In Texas, a state representative named Tom Oliverson has recently filed a bill which would accuse transgender people of committing “gender identity fraud”. Essentially, he wants to codify the bullshit “trans panic” excuse used by bigots to get away with murder. The idea of transsexuality and/or transgender identity being inauthentic is ridiculous for many reasons. One of the most obvious is how trans people endure despite generations of erasure, abuse, and public condemnation. The fact that trans people choose to express themselves as themselves despite overwhelming pressure is proof enough that their lives could never be equated with “fraud”.
I don’t mean to play into the “trans experience as tragedy” stereotype, but as a cis person, I’m trying to state my case briefly in the way which is most obvious to me. What I want to focus on is not the truth of transsexuality, which I take as a given. I want to talk about the role of government in trying to construct truth and falsehood out of a situation. As Gwen Howerton, a producer with Chron, appears to note, the purpose of this bill and of bills like it may be to shift “the conversation” further against trans people.
So what is it that we’re talking about here? What conversation is being shifted?
Or, let me put this another way: why does action in the government have such an effect on people’s own opinions?
It seems to be the case that whatever the government says should have no bearing on what people think. If you say something that seems off to me, I’m not just going to believe it. Why would the passing of a law do anything to change public opinion? Not only that, why would a bill being filed – one that’s a longshot to pass – be enough to do that? Shouldn’t these actions simply be seen as other opinions?
Well, they are and they aren’t. I imagine most people who will find this piece will already agree that transsexuality is genuine and worth protecting. The fact that some Texan has passed a bill in their lower house is not going to change your opinion. To say it doesn’t have any effect on us, though, is misspeaking. To understand better how this works, we will need a model of how concepts are understood and changed.
Let us say that we exist in a Field. In this Field we have a Concept and we have many Observers. Each of the Observers “views” the Concept, and this can be represented by a direct connection between Observer and Concept. This represents the fact that we have one Concept which all the Observers understand as being the same Concept, but that this is understood separately by each Observer. The connection between each Observer and the one Concept represents that Observer’s understanding.
Where does the Concept come from? In a time-bound sense, it may have come from anywhere. Obviously, it could have come from one or many of the Observers. But it isn’t important as such who created it. In a current sense (synchronic, in Sausseurian terms), the Concept comes from all Observers at once. The state of a Concept at any one time is a composite of all the understanding of that Concept from all Observers.
Understanding comes out of a kind of double action. First, the Observer understands the Concept as it is in the Field: they “see” the Concept as an object, observe it, digest its meaning. The Observer then uses the Concept as they interact with other Concepts, and in doing so their own interaction with the Concept shifts, and they impart that new thought into the Concept. In other words, the Observer’s comprehension of the Concept adds to their understanding, while their interpretation of the Concept adds their understanding back to the Concept. Understanding is therefore not a static, one-time event, it is a continuous exchange.
The understanding of some Observers will naturally be more significant to the Concept than that of others. I say “naturally” because we are all familiar with this phenomenon. When we are small and our parents or guardians tell us what something is, we believe them. If we read the definition of a word in a dictionary, we believe it. This is a natural phenomenon which doesn’t need to be explained. Explaining it to some degree will, however, help us understand how this works in a broader context.
What makes one Observer’s understanding more significant than another’s is what we can call Authority. An Observer with high Authority relative to a Concept will have their understanding be more definitive of that Concept to other Observers. People defer to that understanding. It does not mean that this breaks the double action which I talked about before, though. Instead, an Observer with Authority simply has more agency relative to the Concept than other Observers.
It’s easy to picture this Concept as being like a solid ball, or like a classic atom, or an egg with yolk, whites, and shell. A Concept isn’t like any of these. It’s like an empty shell, all the understandings making up parts of that shell which become a whole with no cracks, and there is nothing inside even though it seems like there should be. A Concept is not a substance and it has very little relation to a substance or a truly actual object.
This fact is important for properly conceiving of the Concept. The fact that there are no “insides” to the Concept implies that there is no neutral or foundational meaning to any Concept; each idea is a collective creation. Following on from this, the only determiners of a Concept are the Observers. And further, without the notion of a center to the Concept, the Authority which some Observers have must come from somewhere other than the Concept itself.
Authority comes from two phenomena: Attribution and Utility. Attribution itself is self-explanatory, but will make more sense after explaining Utility. My use of the word “utility”, like most philosophical uses, is unfortunate; it’s already a heavily loaded term and I would choose something else if I could find something more fitting. The reason that I use it, and the reason that most use it (despite less-than-serious protests), is that it is very general. It isn’t meant to only refer to “usefulness” in the sense of profit, production, and pleasure. It also means successful completion, choice of technique, efficiency, reliability, and so on and so forth. In terms of this analysis, I want to use “utility” to mean “relevance to the actual world”.
If an understanding of Concept helps the Observer to better navigate the actual world, that understanding has Utility. If this understanding can then be Attributed to a certain thing (like another Observer), that other thing will be granted more Authority by the first Observer relative to the Concept. In other words, if someone learns something useful about a subject from another person, the first person will trust the second person more about that subject in the future.
