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I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is - searching with DuckDuckGo suggests it's something to do with a Nazi prosecutor - but if defying it means trans women convicted of sex offenses will be put in male prisons, then while I would consider that a win, I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods. Trans rights activists will almost certainly campaign for that trans woman to be put back in a female prison and may even end up reversing the decision.
Dreher’s Law of Merited Impossibility: X will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.
That is clever and astute.
I think it is.
Some people make accusations of conspiracy theory or slippery slope fallacies, but really would like to slide a step further down the slope and will suddenly switch to "and of course it is a good thing" after the latest slide down the slope has occurred. A handy term to group these people together could be valid.
It's a touch of motte-and-bailey while simultaneously pushing everyone down the slope while denouncing everyone who notices.
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Is it really?
The original article is halfway to Moldbug levels of purple prose. The hypocrisy of the "overclass" is assumed rather than shown.
I'll agree with @4bpp.
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I still think that it's actually more of a memetic superweapon in the class of bingo boards than an astute observation. Show me one example where someone actually says something that it is fair to gloss by this abbreviation, as part of one utterance, because as far as I can tell, all examples including the present one actually fall into one of the following patterns:
One person says "X will never happen". Another person says something that may be interpreted as "When X happens, you bigots will deserve it." This means nothing, unless you fall to the old temptation of treating the statements of all outgroup members as being coordinated.
One person says "X will never happen". Later, under different circumstances, the same person says something that may be interpreted as (...). This is only objectionable insofar as the person revised their former prediction without publicly conceding that they were wrong/miscalibrated/overdramatic before. The culture war is replete with people on all sides being wrong, miscalibrated and overdramatic and making no admission thereof, no doubt fueled by an overwhelming desire to imagine oneself the underdog ("the ingroup will NEVER win this much, since our enemies are too strong"), so I'm not particularly convinced that your outgroup is uniquely guilty of this.
One person actually says something like "X will never happen, but if X were to happen, you bigots would deserve it". I don't see anything inconsistent about this viewpoint, and I'm sure your ingroup believes lots of things that have this shape as well. If X does later happen, then the miscalibration thing above applies, but that's about it.
I personally encountered "vaccine passes will never be introduced in this country" and "why are you mad that vaccine passes have been introduced? Are you an anti-vaxxer?" during Covid. I can't say with perfect confidence that the same person said both, but I'm quite confident that I've never heard someone admitting fault for falsely asserting that vaccine passes would never be introduced.
That's the second point in my taxonomy, I believe. I stand by the statement that if the problem is just about mispredictions without subsequent apology, this is a nothingburger on the culture war grading curve.
Symmetrically, do you not imagine yourself possibly acting in the following way?
You predict that vaccine mandates will never be banned in the US.
Later, against all odds(?), compulsory vaccination is in fact banned. Someone in circles of what you thought were respectable right-wing peers is mad about this. You say something to them that amounts to "why are you mad that mandatory vaccination has been banned? Are you a progressive?". It does not seem relevant in this case to go out of your way to revisit your past prediction.
During the pandemic, I was seriously concerned that vaccine passes in the country in which I live were the first step on a slippery slope to a China-style social credit system, and sincerely predicted as much in public fora. When this came not to pass and vaccine passes were (eventually) abolished, I was only too happy to admit my error in judgement, as basic humility and epistemic hygiene demand. I am proud of my ability to acknowledge my mistakes and not to pretend that I have always been at war with Eastasia, even if it would be expedient to do so.
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One example that I recall was that the classical liberal "You don't like gay marriage? Don't get gay married!" has turned into punitive attacks on cake decorators.
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The key observation is not that they were wrong, but that if a right-winger was foolish enough to believe them when they said it wouldn't happen, they'd be wrong, and that the right-winger probably shouldn't believe them the next time, either.
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The general expression of this is "Cancel culture is not a thing at all, it's all a right-wing invention, nobody gets fired or removed from their job just for saying something" and then when someone has been fired, or otherwise removed from a position, just for saying something by the activists baying for blood then it's "X was engaging in hate speech and it's a good thing this happened to them".
