There’s a lot of mishigass on the Internet lately, and one of the craziest is this article in the Torygraph by Tim Stanley, described as “a historian, and columnist and leader writer for The Telegraph.” His Wikipedia bio is here, which includes this:
In October 2012, Stanley stated he was “raised a good Baptist boy”.
Later, he considered himself to be an Anglican, beginning around “one glorious summer” in 2002, and was baptised as an Anglican in Little St. Mary’s, Cambridge, in New Year 2003. He subsequently aligned himself with the Church of England’s Anglo-Catholic wing, before converting to the Catholic Church when he was 23.
Only a religionist could make an argument like the one below, one that bashes atheists but also seems transphobic—in the genuine sense—at the same time.
You can read it by clicking below, or find it archived here.
New Atheism has been blamed for a lot of things, but all it really did was shake people’s belief in God. Since there’s no evidence for a divine being, it simply called attention to what seems to be true, and how can that be bad?
Well, it’s been said to have caused cause a loss of morality, an increase in misogyny, and now the rise of the “trans cult,” whatever that is. All because New Atheism helped dispel a delusion—a delusion that people like Stanley buy into and others, while nonbelievers, still think necessary for society to function. (Scandinavia shows us that’s clearly untrue.)
What’s unclear in the piece is what Stanley means by “the trans cult” or, in sentences like this, the simple word “trans”.
And yet, today, the Christian clergy is almost silent on trans.
While he could mean “extreme trans activism”, like the insistence that trans women can compete with natal women in sports, that’s not the sense I get from reading the piece. Stanley seems to subsume under “trans” anything to do with transgenderism, and that would include supporting the equal and moral treatment of transgender people, which is simply the right and fair way to behave. If Stanley does mean the latter, and the article suggests he does, then he’s an arrant transphobe.
And, at any rate, it’s simply dumb to assume that New Atheism is responsible for “the trans cult” (how can you have a cult without a leader?). The presumption seems to be that New Atheism kept other religion-like activities at bay, and then the demise of religion allowed those activities, which includes “wokeness” to emerge: “people need to fill their religion-shaped hole”. And, he says, the “trans cult” is part of that wokeness.
Now all that might be true, but you can’t blame New Atheism for putting a delusion to bed. If wokeness is a replacement for the religion effaced by New Atheism—and I’m not at all sure it is—is it really New Atheism’s fault for the unpredictable emergence of an unpredictable strain of ideology? That’s Stanley’s view, and remember he’s a Catholic, so he has bought the whole hog:
We all love a repentant sinner. After a decade of encouraging the trans cult, the elite has realised that it’s a dreadful idea and is nimbly backing away. Self-ID is out; the Tavistock clinic is closing. Gender services will return via NHS England, but with a minimum age of seven – just in time for one’s first communion.
But don’t let the powerful tell you trans was a one-off mistake, a wrong-turn down a blind alley from which we can reverse. It was, and remains, our direction of travel. It’s the consequence of tearing up the old maps by which we once lived, inviting us to plot our own chaotic routes to nowhere. Yes, I blame Richard Dawkins for a lot.
And then he claims, without support, that most New Atheists went on to become “fanatically woke”. Where are the data? If I were to guess, I’d say that some woke people were New Atheists, whole others were religionists who thought wokeness was a way of doing good. In fact, nearly all the New Atheists I know are antiwoke, but that’s just my subjective experience. And those who are antiwoke are supporters of trans rights with the few exceptions like trans women competing in women’s in sports and occupying women’s “spaces” like women’s prisons and shelters.
And Stanley has his own subjective take:
Do you ever wonder, he [Peter Boghossian in an interview with Helen Joyce] asks, if we were wrong? Wrong, because the “vast majority” of New Atheists went on to become fanatically woke. Even Dawkins, who insists sex is a biological reality, has been mildly cancelled; the American Humanist Association took away his humanist of the year award. Could it be, Boghossian suggests, that without religion, people “go to crazy town” and “believe things even far more out there than walking on water”?
