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Notes -
Your soul.
I've recently heard James Lindsey embrace a position that I've held for a long time now: transgenderism as an ideology is a gnostic cult. The material world is the work of an evil creator that has to be transcended to become one's true self.
Biology, culture, these are all the means to the end of what is most essentially a metaphysical argument about the very nature of the world and of oneself. This totally explains the paradox of gender abolitionists who nonetheless make a gazillion different genders: if you listen to them what they are looking for is communion with their true essence.
It is an argument about the nature of the world, I guess, but it's happening on the other side of the is/ought divide.
Gnostics drew their dividing line between the two: observable reality was on one side, moral authority on the other. The gnosis itself was a way to bring that authority across the line. There's no equivalent for transgender, because the trans line is drawn entirely within the "is" side. Is sex separable from gender? Are gender roles tied to objective reality? Any moral oughts are outsourced to the usual classical liberal principles.
Consider the concept of "validity." As used by the trans community, it's an assertion that one's internal experiences are real. That they are as real as the external presentation which traditionally signifies gender. There is no gnosis to be internalized; it is a materialist divide.
I also don't think the gender abolitionists are on board with xenopronouns or, often enough, transitioning. My impression has been that mentioning gender abolition in modern extremely-online communities will get you labeled a TERF. If true, there's no paradox to explain.
I disagree. What is self-id if not gnosis? I have the authority to decide what my true essence is and am therefore above the laws of society in dictating my role within it.
I fully maintain that the flipflops of sex/gender and nature/nurture are meaningless rhetorical artifice. That are ditched or swapped based on pure utility.
You'd think so, but reading their litterature, xenopronouns are actually a specifically abolitionist concept in trying to destroy or dilute the binary into absurdity. A escape into creativity if you will. All those endless videos of conservatives mocking the absurdity of them are missing the point. It's meant to be absurd in some sense. Of course the autists that maintain the wikis might just be so much into it that they actually believe in they/them astrology, but xenogenders are at at core a tactic. A political tactic.
If anything I think the people who talk most about gender abolition that I've seen are some of the most radically trans you can find. It is true that if you try to use this as an excuse to rebuke the necessity of medical transition they will pounce, and there is some latent hostility between the woman-in-jeans with a fancy title FTMs and the hardcore medical transhumanist MTFs for obvious reasons, but overall I've seen honest discussion of gender abolition among the left wing of transgenderists to be relatively unanimous on the goal being positive, and very staunch disagreement on how to get there, in a way quite similar to full communism.
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It feels like a while since the term "reality-based community" was in vogue, but I remember wondering how support for trans rights could possibly fit well with that back when I first saw progressives using it, without realizing it was just a shorthand for "we believe in The Cathedral, not The Church".
Yes I've also long held that "reality has a liberal bias" and "Gött mitt uns" are phrases with essentially identical meaning.
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