The Failing of Empathy [LONG]

[doctorinkwell]

I have been seeing more and more posts on social media saying things along the lines of "For real women, bravery is carrying a child for nine months" "For real women, courage is raising a family and making ends meet in a man's world" and various other things, mostly pointed at figures like Caitlyn Jenner, calling them "not real women." Here's an example: http://tinyurl.com/pm9ab8s (I'm not sure if I'm not allowed to post links. Apologies if I'm not.)

I feel that posting on social media about politics or social issues is generally useless, especially on places like Facebook. What mostly happens is people preaching to the choir. I feel that you're not going to change anyone's point of view through a Facebook post, as people reading it often strongly hold their beliefs and are not open to thinking about it.

However, I really feel the need to talk about the key flaw in these posts people have been making, saying transgendered people are not "real [insert gender identity here]," and I need somewhere to talk about it. (Although, posting about it here is just the same thing - preaching to the choir.)

Let's take a moment and step into someone else's shoes. Imagine that you could feel exactly what someone else is feeling - all of their emotions, their thought process, their motives, hopes and dreams, and their personal demons. Think of what they hold as "true." To each person, "truth" is entirely different. One person can hold a belief, and at the same time, someone right next to them can hold the exact opposite belief with the same amount of conviction. Does this make any one "truth" more valid than the other? Is one person's truth more informed or educated? It's really hard to know. However, I feel a line is drawn when a belief has certain affects on the people around them.

Let's take someone with clinical depression. We'll call her Lila. To her, she knows what she is feeling is real. She can feel it in every corner of their body. However, to another person, who we'll call Paul, he may believe that depression is a myth. He may feel that there is no way it can be real, possibly because he has never felt it himself. He may think Lila is faking it for attention. Why would Paul believe that? Through his own personal experience - the way that most people validate their beliefs - he has never encountered or felt exactly what it is to be depressed, so what reason would he have to think that depression is real?

This example probably doesn't happen for most people, all due a wonderful trait of many social animals - empathy. Because of empathy, realistically, Paul could try to understand what Lila is feeling. Even though he's never experienced clinical depression, he can have a level of understanding and acknowledge that depression is real.

Now, let's apply this trangendered people. People can claim trans people are not real men/women/humans. They think it's not a real thing. They deny that someone can genuinely feel like they are not the gender they were born with. These people who deny others can still have empathy for others. They all can probably feel for someone when they get hurt, go through a break up, lose a loved one, and so on. However, why must empathy stop when it comes to transgendered people? Why can they not acknowledge what a trans person feels? They can never know exactly what someone else feels, however they should at least acknowledge it.

I'm sure a lot of us would never walk up to someone with a broken leg and sincerely say, "Gee, I bet that didn't hurt at all." Now, that's not the best example, because a lot of us have and probably will break a bone in our lifetimes, so it's an easily-relatable situation. However, if you had never broken a bone, I bet you would at least have some empathy to understand that it did hurt when someone else broke a bone.

Talking to a transgendered person, why would it be okay to say, "You're not really a woman/man/person"? You do not know exactly what they feel. You do not know whatever pain they've had to go through. You do not know if you have not gone through it yourself. However, I hope that people can at least of empathy to understand that it is real. Trans people do not transition to the another gender to trick people, to sneak into locker rooms to spy on people, to go into sex work when there's no other option.

They just want to live their lives happily. An astounding statistic that 40% of trans people have attempted suicide shows how real all of this is. The unfortunate thing is that so many trans people are unaccepted. Why would someone choose to risk being outcast, disowned by their family, or lose their job because of being trans? Trans people never chose. It's just who they are. Why can't some people acknowledge that?

Everyone has their own beliefs. However, when those beliefs invalidate and belittle others, shouldn't you think about them a bit? Who are you to claim that someone else's feelings are invalid? You have not walked in their shoes, so you will never know exactly what they feel, but you can at least acknowledge that what they feel is real. This applies to everyone - LGBTQI people and beyond.

Empathy can only help heal the world. What is wrong with being understanding of each other? There is nothing - NOTHING - to be gained by invalidating others, but there is all to be gained by being accepting and empathetic.

Okay. Rant over.

- Sunny

[Deborah]

I agree with you but I have observed that empathy only overlays a person's core concepts of right and wrong, good and evil.  So it's very easy to empathize with something one views as neutral  like a broken bone or something right and good like CIS  gender.  But if one's core belief is that something is wrong and evil then empathy will never arise.

Everyone except sociopaths have the ability to express empathy, but only to what they conceive as good.  So I think the real problem is a person's faulty value system and in America at least that's primarily defined by Christianity.

Change what the leaders preach and empathy will follow.  I don't have any idea how to do that other than wait for the old to die as Christianity, as it always has, metamorphises to accept cultural trends and discard old ideas.  Unfortunately, that time is still not here.

The good news is that it is happening as I I think evidenced by the increased rhetoric from the old guard as they see their power and influence fading away.  It is still a ways off in the future though.

A better outcome would be for everyone just to abandon their mythologies and accept seen and experienced reality rather than the writings of Bronze Age Middle Eastern sheep herders. 

Imagine.


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[Asche]

For what my opinion is worth:

I'm not so sure it's a failure of empathy as it is people who have an inner need for simple answers, for certainty, and for black-and-white categories, and are willing to ignore large chunks of what they know in order to get them.

I mean, people who say things like "for real women, bravery is carrying a child for nine months" are obviously not thinking, because they surely know about women who are infertile, or who have had ovarian cancer and had to have their ovaries and uterus removed, and they would probably deny that they are saying that those women aren't "real women" (if only because if they did say that, they know everyone would know they were being insensitive jerks.)

It's a whole lot simpler to treat "men" as if they were clones of one another and "women" as though they were clones of each other.  You don't have to use all those brain cells figuring out who each person is as an individual, you can just figure out how to deal with the master template of "male" and the template of "female."

Suddenly trans people come along, who are in some respects like one (assigned sex) and in other respects like the other (sex they've transitioned to), and their heads explode.  They're like the entomologist who sees a bug that disproves the theory he's devoted his life to and decides to squash it so his theory will be safe.

I've found that people who take other people as they find them have no problem with trans people (well, with most trans people), it's the people who have to have everything and everyone fit into nice neat Procrustean categories who have a problem with them.