The Kind Tyrants

Wading into the gender wars

Many years ago, when I was in college and still had one foot in evangelicalism, I was attending a CPR class required for school. Somehow, and I don’t remember exactly how, during one of the breaks, the instructor and I struck up a conversation about church. I don’t remember what the reason or point of it was, exactly, other than that we spoke about 40 Days of Purpose, a church growth and discipleship program built around Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life, which both of our churches were participating in. 

There was another woman who hung on the edges of the conversation interjecting every now and then, trying to participate, but not quite connecting. The instructor was a black woman maybe 10-15 years older than I was and the third woman was white and of retirement age. The thing that struck me then, as it does now, is why that woman felt like such an outsider to the conversation the instructor and I were having: It wasn’t her age, and it obviously didn’t have to do with race. It was the fact that the instructor and I were both evangelical, and she was a liberal mainline protestant, which are two very different cultures. 

We weren’t deliberately trying to exclude her from the conversation, we were simply having a conversation she didn’t understand, and her interjected non-sequiturs felt like awkward intrusions. Nonetheless, we both were polite, acknowledging her and trying to include her even as she became increasingly frustrated by her inability to integrate herself. Finally she ended with a comment, said in a pointed and sickly-sweet, obviously affected tone: “well, they will know we are Christians by our lo-oove…”

The instructor and I both gave each other a bemused look; the comment had nothing to do with the conversation we were having and seemed like an obvious attempt at some sort of Jesusy one-upmanship. But it was time for the class to resume and we moved on. 

These kinds of awkward interactions happen all the time— I’ve been on the inside, and just as frequently, if not more, on the outside. Sometimes the people who are “in” are quite conscious of it, in a deliberately exclusive mean-girl kind of way. More often than not, as in my example, it’s simply a function of cultural or interpersonal disconnect. When I find myself on the outside in these kinds of interactions, I’ve tended to go into a spiral of self-loathing and doubt, and sometimes it can be quite easy from there to create a whole story about how terrible the other people are and how I’m the truly virtuous one, etc, etc.

I think that’s what was going on with the woman in my anecdote. We didn’t have anything against her, personally, we were simply talking about something she didn’t quite have the context for, yet felt she should, so she decided to take it personally and attempted to scold and shame us by invoking “love.”

The Dogmatization of Kindness

I’ve thought about this incident a lot in the past few years, because it feels related to a modern phenomenon that I can only call the cult of kindness. You know what I’m talking about. It’s a religion whose creed is posted in the front yards of legions of funky urban craftsman bungalows: 

The basic implication is that kindness is always obvious and straightforward, that someone who holds a differing political view is clearly unkind and possibly evil, and if you put this sign in your front yard you are on the side of the righteousness. You will know the people in this house are the right kind of people by their kindness.

I don’t necessarily begrudge people these kinds of social signifiers. As someone who’s been a progressive mainline Christian for about as long as I was evangelical, and far longer if we throw out the childhood years when I was a captive congregant, I will probably have a lot more in common with the “In this house” people than I will the people with the MAGA sign in their yard. 

I remember when those kindness signs first sprang up, sometime in the crazy-making days surrounding the 2016 Presidential election. I, like many, was horrified that a man so brashly rude and inconsiderate, a man who openly bragged about harassing women and who branded immigrants “rapists and murderers” could be our President. When I saw the first rainbow sign in my Tacoma, WA neighborhood, I felt a bit of hope and yes, a thrill of “resistance” to the coarsening meanness emanating from the other Washington.

If they identified themselves by their prejudice and bigotry, we would distinguish ourselves with open-mindedness and kindness. We’d show up to protests for the oppressed, to airports where people were being denied re-entry to the country, to neighborhood organizing meetings. 

As we became more and more infuriated by the absolutely asinine and downright perverse behavior of the Republicans and deplorables, we clung even tighter to our kindness, insisting anyone who “they” opposed was welcome with us, no questions asked. Claims of oppressive treatment, microagressions, and systemic injustice were never to be interrogated, judiciously weighed and carefully considered, because we might be accused of being unkind. In this way we became more and more shaped by the worst stereotypes of the right— irrational, histrionic, priggish— drawn into a sort of reaction-formation tango. We became the thing we decried in others.

This isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, although this current iteration seems to have originated with us. I see the UK media complain all the time how the American culture wars have infected their country, and the French have decried“Le Wokisme” spreading from our shores.

