They're not cool.

They're a protocol for people to impose their own self image on others, dictate to people what they are to perceive, and then have a tantrum when they don't comply.

They're narcissistic domination. https://twitter.com/rachelzegler/status/1305207510912176130

If someone makes a point about the authoritarianism of something going all Inquisition on someone else for RTing it isn't really helping your case.

It's worth thinking through a couple of things in this statement, in addition to the 'thinly veiled' authoritarianism of demanding people explain what they choose to RT.

1. 'A thinly veiled attack on trans people.' This statement is disingenuous. It depends on completely

collapsing the difference between 'trans people' and 'the authoritarian gender essentialist and sex denialist ideology of the current trans rights movement.' As we have said repeatedly, we don't believe your religion. We think your religion is based on the reification of gender

stereotypes, that it's harmful to women's sex-based rights, that it's bad for homosexuals and transsexuals, and that it leads to the unnecessary medicalisation of gay and GNC children.

*Everything* I have ever said is a critique of this ideology, not an attack on trans people.

There are *plenty* of trans people who do not believe your religion either. Which is to say, the existence of trans people and the belief in gender identity ideology are not the same thing. Trying to consistently impose this ideology by collapsing it into trans people's existence

is an act of deliberate obfuscation which serves to try and make any criticism of the ideology illegitimate, and to enforce ideological conformity. It is an anti-democratic attack on freedom of thought and belief.

2. 'Refusing to validate the existence of trans people.' Again this relies on collapsing 'gender identity' and its validation into 'the existence of trans people.' I am not denying, nor have I ever denied, that trans people exist. Indeed. I have argued multiple times that trans

people exist. What I, we, are denying, is the belief in gender identity as the sole over-riding determinate of *who someone is* in a way that over-writes their perceptible sex, especially now that your religion demands that we 'validate' an immaterial identity solely on the

basis that someone else asserts it (This is what the pronoun protocol is, it is an instruction to someone of what your gender identity is and the way one is to validate that identity over-against anything one perceives or believes.)

To repeat. We don't believe your religion. And

in a free society I am not obliged to believe a religion I don't believe, especially one that directly contradicts my own analysis of the world, and which I consider to be regressive and harmful.

The entire problem here is that gender identity depends for its existence on its

validation, and the entire political project is about demanding and securing that validation. As I suggested here, that makes the project fundamentally, not accidentally, authoritarian. This is the process I have called 'ontological totalitarianism.' https://janeclarejones.com/2018/12/08/ontological-totalitarianism-by-numbers/

It should be noted here, that this gives the lie to all the talk of authenticity. Authenticity depends on the ability to be and to express yourself, in a manner that doesn't require coercing people's response to you. If you are behaving authentically, what you will find is that

people will perceive that, and they will respond to you on the basis of perceiving you as the thing you also understand yourself as being.

That is true validation. Because it is freely and honestly given. And not coerced. And no validation that is coerced actually serves the end

of validation. Because people being forced to tell you something they don't perceive as true won't actually work. And you know it. Which is why this entire movement is characterised by people being on the verge of narcissistic rage the whole time.

This is the paradox of authenticity. To get social recognition you have to not give a fuck about social recognition and immerse yourself comfortably and completely in the business of being yourself. And then people see who you are, and recognise it.

Freely and meaningfully.