You can argue (and I'm inclined to agree) that that particular instance is bad and calling it out is appropriate. What makes this a rhetorical superweapon is that it is effectively applied even in cases (such as, arguably, this one) where it is not.
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When One refuses to notice the existence of Another or treats you as crazy for believing that Another said something that may be considered representative, it's a mite insulting.
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I think youre missing an important part. The whole conversation the idea describes goes more like this:
A: "We shouldnt do Y, that would imply we should also do X, which is bad"
B: "X will never happen, it would be totally safe to do Y"
Y is done, X happens
A: *angry*
B: "Obviously its good that X happened, its good for the same reason Y is good, are you really such a backward bigot that you think even Y is bad, or are you too dumb to understand consistent principles?"
Your third scenario is not a case of the pattern at all, because the "X will never happen" isnt used to assuage. Your second scenario might be, but I think youll find very few examples of conservatives using it that way. They just dont get enough wins for that.
As for the first example... well somewhere in between those two totally different people saying these things, the X did in fact happen. That would be very unlikely if noones mind changed. So propably there is a significant faction who made the switch in-one-person.
But thats not particularly relevant. The point is that you shouldnt believe the "X will never happen", and waxing about how totally sincere the liberals are and how mean and unsportsmanlike it is to say theyre not doesnt change that.
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or:
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I think it's interesting how it combines or reconciles two contradictory things ,one that is unpopular with another which is at least not as bad. For example, censorship is generally unpopular. It's hard to make a case for it. No company or group can easily come out as openly pro-censorship. But preventing hate or misinformation is at least easier to justify due to the socially desirability bias. So it's like, "We will not censor (or 'we are committed to speech'), but if there is censorship, it's to prevent hate speech/misinformation." This is the sort of logic I have observed with the left, at least. It's like a motte and bailey.
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I wish that this was the standard formulation of the law, for exactly the reasons you suggest. It's a case of bad argumentation that's not as simple as inconsistency, but which justifiably aggrieves people. You could probably spend years of research doing informal logic to work out what is wrong with it (insincerity? excessive discursive robustness?) but that doesn't mean it's right.
After all, our ability to systematically categorise and understand pathologies of human thought is far from advanced:
https://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html
Hey I only got like ten paragraphs into this, and I would like to read the rest, but it feels a bit like a shaggy dog joke. Is the issue that when smart people are interested in something they get super invested in it and start talking in circles like an obsessed lunatic? Does he acknowledge that he is doing that in this essay?
He's talking like an obsessed lunatic, but not in circles. And the issue is that, when humans leave relatively concrete domains, our thinking tends to fall apart in a very diverse range of ways.
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The Law Of Merited Impossibility
There are popular formulations that make it less specific to gay marriage like "that'll never happen but, when it does, you bigots will deserve it/it'll be good".
In this case, we've seen the absolute refusal to grant any potential downsides like this specific scenario, until it happened.
Neither would I. To be frank: even having this discussion at all seems like a sign of vast confusion, in multiple domains.
But, while I did start to write a "Dreher's Law strikes again?" post I think it's fair to note that the worst didn't happen...yet. While pointing out that it still could.
Yes it did. Like I said, it's old news.
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I don't think it's fair at all. If anything, the fact that Bryson ended up in a Women's prison in the first place kind of proves Dreher's point.
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Not the worst, but a significant step on the slope. "What if a rapist identifies as trans and wants to be transferred to a women's prison?" was one of those steps on the slope that we weren't supposed to think about.
It was one of those steps we were told absolutely would not happen, could not happen, and we were just bigots and horrible people for even suggesting it. Years back on Ozy's old blog, to be fair to them, they did let a lot of discussion between conservative-leaning and others happen, and the trans thing was just taking off - this was the time of the bathroom laws. And one of the rock-solid principles the pro-trans right side insisted on was that no boy or man would ever pretend to be a woman, because the social costs were just too high, and for what? The chance to leer at naked women? And anyway, if any man did do this, they weren't really trans in the first place. So there could never be anyone pretending to be trans because if they did, then they weren't really trans, and only real trans people counted and real trans people would never do anything bad, they just wanted to use the bathroom.
