Let me begin with a phrase so worn-out it almost dissolves on the tongue: We live in strange times.

It’s not its repetition that makes it banal. It’s the fact that it couldn’t be otherwise. Even a line like “we live on planet Earth” at least allows us to imagine that things might have turned out differently. But when it comes to the strangeness of our own age, our own lives, no such alternative seems even conceivable.

Times are strange — not because they’re exceptional, but because we’re in them. Like Heraclitus’s river, we can never enter them twice. Their strangeness lies in the fact that they’re happening. Panta rhei — and to hell with whoever’s still on the shore.

This isn’t idle metaphysics. What I want to understand is something sharper, more personal:

Why is certainty so hard to find in human experience — and so easy to fake?

Why do we stumble precisely when we feel most confident — when we’ve seen enough, lived enough, read enough to allow ourselves to say that fatal thing:

“Wait, let me explain how it really is.”

Why do we collapse into error the moment we believe ourselves immune to it?

Trying to answer that would be a kind of suicide — since it would mean placing myself outside the very ignorance I’m trying to describe. And yet I don’t want to retreat into the comfort of relativism either.

It’s not true that nothing can be known. But it is true that nothing can be finally known. And the moment we forget that, the moment we stop moving through knowledge and start sitting in it — we sink. Not into stupidity, but into something worse: the dread of our own incompetence. Felt or not, it’s always there. This is the swamp. And we’re all in it.

So why bring it up now?

Because I still believe — or try to believe — that learning is possible. That one can develop habits of resistance against the seductions of experience. That it’s possible, even late in life, to stay open — to treat new ideas not as threats but as warnings.

And if we’re lucky, to sketch out a few principles that might help us tell motion from inertia, thinking from repetition, living from calcifying.

What prompted this reflection was not a theory, or a crisis, but a pattern — one I’ve seen repeat itself too many times to ignore.

A person, usually older, often admired, begins to speak from experience. And what they say is not unreasonable, not hateful. On the contrary — it’s calm, composed, morally grounded. But the tone is different. There’s no space for doubt. No curiosity. Only the quiet insistence that they know, and you don’t.

But the structure of this thinking — that’s what strikes me. And that’s what I want to explore.

In early 2020, a well-known author — J.K. Rowling, one of the most widely read living writers — triggered a public firestorm with a short tweet about menstruation. The phrasing was sarcastic, pointed, and quickly interpreted as a mockery of efforts to make gender-inclusive language more precise or accommodating.

What followed was a string of increasingly impassioned statements, in which she argued that the concept of biological sex was being erased, that this erasure undermined the lived realities of women, and that affirming the rights of trans people should not mean denying basic biological truths.

She insisted she bore no hatred toward trans people — on the contrary, she expressed sympathy and even solidarity — but maintained that recognizing trans identities without biological reference posed risks both cultural and medical.

In a long essay published on her website shortly afterward, she elaborated on these views, laying out what she saw as a principled defense of women’s safety and of her right to speak openly. She wrote of her own trauma, her experiences of abuse, and her concern for vulnerable young people.

Many found her words offensive or harmful. Others called them brave. But what struck me most was not the controversy itself — nor even her specific views — but rather the way her thinking unfolded.

What began as an expression of concern quickly hardened into certainty — and that certainty was grounded not in ideology, but in experience. A kind of experience that claimed: I’ve been there. I know what this is. Let me explain.

And this, I think, is the core danger. Not the position itself — but the deep conviction that experience entitles one to final truth.

Rowling’s statements didn’t stop with trans people. What made the situation truly volatile was her suggestion that others — not just trans individuals — were also at risk. That the push for full and unconditional recognition of gender identity might carry dangers for non-trans women, for children, for social norms as a whole.

For her, recognizing a person’s self-identified gender regardless of their physical characteristics wasn’t just a cultural shift — it was a potential threat. To medicine, to education, to feminism. To truth. She wrote about it at length, offering a structured defense. Her reasoning unfolded across five pillars:

1.   Scientific integrity — she feared that replacing “sex” with “gender” in law would undermine biological research and healthcare.

2.   Social influence — she voiced concern that trans activism was reshaping schools, family dynamics, and even environmentalist messaging.