Gender and the Compassion Quagmire

This was brought home this week as I read an interview with the British Labour politician Angela Rayner. A little background for Americans who haven’t been following: 

The UK is, like our own country, in an uproar over the whole issue of sex and gender. It all came to a head recently when Scotland passed a measure that would make it very easy for people to change genders and access services for their preferred sex. Although some lawmakers raised concerns that this could compromise services for women, particularly vulnerable women, they were pooh-poohed as being fearmongers. Then it came out that a rapist, Adam Graham, had transitioned to a female identity, Isla Bryson, after arrest and obtained a transfer to a women’s prison. This has turned a large part of the UK against so-called “self-ID” legislation (that is, allowing people to legally change gender with little to no medical evaluation or transition) and caused the resignations of Scotland’s political leader, Nicola Sturgeon. (Slavoj Zizek recently wrote a pretty good summation of all this).

So it was in light of this that a London Times reporter asked Angela Rayner, who holds the second-place leadership in Britain’s Labour party, whether Isla Bryson was a woman:

Is Isla Bryson a woman? “The recent case?” Looking slightly thrown, she [Rayner] starts talking about guidelines, processes, safeguards, circumstances. “So from what I know about the case, I would not have been putting that person in a women-only prison.” But that wasn’t the question, so I ask again.

“Well, that person’s identifying as a woman now. But they’re right at the beginning of a transition — that they believe is right for them, however, and that’s fine. We respect that. That doesn’t mean to say by respecting it you instantly say, OK, well, that person then goes into a vulnerable space.”

Rayner keeps saying Bryson is “at the very start of the process” of becoming a woman, and keeps citing this as a reason why she should not be in a women’s jail. But Bryson began gender reassignment therapy back in 2020, shortly after she was charged. The SNP’s new Gender Recognition Reform Bill, which Labour voted for, would grant a gender recognition certificate (GRC) to any adult who declared they had been living in their acquired gender for just three months. In other words, had the law Rayner’s own party supports been in place when Bryson began her transition, she could by now have been legally female for more than two years. Even under the existing legislation, brought in by Labour in 2004, Bryson is by now eligible to apply for a GRC, although as far as anyone knows she does not have one. The Scottish Prison Service still remanded her to a women’s jail, though, because several years ago it quietly adopted a de facto self-ID policy — the very policy Rayner supports. By the logic of Rayner’s own stated beliefs, Bryson is categorically a woman.

Bryson, 31, claims to have known she was a woman since she was four. Does that mean she was a woman when she raped her victims? Rayner looks puzzled.

“Well, I don’t know. Because I don’t know what’s inside that person’s head.” I agree, it is impossible for anyone to know. But according to the principle of self-ID, what’s inside someone’s head should determine their legal right to access female-only spaces.

Rayner says Bryson should be in a men’s prison because “that person is a dangerous person who was proven to be a dangerous person and could continue to be a dangerous person”. If I were sent to jail, there is every chance I’d be locked up with dangerous women. We’re not sending them to men’s prisons, though. So why Bryson?

“Because … because … it’s where … you’ve got to take it as a whole of the circumstances.”

Do these circumstances include the fact that Bryson has a penis? “No, it’s because Isla Bryson has done damage and harm to women.” With? “Yeah, sure, I mean …” She looks cross and flustered. “It doesn’t matter whether it was a penis or some implementation.” I think Bryson’s victims would say her penis played an important part in her crimes. Does the phrase “her penis” even make any sense? “I think … to be honest, I don’t think that particularly matters.”

The Bryson case is important because it exposes the logical implications of allowing a person’s legal gender, irrespective of biology, to be a matter for them simply to decide for themselves. I want to be reassured that Rayner has really thought this through. But she doesn’t seem to have interrogated her own position on this issue very thoroughly at all, and looks increasingly confused when I try to.

“I think people just want to see the human side of being compassionate for people, but also seek that reassurance around safe spaces. I don’t think those two things are incompatible. There has to be some movement that is compassionate and in line with our British values.”

Legal definitions, of course, hinge on precise language that leaves matters as unambiguous as possible. This is how you hold rapists, murderers, and other wrongdoers to account. But “kindness” demands we prioritize people’s internal subjective feeling states, walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting them. You can feel the internal workings of Rayner’s mind panicking, struggling, and ultimately failing to thread this particular needle. Very few people question the fact that compassion is both a virtue and a necessity. But what is the right use of compassion? And when does it leave us open to manipulation and abuse?

