Suicidal ideation as a rhetorical tool
And other such ghastliness
This post is kind of a follow-up to my last post. I do keep going on about ‘trans rights’ a bit, but it’s a topic that really bothers me because it seems to so neatly exemplify the “thing that is not what it says it is”, that no one wants to talk about - you know, like Voldemort. There has been more than one occasion when I’ve been trying to discuss the Ukraine conflict, or indeed anything related to Russia, and trans rights have been crowbarred into the conversation as a cheat code to quickly demonise Russia, because Russia doesn’t have the same approach to ‘trans rights’ as Western Europe. It’s an incoherent argument, but it’s one that appeals directly to an assumed set of emotional responses: pity for trans people and anger at Russia for denying them ‘rights’.
I have written before about how much talking about Ukraine feels like talking about LGBT issues, and I’ve had a sort of epiphany since I realised that the reason they feel similar is because they are both manifestations of the same inculcated ‘backwards logic’ that demands you repeat maxims and incantations in lieu of thinking critically.
The last time the Ukraine-Russia-LGBT crowbarring happened, I asked as politely as I could for the person who had just brought up ‘trans rights in Russia’ to say what trans rights she meant, which were apparently denied in Russia. I didn’t even ask what the hell that had to do with what we’d been talking about moments prior. Predictably enough she rolled her eyes, puffed her cheeks out, sighed, shook her head and made very clear that I had just shown myself to be very ignorant, but she still didn’t say what those rights were. The more I pushed the question and asked her to name a single one of those rights, and she refused to give any answer beyond acting offended and saying “just stop”, the more frustrated I became. I honestly don’t know whether people do this with the express intention of riling up the other party - God knows it works - or whether they really believe that the answer is so obvious that there is no need to answer it. Either way, I found it incredibly rude. So what are those trans rights that so many people think don’t exist in Russia?
If you read an article like this one in TIME from Dec 4 2023 and take it all at face value, you come away with the message that Russia’s1 Supreme Court ruling to uphold the Justice Ministry’s claim to classify the ‘international LGBT social movement’ as an extremist organization
criminalizes … any activist working to advance human rights for queer individuals.
That’s in the text of the article, they’re not quoting a third party.
They don’t offer links to any official Russian sources, even though Russian state media outlet TASS did report on it in a Nov 30 article titled ‘LGBT movement tagged as extremist in Russia — Supreme Court’. Why not link to that, when TASS are openly admitting that they tagged ‘the LGBT movement’ as extremist, and will henceforth be considering any activist working to advance human rights for queer individuals a criminal?
The reason the TIME article didn’t link to that TASS article (apart from the fact that you might wander off and read other TASS articles) is that it doesn’t say that Russia will henceforth be considering any activist working to advance human rights for queer individuals a criminal. That was a bit of dramatic ‘journalistic interpretation’ of the admittedly vague statement about “the LGBT movement”, from the anagram-friendly author Solcyré Burga (OLÉ! CARRY BUGS) - but without an external source to check, you would have no way of knowing that.
The TIME article extensively quotes reports and representatives from various LGBT advocacy groups, but all of those statements offer further speculation on what the ruling might mean, couched in confident yet vague activist language. For example:
“In essence, it means if you live in Russia, and you're gay if you live in the closet they are not going to bother you. But if you make a single step, a tiny step out of that closet, you are at risk,” [Tanya Lokshina, associate director for Human Rights Watch's Europe and Central Asia division] says.
What exactly do you mean by “a single tiny step out of that closet”, Tanya? Oh right, no one asked.
The TASS article admits that it was a closed-door session because they were reviewing classified information, and that the extremism was related to ‘incitement of social and religious discord’, without going into detail. It’s a pretty short article, but there was a longer ‘Press Review’ article on Dec 1 that goes into a bit more detail, including quoting Vladimir Voronin, managing partner of the Altavista law firm, who criticised the ruling because it does not give a clear-cut definition of ‘the LGBT movement’, and therefore law enforcement agencies may feel free to adopt "a broad interpretation of the law". Wait, I thought TASS was supposed to slavishly do the bidding of the Russian government, who are always aligned on everything with Dear Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich? Why are they admitting that this ruling might be open to interpretation and therefore abuse? Maybe it’s because that’s a very reasonable criticism to have of a ruling made behind closed doors, and TASS might not be the monolithic propaganda machine we’ve been warned about.
Returning to the TIME article, a bit further down it admits that
Russia does not explicitly criminalize same-sex relationships or differing forms of gender expression, but their laws largely limit the rights of people whose gender identity or relationships fall out of so-called traditional norms.
