A large number of people (mostly men, in my experience) who’re sympathetic to some of women’s opposition to gender identity ideology, nevertheless think it’s cruel to point out that a trans-identified man looks like a man, and unkind not to ‘respect’ his pronouns. They think these are ‘compromises’ women should be prepared to make. ‘What does it matter?’ they say. ‘How does it hurt you?’
The psychological effects of being coerced, manipulated or pressured into doing something that is against a person’s own beliefs or values are well known. ‘Moral injury’ occurs when a person is forced to betray deep-held convictions, or stand in silence while those convictions are being betrayed. The individual feels transgressed at a core level. The inevitable consequences are stress, anxiety and anger.
Workplaces across the west have imposed a Kafkaesque situation on women. A belief system most people consider nonsensical, but which, in elite circles, has become almost a religion, has been imposed from on high. Women are being persecuted and punished for not pretending they think men can change sex. The policing of pronouns, and the harassment and shaming of women who won’t pretend they can’t recognise a man when they see one, is merely the tip of genderism’s gigantic, threatening iceberg.
Any man who seeks to force women to play along with the fantasy that he’s female is engaging in a typically male power play. At worst, he will suffer narcissistic injury from her non-compliance, but that doesn’t make him objectively vulnerable. The non-compliant woman, though, suffers lasting moral injury by being forced to participate daily in a lie – a lie, moreover, that constitutes a fundamental threat to her own rights to privacy, dignity and safety.
It has been profoundly illuminating to see how many people – possibly because their own values spring, not from a place of rationality or true conviction, but from fashion and self-interest – see male narcissistic injury as so very much more worthy of compassion than the moral injuries suffered by women.
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