Ben Shapiro vs Neil deGrasse Tyson: The WAR Over Transgender Issues

[Belacqua]

the "cost" of someone on society is determined by their actions, not by their sex or gender - or any other stereotype you want to try to fit them into.

Though I think I would use different language than @TheWhiteMarten here, there is a serious discussion to be had.

I wouldn't say "cost," necessarily. But the idea that a person's political role is formed by their actions, rather than their identity, is one that Christopher Hitchens argued for. He was very much against identity politics. For him, actions were what mattered, not the accidents of one's birth.

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(from his memoirs):

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference”, to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

(and from his Letters to a Young Contrarian):

Beware of Identity politics. I'll rephrase that: have nothing to do with identity politics. I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political". It began as a sort of reaction to defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they 'felt', not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its sub-groups and "specificities". This tendency has often been satirised—the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs—but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance.

Anyway, what you swiftly realise if you peek over the wall of your own immediate neighbourhood or environment, and travel beyond it, is, first, that we have a huge surplus of people who wouldn't change anything about the way they were born, or the group they were born into, but second that "humanity" (and the idea of change) is best represented by those who have the wit not to think, or should I say feel, in this way.

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I got to wondering whether Hitchens would be on Dawkins' side in the current debate, or on P.Z. Myers' side. That is, whether he would get moved to the Naughty List with Dawkins and Coyne.

Of course we can't know, since he's dead, but based on things he wrote I think we can make some guesses.

First, based on the quotes above, I don't think he would support the politics that focusses on identity. As an old-fashioned leftie, his politics were more about social class and economic justice.

Also, as I recall, he was personally fairly conservative on the subject of gender roles, and was personally opposed to abortion -- although he thought these things were personal and shouldn't be legislated. So he might well have downplayed the trans rights movement.

I suspect that he would have supported an individual's right to determine issues about their own body, and to live and dress as they wish. But at the same time, he was adamant about anyone attempting to control his language, so he probably would not have stood for anyone telling him what pronouns he was allowed to use.

I'm not expert on his work, though, so if anyone has different quotes that are relevant I'd be interested to see them.

I understand, of course, that atheists are people who think for themselves and no one here would care at all about Hitchens' opinion. I'm just interested in the way trans issues appear to have re-drawn certain battle lines, with people who were formerly judged to be Good People now recategorized onto the Bad People list.