Last week was the week of TribFest, which is great. It’s just heaven for policy wonks. Normally, of course, it’s in person, and, since the Texas Tribune tries to be non-partisan, it means that there are often panels with people on “both sides” (Lawdamighty I hate that metaphor). But, this whole last week I was thinking about a panel from a few weeks ago.
I should begin by saying that I think that conservativism is a legitimate political philosophy (although it’s one with which I disagree). And, as a legitimate political philosophy, it can be defended through rational argumentation.
The GOP, on the other hand, is not conservative, nor does it engage in rational argumentation to defend its policies, because it can’t. And a speaker from a couple of years ago seems to me to exemplify how GOP rhetoric works. It’s all about irrational fear-mongering, with some shameless exploitation of children as a kind of rhetorical shield thrown in.
Just to be clear: I think being fearful can be rational. And I think it’s possible to make a rational argument for being fearful. The GOP use of transphobia is not a rational fear, and, in fact, the rhetoric works to keep people from thinking rationally about the issue. Instead, the whole rhetorical strategy consists of teaching people (especially vulnerable people) to memorize and repeat certain talking points verbatim, even when those points are contradictory, incoherent, and often outright lies.
A teenager on the panel (call her Chester), who was representing an anti-trans organization, talked about how she went home to her daddy (I’m not kidding, that’s what she said), saying that she was frightened at the idea of boys in her bathroom. Her spiel (since all she could do when asked a question or pushed was to repeat that spiel or part of it verbatim in the discussion, I feel it’s fair to call it a spiel, rather than an argument) emphasized how terrible it was that she should feel frightened going to the bathroom. She also talked about how Obama was forcing this down her throat. (Another metaphor I think people have not thought through) because he enacted an Executive Order after a particular event (I don’t remember the event).
What I do remember is that someone pointed out that she had her chain of events wrong, and that she was putting Obama’s Executive Order after something that was actually before it, which she admitted. Yet she continued to repeat the spiel with that false narrative–the one she admitted was false.
But the whole argument was hateful. Her argument–this policy is bad because it frightens students–has the major premise that teens (all teens, even ones not like her) should not be afraid to use the restroom in their high school.
Except she didn’t believe that major premise.
Someone asked her, “So, you think that teenagers should be able to go to the bathroom without being afraid that they’ll get assaulted?” and she said, “Yes, absolutely.” I think I kind of momentarily blacked out from how hard her in-group entitlement hit me, but I think someone pointed out that trans students are far more likely to get beaten up in bathrooms that she is likely to get….what? Assaulted by a male who thinks his best strategy for assaulting women is to pretend to be trans in an American high school?
She didn’t care about whether students might be assaulted in a bathroom. She didn’t care whether students are afraid in a bathroom. She only cared about whether she was frightened. What she was appealing to was not a premise about students feeling safe in bathrooms, but a premise about what the ideal society is: a world in which policies protect people like her from being made uncomfortable. It’s all about politics as providing safe spaces for easily-triggered in-group members. It’s toxic populism.
Also, it isn’t within several football fields of a rational argument. Rape is a major problem among American teens, and I take it very seriously, but it isn’t possible to make a rational argument that the most common kind of rape—the kind about which Chester should be worried—was the kind about which she complained to “Daddy.” (Her word, seriously.) A girl in an American high school isn’t suddenly presented with the threat of rape if a trans girl can use the girl’s bathroom.
Her argument was not grounded in a rational assessment of relative threats to her physical safety.
I really wish that we still taught people about syllogisms. As Aristotle said, in public disagreements (as opposed to how philosophers in his day argued), we rely on enthymemes (A is B because A is C). In common conversation, I might say to you, “Hubert is a jerk because he kicked my shins for no reason.” I would not have to engage in a long and complicated argument to show that my major premise—kicking someone in the shins for no reason is bad (C is B)—is true.
But, let’s imagine that I made that argument, and then I told you a story about how much I admire Ruth because she goes around and kicks shins for no reason. In that case, I don’t actually believe my own major premise is a principle. So much of our political discourse works this way–people make arguments with major premises they don’t believe.