It all must have seemed jolly clever. The problem, however, is that atheism can only take something away; once the old faith is gone, it offers nothing to fill the void. Yet some atheists acknowledge that human beings consistently demonstrate a need to believe in something beyond themselves, conceding that this might serve an evolutionary purpose. Whatever the cause of our curious instinct to put our hands together for gods, dictators or Gary Lineker, we can now see that a generation that doesn’t look outwards, towards God, looks inwards, to itself. The defining spirit of our time is self-obsession; neurosis, self-actualisation, the triumph of mind over matter. What I want, I must have. What I wish to be, I can become.
Stanley’s error is twofold. First “taking something away” can be a good in itself (anti-Semitism and belief that Trump won the last Presidential election are two beliefs whose removal was very good). Second, I don’t agree that we all need to fill the gap created by the loss of religion. I keep saying that if you look at Scandinavia and northern Europe, which are losing religion faster than grass goes through a goose, you do not see these mostly atheistic countries filling the loss of religion with some religion-like activity. People can accommodate to the loss of a delusion, and most do. I’ve met many new atheists who were former religionists, but have a reasonable and empathic stand on trans issues.
I won’t go on, though Stanley does. I’ll just reproduce his last two paragraphs:
Therefore, denying the realities of sex spells misery for individuals while also undermining social cohesion, for we lose a common understanding of what words mean. Our new culture says that truth is subjective, that what matters is lived experience; two plus two might equal four to you, five to me. But science and religion search for truth on the assumption that it is objective and of universal meaning. There is the basis in that commonality for a dialogue that is far more sophisticated and enriching than the one we had in the past when Dawkins toured Lourdes and said it was far-fetched.
Without an honest conversation, we are doomed to repeat the mistake of privileging feeling over fact, for fear of causing offense. To return to the NHS’s approach to gender, a minimum age on treatment isn’t good enough. Do we believe that human beings can change their sex with medical intervention? I say, as a rule, “no”. And by establishing this, we can accept, love and support those who happen to break it.
Apparently, because God created two sexes (something Joyce asserts in the preceding paragraphs), the “trans cult” is a denial of God’s creation. That is, of course garbage, and not because there’s no God. It’s garbage because there really are people who feel they’re members of their non-natal sex and adopt the persona of that sex. They of course remain of their natal sex (trans women are biological men), but are fully deserving of the respect due any human being—and to me that means addressing them by whatever pronouns they choose.
It’s also garbage because Stanley thinks that “privileging feeling over fact” is wrong but lives his life dong that. He’s right about the priority of fact over feeling, but what else is religion (like Joyce’s Catholicism) but privileging feeling over fact? The essential beliefs of Catholicism—that Jesus was the son of God/God, performed miracles, was crucified and resurrected, and that accepting these as facts is essential to get into a speculative Heaven—all of these involve privileging feeling over fact. That’s what religion is all about, and that’s what New Atheists want to dispel
“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”
The kind who won’t schtup standing up ’cause it looks too much like dancing?
If I understand, cult is short for “occult”, which means “hidden”. Consider, at the doctor’s office, occult tests look for hidden blood, or the moon can occult stars.
I’m not convinced one or more leaders are necessary for a cult, but my reading if Margaret Thaler Singer’s Cults In Our Midst suggests all the cults around at that time – literally hundreds – all had living leaders. But she writes :
“A cult can be formed around any content: politics, religion, commerce, self-improvement techniques, health fads, the stuff of science fiction, psychology, outer-space phenomena, meditation, martial arts, environmental life-styles, and so on.”
She specifies “… those centered around New Age thinking and certain personal improvement training, life-styles, or prosperity programs. These latter cults are most likely to be the kind you or your friends may have come across or been influenced by, perhaps even seduced by, for a period of time..”
Who is the New Age leader? There is not just one, but maybe that guy on the checkout aisle rag might serve. Weil?
