The Non-Conversation: When Dialogue Fails in Activism

A Day in Washington Square Park Reveals the Limits of Trans Discourse

Billboard Chris, Trans, and Washington Square Park

This was a fascinating non-conversation. Billboard Chris, Reid, and I spent the day in Washington Square Park in NYC. Chris, due to wearing “billboards,” is a magnet for controversy and all manner of crazies. It’s no surprise then that a woman professing to be trans approached us for what I thought would be a conversation.

My tendency is to always give people the benefit of the doubt. I’ve been out of the US, in Western and Eastern Europe getting content, and I had forgotten how truly divorced from reality and civility many people in this country are. This interaction was a reminder of that and made me think about my hermeneutic of charity toward people who profess to want to have a discussion.

The woman who approached us had absolutely no intention of having a conversation. Rather, she wanted to waste our time. I suspect she wanted to waste our time so that Chris’s message, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers,” did not gain traction and could not influence people.

What is Trans?

The non-conversation instantly devolved when Chris asked her, “What is trans?”. She could not answer this question. She said that she’s transitioning, but as Chris correctly pointed out, that does not answer the question, “What is trans?”.

She was completely incapable of stating what trans is. I found this to be absolutely fascinating. She literally constructed an entire identity around being trans, including taking powerful drugs, and could not state what trans is. I cannot think of a single example of something else that someone believes so strongly, or even an example of something that someone believes less strongly, that someone could not tell you why they believe it.

Q: Why do you think the sun heats?

A: Because I feel it on my skin.

Q: Why do you think Germany is in France?

A: Because I saw it on a map? (It doesn’t need to be true.)

Q: Why do you like ice cream?

A: Because it tastes good.

The list is endless.

Even if she had said, “I sincerely feel like I was born in the wrong body,” that would at least be a reason. But she was not even capable of this.

Anti-Reason Communities

When someone’s reasoning breaks down at such a fundamental level, something else is going on. It’s not merely that one cannot think of a reason for why they believe something, or that they have some kind of cognitive disorder (these are not mutually exclusive), but that they are participating in a community where non-answers are the norm. It is thus a moral issue to not engage in conversation, and even dialogue itself is seen as an instrument of oppression.

(Wise/Lived Experience Educator)

In addition to there being entire lines of academic literature being overtly hostile to reason and dialogue, this comports with my “lived experience” while teaching at a university I will not name. Asking for evidence was a microaggression. Discourse was seen as a tool of oppression. Deference to marginalized people was demanded. Heterodox voices were culled.

In short, the means of error correction were willfully disabled and the institution weaponized offices of Diversity and Inclusion against those who dared ask questions. You could not come up with a better way to shove students into delusion and maintain the dominant ideology: Blasphemy. People willfully suspending their ability to make discerning, rational judgments and thinking they’re better people for doing so. Do this long enough, and you become cognitively crippled, unshakably certain in your convictions and convinced that people who don’t share them are existential threats.

And that, in brief, is what I see in this young woman. Someone who participates in a community that loves, nurtures, and supports her. Someone who is constantly affirmed. And someone who never sincerely considers alternative views or ideas. Someone who’s not only incapable of making arguments, but who wholesale demeans the very conditions that would enable her to make more informed, more rational, and more compassionate decisions. She thus condemns herself to unwarranted certainty and unrestrained arrogance. It is heartbreaking.

Perceptions

One of the downstream consequences of willfully disabling one’s faculty of making rational judgments is that one becomes oblivious to how one is perceived. A great example of this unspoken consequence can be found here. People who live in hermetically sealed echo chambers cannot understand how people who do not live in these echo chambers will react when they witness their behavior.

Art by Sol J Brager

When you live in groups that constantly affirm, you have no way to give yourself a reality check. Here’s the reality check for the woman who spoke with us: You will be seen as having a mental disorder. You will be seen as sad, even pathetic, and wholly delusional. You will have hurt the very cause in which you profess belief. And the more of these videos that go public, the less sustainable your ideology will become, the more the general public will reject whatever it is that you think you’re offering, and the more you will have to resort to asymmetrical tactics like “Trans Day of Violence.” That’s because you’ve given no reason for people who don’t support your cause to support your cause. Rather, you’ve given them every reason to think your beliefs need to be marginalized and public policies established to contain their spread.

My Unsolicited Advice

Here’s my unsolicited advice to trans activists: If you want people to take you seriously and to influence the discourse and thus public policy, behave in such a way that people want to listen to you. That begins by really listening to what others think about your beliefs. And yes, you may feel hurt. It may sting. But this is what it means to be an adult. It means that you answer questions directly. It means that you say, “I don’t know,” when you don’t know. It means that you are willing to revise your beliefs. It means that you grow up. You have to make this choice. It cannot be made for you. And the longer you avoid making it, the more dire your predicament will become. Choose wisely. Your life literally depends upon it.