The second clause is a word salad that attempts to undermine the concrete fact in the first clause, by bloviating a load of nothing. How do laws limit people’s rights, if same-sex relationships and gender expression aren’t illegal? The following sentence tries to justify the word salad:
This year, there’s been an expansion of those policies through a law banning gender reassignment surgery and legal gender recognition.
Now we’re getting somewhere. So Russia has banned gender reassignment surgery and legal gender recognition (“self-id” in British parlance), and those are the rights that trans people lack in Russia.
It’s important to point out that ‘gender reassignment surgery’ does not turn men into women or vice versa, because that fact seems to get overlooked awfully often. Men who’ve undergone it won’t be able to have babies, and women who’ve undergone it won’t grow a functioning penis. In both cases, each sex merely loses their natural sexual function, and ends up with some prosthetic approximation of the opposite sex’s genitals, with all the attendant risks involved. There are some truly stomach-churning stories of trans women’s bespoke ‘vaginas’ getting infected, or the wall between the colon and the urethra becoming perforated. It’s grotesque and it benefits no one except the surgeon who got paid to it, and this is the ‘right’ that Russia has decided to deny people. One person’s ‘denial of rights’ is another person’s ‘protection from a predatory medical industry’.
With regards to Russia banning legal gender recognition, complaining that the state won’t recognise your psychological condition (in this case gender dysphoria) as reality, should really not be described as a ‘rights’ issue, although it frequently is in Western media. As has been observed ad nauseum by many others, self-id would never be applied to anything besides gender, for example age, or race, or whether you are an attack helicopter. The Russian legal system is putting its foot down and firmly saying “no” to these people, because it recognises that once you start accommodating one group’s delusion, you set a precedent to accommodate all others’ too. The pertinent legal question is not “Why shouldn’t they be allowed it?”, the question is “Why should they be allowed it? Why do they need it? How does it benefit them?”.
Answers to this all tend to revolve around emotionally charged words like affirmation, acceptance, fulfillment and the like, which are entirely subjective and can’t be proved or disproved. When people push back against these answers and demand tangible material benefits, is when you get to the argument that the most cynical trans rights activists fall back on when previous attempts at emotional blackmail have failed: “Because gender-affirming care saves lives.” Sounds like a bold claim; how does it save lives? “People who don’t get the surgery, medication or affirmation they want are at heightened risk of suicide.”
I can barely express my disgust at these statements, promoted as they are in mainstream media. It is a perfect example of duplicitousness, of talking out of both sides of one’s mouth: the more ‘trans rights activists’ talk about people who identify as trans being at high risk of killing themselves if they don’t get what they want, the more they implant the idea in those people’s heads that if they don’t get what they want, it wouldn’t be their fault if they killed themselves. If one of these people actually does kill themself, they become a convenient statistic for those same cultural vampires to use to win debate points.
There’s no way of proving why a person killed themself, or how it could have been prevented, it’s all pure speculation and exploitation. In the sense that the fifth dimension is the conceptual dimension of the possible and the causative, they are literally playing ‘5D chess’ with vulnerable people’s lives. The people who claim to care about trans people - or the cutesy aphorism ‘trans kids’ - so much that they want them to get unnecessary medical treatment, are the ones who in reality care about them the least.
As the post below by The Distance writes, the Cass Review notes that Charlie Millers, a trans-identifying 17 year old girl who killed herself in a hospital in 2020, was subject to repeated questioning about her mental state. If someone tells you not to think of a blue VW Beetle, you’re going to think of a blue VW Beetle; if someone keeps asking you if you’re suicidal, you’re going to think about suicide.
Just imagine if this line of reasoning applied to anything else. I’ve felt suicidal after a breakup, as I’m sure lots of other people have at one time or another. If I had told my ex that I was going to kill myself if she didn’t get back together with me, the ‘trans care saves lives’ logic would state that if she didn’t get back with me (regardless of what she wanted) and I did kill myself, it would therefore be her fault. No. Sometimes you just have to deal with reality no matter how much you don’t like it, and if you go and do something tragic and foolish, you are still responsible for your actions2. It’s called being an adult.
The title of the article focuses on Russia, but admits that the move is ‘global’. Later on, it quotes rises in ‘hate crimes’ in the UK and France, and bemoans ‘regressive’ policies in Italy and the US. Blame Russia anyway! A lot of people will only read the headline, after all.
It’s a heavy topic and not one that lends itself to comedy, but the streamer and comic genius Limmy, who is open about his own struggles with mental health, did an excellent improv story in which the main character ‘successfully’ uses a threat of suicide-by-paint-drinking to get what he wants, for a while at least. I think Limmy is great.