was (gasp!) a choice, something they just preferred, something they were just happier living as. Well, except fundamentalist Christians maybe…who also think Goths and Hippies are abominations, but are arbitrarily okay with Cowboys or Preppies. As if the Bible laid out which sub-cultures were cool with God and which weren’t.

These subcultures are typically conformist. They have their own rigid social expectations which you must live up to to be accepted.

(Note to the wise: it doesn’t…except pages and pages of “You’d better adopt the immensely onerous and detailed culture of an ancient Orthodox Jew or else you are an abomination before God who deserves to die” rigamarole [see Leviticus and Deuteronomy], but no fundamentalist Christian obeys any of that, so they pretty much can’t appeal to the Bible here without getting themselves in super big trouble.

i) To begin with, I think Carrier is confusing halakhic or Hassidic customs with the Mosaic Covenant. The latter isn’t that detailed.

ii) The New Covenant minimizes the OT purity codes.

 They generally don’t even follow the New Testament’s requirements that women always cover their hair and never wear pretty dresses or jewelry.)

What Bible commentaries has Carrier read on 1 Corinthians or 1 Peter?

This point becomes all the more clear when we notice the fact that we all of us often transgender ourselves when we have “safe” opportunities to do so. For example, when we play another gender in video games, role playing games, and even on blogs and social networks. Suddenly transgenderism in that environment is all okay and not insane.

That reveals a lot about Richard Carrier. I’ve never transgendered myself.