A Failure to Understand Either Language Or Evidence

I recently wrote a short article about “Luxury Beliefs And The Victim Mentality”, in which I quoted a number of tweets that had been sent to me. The ‘luxury belief’ I discussed was transgender self-identification. I highlighted where the authors of those tweets had the luxury of promoting this position, while remaining callously indifferent to the very harmful effects that it causes. The ‘victim mentality’ that I discussed was related to the insistence of the authors that they had been the victims of various transgressions, which in fact they had transparently invented out of thin air.

I have now received a response from an author of those tweets, which fails to understand any of these very straightforward issues. Not a single word from my article is quoted in the response, because nothing that I wrote in my article is factually inaccurate. Instead, the response attributes to me a large number of arguments that I didn’t make, and then attacks those fabrications. For example, consider the short quote below:

This response accuses me of creating a straw man, when in fact my article provided screenshots of the tweets that I was arguing against, along with links to each one. I also included video clips of the statements that I was disagreeing with, in the author’s own voice. I was at pains to include these accurate citations, and to quote verbatim statements describing every position that I took issue with. Having falsely complained about me creating a straw man, the extract illustrated above then goes on to manufacture several of them. Nowhere in my article do I suggest that the only people seeking police reform are rich liberals; that policing is the only thing preventing society descending into chaos; or that defunding the police only means eliminating law enforcement. This is all pure invention. I had merely stated that more affluent people had often promoted defunding the police, and that the less privileged groups who would suffer the harmful effects of these positions were often more opposed to them.

Where my article states that defunding the police is “a view that was often promoted by more affluent people” and my correspondent responds with, “he pretends the only people calling for police reform are rich liberals”, then the problem is a simple failure of language comprehension. The response to my article demonstrates repeatedly that my correspondent is just sadly unable to understand very basic prose. This is embarrassingly obtuse, and more such dull-witted blunders are mentioned below, but even worse than that is the failure to understand what the basic evidence of our objective reality indicates.

Failure To Understand Evidence

The response that was sent to me argues that facilitating transgender self-identification is harmless. It does so by drawing invalid conclusions from some fairly straightforward evidence. For example, one implication of transgender self-identification that my original article highlighted, is that it is open to exploitation by convicted sex offenders. My article stated as follows:

“policies allowing for transgender self-identification facilitate male sex offenders in being locked up with women, where they can carry out further assaults”

Quote from my article

If any given man need only self-identify as a woman to be treated as female, then a rapist incarcerated for his crimes can take advantage of such a policy in order to be transferred to a female prison. It should not be a surprise to anyone that when presented with such an opportunity, some offenders will seek to exploit it. Indeed, some men convicted of heinous sexual crimes have already used transgender self-identification to carry out further such abhorrent assaults in female prisons.

While remaining callously indifferent to the victims of a policy facilitating transgender self-identification for rapists, the response that was sent to me seeks to justify this position as follows:

“The actual data shows that trans women in prison are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.”

Quote from the response to my article

This vapid and simple-minded response is both utterly irrelevant and also entirely disconnected from the evidence that the author themselves cited. Of course, it is awful when any trans-identified man is the victim of any violence while incarcerated. Prison authorities should make every effort to ensure this never happens. As such, the response to these events should involve remedial actions to prevent any repeat. However, the response should not be to lock up male rapists with female inmates instead. That some trans-identified rapists are assaulted in male prisons, does not for a moment suggest that it is acceptable for such offenders to instead be confined in a cell with a vulnerable woman.

The statement quoted above also fails to understand the evidence cited to support it. A link was provided with the response to an annual report of ‘Offender Equalities’ in the UK. This document states that in the years 2022 and 2023, there were 203 trans-identified men and 41 trans-identified women in UK prisons. All 41 of the trans-identified women were housed in female prisons, while 196 of the trans-identified men were housed in male prisons. That is, of the 203 trans-identified men in the UK prison system, only 7 had been allowed to transfer into female prisons. The statement that one group of 196 prisoners had been involved in more assaults than another group of 7 prisoners, quite obviously doesn’t demonstrate what my correspondent thinks it does.

