#688 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Tuesday June 20)
Good morning,
I have been encouraging people to attend Transparent: The Musical (playing at the Mark Taper Forum downtown until the end of this week). It is a creative, entertaining, exuberant musical.
The story is that of a grown man coming out to his wife and three children as transsexual. The ensuing plot touches on the quirks of being part of a minority, how families interact with each other, and how it matters less how one acts than who one is. It’s about human dignity and the right to be—and be celebrated for being—oneself.
A CONNECTION TO NATIONAL SELF-DETERMINATION MOVEMENTS
I’ve been taking a YouTube class on the History of Ukraine from Yale professor Timothy Snider. At one point Mr. Snider talks about revolutions and what they represent. I won’t bore with the details, but will note one of the core conclusions:
Revolutions may be political and they may be seeking to express national identity, but in the end, they are less about either of things and more about human dignity—the dignity of being oneself and being recognized as able to pursue one’s aspirations. While a revolution may talk about patriotism or political rights, in the end they gain traction when they are focused on the individual--the right to human dignity, as expressed by Immanuel Kant. In the end, Ukraine fought for its independence not primarily because of the promise of a Ukrainian state. They fought for the right to be themselves—to speak their own language, practice their own beliefs, live lives of purpose and choice, and sing their own songs.
The last observation—the right to sing one’s own songs—rang true as an expression of the individual, not as a political animal, but as a human being. At the end of the day, isn’t this all we all really want is to being able to sing our own songs, both literally and metaphorically? This desire for human dignity is not simply an acknowledgement of one’s ethnicity, beliefs, or heritage, but extends to the right to live and celebrate one’s own life choices. There is a connection that flows from the pursuit by Ukrainians of the right to live as they choose and the struggle of Gay people to live the lives they choose and the right of trans people to live the lives they choose. Who are we to judge which pursuits of human dignity and self-expression are more justified than others?
I must confess that I have never really understood transsexualism and perhaps may never fully understand it. But as I think about it, I also don’t really get the amount of hair gel some people have to apply each morning or, for that matter, why women (and some men) put up with high heels. In each of these cases, no one is asking me be like them or do what they do. What they ask (explicitly or implicitly), and what they have every right to expect, is that the rest of us allow them to be themselves.
Why is it that people care about how these people dress, address themselves, or live their lives? If you don’t like it, move on. Choose not to associate. If you think your children are confused, spend time explaining how people can be different.
Issues of whether gender affirming therapies are desirable pre-puberty (I think not, for the reason that these choices should be informed and developed over time) and when one teaches about sexuality in school, and the extent of those lessons, are questions of pedagogy. In how we discuss these life choices with children is fair game for us to debate. But in the limited case of acceptance, all they are asking—and have every right to expect—is the right to sing their own songs. It’s not like they are asking us to all join in, and it’s not like it’s a contagion. It is their choice and we should let them sing and laugh and live in peace.
CARL SAGAN ON BEING BAMBOOZLED AND PROVING THE NEGATIVE
“If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
–Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World
In the same book, Sagan explains the impossibility of disproving a ridiculous statement. It often is said that it is impossible to “prove the negative.” If you make a statement alleging the existence of something, you must back it up with evidence. If there is no evidence to prove or disprove its existence, then it must be presumed not to be true. Here is Sagan’s example:
“Now what's the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there's no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true."
In our current environment, if one alleges an election was stolen because one believes it might have been stolen, or that the opportunity to have stolen it may have existed, it is incumbent upon you to come up with evidence. It is not incumbent on the person denying your allegation to prove it didn’t happen.
Have a great day,
Glenn