Trans and the One-Way Street of Compassion

Because it's not actually about compassion at all

Everyone involved in the gender debate knows that compassion only flows one way. For example, when men and boys want to compete in women’s sports, we are told they must be allowed to do this to make them feel included and protect their mental health. If you bring up the mental health, safety, inclusion, opportunities, and dreams of the female athletes, you hear either crickets or accusations of bigotry. When a man like fully intact contract killer “Fallon Aubee” wants to be moved to a women’s prison for validation and comfort, Canada says “Come on in!” But if women raise concerns about the impact of these transfers on their own comfort and safety, they are ignored, told to suck it up, called bigots, or even reprimanded. This pattern extends to all women’s spaces and services.

Why are gender ideologues, who try to paint themselves as highly compassionate people, incapable of feeling compassion for those hurt in these situations? Because they don’t actually value compassion for its own sake. They value compassion—or, rather, the showing of complete and utter deference—only when directed at the “correct” group of people.

And who is the correct group to show compassion to? It all comes down to a calculation of who is deemed the most oppressed. The “victim” is always right, and the “oppressor” is always wrong. So, in these cases, the oppressed trans-identified man who wants access to women’s sports and spaces must always be shown deference because “cis” people are the oppressors.

Of course, this is not reflective of actual power dynamics in the real world. It is absurd to think that a man becomes oppressed just because he starts calling himself a woman. In fact, it is the height of privilege that such a declaration grants him unbridled access to female spaces, sports, and services.

But what do the so-called “allies” get out of this—the people who aren’t in the victim group but who defer and show reverence to them? I often feel that these people are treated as punching bags, and yet they take it. Why? Well, because they do get quite a lot, both psychologically and socially, out of playing the Rescuer role in the drama triangle of Victim-Persecutor-Rescuer.

Playing the Rescuer allows them to feel morally superior and, depending on their social circles, may give them a lot of clout. Focusing on being the Rescuer also allows them to ignore their own personal worries and failings because they are too busy partaking in an important fight against the evil Persecutor. In reality, however, all they do is enable the Victim, keeping them dependent and stuck in their persecutory fantasies.

The drama triangle and the subjective moral framework that says Victim=Good Guys and Persecutor=Bad Guys extends far beyond gender ideology and is a mainstay feature of modern critical social justice movements as a whole. It is a worldview inherent to critical and queer theory, which make up the philosophical underpinnings of radical progressivism.

It is the progressives that currently wield social, political, and cultural power who decide where on the oppression hierarchy everyone sits based on factors like sex, race, and “gender identity.” These calculations are often made by using rhetoric and emotion rather than any kind of honest investigation into reality.

But it would be a mistake, in my opinion, to think that this subjective, grievance-based moral system will stay or ever truly only lived solely on the left. Right-wing grievance-based identitarianism absolutely exists, and I fear it is growing in response to what has happened on the left. This system has been shown to provide those who wield it with a lot of power. It captures people of all stripes and traps them in the destructive mode of interaction inherent to the drama triangle.

Anyone can fall into the mistake of treating people as atomized versions of their identity categories. The real goal, whether tackling gender ideology or any other type of critical social justice movement, is not to turn around and become exactly what you’ve been fighting.