Battling the bullshitters
Why be a loser when others are winning by spewing nonsense?
This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
It’s not often you’re present at the birth of a meme. But on 20 January, when the new Trump administration published its executive order on “defending women from gender ideology”, anyone paying attention could watch as the latest transactivist talking point emerged, blinking and squalling, to flummox the world.
By defining “male” and “female” as “belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces” the small and large reproductive cell, respectively, the order aimed to halt the stealth redefinition of those words as identities, not biology. Cue an army of libfems, wokebros and blue-haired TikTokers claiming Trump had accidentally abolished the male sex since — apparently — all of us are conceived female.
The backstory is that careless wording in outdated biology texts sometimes describes embryonic sex differentiation, which starts six weeks after fertilisation, as male development deviating from a female baseline, rather than the two sexes following different developmental paths from that point on. This makes all new embryos female only if you think “female” means lacking male sex organs — by which standard almost everything is female: teapots, towels, trains …
The first big name to link this misunderstanding with the executive order was Sarah McBride, a trans-identifying senator from Delaware, who told the Independent that Trump had “just declared everyone a woman from conception”. Embryos produce neither sperm nor eggs, McBride added, which is true enough, but as he knows perfectly well, they come pre-installed with instructions that result in producing one or the other.
Just how opportunistic his claim was can be judged from the fact that he, as a man who claims to be a woman, denies that the production of sperm or eggs, current or hypothetical, has any bearing on whether someone is male or female.
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Details, details. For many outlets the chance to dunk on Trump was irresistible. McBride had “hilariously discredit[ed] Trump’s gender policy with simple science”, said Yahoo News; Mashable claimed that “All Americans are now AFBT (assigned female by Trump)”. The Late Show host Stephen Colbert mocked it with a leaden skit on Beyoncé’s song “Run The World (Girls)”.
The supply of people willing to repeat these irrelevant and untrue talking points is seemingly endless
Veterans of the gender wars are sadly accustomed to bizarre statements cited to support the claim that men can become women, and vice versa. Clownfish (they can change sex), ladybrains (trans people supposedly look like the opposite sex on brain scans), your toilet at home (it’s gender-neutral), intersex people (that’s 2.7 per cent of the population, the same share as have red hair!) … the supply of people willing to repeat these irrelevant, inaccurate and untrue talking points is seemingly endless.
Do they believe what they are saying? And if not, why are they saying it? A distinction proposed by Harry Frankfurt, an American philosopher, sheds light on both questions. In his book On Bullshit, published in 2005, Frankfurt contrasts liars, who knowingly seek to convince others of a falsehood, with bullshitters, who don’t care and may not even know whether what they say is true or false.
Liars seek to deceive their listeners about the content of their speech. Bullshitters are much more dangerous: they want you to think they seek to speak the truth, when in fact they don’t care about the truth and are rather aiming to convey an impression about themselves.
The problem with bullshit, Frankfurt wrote, is not that it is false but that it is a counterfeit, and “what is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made”.
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Once you accept this distinction, it’s clear that “everyone is female at conception” isn’t a lie, it’s bullshit. The purpose of saying it is not to inform or even to misinform; it’s to position the speaker as opposed to Trump. All arguments are backfilled from that starting point, with no preference for truth or falsehood in either direction.
This explains the contemptuous tone of the bullshitters — the Independent called the executive order “nonsense science”, “garbled” and “head-twisting” rather than actually explaining anything about embryonic development. It also explains why seemingly educated people are willing to make statements that are incompatible with facts they surely know.
Many of those claiming all embryos are female until six weeks after conception will have heard of sex-selective IVF, in which embryos from would-be parents who carry sex-linked genetic diseases are sorted into male and female in a petri dish a few days after fertilisation. But bullshitters don’t care about contradictions.
Sometimes the shamelessness is even more blatant. Take a Guardian column with the headline: “After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?”
After it appeared, Carole Hooven (an evolutionary biologist and author of Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us) published an email she sent to the column’s author, Arwa Mahdawi, in which Hooven explained embryonic sex differentiation and stated clearly that all of us are, indeed, male or female from the moment sperm meets egg. None of that made it into the article.
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Another insight into the purpose of bullshit comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, although he didn’t use the word. In an essay about antisemitism written after the Second World War, he points out that for antisemites, the facts about Jewish people are neither here nor there. Antisemites define themselves by what they are against, hating first and inventing reasons afterwards.
That makes them frustrating to talk to, Sartre observed, quite apart from the repulsiveness of their claims. “They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge,” he wrote. “But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words … They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”
This description is strikingly reminiscent of internet trolls, whether alt-right or wokebro, who don’t merely misrepresent the other side’s positions, but start from the premise that those positions are always wrong, since if they aren’t, trolls can’t tell what to be for or against.
This style of discourse is effortless for one side but exhausting for the other. Antisemites, Sartre pointed out, throw together nonsense without regard for consistency or plausibility, whilst those seeking to counter their claims must gather evidence, construct arguments and follow the norms of educated dialogue.
Such an imbalance is sometimes called “epistemic exploitation” — the way people in a dominant cultural position can require others to explain themselves, at length and repeatedly, whilst never bothering to absorb or act upon what they are told.
The thankless task of debunking their bullshit is a distraction from more fruitful endeavours, in particular advancing knowledge. Over time, it can be so demoralising that it is easier to give up.
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A related technique is the “firehose of falsehood”, in which a bad actor sprays out unrelated falsehoods, half-truths, misrepresentations and irrelevancies at high speed. The point is not to convince anyone of anything, but to convince observers who know little of what is under discussion that the two sides are “as bad as each other” and that it is all “too complicated” to come to an informed opinion.
The technique is a favourite of authoritarian regimes — the expression was coined to describe Russian disinformation — because it chips away at democratic values and degrades public discourse.
If others are winning by spewing brazen nonsense, why be a loser and restrict your utterances to what you sincerely believe to be true? The end result is worse than an ignorant populace: it’s one that no longer knows or cares about the difference between ignorance and knowledge.
Hannah Arendt saw this as the main purpose of propaganda. “The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instil convictions,” she wrote, “but to destroy the capacity to form any.” Rather than complaining when a lie was revealed, people living in totalitarian regimes would instead “admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness”.
When the world and the totalitarian leader’s words collide, it is the world that must be beaten into submission. Though the production of bullshit is distributed, in industrial quantities it has something of the same effect. It makes people both cynical and passive, since when you believe nothing, nothing can be worth fighting for.
