Calling a deer a horse and a ‘transwoman’ a woman
Opinion – Eliza Mondegreen
ELIZA MONDEGREEN – 12 January 2022 – gender:hacked
A true test of loyalty hinges on an invention, a piece of pure fiction. If an issue hasn’t been invented—or distorted beyond recognition—it’s a poor test of loyalty, an experiment contaminated from the start in ways that might skew the results.
There’s a Chinese expression for this: “calling a deer a horse,” derived from a famous 2,000-year-old loyalty test that exposed and thinned the Chinese court and smoothed an Imperial Chancellor’s rise.
To bring us up to the 21st century, when Trump was newly elected, it was a test of loyalty to send out spokespeople and other sycophants to praise the unprecedented size of his inauguration crowds when anyone with eyes could see the distortion.
So loyalty is a function of disparity. The greater the disparity between what actually is and what someone attests to, the greater the loyalty that person demonstrates.
There are plenty of ways allies can voice support for trans identities. A trans ally might say something like ‘transwomen are transwomen,’ an (admittedly rather bland) statement that recognizes the unique status of males who identify as women. But ‘transwomen are transwomen’ isn’t saying very much, is it? A male who identifies as a woman is a male who identifies as a woman. Why bother? Better to kick it up a notch: ‘Transwomen are women.’
Enforce a line like “transwomen are women” and you’ll learn something about the people who repeat it—or don’t.
‘Transwomen are women’ is the perfect loyalty test because ‘transwomen are women’ is not a conclusion it’s possible to come to based on observation or inquiry or even just sitting alone in a room thinking your thoughts all the way through to the end. You have to take some other route to reach such an absurd conclusion.
Maybe you’re prone to taking mental shortcuts and making lazy associations and analogies (“This is just like marriage equality!”—except for all the ways it’s nothing like that).
Maybe you succumbed to emotional manipulation or lack confidence in your own judgment. Maybe you bought the line that it’s not your place to ask questions, just lend support.
Maybe you bought the marketing campaign…