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phaylenfairchild · 6 years ago

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The Future Of Trans Americans Still Hangs In The Balance

It’s easy to get excited about the House Of Representatives becoming majority Democrat, but what does that really mean?

For transgender people, the last two years have exposed us to a steady onslaught of relentless attacks. From fear-mongering televised advertisements that posture us as inevitable sex predators to rile of the evangelical voters, to the attempted ban on transgender people serving in the military, the ban of the word “Transgender” or “Vulnerable people” in any missives between the CDC and the White House, the redactions of protections for transgender students in public schools and college campuses. Then came the establishment of the United States Department of Health and Human Services founding a new branch called The New Conscience and Religious Freedom Division intended to allow medical caregivers the right to refuse treatment to LGBT individuals citing their religious convictions.

Most recently, we’ve seen the proposal to remove us of from inclusions beneath the 1964 Civil Rights Act which will, consequentially, expose to to further acts of violence, discrimination and harassment. In a memo that was leaked to the Washington Post which had been drafted and amended by four judicial branches, the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor since early 2018, it stated that the Obama Administration, by force “…wrongfully extend(ed) civil rights to people who should not have had them.”

Within days, Trump appointed renowned anti-LGBT attorney Eric Dreiband to the head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division who immediately sent a directive to the United States Supreme Court saying trans identifying people can now be fired without legal recourse.

The latest series of attacks came from all sides, fast and furious. In true Trump fashion, so many other stories dominated the headlines that the conversation, the outrage, the backlash disappeared within days, buried. This is truly the era where it seems impossible to keep up or even stay proactive when something new arises every day, provoking more shock, more fear and more cultural division.

But, transgender Americans were watching this election from the edge of their seats. We knew that the unfolding results had direct implications on our lives, our safety, our security and our future ability to thrive in this nation as an equal. There were throngs of cheers as Democrats swept the House of Representatives, but that alone cannot protect us from the political missiles ready to launch in our direction.

The House of Representatives has several powers assigned to it, including financial oversight, introducing or reforming revenue bills and even the ability to impeach a federal official- yes, they can move to impeach the President. However, what passes through the House must also pass through Senate… and if you, like millions of others, watched the election results come in on November 6th, you know that Republicans not only maintained control of the Senate, but picked up two seats.

The Senate can block every effort that the House of Representatives makes. This is the dark reality of having two branches each run by opposing factions. They don’t care about the issues as much as they care about keeping score. They vote with each other, not against each other. They are more like National Sports teams than a body intended to represent everyday folks like you and me. We must accept there is no bipartisan effort in government.

Even before all the votes had been counted, the future for transgender Americans began to look more bleak when Trump demanded the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions– who was, himself, notoriously anti-LGBT- and appointed a younger, more bigoted version of Sessions in the form of Matt Whitaker. A Man who has historically weaponized his political power against LGBT people. A man who insists that Federal Judges must rule by Biblical Law.

We trans folks and our allies can fight these immeasurably damaging lawmakers all the way to the Supreme Court, but Trump has been ahead of the ball, stacking the bench with Conservative Judges- and one specifically, Justice Kavanaugh, is very eager to please the President who defended him against multiple sexual assault claims to ensure his confirmation- a decision made by Senators who, unsurprisingly, voted along party lines to put him there for the duration of his lifetime despite evidence he may have perjured himself during his testimony.

It’s been hard for the nation to stay on course, however, with so many minorities coming under fire by Trump Administration and the venomous candidates he has devoted the last two years campaigning across the country for. Amidst blatant voter suppression, bombs sent to leaders of the Democratic Party by a Trump loyalist, more devastating gun violence, the latest at a Country and Western Bar in Thousand Oaks, California marking the 307th mass shooting since the beginning of the year, it’s easy for us to get lost in the chaos.

And it is chaos. The entire Nation is reeling.

As a Transgender person, I get a lot of critical feedback. Some are polite and some are violent threats. The argument most often posed to me is this:

Many people say; “There are just too few of you to matter.”

They can’t even agree on how many of us there are. All our detractors care about is there being more of “Them” than there are of “Us.” Those are the politics this administration relies on. Them vs. Us.

