BreadTube Faux-Intellectualism & Bias | TE Report Trans S3 E6

TaraElla: Hi everyone, welcome again to the special LGBT season of the TaraElla Report. From now on, we'll be doing something different: I'll be having a chat with some of my LGBT friends who have a different view of LGBT matters to what the activists promote as being representative of us. What I want to do is to showcase the diversity of views in this community, to show that diverse views do exist, to encourage the creation of solutions that will work for everyone and not just the activist establishment. Today, we have Ashley, who is, above all, skeptical of the new dogmas surrounding the trans experience and the concept of gender identity. She is here to respond to my recent talk about why BreadTube hates transmedicalism, in Episode 24 of BreadBusting. For those who are new to this discussion, BreadTube hates transmedicalism, the idea that the trans experience is defined by the medical condition of gender dysphoria. This discussion has blown up again, due to the latest ContraPoints video featuring Buck Angel, a trans male icon with transmedicalist views. This led to Natalie being accused of platforming transmedicalist ideas, even though she's not transmed herself. Apparently, transmed views are now so taboo in BreadTube that even including a transmed's voice in a video is a sin.

Ashley: I've always had a skeptical personality. However, my skepticism towards everything grew further from my political experience, having gone from the so-called SJW crowd, to the so-called anti-SJW crowd, and then distancing myself from both of these crowds, having finally seen the flaws in all of them. The problem is, they all have certain dogma, a certain party line that you have to toe, if you want to be part of the group. This means they are not committed enough to the truth. What I'm seeing recently in the LGBT community, including on BreadTube, is, unfortunately, something similar. There are certain views about gender identity, what being trans is, and how a trans person should relate to the wider world that one now has to have if one wants to be cool in many LGBT circles. And these views are, in my opinion, often explicitly anti-science. Like you said last week, there is a general prioritization of ideas from the sociology and philosophy departments over ideas from the medical science department. And frankly, I think this bias stinks of faux-intellectualism.

TaraElla: My point was that, BreadTubers have more educational capital in the humanities, and they often have little educational capital in the medical sciences, therefore, they favor sociological explainations to make them sound smarter. But the fact is, medical explainations have usually turned out to be correct more often than sociological explainations, if you look at the history of humans asking the big questions of our existence.

Ashley: That's exactly what I'm worried about. For example, Dr Benjamin is out, and Foucault and Butler are in. I'm a pretty science-based person, and I don't like that. There's little interest in all the medical scienfitic hypotheses like genetic imprinting, hormone receptor mutations, or partial androgen insensitivity, all of which may lead us down the path towards more knowledge about the condition of gender dysphoria and its endocrine origins. Instead, there's an over-focus on how gender is socially constructed, and a misguided attempt at trying to deconstruct it all. I am pro-science because, frankly, I think science leads us to the truth, and philosophy often makes us more confused. Of course, what I mean by science is not the simplistic eighth-grade science that doesn't acknowledge any possibility of deviation from the usual sexual norms of the 98%. At more advanced levels of medical science, there are plenty of plausible theories about the origins of gender identity and gender dysphoria, and I'm angry that too little attention is being payed to those theories.

TaraElla: I think what you're saying is that we shouldn't let the social overshadow or overtake the scientific. And I totally agree. The scientific method exists for a reason: it's the best way to lead us to the truth. Many activists say that transmedicalism is about putting down non-binary people, which is nonsense. For many of us, transmedicalism is basically about sticking to scientific methods as the principle way of learning about the trans condition. And as you said, there's much to learn, and much truth to uncover here, something that's being ignored by both cultural conservatives who stick to the eighth-grade version of 'science', and Foucauldian cultural radicals who essentially believe that the scientific method is a tool of oppression and control. I think that's a sad situation indeed.