Appealing to the premise that kicking shins is just something useful for me in the moment. For instance, if I say, “You are a terrible room-mate because you leave dishes in the sink,” I am making an argument with the major premise that “people who leave dishes in the sink are terrible room-mates.” If you point out that I also leave dishes in the sink, and I don’t acknowledge that means, by my argument, I’m a bad room-mate, then I’m throwing claims to deflect from my behavior the way a monkey throws poo.
Chester was, obviously, throwing poo. Her whole argument was deflecting from how trans students are treated to how she felt. She didn’t actually care about whether people feel threatened or might get assaulted in bathrooms. She only cared about whether she felt scared.
She hadn’t thought it through at all, as was made clear by the fact that she couldn’t do anything other than repeat the script she’d been given. And that’s another appalling aspect of this whole argument. There are, and always have been, Machiavellians who so believe in their case that they throw children like her out to make insensible arguments. I think she was shocked at getting challenged in what she said, and she was probably traumatized. The organization that put her out there knew the argument they were telling her to make would be treated with outrage and scorn. They exploited her. They put her out there making an incoherent and irrational argument that was actively offensive and hurtful to trans students, and let her take the heat.
That’s unconscionable. And it shows that they don’t actually care about her, or the feelings of high school students. So, let’s do the math. She made an argument that made it clear she didn’t care about anyone other than her in service of a group that didn’t care about her. There’s a theme here.
And in service of what argument? There is no rational argument that can be made that trans students are more of a threat to other students than cishet students; when transphobics try to make an argument that gender is perfectly correlated to biology, they get into a set of claims that only MC Escher could map.
Clearly, GOP fear mongering about bathrooms is just another instance of what is often called the Southern Strategy. But, the author of that strategy wasn’t just talking about the South. What he said is that people prone to voting GOP are more likely to respond out of fear of the Other, and he was right. People drawn to closure, people who get anxious in situations of ambiguity or hybridity manifest that anxiety as anger.
Years ago, Mary Douglas showed that we want to live in a world that is a taxonomy of hard categories. We want things to be purely their thing—fish don’t have shells; we don’t eat the same things our enemies eat; birds fly. Fish that have shells, birds that don’t fly—those are dangerous. Arie Kruglanski showed that many people are drawn to closure (aka, certainty). For some people, that sense that the world can be easily and with certainty categorized is tremendously comfortable. They need to believe that their cognitive categories are ontological ones—their neat mental categories are how the world is—because that means they know the world.
Presenting someone who believes that there is a clean binary of gender/sexuality with the fact of trans people is like giving a Sun Ra album to someone who is obsessed with a music collection that has rigid categories of genre.
They get mad. Irrationally mad. Because their categories are gerfucked. Because they’re being presented with a world that is not a rigid taxonomy of discrete categories, one in which we can be certain that our internal imagination and the world outside of that imagination are definitely the same.
If you noticed, I shifted from they to we. We are all drawn to a world in which we make quick judgments, on the basis of categorizing people, places, groups, experiences. We have to be in that world; otherwise we would go mad. We all have taxonomies, and we all get flustered when we come across something that blurs the categories of our taxonomy. It’s fine that we have categories and taxonomies. What matters is what happens when we come across data, an experience, or a person that presents us with a transgression of our taxonomy. That transgression is threatening only insofar as it proves to us that our taxonomy does not guarantee certainty.
The more frightened we are by uncertainty and ambiguity, the more we are frightened by transgressions of our taxonomy. That we are afraid does not mean we are in danger. That someone threatens our taxonomy does not mean that they threaten our safety.
That Chester experienced trans girls as violating her taxonomy is understandable, that this transgression made her uncomfortable is also understandable, but that she went from her feeling uncomfortable to characterizing them as a threat is externalizing and exaggerating her discomfort. What made them seem dangerous for Chester is that they complicated her sense of how identity works, that they transgressed the lines of her taxonomy. The leap from “This person is a serious threat to my way of thinking about people” to “these people are a threat” is the real danger.
The position she was given to memorize and repeat is not rational. Nor is it Christian. She wants to be able to go home and tell Daddy that she is frightened of people, and they should therefore be banned from her space. If students find her presence in a high school restroom frightening, should they be able to get her banned from that space? Is she willing to be treated the way that wants to treat others?
Nope.