Ontological Totalitarianism
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Context
In the context of the discussions around 'pronouns' and 'compelled speech legislation', opposed by feminist scholar Jane Clare Jones.
URL = https://janeclarejones.com/2018/12/08/ontological-totalitarianism-by-numbers/
Principles
- Human beings have a right to freedom of conscience and belief.
- Human beings have a right to their own perceptions.
- Humans beings have a right to speak in a manner which expresses their own conscience, belief and perceptions – providing that speech is not an incitement to violence against another person (see 14).
- The only pronouns one can prescribe to oneself, ethically, are ‘I’ and ‘me.’
- Third person pronouns are granted to you by another person.
- Pronouns function as a ‘recognition procedure’ in order to instruct someone else how they are to recognise someone, often in the absence of, or in contradiction to, observable cues.
- Asking someone to use certain pronouns is a request that they perceive or recognise you in a certain way.
- Prescribing pronouns is a diktat that another person perceives or recognises you in a certain way.
- Prescribing pronouns and enforcing that prescription is an act of coercion which violates people’s freedom of conscience. This is ontological totalitarianism.
- Resisting coercion is not bullying.
- Ontological totalitarianism may well be bullying.
- Recognition must be freely given if it is to meaningfully function as validation.
- Coerced recognition is both a violation of people’s freedom of conscience and is functionally worthless as validation.
- Resisting coerced recognition is not an act of violence – literal or otherwise – nor an incitement to violence.
- Trans people who are visibly gender non-conforming are subject to violence as a result of the policing of patriarchal gender norms.
- Feminists do not police patriarchal gender norms.
- Violence directed at people who violate patriarchal gender norms is an artefact of patriarchy, not an artefact of feminism.
- Many feminists believe that sex and gender are analytically distinct, and do not believe that the performance or identification of a person’s gender changes their sex.
- This is a matter of our perception of reality and a matter of political conviction. It is not a pretext.
- Blaming feminists for patriarchal violence against gender non-conforming and trans identified people is empirically baseless political strategy which serves as an instrument of coercion.
- People refusing to validate your identity may be painful.
- Something being painful is not conceptually identical to it being a moral harm, structural violence, or an act of oppression.
- Not getting our needs met is sometimes painful.
- Sometimes our needs don’t get met because other people also have needs, beliefs, and interests.
- Thinking you must always have you needs met and refusing to understand why other people may not meet your needs, is narcissistic entitlement.
- Narcissistic entitlement is the refusal to recognise the needs and interests of other people.
- Narcissistic entitlement is the opposite of mutual recognition.
- Mutual recognition is the condition of possibility of justice.
- Ontological totalitarianism is a political manifestation of narcissistic entitlement.
- Ontological totalitarianism is antithetical to the conditions of possibility of justice."
(https://janeclarejones.com/2018/12/08/ontological-totalitarianism-by-numbers/)