Twitter thread
Why dialectical materialism isn’t compatible with trans ideology: 🧵 First it is important to note that dia-mat is a formula that can be used to deconstruct popular beliefs & attitudes into more or less systematic doctrines. (1/13)
Marx used it to combat both German idealism & the beliefs held by the Church. Today the church has been replaced by postmodernism. Materialism seeks the conditions (material, economic, social) that make for such possibilities (systems, ideas, trends). (2/13)
I argue that trans/gender ideology is idealistic & irreconcilably opposed to materialism. Dualism is a philosophy that separates the material world from the spiritual. Descartes popularized this view in the 1600s with his first principle “I think therefore I am.” (3/13)
Trans ideology encapsulates this because it views the mind and body as separate entities; one is born male but thinks he is a woman because of how he feels. This sort of idealism asserts that the material world is dependent on the spiritual. (4/13)
Materialism opposes this because it teaches that matter is objective reality existing outside & independent of the mind and that everything mental/spiritual is a product of material processes. In Lenin’s “Materialism and Empirio-critcism” he thoroughly rejects the idealist (5/13)
elimination of the ‘dualism of mind and body.’ Idealism implies that one should not place reliance on science and encourages us to not believe things despite having evidence. (6/13)
Trans ideology rejects observable reality, it suggests that doctors assigning sex at birth (which is based on observing genitalia) is not grounds for determining sex. They will argue that intersex condition is ’the exception that proves the rule.’ (7/13)
But disorders of sexual development do not prove that sex is neither a material concept or a social construction. If anything, DSD are indeed exceptions that prove the rule that: humanity is composed of men & women (and such anomalies prove that there is a standard). (8/13)
Calling those who critique this ideology “mechanistic materialist” is also incorrect. Mechanistic materialism reduces the understanding of things to parts, this dogmatic view rejects the processes of things. In approaching trans ideology with dia-mat, (9/13)
no one denies that social conditions (such as, but not limited to: homophobia and misogyny) have created the possibility in which people acquire postmodern identities. (10/13)
But like the dia-mat approach to evolution; which is that things develop continuously and are not static, one cannot prove that sexual organs are capable of evolving into the opposite. (11/13)
Like so with claiming we are metaphysical thinkers, when metaphysics in itself is an abstract way of thinking that disregards essential detail; such as material reality; such as biological sex. (12/13)
As a Marxist, it is important to be critical of such an ideology because it is currently being pushed by multi-billion dollar corporations that are neither interested in the health of trans individuals, children and most certainly the rights of women. (13/13)
I beg of these pseudointellectual fucks READ MODERN BIOLOGY PAPERS ON GENDER. Your high school science class from god knows how long ago does not give you the authority to tell people what is or isn't an objective biological fact.
These morons always act like there is this hard line in science that never moves and that we haven't discovered or built upon our knowledge since the 1900s. Mother fucker makes so many assumptions while pretending to be rational it makes my head spin. FUCKER QUOTES A GOD DAMN PHILOSOPHER FROM 400 YEARS AGO! Mother fucker if you put that shit as a citation in a paper you would be laughed at by the scientific community so hard that your PhD would fly off and you'd have to resort to writing self-help books to get anyone to take your mental flatulence seriously.
After the revolution, I'm opening a god damn school to teach these mother fuckers how to apply the scientific method without being a biased fuck. It's going to be call Dirt_Owls school of shut the fuck up lobster boy.
I'm drunk, fuck you, stop judging me. Shit.
Totally agree with you.
They also show a hard misunderstanding of what materialism is, what idealist mind body separation is etc.
The point was that they are not separate entities, but that they are in entirely separate realms. This is not the case though, since everything that is is materialistic. Our mind (or the perception of it, our sense of self) exists precisely cause of materialism.
Guess what feelings are produced by real material conditions. So :trans-specter: are actually more based than a person who thinks that there is a thing "the spiritual". Thinking there is "the spiritual" is idealist and non-materialist.
In addition saying there is a thing that is "biological XYZ" or "men" and "women" is idealist and cringe AF.
While I think telling people to read Marx as theory is sometimes cringe and often not necessary we have a case here which shows why reading and understanding stuff out of the German Ideology of 1846 might be beneficial. Though I will now always suggest people to get schooled in the new cool school in town:
to add to this, one of our best explanations of how certain kinds of transness develop (not all - no explanation can possibly be total because trans people are not a monolith) is that the developing fetus is exposed to one sex hormone during primary development of the gonads, causing them to develop down one path, but the brain develops at a different time - and it consequently can grow to expect a different sex hormone than what the gonads wind up producing. the brain is much more complicated to alter than to simply give it what it expects by shutting down the gonads via blockers and exogenous sex hormones.
the brain is a physical organ and the mind arises of dialetical conflict between the brain and it's environment. it is literally only with trans biology that anyone can get away with saying something as galaxybrained as "treating developmental issues with the brain is to reaffirm mind/body dualism".
But if they did that they'd probably be forced to renounce phrenology too!