3.   Free speech — she saw the backlash against dissent as a warning sign of intellectual authoritarianism.

4.   Youth vulnerability — she worried that some young people, especially girls, were being nudged toward gender transition not from inner conviction, but as an escape from homophobia or gendered pressure.

5.   Personal trauma — perhaps the most powerful of all. She disclosed, for the first time, her own history of abuse: a violent first marriage, experiences of assault, and the deep psychic scars they left behind.

She described how even now, in a safe and loving relationship, she startles easily. How she fears her daughters might one day flinch at shadows the way she does. Her anxiety, she admitted, has become a kind of family punchline. But the pain beneath it — that wasn’t funny. That was real.

And it was from this well of reality — pain remembered, processed, politicized — that she drew her authority to speak. She did not ask for sympathy. She claimed solidarity. With women. With trauma survivors. With those who had been told they were hysterical, overreacting, or simply wrong for wanting a space of their own.

What struck me most was not the list of claims. It was the structure of conviction beneath them. The sense that these truths had been earned — and that they therefore could not be questioned. That’s what makes experience so dangerous. Not because it’s false — but because it feels so fully true.

At a certain point, the tone shifts. From appeals to caution and concern, the argument edges toward prescription. It stops being a personal testimony and becomes a normative claim: this is not just my view — this is the way things are.

Trans people, she insists, deserve safety and protection. She expresses empathy for those who have been brutalized, especially trans women of color working in high-risk professions. She speaks, again and again, in the voice of solidarity — as someone who knows fear, who recognizes its texture.

But then, in the same breath, she makes an assertion that undermines the very compassion it rides on:

When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman […] then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside.

That, she declares, is the simple truth.

This is the pivot — the moment where experience ossifies into generalization, where trauma becomes template, and where empathy, without realizing it, lays the groundwork for exclusion.

A few paragraphs later, the transformation is complete:

I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it.

And here the logic of her argument becomes most visible. Not in its content, but in its structure. It’s a textbook case of how accumulated experience — when left unexamined — turns into ideological scaffolding.

The pattern is familiar:

1.   Begin with a claim that feels axiomatically true: trans people are not the same as cis people.

2.   Proceed to assert that this difference cannot be bridged — not through surgery, not through hormones, not through self-perception.

3.   Anchor that assertion in the language of biology: sex is real, sex is immutable, sex is not a feeling.

From there, the conclusion feels inevitable:

If self-identified gender is treated as equivalent to biological sex, then social protections based on sex — for women, for girls, for survivors — are diluted, maybe even destroyed.

But this chain of reasoning only works if its premises are granted the status of objective truth. And that is precisely the problem.

Because what we have here is not science — it’s saturation. A worldview that has become so dense with lived experience that it no longer permits permeability. That treats contradiction as threat, and complexity as betrayal.

First, the science it claims to defend is not as settled as its defenders suggest. Differences in the 23rd chromosomal pair are no more capable of explaining gender identity than they are of capturing what makes someone a parent, a lover, or a citizen. Nor have the many institutionalized efforts to “correct” gender nonconformity ever yielded convincing results — unless one finds conviction in broken lives and tragic endings.

Second, the 20th century offers more than enough cautionary tales about what happens when deterministic ideas — especially biological ones — are allowed to set legal norms. From eugenics to apartheid to gendered segregation, history has shown us how quickly the language of “difference” becomes the machinery of repression.

And yet, the logic persists:

If gender identity is accepted as legally equivalent to biological sex, then — the argument goes — we risk dismantling essential safeguards. Women’s shelters, changing rooms, prisons, sports categories — all become contested space.

From this fear, a conclusion is drawn:

That acknowledging gender identity as self-defined opens the door not just to trans individuals, but to opportunists and predators. That what begins in empathy ends in risk — and that therefore, the door must be shut.

But here, the logic collapses.

From the presence of a few individuals with harmful intentions, one cannot extrapolate a danger posed by an entire group. The moment we do — the moment we accept guilt by category — we join a long and dismal tradition of moral panic. We repeat the logic of “all X are Y,” whether X stands for race, religion, or identity. This is not clarity. It is closure disguised as caution.

And the irony? It rarely comes from ignorance.