Poststructuralist/postmodernist writers effectively serve as theologians, e.g. Judith Butler for Queer Theory. She is quite revered by the Queer Theorists. Is Butler a “leader”?
And a cautionary note :
“Despite the myth that normal people don’t get sucked into cults, it has become clear over the years that everyone is susceptible to the lure of these master manipulators. In fact, the majority of adolescents and adults in cults come from middle-class backgrounds, are fairly well educated, and are not seriously disturbed prior to joining.”
And, (my emphasis):
“Former cult members report that certain classes they took late in high school and early in college contributed greatly to their bewilderment. They commonly describe classes, teachers, and experiences that they felt destabilized their views of the world, leaving them frightened by the complexity of making seemingly endless decisions.”
I’m done with excerpts for now, but this book (Singer) is old but useful, worth a library visit. A bit disturbing as well.
The word origin for cult is this: “early 17th century (originally denoting homage paid to a divinity): from French culte or Latin cultus ‘worship’, from cult- ‘inhabited, cultivated, worshipped’, from the verb colere.” Occult is from verb occultare.
Appreciate that, it makes me go read :
https://www.wordnik.com/words/occult
https://www.wordnik.com/words/cult
https://www.wordnik.com/words/culture
… so accidentally similar, I suppose.
“cult” is closer to “culture” – certainly a relevant word.
This has a bit of discussion on “occult” :
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/occult
Seems my Margaret Thaler Singer excerpt on “occult” was denied, sorry about the volume, so I’ll simply note that Singer discusses “occult” in her book on p.44, and “Targeting the Young” on p. 122.
The argument of “the religion-shaped hole” could logically be transferred to medical matters. After all, the discovery of bacterial disease dispelled the older doctrine that disease was a consequence of imbalance among the four humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile). A Stanleyish argument would therefore be to blame Pasteur and Koch for the rise of quack medicine, because of the need to fill a quackery-shaped hole in the human psyche.
On the other hand, Stanley is certainly correct that “The defining spirit of our time is self-obsession”. But the blame for this should go to the poseurs and post-modernists in academe who have fostered it—and, beyond that, to sociopsychological factors that were
discussed 40 years ago by Christopher Lasch, among others. Come to think of it, the
post-modernist cult in academe is probably itself more a symptom than a cause of the culture of narcissism.
I love this post because it combines my favourite bugbears: “trans” and Catholicism.
Stanley’s argument is incoherent. Religion in many countries was declining long before the “trans” movement gained any steam. Religions have played little role in the (seeming) turning of the tide against “trans” activism (Lia Thomas and rapists in womens’ prisons seem to have done that). If Catholicism is now going to finish off the “trans” movement, why didn’t Catholics just fill the god-shaped hole in everyone’s hearts in the first place? Why did Stanley and his coreligionists wait so long to step into the void?
The rise of “trans” was not caused by new atheists creating a god-shaped hole that activists filled with gender nonsense. I think there is a good argument that the “trans” movement grew organically out of a toxic brew of cell phones, social media, misogynist pornography, mass therapeutic culture, and the coddling principles (good vs. evil, weakness as a virtue, trust your feelings). And the “trans” movement could only have come *after* the admirable successes of gay men and lesbians in winning basic human rights at the turn of the century. The forced teaming of the 2STQ+ gangsters with the LGB alliance can’t be overlooked.
He says “ Without an honest conversation, we are doomed to repeat the mistake of privileging feeling over fact.” LOL. That’s exactly what Religion is, feeling over fact, especially Catholicism. New Atheism was all about not privileging religious feelings over facts, but this guy can’t see the connection.
As the saying goes, what Stanley writes in this article is either confession or projection.
Ummm, no.
Religion is (in the general case) the consequence of prioritising use of “feeling” over consideration of external evidence determining whether something is a hose of hogwash or a matter of fact.