Trumpists vs. Immigrants.

Trumpists vs. Muslims

Trumpists vs. Transgender people

Trumpists vs. Women

Trumpists vs. People of Color

Everywhere you look, the Trump administration is starting a war on people. Their goal is to keep everyone scattered. Like a pride of Lions attacking a herd of wild buffalo, they keep the attacks coming with a rapid intensity, thus there is no time to organize against or even react to the last. They go for who they perceives as the weakest first. It is not unnatural, if you are a member of any of the disenfranchised communities that have suffered as a result of this cancerous presidency, to be concerned for your own fate or be hyper-focused on issues that explicitly target you. It’s hard to be angry with others for having already moved on from the discussion of my civil rights. That only happened two weeks ago, although it feels like years by now. As a social activist, or, more accurately, a humanist, it’s a challenge to determine where my own efforts are best served. Every day it feels like a new crisis and another marginalized community in need of our collective acknowledgment and more importantly, our compassion as acts of hate are emboldened and then escalated by Presidential rhetoric. He winds up his base with lies and fuels their white, cisgender, heterosexual anxieties over sharing spaces with people unlike themselves. He gives them a show, they give him unwavering loyalty. It isn’t entirely dissimilar to the time he was a mainstay on the World Wrestling Entertainment Stage. That was a gig Trump maintained for awhile, appealing mostly to those who enjoy watching others being kicked, punched and body slammed, but in a ring rather than at a rally. Although not a wrestler, he was combative sidebar; A character of antagonism and the audience loved him… and he loved the attention. Great entertainment for denizens of a sports bar, a tragedy for a country under his unqualified leadership.

For several years there has been talk about developing an Equalities Act, one akin to that already adopted by the United Kingdom in 2010. Again, for that to ever see the light of day, it would have to pass Senate. It does not, sadly, rely solely on the House of Representatives. In Senate, transgender Americans have absolutely no representation. While several trans candidates were elected to local and state offices, Vermont’s Christine Hallquist is the first trans person to win a Gubernatorial primary, but lost in the race Tuesday night. She immediately expressed her concerns for the future of transgender Americans and their potential loss of more rights.

The Department of Health and Human Services has already moved to replace references to “Gender” with “Sex” as they have decided- behind closed doors as the world spun off its axis and we were all distracted- that sex is binary and gender identity that contradicts genital does not exist, nor will it be acknowledged by government agencies despite scientific evidence that anatomy does not determine gender. This reformation of policies, not just from the Obama era, but as far back as 1964, will have far reaching implications, including limiting or removing our right to vote given that some are arguing the constitution directly references sex, not gender, and some have had their government documents amended to reflect their gender identity, not their birth assigned gender. If Republicans succeed in their efforts to remove insurance coverage for people with pre-existing conditions, that will undoubtedly include those diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Suddenly, transgender people could find themselves without affordable access to medications vital to their health and emotional well being. Those in the House of Representatives claim they will prevent this when they assume office in January, 2019.

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nicholemhearn · 7 years ago

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The Problem of Inconvenient Expertise I. Facts, Truth, and Populism

Consensus perceptions of truth rely on trust—in expertise and in the institutions that create knowledge (such as universities). But these forms of trust are diminishing. So are the perceived realities that we share.

Donald Trump did not create the problem of polarized fact perceptions, which preceded his campaign and no doubt will be with us long after he is gone. But he made the problem worse by speeding up the decline in trust and the fracturing of consensus over facts. A populism that rejects expertise as elitist and distrusts conventional sources of authority can reject inconvenient expertise across the board.

Paradoxically, though, the problem of inconvenient expertise—the testimony of experts, scientists, or professors whom we would like to dismiss—is even more of a problem for anti-populists than for Trump supporters. In principle, anti-populists could embrace all epistemic authorities uncritically, and that’s a nightmare fully the equal of the populist’s blanket rejection of expertise.

Between these two poles are most of us, who walk through the cafeteria of expertise and select only what is appealing. The desire to uphold authoritative knowledge some but not all of the time, picking and choosing in the contemporary way, poses the challenge of dealing with the corrosive interconnections of truth, trust, and Trump.