The people who most forcefully draw such lines are often those who have fought — and rightly so — against other kinds of exclusion. They know the stakes. They know the history. They are not fools.

But this knowledge becomes a trap.

Because when experience is mistaken for wisdom — when pain turns into dogma — the mind closes. It begins to defend not ideas, but injuries. And in defending them, it forgets that others, too, carry wounds.

This, I believe, is one of the deepest dangers of aging: the illusion that the lessons we’ve learned are the only ones that matter. That our experiences are not just true — but universally applicable. That we no longer need to ask. Because we already know.

Let’s return to the beginning of that familiar reasoning chain: the recognition of difference.

Yes — trans people are different from cis people.

In itself, this is a banality. But only until that difference is assigned consequences — until it begins to suggest the need for different rules, different rights, different thresholds of legitimacy. Until it begins to imply how one ought to behave.

Which raises the real question:

What does correct behavior toward transgender people look like?

If we begin, as we should, from the Kantian principle that every human being must be treated as an end and never as a means — then the answer, at least in outline, becomes clear.

As a rational subject, I can acknowledge that there are experiences I cannot share — identities I cannot fully inhabit. That is not a failure of empathy, but a fact of existence.

What follows from this isn’t retreat or skepticism. It is humility.

If I cannot feel what they feel — if I cannot live what they live — then it is both illogical and unethical to insist that I understand their identity better than they do.

Therefore, I am bound to accept their self-definition as real — not because I “agree,” but because it is theirs.

Trans women are women.

Trans men are men.

There is no neutral ground between this affirmation and its opposite.

To deny someone the right to say who they are is to strip them of the most basic right of all: the right to be a subject in their own story.

Of course, between these poles — radical affirmation on one end, outright denial on the other — lies a broad and messy terrain.

Most people navigate this terrain with varying degrees of caution, hesitation, inconsistency. And among them are those who sincerely believe they occupy a middle ground — one of empathy with reservations, of recognition with conditions. But the trouble with this imagined “middle” is that it often isn’t a middle at all. It’s a fallback. A line drawn not from principle, but from fear. And the consequences of that fear are real — for those who have spent their lives being asked to justify who they are, over and over, to those who will never live what they live.

At the heart of the controversy — and indeed, of any serious analysis of the debate around gender identity — lie two opposing forces: acceptance and rejection.

These are not abstract concepts. They are the tectonic plates beneath every public statement, every policy dispute, every gesture of solidarity or suspicion in this space. And the key question is always the same: how do these forces manifest? Where do they cohabit, where do they fracture?

To approach this question seriously, we must first recognize a structural difficulty: in discussions about transgender identity, meaning often hinges on a distinction that is frequently left unspoken — the distinction between pre-transition and post-transition identity.

Unless it is made explicit which self is being addressed — the self before transition or the self after — it becomes extremely difficult to locate the intent, or even the logic, behind a given claim.

This is why contemporary language, both in formal and everyday use, increasingly adopts terms like MTF (male-to-female) and FTM (female-to-male) to designate trans identities more clearly. And while this may seem to some like another instance of semantic hair-splitting, its analytical importance cannot be overstated.

Because once we start to trace public responses to trans identities, we notice something disquieting: the same individual may be embraced in one breath and rejected in the next — depending entirely on which version of their identity is being invoked.

This ambivalence is strikingly evident in Rowling’s own formulations. When she speaks of solidarity, of empathy, of shared vulnerability, it is with trans women conceived as women — as victims of male violence, as fellow survivors, as people whose lives deserve protection.

But when she raises the question of safety — particularly in relation to shared public spaces — the referent shifts without warning. Suddenly, these same women are no longer seen as women at all. They are reclassified, implicitly or explicitly, according to their biological origins: as men, and therefore as potential threats.

The shift is subtle — but its implications are not.

This is not merely a rhetorical sleight of hand. It is a moral pivot, one that determines whether the trans subject is admitted into the circle of shared humanity or held at its edge.

And the pivot rests not on behavior, or threat, or intention — but on biology. Or rather, on the presumption of biology as the final arbiter of identity.