To the average religionist, the “feeling of connection to god” (yadda yadda ad nauseam)is as much a fact as the reading on a barometer (particularly one being used as an altimeter). Which doesn’t mean they can’t safely work as a gas fitter, though I’d have real concerns about their judgement if they happened to be a pilot. Less concern if the altimeter is on their wrist while free-fall parachuting – because the potential consequences of their poor judgement are relatively small.
Richard Dawkins’ latest post on his The Poetry of Reality substack asks “is religion inevitable?” and includes a discussion between him and Peter Boghossian: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OgJ9-othjJk&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Richard Dawkins’ latest interviews have roiled the waters in the atheist community. Since I have problems making YouTube links stick on WordPress sometimes, I’ll just refer interested readers to search YouTube for the latest from prominent atheist YouTubers such as:
Rationality Rules
Forrest Valkai
TMM
It is hard to take Rationality Rules seriously, I’m afraid. Not familiar with the other two, but I do know FV appears with Dillahunty on shows, which is an instant no-no.
Yes on the science, not so much on the religion, since religious truths such as God’s existence can ultimately only be known through the subjective lived experience of encountering God. Such encounters, like gender identity, can seemingly only be described by analogies and established by handwaving references to You Just Know, That’s How.
It’s also rather rich that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Stanley that God being an obvious He/Him without having the necessary male gametes, body organized for male gametes, or body at all means he can’t exactly point a finger at Innate Gender Ideology and call it irrational. He ought to acknowledge it’s completely familiar.
Where I would say New Atheism might have some blame here is not within New Atheism itself, which primarily rested on a scientific approach towards God, but within a popular misconception of New Atheism, which was thought to primarily rest on sticking it to the Christians. Both religious conservatives and trans rights activists lump transgender claims about the nature of being a man or woman with homosexuality, which is about men loving men and women loving women. I think many atheists were too eager to accept the analogy, too quickly agreeing with the Christians on that point in order to stick it to them further.
“The problem, however, is that atheism can only take something away; once the old faith is gone, it offers nothing to fill the void.” – Tim Stanley
Yawn! That’s the ludicrous either-theism-or-nihilism objection.
Perhaps he is railing against rapid onset gender dysphoria (given the mention of the Tavistock center).
I see no way how New Atheists led to the extreme forms of trans right activism and being Woke, since those who at least identify as New Atheists seem an aging demographic, while the other causes are mainly forwarded by young people and I don’t think I see them declaring they are New Atheists even if they are atheists or whatever. The camps have missed each other entirely.
And if he is horrified by the trannies, I would like to ask him whether homosexuality is also the devil-spawn of New Atheism? Well, of course it is (kidding), but that sky-is-falling-because-of-atheism opinion piece was no doubt already written decades ago.
I think Andrew Sullivan wrote that opinion piece at least a dozen times.
“It’s garbage because there really are people who feel they’re members of their non-natal sex and adopt the persona of that sex. They of course remain of their natal sex (trans women are biological men), but are fully deserving of the respect due any human being—and to me that means addressing them by whatever pronouns they choose.” Thanks for this summary language, Jerry. It’s worth repeating and subscribing to.
This is tangential to the topic of “religion-shaped holes”, but of irresistible interest. A
delightful Inside Higher Ed report tells us that Oberlin College is suing four of its insurance companies on the grounds that ” “the defendant insurers have failed to pay a penny toward the $36,590,572.48 sum that Oberlin paid the Gibson plaintiffs. They also have failed to pay for the full cost of Oberlin’s appeals, which were pursued at the behest of the insurers in order to reduce their collective exposure.” “
There’s so much wrong with this — where to start? Well, more or less at random…
Oh really? So if both sides are engaged in an objective “search for truth”, we should all be converging on a single, definitive explanation of life, the universe, and everything, any day now, right?
How many scientific methods are there, and how many religions? If there’s any objectivity to religion’s “search for the truth”, they’re doing a great job of keeping it secret!
I know that the dictionary definition of “catholic” (with a lower-case c) is “universal”, but I think even Tim Stanley would have to agree that there is not, never has been, and never will be a universally-held religion!