We have to stop before we understand Utility the wrong way, though. It would be easy to connect Utility with a kind of natural empiricism: something has Utility if it reflects “reality”. This isn’t the case. We should instead take the view of flow and code which I discuss in Traffic, Flow, Code, and Boundary. Utility is less a matter of being pleased with the destination of one’s thinking than being able to confidently navigate to a destination, even if the potential destinations are restricted.
To take a current issue which is less critical than trans rights, let’s think about raw milk. There is a significant public push in the United States to make raw milk legal to consume. Many of us are also aware that there are no real benefits to drinking raw milk while there are significant risks. For many of us, the only thought that would seem to have Utility is that of regulating milk production and making raw milk illegal. For those who promote raw milk, other lines of thought have Utility, perhaps most importantly a distrust of certain institutions. This Utility comes out of the social value of rejecting regulations, the quasi-mysticism of natural remedies, the political value of organizing against the party of competent government, and so forth. The negative aspect of potential ostracization acts as a boundary in this matter, helping to steer people away from certain ideas.
There are passages and boundaries for these decision flows constructed throughout our society, and navigating these are one of the primary ways of demonstrating a Concept’s Utility. For us, living in society, most of these courses are constructed by the laws and regulations enacted by the government. They can determine, at their discretion, what is lawful and what is unlawful. That declaration isn’t the boundary, at least not on its own. That boundary is enforced by the use of money through fees, debt, and denial of service, as well as through the application of force through formal and informal policing. Money serves as the major incentive for ways of thinking as well; tax credits are a common way to support and incentivize behavior familiar to Americans.
Getting into how the government controls all these other elements is too intricate to map out for the moment, but it is done essentially through an application of these ideas: forcing certain choices through construction of these decision courses. Ultimately, the government is able to seize Authority for itself on all sorts of issues because of its ability to pass and enforce rules about those issues. When a matter becomes a government concern, whether one is successful or unsuccessful with what they want to do in that matter suddenly becomes subject to the government’s desires and processes.
The presenting of a bill in a government setting, like the Texan asshole did, is contributing to that double-action of understanding that the government (as an Observer) does with the Concept of transsexuality. That particular understanding has a high degree of Authority and, therefore, strongly affects all other understandings of that issue. To say again, this action is influential because the government can decide to fine and harass you based on what it thinks.
What I’ve attempted to do here, and hope to have succeeded in, is to explain that simple observation in a way that will hold up to objections people may have about personal choice and cognition. Personal choice is involved in how people understand issues, obviously, but the lack of familiarity/expertise is a real issue which can be explained through decision flows and double-action of understanding rather than the dead-end defeatism which I usually see as the reaction.
I will finish by making a note about Expertise. One function of government making statements is to give permission to certain segments of society; whereas before there was a boundary, there now is a passage, that kind of thing. This is certainly part of what the danger is, especially as regards the current trans genocide in the United States and United Kingdom. People who are accepting this permission will have had their own understanding of this issue fixed some time in the past. We won’t worry about that now; or, rather, we’ll assume that what I’m going to lay out happened to these types sometime in the past.
Other than the people who are already hateful, there are also people who are genuinely underinformed. I won’t make a guess as to how many there are of these on trans issues, but there are certainly at least some people who are not very informed and who will be reacting to news from their government as some of the first things they hear about trans people. These underinformed people are most susceptible to a confusion between Authority and Expertise where they think that just because someone has Authority on a Concept, that person must also possess Expertise in that same Concept. This is a difference between Utility, which is related to Authority, and ideas like desire or pleasure which are not. Put another way, Expertise can tell you whether something can possibly be achieved, while Authority will tell you whether something known is likely to be achieved.
The confusion between Authority and Expertise comes from proximity to the Concept; we could also call proximity “tenure”. This proximity-tenure is a measure of something’s closeness to a subject. Obviously, simple tenure isn’t enough to prove that one actually has become an expert, but we’ll put that aside from now; however we would define it, someone with close proximity (or high tenure) would by highly connected to the Concept. While understanding is still a double-action, someone with Expertise can be said to primarily be comprehending the Concept. Someone with Authority, on the other hand, is primarily interpreting the Concept.
The proximity experienced by Expertise is gained through that close/long association. The value of Expertise comes out of the effort spent growing close or staying with. Authority, on the other hand, moves suddenly. It does achieve proximity with a Concept but it does this by a rapid claiming, a conquest. It has proximity-tenure but the quality of its proxmity is different than that of Expertise.
What many people see when looking at a Concept is who is more proximate to the concept. In most cases, it will be the Authority, due to them being able to construct the choices leading to a utilitarian destination. When faced with a government, people will believe that the government must know what it is doing if it’s dealing with an issue and they will confuse its decrees with the result of Expertise.
Is there a solution to this? Yes and no. What I feel most pieces like this want to end with is a way that regular people can go out there and change the world. What I would say for that is something like “Make sure you give your authority to real experts, not just the government!” But this kind of individualistic reaction is not going to be helpful.
Any solution will involve institutional takeover through elections*. That’s not the sort of thing I can plot out in a piece like this. If there is anything strategically I would suggest, it would be to try and map these relationships out and use them in the way a field commander would use a map of the battlefield. I think that this analysis can help us find connections of soft power that can be challenged and broken down successfully. The trans community and all communities targeted for death by the capitalist establishment deserve that kind of thorough campaigning to secure their liberation.