“Truth” vs. “Fact”

We often use these two words interchangeably, but they’re dramatically distinct.

Truth refers to what really exists, the actual state of things. We’d all like to know the truth, but philosophy and science both start from the recognition that misperception and error are rampant. Philosophers and scientists use logic and evidence to try to correct illusions, but the task is never ending.

In the meantime we have facts: fallible, socially determined approximations of truth. Facts are usually accepted as such because of their endorsement by institutions that are seen as authoritative: governments, universities, scientific societies, professional associations, respected media outlets. Sometimes those institutions are in accord and sometimes—as is often the case in our polarized polity—they endorse competing facts.

Facts are as close as we can get to the truth, but they may not be that close. Accepted “facts” may be somewhat incomplete or fully wrong. They may some day be shown to be false and replaced by other facts. So no reasonable person believes that all of the “known facts” of the current moment are truths and that none will be withdrawn (like the “fact” that eggs are bad for you).

Trusting the Experts

One can pretend that this difficult problem is easily solved: just trust the experts. As Jimmy Kimmel said to Sean Spicer in disbelief: “Can we though disagree with the facts?” By which he might have meant, Can we dispute the truth? The answer is that we can if we aren’t sure what the truth is.

I believe that Kimmel was really asking, “Can we dispute the experts?” The answer of course is Yes, if we don’t trust those experts. Trust is the foundation of our confidence in what we know. (Ironically, Kimmel has recently become a vehicle for “facts” about health-care proposals, although he is in no sense an expert on them.)

In a fascinating book on the origins of contemporary claims to expertise (A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England), Steven Shapin argues that trust is at the heart of science. The goal of the book is “to draw attention to how much of our empirical knowledge is held solely on the basis of what trustworthy sources tell us” (21). “What we know of comets, icebergs, and neutrinos irreducibly contains what we know of those people who speak for and about these things” (xxvi). Our search for “a world-known-in-common” (36) reduces, in effect, to the search for “a reliable spokesman for reality” (xxvii).

Who can be trusted to tell the truth about reality? Children (as in the Emperor’s New Clothes)? Political leaders (of our party)? Religious leaders? Shapin’s argument is that in the early modern period, the answer was the gentleman, who was thought to be so independent, both financially and morally, that he had no incentive to lie. His statements—absent proof that the public could understand—would be believed. This made gentlemen the perfect scientists. Eventually trust was transferred to scientists in general, who are the modern-day gentlemen who do not lie.

However, the era of trust seems to be coming to an end.

The question of the tree falling in a lonely forest applies here, but in reverse. The usual framing of the question assumes that we know a tree has fallen. But if I don’t know one way or the other, and someone tells me she heard it fall while another insists that the noise was caused by something else entirely, whom do I believe? Should I believe a tree fell if the ear-witnesses in favor outnumber those opposed by a small margin? What if there is an overwhelming consensus, but a seemingly trustworthy dissenter? What if the dissenter is a friend of mine?

Consider the infamous journalism scandal revolving around George W. Bush’s National Guard service, which ended Dan Rather’s long career in journalism. The truth of the situation—whether Bush did or did not use family influence to gain a National Guard spot to keep him out of Vietnam; and whether he did or did not complete his flight training—will always be the same. While the truth is stable, however, the “known facts” have changed. Until 60 Minutes aired the accusations, the known facts were that Bush served honorably, if not in combat. But then a trusted institution, CBS News, reported a different set of known facts. Soon after, CBS retracted the accusations and fired several influential reporters and editors, changing the known facts again.

A 2015 film about the saga, entitled “Truth,” insists that the 60 Minutes story really was true, even if its sources were false. Rather agrees. His position is that even though the story cannot be documented, and even though the evidence may have been falsified, the story painted an essentially true picture of what happened. So to summarize, CBS initially said that its sources provided facts that delivered a new truth; CBS later said the sources are not facts, so the story cannot be said to be the truth; Rather says the story may not have reported facts, but the story is nonetheless true.

In such cases, which seem to be increasingly common, trust loses its purchase. Rather recently told Variety magazine: “Don’t take my word for what it is; don’t take CBS’s word for what it is; go see it”—that is, “Truth,” the documentary—“and make up your own mind.” How, though, can we do that with any hope of accuracy when the only basis for making up their own minds is the match between what the documentary says and our prior beliefs? At that point we have reached the post-truth era.