In contrast, the meaningful evidence indicates that 3.3% of incarcerated women in the UK are sex offenders; 16.8% of men incarcerated in the UK are sex offenders; whereas 58.9% of trans-identified men incarcerated in the UK have been convicted of sex crimes. In this context, it is utterly abhorrent to argue for the ability of rapists to self-identify into the prison cell of a vulnerable woman. Such ‘luxury beliefs’ are entirely disconnected from what the evidence actually demonstrates, and this failure of my correspondent to understand very obvious objective realities extends to other harmful effects of transgender self-identification. For example, the response that I received also states as follows:

“Trans women have been competing in women’s sports for years with no statistical evidence of domination. The argument conveniently ignores that elite sports already have rigorous regulations (such as those from the IOC) to ensure fairness.”

Quote from the response to my article

This is utterly delusional. It has in fact been widely acknowledged that the arrangements the IOC has had in place with respect to testosterone levels, have not been protecting the female category at all. The evidence demonstrates that such testosterone suppression requirements did not eliminate the relevant male advantages. Moreover, a recent UN report on “Violence Against Women And Girls” stated that 890 medals have been taken from women by trans-identified men competing in the female category. At the Women’s 800m event during the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, all three podium places were awarded to male athletes. The gold medal winner Caster Semenya has testes that produce testosterone at normal male levels, and has said that this is indicative of “a different kind of woman”.

This is why World Athletics is now changing their rules. Heretofore they had stated that they “do not deny the right of biological males with a female gender identity to compete in the female category”. This language has now been removed, to be replaced with the view that World Athletics will no longer be interested in how an athlete self-identifies their own gender. In future they will base their rules on objective reality rather than self-identity. The male athletes pictured above are no longer eligible for the female category, notwithstanding the previous arrangements that facilitated their participation based on their self-identity and testosterone suppression.

For the response I received to argue for the continuation of biological males competing in the female category through self-identification of gender, is the epitome of a ‘luxury belief’. My correspondent who advocates for this position, has the luxury of doing so while never having to confront a male athlete in an Olympic boxing ring. At the same time, they have a callous disregard for the fairness and safety considerations of other women who are being punched in the face by men. In fact, they glorify such male violence against women by presenting it as being part of their “ongoing struggle for equality and justice”.

Failure To Understand Language

When an inability to grasp simple concepts seems so profound, it is often worth wondering about the distinction between a fool and a knave. For example, my original article described the core problem with woke advocacy for transgender self-identification as, “dismissing the real harms that others will suffer” as a result of this ideology. Maybe a fool could read this and perceive that it means I have proposed an “evil plot”, but perhaps a knave is involved when this is done by falsely attributing language to others within quotation marks? One such example fake quotation is included in the extract below:

“John’s thesis — if we can dignify his rambling paranoia with that term — is that transgender self-identification is an evil plot designed by far-left “woke elites” to … do what exactly? Destroy society? End women’s sports?”

Quote from the response to my article

The word “elites” does not appear anywhere in my article, and the above sentences are not the only part of the response that falsely attribute words to me within quotation marks. Nowhere in my article did I write anything about destroying society, or propose that anyone is plotting to end women’s sports. Notwithstanding the self-importance of the authors, nobody described them as “elites”. Offering the author of the above sentences the benefit of the doubt though, it may be the case that they are not lying but just genuinely incapable of grasping the difference between two very difference propositions. The thesis that my article describes is that many people promoting a woke ideology are disregarding some very real harms that these ideas are causing. This does not imply that I believe the same people have concocted a malign plan with the purpose of deliberately creating those harms. I think that most people can understand the difference between those two things, but perhaps not all.

This problem is not only observed with regard to the overall thesis, but also with respect to the narrower arguments about specific public policies. The quote below provides another example. One policy position that I described was entirely straightforward and easy to understand. Consistent with the quotation from my article that is reproduced above, I stated that any facility that allows male convicts to self-identify as female (and on this basis be transferred into a female prison) is open to abuse by sex offenders. Somehow, it seems it was possible for an actual adult to read this and believe that the issue being raised related to how “widespread” rapes by male convicts in female prisons might become.

“John wants us to believe that if trans women are allowed to self-identify, then prisons will suddenly be overrun with male rapists pretending to be women. This is a slippery slope fallacy at its finest. No evidence. No statistics. Just pure, uncut fear-mongering. There is no credible evidence that policies allowing trans women in women’s prisons lead to widespread violence.”

