The Trans Rights Movement Is Obsessed With Victimization
The Trans Rights Movement Is Obsessed With Victimization
And we should all be concerned about this
Certain people are prone to adopt victimhood as an identity… they are proud of their victimhood; they compete with each other… it becomes identity politics… The infiltration of narcissists and psychopaths is universal in all these victimhood movements and they become the public face of the movement… It’s very dangerous, because if you are a perennial victim, if this is your identity… you would tend to feel entitled to special treatment and, if you don’t get this special treatment, you will become aggressive… The potential for aggression in victimhood movements is much larger than in the general population… Anything that is grievance-based leads to violence and death. End of story. All death cults started as victimhood movements.
- Sam Vaknin
In October of last year, Michael Shallenberger tweeted a clip of psychologist Sam Vaknin talking about victimhood movements and why they have such a potential for aggression and violence.
(The clip is just a short part of a longer interview that I also encourage you to watch: Narcissistic Abuse and Victim Aggression.)
Though what Vaknin discusses applies in a much broader scope (he mentions everything from the empath movement and Black Lives Matter to Nazis and communism) I was struck by how perfectly it applied to today’s “trans rights” movement.
Already, this year, we have been horrified by the willingness of trans activists to use violence while crying that they are being victimized. A harrowing example of this was the mob that broke through the barriers at Kellie-Jay Keen’s Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand and surged in around her as she tried to leave. Keen was assaulted, a 70-year-old woman was punched in the face, and, quite frankly, it’s a miracle that even worse didn’t happen.
Just a few days later, a 28-year-old woman who identified as a man went to a school and shot six people dead, including three children.
It then came to light that a “Trans Day of Vengeance” rally was planned in DC for April 1. Organizers ended up canceling the event, citing “threat to life and safety.” Their movement is a threat to life and safety.
Around the same time, children’s advocate Billboard Chris (Chris Elston) was assaulted in Vancouver after a screaming mob closed in around him.
Actual liberation movements do not do this. They do not place vengeance and violence at the center of their activism. The gay rights movement did not do this.
As my friend Matt Osborne writes:
LGB people have made great strides in America, and much of the world, for decades exactly by not seeking revenge on straight people for the harms done to themselves.
Although violence born of frustration initiated the LGB freedom movement at Stonewall, that movement ultimately adopted nonviolence as a principle in order to highlight the violence done to themselves.
Transgender activism and its cousin category for fancy straight people, “queer” activism, have impressed a dominant narrative on society and media that they are uniquely vulnerable to violence. In turn, this supposed vulnerability justifies preemptive violence by themselves, against anyone they denounce as one of their persecutors.
The trans movement is not a liberation movement; the trans movement is a victimhood movement.
How do we know which is which? In an interview with News Intervention, Vaknin admits that it can be difficult to tell apart “legitimate evidence-based grievances from entitlement-fueled manipulative and counterfactual claims.”
But he does offer a useful tip:
One helpful way to distinguish the two is by noting that narcissists and psychopaths are destructive, not solutions-oriented. They thrive on negative affects such as anger and envy and are loth to invest in the routine and tedious chores attendant upon rectifying wrongs and building a better world.
It can also become easier to identify victimhood movements by better understanding the mindset of a victim, and there has, thankfully, been quite a lot of excellent research carried out in this area over the past few years.
In June 2020, Scientific American published a fascinating article by Scott Barry Kaufman on the topic, titled Unraveling the Mindset of Victimhood.
Kaufman described how researchers have delineated four main dimensions of the tendency for interpersonal victimhood. Let’s take a look at each in turn.
Constantly seeking recognition of one’s victimhood. Those who score high on this dimension have a perpetual need to have their suffering acknowledged.
Kaufman does offer the important clarification that seeking recognition for victimhood is a normal response to real trauma and that it is normal to want actual perpetrators to take responsibility for their actions. Of course, the victimhood mindset doesn’t end there.
Next, we have:
A sense of moral elitism. Those who score high on this dimension perceive themselves as having an immaculate morality and view everyone else as being immoral. Moral elitism can be used to control others by accusing others of being immoral, unfair or selfish, while seeing oneself as supremely moral and ethical.
Kaufman explains that feeling morally superior to others makes the person with the victimhood mindset more likely to deny their own aggressiveness while perceiving others as threatening.
This leads to:
Lack of empathy for the pain and suffering of others. People scoring high on this dimension are so preoccupied with their own victimhood that they are oblivious to the pain and suffering of others.
Lack of empathy also manifests at the group level, leading to an increase in conflict and a denial of the suffering and pain of adversaries.
Finally, a victimhood mindset includes:
Frequently ruminating about past victimization. Those scoring high on this dimension constantly ruminate and talk about their interpersonal offenses and their causes and consequences rather than think about or discuss possible solutions. This may consist of expected future offenses or past offenses. Research shows that victims tend to ruminate over their interpersonal offenses and that such rumination decreases the motivation for forgiveness by increasing the drive to seek revenge.
I am strongly reminded of such “hate crimes” as “misgendering,” calling a man, “sir,” or simply not actively fawning over a man in a wig and telling him what a brave and stunning woman he is. Trans activists take these slights and blow them up in proportion to “actual genocide.”
Each of these four dimensions is obvious in today’s trans rights movement and among the narcissistic and psychopathic individuals who lead it.
It was inevitable that this movement would turn violent. In fact, those who have been paying attention have been seeing the violence build for years. Now, it’s finally reaching the broader public consciousness, allowing more people to see the trans movement for what it is: a victimhood movement that has already gone completely off the rails.
The gay rights movement was about equality, It was never about anything else. We never demanded any special treatment; the charge that we wanted "special rights" was about as true as "Trump the successful businessman." We wanted to stop worrying about being fired when employers discovered we were gay, we didn't want to be evicted by bigoted landlords, we wanted legal marriage.
Yes there were those who were in it for attention and it's true that we didn't do enough to tell them to cut it out, but in the end we overpowered the freaks by coming out at work and in public *without* projecting what we liked to think about while masturbating.
Yes there were those who identified with victimization, for whom the notion that they were important enough to be hated made them feel all wriggly and important. The rest of us finally supplanted them.
There is none of this in the "trans" movement.
First of all, real transgender people are simply too rare. By medical statistics they number in the low thousands, not the five million TikTok Generation to whom "trans" is edgy and cool and imparts a sense of belonging. The worst are the "nonbinary"; at least a few people actually are transgender, as in diagnosable as gender dysphoric, but there is no psychological basis for "nonbinary" at all, which may explain why they won't sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up about their fucking pronouns.
But wow have the "trans" been successful at getting that attention. People are getting fired from work for not using "they" as a singular pronoun.
Would you like to share an office with her?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFjUjSJplfs
Aside: I wish people would stop bringing up Stonewall. It's a myth.
Yes there was a protest, but it wasn't drag queens courageously rebelling against police oppression; anyone who has ever known any drag queens knows how absurd that is. The few photographs of the event show young men with beards (uncommon among transvestites) who look, to anyone familiar with the period (1969) a lot more like Vietnam war protesters than transvestites.
And more to the point: while Stonewall is cast as the pivot point from meek acquiescence to the politically self-destructive "in your face" belligerence that dominated for so long, gay activists living less than a hundred miles away from the Stonewall Tavern had not heard of the "riot" ten years later.
A few passing war protesters uprooted some parking meters.
Ten years later with the advent of "ACT-UP" cathartic foot-shooting, Stonewall was pulled out of the trash can of history and recast into some pivotal event with drag queens and other malcontents leading the charge for justice.
It never happened.