His beef shouldn’t be with atheism — let him start by sorting out the differences among religions and get back to us when they all agree!
To posit that wokism can replace religion is to pretty much admit that religion itself is a placebo. Also, to blame this trend on God-deniers as opposed to, say, pedophile priests, is a blatant example of confirmation bias (is there such a thing as baptism bias?).
Perhaps it’s a case of spiritual narcissism.
Not being a subscriber to a whole-body immersion, adult-only baptist church (as opposed to the “line the newborns up and pass the hosepipe” schools of religion), I can’t say for sure that there is “baptism bias”, but having heard the various cult’s advertising for decades, I strongly suspect that there is.
It’s a ceremony that is often used as a shibboleth to distinguish “us” from “them” – for which bias is the main reason for existence. It’s like … those little rhomboid lapel pins that Trumpians and fellow travellers wear so they can distinguish “true believers” from “enemies to destroy”.
The philosophy of wokeness predates New Atheism. Perhaps it might make more sense to say that New Atheism was ideologically captured, as with other cultural movements and institutions. But I doubt that distinction matters to Stanley, since the narrative he wants is that of christianity vs the forces of evil™.
The deception of people like Stanley is something that makes me wary of people on the right who similarly oppose wokeness. Yes, they correctly recognize how psychotic and out out touch with reality wokeness is. But being right on one thing doesn’t make them right about the rest of their beliefs. And yet you can infer just that from what their anti-woke rhetoric is fused with, that is, religious, conspiratorial, and bigoted views.
As much as I think it’s great that the right is helping to push back against wokeness, I do not think they are sound or good faith actors.
“A key error of the New Atheists was to insist that all faith is equally irrational, that if you open the door to just a bit of theology, you’ll end up with fundamentalism. Refusing to take seriously what they regarded as a fantasy, they failed to appreciate the difference between, say, al-Qaeda and Anglicanism. Baby, bathwater; it was all thrown out.” – T. Stanley
To say that theism is false is not to deny the ethically relevant difference between peaceful religious moderates and throat-slitting religious extremists.
Speaking of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, when the religious right attacks “the trans cult” or “the trans ideology”, most of them don’t just attack postmodern gender/queer theory but the tolerant and accepting attitude of secular liberals toward transsexuals in general.
Religious conservatives and fascists now use “wokeism” as a synonym of “(cultural) liberalism” or “the liberal left” rather than only of “the illiberal postmodern left”.
The following article is about religious homophobia, but there are obvious parallels to religious transphobia (properly so called). The illiberal religious right enjoys its sadism, its humiliation of and cruelty toward homosexuals and transsexuals—as it currently takes place e.g. in Uganda and Russia.
“How U.S. Evangelicals Helped Homophobia Flourish in Africa: Anti-gay sentiment had previously existed on the continent, but white American religious groups have given it a boost.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/19/africa-uganda-evangelicals-homophobia-antigay-bill/
> And then he claims, without support, that most New Atheists went on to become “fanatically woke”. Where are the data?…In fact, nearly all the New Atheists I know are antiwoke, but that’s just my subjective experience.
Putting aside the veracity of his overall argument, it is indeed true that many prominent New Atheist figures are now extremely woke. Some examples are Matt Dillahunty, Hemant Mehta, PZ Myers, and Phil Torres.
Related, even the Freedom From Religion Foundation, an org that played a large role during the heyday of the New Atheist years is pretty woke. You yourself have even written about its shift: https://whyevolutionistrue.com/?s=%22Freedom+From+Religion+Foundation%22&orderby=relevance&order=DESC&post_type=post
No matter how many atheists have gone woke (whatever “wokeness” means exactly), there is no logical connection between atheism and postmodern (trans)genderism or queerism.
Tim Stanley says science and religion search for truth on the assumption that it is objective. Beware religion’s use of “objective” as a synonym for “authoritative.” The latter implies a lust for dictatorial power that many promoters of religion long for but seek to hide.