Truth and Populism

Trust in media “expertise” as a means to solve the post-truth dilemma is at a low ebb. Here are data from Gallup:

Source: “Americans’ Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low”

If the news media are no longer considered trustworthy sources of knowledge, what replaces them?

American populism has always been difficult to define. My own definition, at least of the current manifestation of populism, is epistemological: it’s the view that the beliefs and perceptions of normal citizens tend to be correct. What non-“elite” Americans think is good and true is what is really good and true.

Populism equates the facts perceived by ordinary people with the truth. It disparages as “fake” facts those that are perceived by extraordinary people. Populism, then, blocks the flow of trust from the bottom up. When the top is no longer trusted, the bottom is left to its own epistemic devices.

In electoral terms, the epistemic us-versus-them turns into more recognizable demographic categories. If Republicans have catered in the past to Americans who perceive themselves as wealthy (or aspire to be so), and Democrats to Americans who perceive themselves as downtrodden, populism caters to Americans who perceive themselves as normal people who can no longer trust either party. It’s not money that American populists dislike (Trump’s wealth makes that clear). It’s elitism.

Elitism comes in many flavors. The more familiar variety is perceived snottiness, putting on airs, looking down on the practices of ordinary people. Trump certainly doesn’t do that. He eats fast food often and publicly. But his ingeniously post-modern variant of anti-elitism relates to his presentation of facts as ordinary (popular) perceptions rather than as perceptions vetted by elites.

The Death of Expertise

If the perceptions of normal folk are correct, then those of the hyper-educated are suspect.

Highly credentialed scholars and journalists both claim to be arbiters of the truth. Both strongly believe that normal Americans should respect this authority. Trumpist populism openly disparages it. Do populists distrust epistemic elites because of their leafy academic pedigrees, or have these pedigrees lost their luster because their bearers no longer seem to be speaking the truth?

Trump’s answer comes to us in a Wall Street Journal op-ed under his byline: “On every major issue affecting this country, the people are right and the elites are wrong. The elites are wrong on taxes, on the size of government, on trade, on immigration, on foreign policy. Why should we trust the people who have made every wrong decision?”

In The Death of Expertise, Tom Nichols presents what seems, at first glance, to be a protest against the notion that experts deserve the loss of people’s trust. “We live in a society that works because of a division of labor,” he writes, “a system designed to relieve each of us from having to know about everything. Pilots fly airplanes, lawyers file lawsuits, doctors prescribe medication,” and scholars of national security (of which Nichols is one) write books about it. Why, then, are ordinary citizens losing faith in experts?

At first, Nichols seems to be chiding the citizenry for disrespecting the division of epistemic labor, but then he reveals that the true culprits are higher education, the Internet, and journalists. In two out of the three cases, the death of trust in expertise is due to the failings of these experts: those in the universities and those in the media. Bad universities are dumbing down their training and bad journalists are claiming expertise they do not have. Only in the case of the Internet is the cause an outside force (really a replacement for expertise, one that’s embraced because of experts’ failings).

In the final chapter, Nichols says what he really thinks: that experts have brought this on themselves. He describes some of the prominent cases of failed expertise, such as the consensus misprediction by foreign policy experts of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the consensus misprediction by pollsters of the 2016 election outcome, and the consensus non-prediction of the financial crisis. He also describes some of the recent events that have brought social science into disrepute, including:

A falsified study of vaccines and autism, which deeply influenced the anti-vaccination movement after being published in The Lancet.

A falsified study on attitudes toward gay rights, published in the prestigious journal Science and later withdrawn.

A falsified study of gun ownership in the colonial era, awarded the Bancroft Prize in history before being withdrawn.

Yet it doesn’t seem probable that generally low-information populist voters were aware of such missteps. So my next post will discuss a different view of the origins of the decline of faith in experts.

The post The Problem of Inconvenient Expertise I. Facts, Truth, and Populism appeared first on Niskanen Center.

from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/problem-inconvenient-expertise-facts-truth-populism/

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