Don't Confuse Kindness with Capitulation

You can be kind without losing your self-respect

Frederick Barbarossa submits to Pope Alexander III, by Spinello Aretino

Kindness—actual kindness—is a virtue I value a lot. As a default, I try to let it guide my interactions with others. Even if I sometimes fail, or if someone shows me that they don't deserve my kindness, I still think it's a good thing to aim for at the outset. Unfortunately, too many people have the wrong idea of what kindness is. Often, kindness is not seen as being friendly, generous, and considerate but rather as being permissive and even capitulating. In far too many circumstances, the call for kindness has transformed into a call for simply giving people what they want, even at your own or others’ expense. It is used as a tool to beat people into compliance.

Kindness is a particularly favorite bludgeon of trans activists. “Be kind,” they cajole. “Be kind to the men with gender identities who want access to your washrooms, changing rooms, sports, and even your rape shelters.” These calls to “be kind” are nothing more than a veiled way of saying “This person matters more than you. His comfort, safety, and desires matter more than yours, even in spaces that were created to cater to you.” It is no wonder, then, that many women who speak out against gender ideology have passionately expressed that they are done being “kind.” They feel their goodwill was taken advantage of, and indeed it was.

I often speak about how disappointing it is that so many other women support gender ideology and that, as far as I can tell, they do so at disproportionate rates to men. But I do understand how they got there. I, like many other women, grew up feeling a lot of pressure to “be kind.” Since I was a child, I really did have a genuine desire to be nice to others, and that stuck with me as I grew up. But there was also a lot of pressure to show that kindness by being agreeable and accommodating. So, when this group of people called “trans” was painted as a vulnerable group that you could only have a problem with because of irrational prejudice, it seemed only natural to consider myself a supporter. I'm sure many women felt the same. Being a lesbian just compounded the feeling that I owed something to these people.

It took a long time to unlearn the mindset that led me to believe I should essentially not have any boundaries because it would be “nice” and “kind” to the people who wanted to take something from me. It's still an ongoing process, and, I want to note that I do still genuinely believe that sometimes it's good to give selflessly. But I've learned to reserve that kind of giving to the people who are close to me, not some abstract “oppressed” identity group who I am indebted to out of “privilege.”

In fact, part of what woke me up to the false notion I had of kindness was learning what the demands of the trans movement were, especially when it came to what it was asking of women. Unfortunately, I think a lot of women still don't realize just what is being asked of them, and so it's very easy for them to see the women who are against gender ideology as betraying the expectations that have been placed on us to “be kind.” Then there are women who do hear about what the trans movement is doing but think that going against it would require them to betray their political tribe. For some people, there is nothing worse than being or simply being considered by others as “conservative” or anywhere right of center on any issue. In my opinion, this is just another problem born out of the wrong idea of what it means to actually be kind.

This mass confusion is interesting to me, especially among women, because most of us can agree that it isn't, for example, kind to give children whatever they want. A child will want to eat all the candy, not stop watching TV, and not go to bed, but we know that the kind thing to do is to tell them “No,” and make sure they do what is actually good for them. We understand that permissiveness doesn't equal kindness. And while we can't (and shouldn't) dictate the behavior of adults as we do with children, we still can draw boundaries and say “no” when it comes to the ways those adults’ behaviors affect us. Plus, the kind thing to do would be to point out when their behaviors negatively impact them as well, such as when they pursue medical interventions in the hopes of reaching the impossible goal of becoming the opposite sex.

The need for this boundary-setting and true form of kindness extends far beyond trans and to all of the critical theory-inspired movements that extract “kindness” from us through guilt and shame. Unfortunately, here I am particularly thinking of the UK Pakistani Muslim rape gangs and how many people, yes even women, admonished others for not being very nice and focusing on the culture and religion of the perpetrator—which are critical components of why such atrocities happen and are allowed to continue.

This vapid form of kindness turns out to not really be kindness at all, but rather a self-serving calculation designed to optimize appearances. Yes, there is a sense in which people, and I think particularly women, feel that it is “expected” of us. But, if I'm being honest, when I did feel this pressure to “be kind” when I was younger, it was because I wanted to appear correct in the eyes of the “right” people. As a young kid, these were typically people in positions of authority, like teachers. As I grew up, these became political progressives. To “be kind” meant simply to be permissive of the types of people that progressives expected me to be permissive of.

I'm thankful that I discovered what gender ideology really was, in my late 20s, so that I could stop this embarrassing kind of thinking before I got any older. It's been an important change that impacted more than just my politics and helped me grow into a person I can respect. I now value kindness more than ever, but I am also more aware of what it is not: capitulation. You do not have to set aside your own self-respect in order to be truly kind, no matter how much the people who seek to control you want you to believe you do.