I suspect a lot of people know, deep down, that this pantomime of “kindness,” that involves giving some people (the marginalized du jour) unlimited and unchallenged leeway to claim oppression and harm, while denying any legitimate concerns and feeling of others, is absurd. But to admit this would be to give in to the other side, the “deplorables” and “fascists” and “TERFs” to concede they might have a point, and therefore lose one’s identity as one of the righteous.

Normalizing Common Sense

I mention all this because not long ago one of my spiritual direction clients struggled to share what was worrying him. He works in a progressive field and found himself deeply alarmed at what he perceives as increasing derangement on issues of gender and identity and the extreme intolerance of any dissenting views. As I coaxed his worries out of him, he admitted that he was terribly afraid that I would judge him.

I was surprised by this, because first, I have a reputation amongst my clients for being pretty open and non-judgmental (“You could tell Rebekah you’re contemplating murder and she wouldn’t bat an eyelash”) and also because I’ve shared my own discomfort with the new gender ideology here.

But I realized that I’ve only done it once, and even there it was buried at the bottom of the piece. I haven’t addressed it again because I’m wary of polarizing myself in the other direction. The pieces I write critiquing the left consistently get the most views and shares, which creates a certain temptation. It is possible to let your bitterness and frustration take you to a very dark place, one where you’re constantly chasing anti-woke pageviews and becoming a reactionary conspiracy theorist.

But after talking to my friend and client, I had to ask myself, by refusing to speak more about this, am I really taking a principled stand to avoid further polarization? Or am I cowering in fear of the “kind” tyrants? I knew the answer was the latter. I am afraid to talk about it more. I’m afraid of being perceived as unkind, of losing new followers, old followers who may have missed that one piece, and even friends who know me and my character.

The truth is, as a nurse who has seen medical fads and “expert opinion” wax and wane like the phases of the moon, and under heavy influence from pharmaceutical and medical technology companies, I am deeply concerned about the increasing medicalization of children, teenagers, and young adults by transactivists, and the irreparable harm that may result.

As someone who understands the basics of human reproduction and biology, I know that sex is not a spectrum and our bodies are not tabula rasa on which we can write our most outlandish and transgressive fantasies. All humans throughout history have struggled with the humiliating limitations placed on us by our mortal flesh. Your spirit may be limitless and beyond gender (and age, and beauty, and ability, etc), but your body is not. The only way out is death. This, incidentally, is why the ancients found the Christian claim that God could exist in human flesh to be shocking and offensive.

I certainly don’t have a problem with people who choose not to (or find themselves unable to) conform to all the gender norms of their natal sex, and I believe it may be appropriate for some of them to transition. But that doesn’t make a transwoman literally a woman, or a transman an actual man. There are situations where I have no problem referring to and treating them as such. But there are others, like women’s prisons, shelters, and support groups, where it is appropriate to have a high degree of gatekeeping. And the idea that we must rewrite our language with increasingly tortured phrasing and alienating language to coddle the fragile sensibilities of a precious few is neither kind nor just. It’s enabling narcissism and manipulation.

Undoubtedly some will call me a TERF, despite the fact that I am not a radical feminist; or transphobic, despite the fact that there are many trans people who agree with me on these issues. This fear of being labeled is how the kindness police get you. At some point you have to decide not to care.

We need to normalize holding the kinds of opinions I’m sharing in progressive and spiritual spaces. We need to let people know it’s okay to question dogma and ideology on the left without being forced down the redpill rabbit-hole of the Intellectual Dark Web.

It’s the kind thing to do.

---

A few resources, if you’re looking for voices on the gender issue that are nuanced and compassionate. They’re both podcasts. The first is Gender: A Wider Lens from two therapists who work with kids navigating gender identity. The second is Transparency, from two transmen, one of whom is a mental health RN.

A Personal Update

Some of you know my mother died recently. I’m sure I’ll write more about it at some point, when I feel ready, but going through all of that is one of the reasons I haven’t posted in a while.

Looking forward, however, I am able to take on more clients, and I wanted to share a little bit more about what I do. I’m a spiritual director who helps people find and listen their own God-given intuition and purpose. I also offer astrology and aura readings. If that’s something you’re interested in, you can find out more about it here.