Oh what an exquisite douche, that fellow. There’s a lot of that about, though. Now church is out, all the “faith community” of yesterday have adopted woke as religion.
Some have.
But going back to the dark horror of religion is backwards (the kind of thinking I’d expect from both the religious AND the woke). Regressive narcissists.
At the MOMENT woke poses a large danger, 20 years ago (people thought) Islam did, 100 years ago Catholicism with its fascism was the most dangerous.
Every age has its foolishness. Fight them all. The “brights” will always be outnumbered by the fools though.
D.A.
NYC https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2020/06/10/photos-of-readers-93/
Dennett should probably receive the facepalm lifetime achievement award for the “Brights” and compatibilism.
“I recently stumbled upon a popular online video of the philosopher Peter Boghossian interviewing the journalist Helen Joyce about what Joyce regards as the trans madness.” – T. Stanley
Here’s the video:
This is par for the course for Dim Tim. He is a master at making assertions without evidence, as is shown by his many risible articles in the Torygraph.
He is also a regular contributor to the Beeb’s “Thought for the Day”, which is imposed by the BBC’s Department of Magic and Superstition on the “Today” Radio 4 programme at about 8.45am six days a week; and is just as regularly ridiculed in “Platitude of the Day”, run by the indefatigable Rev Dr Peter Hearty for nearly 20 years, for instance: https://platitudes.home.blog/?s=Tim+Stanley
Please join in!
Correction 7.45 am UK time!
Ugh.
When he wrote “denying the realities of sex spells misery for individuals while also undermining social cohesion,” I thought he was in fact talking about Catholicism. But, apparently not.
My take on how the “trans cult” came about was it was what happens when society in general starts to respect those who are different but mean no harm, but a small vocal group disagree and they speak out, then the group defends themselves and a small vocal group in them become the poster child who is no better, and they start a pathetic seesaw of one-upping each other.
Apart from the sport and public toilet issues which is complex, and I don’t wish to go there I usually don’t care, not my business for the most part.
Essentially no one (least of all JKR) had a problem with trans people until they made the astonishing claim that ‘trans women are women” and demanded gender self-ID. Now lots of people have big problems. TWAW means that cheating at sports is more than OK, it is “non-negotiable”. Gender self-ID puts predatory men in women’s bathrooms and prisons. Motte and bailey games might fool some people, but you have come to wrong place for that.
Maybe. I understand basic psychology and get the notion it is a matter of one’s innate nature.
I can usually tell one who is faking it and one who is honestly a woman in their minds with a male body.
It is complex and getting emotional only makes it worse and most of all pathetic.
Maybe you can tell, but can the guardians whose job it is to keep fake transwomen out of women’s bathrooms, shelters, and prisons tell? (We’ll assume that soon that no men will be allowed to compete in elite women’s sport, so that really won’t be an issue.) More important, will the fake transwomen accept your opinion of them? Will the state back up the guardian who makes the call at the door that this particular transwoman is faking it and shouldn’t be allowed in? What evidence will be brought?
And even if you don’t care about most of those issues, please do have a care for children who are being harmed by gender-affirming ideology. The evidence is coming in that this does more harm than good. It might even be your child who is caught up in the cult.
All good points. I should have mentioned the impact of “gender-affirming’ ideology on children, but failed to do so.
The essence of self-ID is that no one (not you, not I, not JKR, etc.) is allowed to challenge any claim of gender. JKR correctly pointed out that this nonsense had already led to real harm. Does the name Isla Bryson ring any bells? In the US a transwomen got two women pregnant behind bars.
Well, there is women on women rape, but I know entirely what you mean. She may or may not been trans, I really have no desire to read more on the unpleasant subject.
“I usually don’t care, not my business”
Exactly what I thought.
Try to see the world from the Queer perspective.
