Mental rigidity and emotional incompetence [Note: Content Warning - discussion on bigotry. Reader discretion is advised]

Note: CONTENT WARNING - some of this content is about upsetting, disturbing or triggering events & attitudes. Seek competent help - including professional - if you need it. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that linked articles may contains names and/or images of deceased people. READER CAUTION IS RECOMMENDED! For anyone distressed by anything in this post, or for any other reason considering seeking support, resources are available in Australia here, here, and here. In other nations, you will have to do an Internet search using terms such as “mental health support - <your nation>” (which, for instance, may lead to this, this, and this, in the USA, or this, this, and this, in France [biased towards English-language - my apologies]), or perhaps try https://www.befrienders.org/.

 

A little while ago one of the online groups I am in experienced considerable problems when ONE diehard social dinosaur refused to accept the reality of being trans, and made outdated, offensive, and quite simply wrong comments about gender and sex (their position was biological essentialism). 

It caused problems in that group, including severe mental health problems - all because of ONE person. 

I was pleased with my input (e.g., stating I had had my say, and rather than the small group continuing to do so, wanted to hear from others - which put an end to the ... “debate”), but it also took a toll on my wellbeing.

This sort of mental rigidity crops up in many other areas as well - I have made a formal complaint about shop staff for similar reasons today, and I have seen this sort of abuse over decades in business environments - mostly from cisgender men, but also from cisgender women who do not to grieve the loss of even just a small change to their imagined life situation and style. 

It pretty clearly seems to be mental rigidity, but underlying that is a far worse problem:   

emotional incompetence

And therein lies the biggest problem: while, as Dr Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out:    “It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless”   , having to fight legal battles every day in order to live with simple, common decency and basic rights such as being allowed to live uninjured and without attacks on one’s reputation is no way to live. 

Ultimately, people’s hearts need to change also - and those hearts often have to be reached via those same people’s heads, but reached they must be. 

And to accomplish that sort of change, those people need to have basic emotional, human competence. 

This is also why making sure education is, at the very least, free of backward indoctrination and preferably teaches emotional competence (including identifying and dealing with unconscious - or allegedly unconscious - bias) is so vital to the future survival of the human species: that same combination is responsible for much of the climate denialism.

I’ll leave this post at that for now, although I MAY one day write more about changing people’s hearts. 

In the meantime, here are a few relevant links:

• https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2014/04/activism.html   
  

• https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/09/aspects-of-character-content-warning.html   
  

• https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2015/06/emotions.html  
  

• https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/05/ethics.html  
  

• https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-evil-that-is-known-as-fascism.html   
  
• https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2023/06/patriarchy.html   
  
• https://gnwmythr.blogspot.com/2023/08/post-no-2535-trauma-content-warning.html  
  

 

Assumptions / basis 

In writing this, I have assumed / started from the following: 

• this blog states quite clearly that it is about political and human rights matters, including lived experience of problems, and thus I will assume readers are reasonable people who have noted the content warning in the post header;

Possible flaws 

Where I can, I will try to highlight possible flaws / issues you should consider:

• there may be flawed logical arguments in the above: to find out more about such flaws and thinking generally, I recommend Brendan  Myers’ free online course “Clear and Present Thinking”; 
  
• I could be wrong - so keep your thinking caps on, and make up your own minds for yourself.
  

 

If they are of any use of interest, the activism information links from my former news posts are available in this post. 

 

If you appreciated this post, please consider promoting it - there are some links below. 

Note that, as with my main blog [see here], I am cutting back on aspects of my posts.

Remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing, and all misgendering is an act of active transphobia/transmisia that puts trans+ lives at risk & accept that all insistence on the use of “trans” as a descriptor comes with commensurate use of “cis” as a descriptor to prevent “othering”.

Copyright © Kayleen White 2016-2024     NO AI   I do not consent to any machine learning aka Artificial Intelligence (AI), generative AI, large language model, machine learning, chatbot, or other automated analysis, generative process, or replication program to reproduce, mimic, remix, summarise, or otherwise  replicate any part of this post or other posts on this blog via any means. Typo’s may be inserrted deliberately to demonstrate this is not an AI product.     Otherwise, fair and reasonable use is accepted under Creative Commons 4.0 on an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike basis   https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/