Well, years of fighting hard to reduce the social costs of claiming to be the other sex have paid off with this kind of happening. And of course, we saw with the Loudoun County school case, they did all run out with "the boy wasn't really trans/never said he was trans or gender-fluid" after it was proven he did indeed assault two girls.
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So where do you envision this slope leading?
On that matter, I'm not sure that this idea that people should actually be encouraged to think (non-quantitatively) about outrage-provoking edge cases of a policy would at all work in favour of the right-wing agenda. Most right-wing causes (access to guns, religious freedom, restrictions on abortion...) have edge cases that the median grilling centrist will find far more outrage-inducing (school shootings! sadistic pastors running special Jesus camps in their basement! 10 year old pregnant rape victims!) than that some rapist got transferred to women's prison. (Even if we assume that the prison environment is so lax that this basically guarantees that our protagonist will be able to rape the female inmates, they're prisoners! The median normie doesn't know any women who went to prison, can't imagine women going to prison for anything short of "microwaved her 2 year old", and probably has laughed about prison rape jokes when it was about male prisons)
I, for my part, don't find single instances of any of those situations to be particularly meaningful. In this particular case, if the prison can't be expected to prevent the rapist from assaulting other inmates, it seems to me that something is wrong with it that goes beyond admitting biologically male rapist inmates, and would only be hacked around by not doing that. Women sexually abusing other women is a thing that also happens; is the implication that that is less concerning?
The fact that cis women cannot impregnate other cis women is a major contributing factor why male-on-female rape has historically been considered a graver crime than female-on-female rape. For this specific reason, male prisoners raping female prisoners is a qualitatively different problem to female prisoners raping other female prisoners.
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If trans rapists have to be referred to as "she" by news reports, or else, even when they were still presenting as male at the time of committing rapes, then I think we're sliding downhill pretty fast.
If Isla and her ilk are really trans, then they're really women. And it's unjust and unequal treatment to make a woman serve a sentence in a men's prison. So they should be sent to female prisons. Otherwise we are not treating trans people equally, and it's TERF and it's the trans genocide and all the rest of it.
You can't say it's a mental illness. You have to accept it as normal. Look, they even have their own Pride flag! And if it's normal, then we will have women raping other women, using their feminine penis to do so, and nobody can say a word about it because you're guilty of transphobia and hate crime Trans rapists are real women too and should be housed in accordance with their gender, which means women's prisons.
Just accept the new reality, women can have dicks, men can get pregnant, and trans criminals are not representative of all trans people, even if they seem to be disproportionately sex offenders. Any questioning around what does constitute being transgender or how can we identify it is medical gatekeeping and oppression. Denial or psychological screening means driving trans people to suicide.
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A number of locations are plausible, but one of the more probable is towards treating trans women in the same way as non-trans women.
Do you think that outrage-provoking edge cases would not be used against right-wing agendas if the right-wing stopped encouraging median normies to think about outrage-provoking edge cases that could be used for right-wing agendas?
Is your suggestion that everyone who is worried about biological male rapists in women's prisons are not concerned about rape in women's prisons?
It seems uncharitable to assume that the concern is about an asymmetry of outcome rather than an asymmetry of probability. Certainly, Mother Theresa killing and eating a woman is just as bad as Ted Bundy doing it, but that doesn't mean that we can't have asymmetries of concern. If you think you can demolish a widespread position in two clauses, perhaps you consider the possibility that you haven't appreciated some of the nuances of that position.
I did get the impression recently that there is a push to drop the "trans" bit and just refer to them as "women".
And some are arguing that taking hormones means that trans women are indeed biologically female, so you can't make a distinction between biological sex and social gender. They are not biologically male, they are biologically female.
