Misinformation, Disinformation and Malinformation Are the Cornerstones of Queer Theory and its Bastard Child, Transgenderism
Hunting for the truth is a fruitless exercise when you are exploring cult beliefs
In my very first post for Bodies get in the way…, I talked about the philosophical origins of how we got to a position where we are telling children they can choose their sex and encouraging them to engage in self-harming practices in a vain attempt to follow through.
I named the two founding principles of applied postmodernism (which is the label that academics have imposed on us for this harmful ideology), which are:
The belief that objective knowledge or truth is not possible; no facts exist, and
That society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how things can be known; truth is what anyone says it is.
The four themes of this philosophy are:
1) The blurring of boundaries (messily mixing the experiential with the evidenced in a way that elevates one’s interpretation of lived experience to the status of evidence). An example of blurring of boundaries would be if you take your own birth and breastfeeding experience and promote this as universal (i.e. confusing anecdote with data). Another example of boundary blurring is the ongoing debate about “what is a woman?”. That modern politicians refuse to answer or make up excuses for not answering is also blurring formerly very clear boundaries.
2) The power of language (the idea that words are powerful and dangerous and must be scrutinized according to theoretical frameworks). This is where queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, intersectionality, gender studies, disability and fat studies, trans rights and environmentalism are weaponized as either woke or not. NB: you know all those Women’s Studies departments that used to be in universities around the world? Well, they are gone - converted to gender studies instead. If you can’t talk about women and our sexed bodies, they disappear.
3) Cultural relativism (Western thoughts and ideas are the pinnacle of an oppressive power structure). Cultural relativism posits that anything that comes from the WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) countries is automatically faulty and oppressive.
4) The loss of the individual and the universal (the intense focus on identity categories and politics means that both the individual and the universal are largely devalued). People are not as important as ideas and identities. This leads to a loss of safeguarding for women and children because there are no ways to separate (predatory) men from invading women’s private spaces.
Queering is about unmaking any sense of the normal
In queerland, there is no “normal” as most people would understand it. Viewing the world through a queer lens cast doubts on stability (gender is fluid), disrupts seemingly fixed categories (male and female are artificial) and problematizes any binaries it comes across (sex is on a spectrum).
Queer theory seeks to have gender-identity replace sex, and queer theorists spend no time acknowledging that biological realities exist and almost all of their time rejecting them and asserting the social construction of those categories.
I am left thinking that trans activists must believe in transubstantiation to account for all of this because there is no way for a mammal to accomplish any sort of sex change. Magical thinking is all they’ve got, but this only changes your thoughts, not your embodied reality.
Misinformation is something one believes to be true but turns out to be false; we used to call this being mistaken
Misinformation is unintentionally false information. Despite the probability that we have the most globally educated population in human history, there is still a lot of ignorance to be found about well, nearly everything.
I’m sure that some people really do believe that it is possible “to be born in the wrong body”. In fact, I had a friend tell me this just the other day. She had some long and convoluted reasoning why this could happen, that didn’t actually make any logical sense, but hey, she’s allowed to have her opinion (just as long as this is not creating harm to anyone else, or she is not trying to impose it on others as a form of compelled thought).
Dealing with misinformation is not that difficult. Don’t repress bad ideas, engage and defeat them: telling people “you’re wrong” is not the way forward. Get them to explain their thinking. You will probably discover that many haven’t actually done much thinking, but are just parroting something that they heard somewhere.
Expose misinformation to fair scrutiny and it will implode because the philosophy underpinning this sort of misinformation has a design flaw: it is designed to be chaotic and therefore ultimately self-destructive as in any system that is formulated around esoteric ideals that are unconnected to human realities.
Disinformation is false or misleading information knowingly used to deceive others; we used to call this lying
Disinformation is an orchestrated adversarial activity in which strategic deceptions and media manipulation tactics are employed to advance the goals being promoted. Disinformation is false information deliberately and often covertly spread (as by the planting of rumors) in order to influence public opinion or obscure the truth.
“Puberty blockers give children space to figure out who they want to be and are fully reversible” is a sentence that contains not one, but two statements of disinformation. Puberty blockers are the onramp to a lifetime of constant medical care. They are only partially reversible and even then, if they have only been taken for a short period of time. In fact, nearly every child who embarks on puberty blockers proceeds to the next step of cross sex hormones, which has a devastating effect on their bodies and minds; consequences which are not at all reversible.
Malinformation is information that is spread with the intent to harm someone’s reputation or cause other forms of harm; we used to call this malicious gossip.
Those of us fighting for the rights of women and girls are often called “transphobic”, which is malinformation in action. I wrote about this here.
Malinformation also includes changing the meaning of words, from those which are universally understood to some definition that only those in the know understand. You know, like when men send threats to lesbians because they don’t want to have sex with a penis, even if this is attached to a self-declared “woman”.
The word transphobia has now been expanded well past a “fear of trans folx” to include hatred of transgenderism in general.
If we are called transphobic, we are being told that we feel this way. It is a label imposed by others, from the outside so it is a slur, an epithet or an ideological label applied by someone else onto us, without our participation or consent. It stigmatizes us.
Fake news and alternative “facts”
The blurring of boundaries lures the unsuspecting into a swamp that can be difficult to escape. When there are no facts that are universally accepted, any concept can be touted as the “truth”, with no reality shoring it up at all.
Fake news can hurt real people. Among the most notorious fake news stories of 2016 was one alleging that Hillary Clinton was running a child-prostitution ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. This had real-world consequences for the employees of that pizzeria when an armed man decided to "self-investigate" the rumors.
There are no such things as “alternative facts”; facts are facts. Just because a falsity has been repeated many times by important people and their affiliates does not make it true. This subjective view of the world is a real gift to queer theory, with its dogma that language is a tool for the oppressors.
Lewis Carroll wrote the following perceptive exchange in Through the Looking Glass,
“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”
“And in its requirement that everyone else accept trans people’s subjective beliefs as objective reality, it is akin to a new state religion, complete with blasphemy laws.” Helen Joyce in her book Trans.
No cult is built on truth
Belonging to a cult can cause people to mutilate themselves, to commit suicide, and to murder others on command.
If you want to avoid mis-, dis- or mal-information you can. You have to pay attention to reality and value this above the subjective opinions that are bombarding us all on a minute-by-minute basis. There are no credible “alternative facts” about us mammals. Two sexes (that can’t be chosen or changed and are not interchangeable in relation to reproduction) and learning to live with the body you have is the key to stable mental health.
You know that old saying, “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't."? That works for me.
Excellent, clear analysis. Thank you Lucy Leader!
When you define mis and dis information it makes it so clear what has been happening and why so many people have been caught up by this and many are now afraid to realise they were wrong OR that they were lied to which is why they are wrong... Thank you.