Read Butler, Foucault, Muñoz. Foucault expresses a fascination with spaces. Butler with performance (“performativity”). They write of something like a spiritual experience from inhabiting these spaces.
Now visit a local Queered all-ages bathroom, like in a public library. Read the three-pointed sex symbol next to it. Read how the bathroom is for “all gender expressions”, erased of “sex”. This can serve as my anecdote.
How is that not an indoctrination? And when you gotta go, you gotta go – is that coercion? Remember, this is all ages in a state-run facility that could have simply written “unisex”, or “shared”, “all sexes”, etc.
Think of the effort required to do this.
It is Queer Theory that is authoritarian and impolite in its transformation of society. Not biology, not classical liberal society.
Meh.
All I said was it was it was part of a back and forth that started when a few really opposed different people and they returned fire and it went back and forth.
I think that “Dim Tim” may be too young to have seen this when it was in the cinemas, but John Cleese had a word for people like him : “splitter” [Youtube link].
This debate is worth a re-watch too, particularly for those of us who saw both the debate and the Bishop of Muggeridge’s evisceration on Not The Nine O’clock News the following Monday evening.
Who might be a leader?
The president of the American Library Association – Emily Drabinsky, a self-professed Marxist – aims to “Queer the catalog” of American libraries by recategorization of any subject and reformulating language. For example, for pornography, transsexuality, disorders, or other subjects of interest to The Queer Family. This plan is being carried out by queer political activist service librarians where they will serve to “educate” library patrons in the Queer-Theoretical reading of the library, with the aim of finding themselves in the library – i.e. “find yourself”, or “find one’s self”.
I did not make any of that up – I may have grammatically adjusted words, but I am simply reporting from her academic paper (copy/paste – link is uncertain):
Queering the Catalog: Queer Theory and the Politics of Correction
Author(s): Emily Drabinski
Source: The Library Quarterly, Vol. 83, No. 2 (April 2013), pp. 94-111
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/669547
Here’s a Drabinski talk title :
“Structure and
Power: Information
Literacy for Liberation”
The language is unmistakably Marxist – taking over power by virtue of identity to impose it upon everyone, for “Liberation”, a process common to Marxist literature.
So I would submit Emily Drabinski as a candidate “leader” of “The Queer Family” – a term which is “old-school Queer code” for Queers on the street. (Ref. Upon request).
My own anecdotal evidence suggests Emily Drabinski’s vision is materializing.
Another candidate for leader:
A leader of a religion can easily be asserted/predicted to have “supremely intelligent” properties – not in actuality, but according to the followers. This is evident in Christianity, at least.
Using my public library search app, I entered the phrase “supremely intelligent writing” in the search field.
This is the only result (I reformat and truncate for simplicity):
“Title: Whipping Girl
Author: Julia Serrano
2016
2016
Description: “Julia Serano, a transsexual woman whose supremely intelligent writing reflects her diverse background as a lesbian transgender activist and professional biologist, shares her powerful experiences and observations — both pre- and post-transition — to reveal the ways in which fear, suspicion, and dismissiveness toward femininity shape our societal attitudes toward trans women, as well as gender and sexuality as a whole. Serano’s well-honed arguments [entry truncated]
”
This result would be consistent with the explicit plan described in the journal article by Emily Drabinski (see above) to recategorize subject headings to conform to the doctrine of Queer Theory, in this case, to make the reading by library users to be that Julia Serrano is the source of “supremely intelligent writing”.
Update:
An Internet search for “supremely intelligent writing” returned the following as one of the top results :
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/hksdigitalbookdisplay/publications/whipping-girl-transsexual-woman-sexism-and-scapegoating
The book description appears nearly identical – including “supremely intelligent writing”.
“how can you have a cult without a leader?”
I just heard about Steven Hassan’s BITE model of authoritarian control without a specific leader :
Behavior
Information
Thought
Emotion
… it appears this is a trademarked model. I will look in his books at some point – but I figured I’d point it out anyway – because yes, do cults need leaders? It is not clear.