Some may not go that far, but they do hold that trans women are women and trans men are men, so you have to include trans women as well as cis women in the category of "woman".
Good points.
Slippery slope arguments aren't fallacious if you have good reasons to think that the slope is slippery.
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From the link: "to be a trans woman is to have been through, be going through, be intending to go through, or desire to go through a process that results in a change of a person's sex to female"
Tacitly admitting that only men can be trans women makes a poor argument that they're women. Wait a second, notice the sleight of hand in framing the premise in gender terms and the conclusion in sex terms? Very clever! But oh no, wait a second longer, that means a female can't be a trans woman.
Using the writer's own definition, either a) gender is primary and only a man can be a trans woman, or b) sex is primary and a female can never be a trans woman. Conclusion: Trans women aren't women and they aren't female. Alternatively, man and woman are empty signifiers and the pursuit to justify crossing from one category to the other renders the enterprise meaningless.
My position - the position a decade of high tempo trans rights advocacy itself has led me to - is that trans women aren't trans women either. It's a polite fiction. The uncomfortable reality is that they're transgender men with bad logic and a rhetoric built of sophistry. I've got no business telling them how to live their lives: change your name, buy some surgery, switch your wardrobe! I won't stop you. Demonstrate adequate commitment and I'll refer to you by the fitting pronouns and use practical labels out of simple pragmatism. But don't claim seriously that you are what you aren't and you aren't what you are.
[And vice versa re women/men and males/females.]
Given that it is (currently) impossible to change one's sex, this definition implies that "trans women" is an empty set.
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I'm not sure it matters. Even putting aside a women are wonderful effect , I think some policies can be unpopular or eye-catching enough that it draws a serious political backlash. Which seems to have happened.
Especially when the underlying logic is also being used in other highly visible cases like women's bathrooms (which almost all women use) and schooling (which many people use) and sports (which many people don't play but gets outsized visibility)
I do, when:
The problem is totally avoidable and was in fact predicted ahead of time.
It's motivated by a maladaptive ideology that will not be content to stop here.
It is worse than a previously used or easily implemented alternative.
My problem with this is not that one person did it. I don't freak out at every car accident or serial killer. That's a real random, individual act that is probably not driven by policy - i.e. doesn't require large masses of people (or a small mass of dedicated elites) to buy into an ideology I find perverse and then instantiate that, even partly.
The fact that this - a rapist man - was even potentially a possibility is bad. Because going from an absurdity to a possibility for social ills is bad. Going from an absurdity to a possibility despite being clearly warned about it and the consequences being utterly predictable should make you worry about the ideological gulf between you and the lawmakers of your country.
The argument is simple:
Women are less aggressive and physically powerful than men
Therefore women are less likely to be in prison for violent crime. In fact: less women exist in prison period.
Women are less likely to commit violent sex crimes.
Women are also more likely to be the victims of said crime at the hands of men.
Thus segregating women can not only reduce incidences of said male-on-female crime, but women's spaces can be more appropriately designed given their different crime patterns.
Allowing men into female prisons breaks all of this. Not only are more powerful and aggressive men more likely to assault women (they assault men right now and they're harder targets), this will almost certainly lead to changes in female prisons to minimize this (e.g. more restrictive to provide more safety)
Of course, as mentioned, there're far more men in prison than women so even a small transfer can have disproportionate impacts.
Even worse than that: there are other practical considerations. The most obvious being the fewer men in female prisons the less the risk of pregnancies that the state will have to pay to take care of.
This situation seems like it makes women worse off for...minimal gain to say the least, while not helping the vast majority of men who do face more violence in prison. Women face increased threat from men. A few men get to transfer to women's jails while everyone else suffers. The more of them that do get to transfer, the more female jails simply resemble male jails and defeat the purpose.
I frankly see little to recommend this as a policy. If I had a metaphysical belief that TWAW then maybe I would feel differently. But I do not, and I think there's limits to how far people's self-making should go.
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