Quote from the response to my article

It is difficult to capture just how dim and brainless this response is. For example, I cited one case of a male sexual offender who self-identified as transgender after conviction, and was then moved to a female prison where multiple other women subsequently became victims of their modus operandi. Of course this has not been the only such case, but it is amazing that it needs to be said that one such case is one too many. If a single additional such case can be prevented by changing policies then this is exactly what must happen. There is no threshold number of acceptable rapes, such that we should only worry if the phenomenon is sufficiently “widespread” to exceed this limit. We don’t need a “slippery slope” to extrapolate from a small number of avoidable rapes to some undefined larger number, before the facilitation of avoidable rape becomes a problem. Such an attitude betrays a callous disregard for raped women, wantonly condemning them to this fate unless there is a sufficient quantum.

Moreover, the demand here that there must be “evidence” and “statistics” describing “widespread violence” before any concern might be expressed, has to be one of the most lame-brained positions ever taken. What exactly is being imagined here? Is the idea is that we should lock up lots of convicted rapists in the cells of vulnerable women and count how many assaults there are, such that we can only object to this situation if there are “statistics” demonstrating “widespread violence”? This kind of advocacy, which explicitly encourages transgender self-identification for rapists, would see not just the existing 7 but in fact all 203 trans-identified men in UK prisons transferred into the female estate by right. This is despite the fact that the majority of those trans-identified male prisoners were incarcerated for sex offences. Anyone objecting to this kind of ‘luxury belief’ is then labelled a “transphobe”, unless and until they can demonstrate that there is “statistical evidence” of “widespread violence” that results. What kind of person would advocate for locking hundreds of vulnerable women in a prison cell with hundreds of convicted rapists, then insist that bigotry can be the only possible explanation for objection to this policy? Such ideas are borderline psychopathic.

Victim Mentality

My original article also describes a range of transparently invented transgressions and crimes, of which the authors claimed to have been the victims. For example, following a discussion about their preferred policy of transgender self-identification for convicted rapists, it was stated that I am actively seeking to place the authors in a situation where they themselves would suffer such an assault.

Anyone who actively seeks to place another person in a specific situation in order that a serious sexual assault would occur, is committing a very serious crime for which they should spend many years in prison. There has absolutely no hint or suggestion that anyone at all has been taking any such active steps. The activity described in the tweet illustrated above has been manufactured out of whole cloth. Alleging such imaginary crimes may provide a step-up within an environment of competitive victimhood, but making knowingly false criminal accusations against named people is appalling conduct. Manufacturing fake crimes just to portray yourself as a victim in this way, belongs in the same category of behaviour as using make up to create fake bruises.

In another example of a total failure to recognise objective reality, the response to my article on this victim mentality was to pretend that I am the person inventing a fake victimhood:

“According to John, people are manufacturing fake accusations against him. According to John, society is crumbling under the weight of “woke lunacy.” In other words: everyone else has a victim complex, but when John does it, it’s righteous indignation.”

Quote from the response to my article

The problem with this is not just that my article said nothing at all about “society crumbling”. The core issue here is that there really is a fact of the matter with respect to these issues. Objective reality actually exists and the truth is easy to determine. Either it is really true that the accusation above against me was in fact manufactured and false, or else it is really true that I have been actively seeking to place named individuals in a situation where they would be raped. Either the author of that tweet is inventing fake victimhood by imagining that a named person is actively arranging to have them raped, or else I am demonstrating a “victim complex” in referring to false allegations when no fake accusations have actually been made. Merely describing both of two these possibilities in the same paragraph does not make them equally so. One of these things is objectively true, and the other is utterly detached from objective reality. One of us is inventing a fake victimhood, and the other is stating actual facts using accurate quotations. It is not difficult to distinguish which position is objective reality, and which is some kind of demented wish-casting.

Having failed to comprehend simple and straightforward language, and then failed to understand basic evidence in the form of integers and percentages, perhaps it is no surprise that there is also a failure to grasp objective reality. That my correspondent is as utterly delusional as the most committed adherents to the weirdest cults, is in fact the most benign interpretation of what they have published.

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