This dual lens — one that oscillates between inclusion and exclusion — is not unique to Rowling. It recurs across many well-intentioned discussions of gender, where empathy appears conditional: present only when the trans individual is framed as “like us,” absent when framed as “still, in some sense, not.”

What looks like ambivalence is in fact a deep internal fracture — one that reproduces the very violence it claims to resist. This, then, is where the deep ambiguity lies — not just in Rowling’s position, but in many public attitudes toward gender identity. It is an ambiguity of shifting gazes. Of selective empathy.

One might even say — with some caution — that this ambiguity remains invisible to those who hold it. Perhaps Rowling herself has never fully grasped the internal inconsistency of her stance.

How else to explain the firmness, the unshaken confidence with which she defends a position that is, in fact, structured around a constant pivot — between sympathy and suspicion, embrace and exclusion?

This oscillation — between permission and prohibition — defines the entire rhetorical structure of her statements. Time and again, she moves fluidly across a moral divide, but the pattern remains strikingly consistent. Whenever the subject is women — whether cisgender or trans women (MTF) — her tone is one of care, compassion, solidarity. But when the subject shifts — to men, or trans men (FTM) — the trust vanishes. The compassion drains away. And what enters is coldness, caution, even hostility — a kind of anticipatory recoil.

The distinction, in short, is not merely about gender identity. It is about where empathy stops — and what triggers its withdrawal.

This leads to a broader — and admittedly speculative — hypothesis. One I offer not as psychological diagnosis, but as a cultural pattern worth noticing:

There is little evidence that Rowling (or many who share her views) have seriously engaged with the lived realities, the inner logic, or the moral claims of the transgender community.

The categories “trans woman” and “trans man” appear to function, not as valid identities, but as euphemisms — either for a kind of psychological instability or, worse, a potential for deception, perversion, even violence. It is probably no coincidence that themes of psychopathy and abuse dominate Rowling’s post-Potter fictional work. The danger, once fictionalized, becomes a lens for sorting human legitimacy.

And here we return to the core question that sparked this reflection in the first place:

What is the unbearable lightness of life experience — of knowledge — that makes these patterns so difficult to dislodge?

In this particular case, as in many others, the difficulty lies in the way experience hardens. In the way it calcifies into certainty. In the way it stops being something lived — and becomes something possessed. It is nearly impossible to argue with someone who is “speaking from experience.” Not because their story is unimpeachable, but because its emotional weight has acquired the status of moral authority.

But if we zoom out from the personal and turn toward the broader social field, the picture sharpens further.

When the UK introduced the Gender Recognition Act in 2005 — and especially when a 2016 proposal aimed to streamline the process of gender declaration — the public backlash revealed something unexpected. The strongest resistance did not come from the usual bastions of conservatism. It came — strikingly — from within feminist circles. From women who had spent their lives fighting against exclusion and marginalization. Women whose hard-won social position now appeared under threat — not from men, but from others who also claimed the status of “woman,” but who had, in their view, not paid the same price to earn it.

The reaction was visceral. It was not just political. It was existential.

In response to the proposed reforms, female activists across the UK have founded discussion forums such as Woman’s Place UK — spaces where women insist on their right to speak freely, without being shamed or silenced, about what they see as serious implications of the shift in gender norms.

Other women have taken to the streets. Some, like Kathleen Stock — former professor at the University of Sussex — have spoken publicly as self-described “gender-critical” feminists, and in Stock’s case, the result was her resignation in 2021, amid public backlash and student protest.

What’s notable is this: the most intense confrontations around transgender recognition do not unfold along classic conservative-progressive fault lines. Instead, they often run through the heart of feminism itself — through its legacy, its internal contradictions, and the differing generational investments in what it means to be a woman.

Which brings us to the question that can no longer be avoided:

Why is it, so often, older women who lead the resistance? Why are such sentiments largely absent among younger women — or among men?

One conclusion — the very one that first sparked this reflection — is that experience itself becomes a liability. Not because it makes people ignorant, but because it makes them certain.

I don’t share the fears in question. I doubt their legitimacy — and not just because I happen to be a 60-year-old cis man. The statistical evidence, as far as I can tell, offers little support for the idea that trans rights endanger women’s safety. Trans people make up, by most estimates, around 1% of the population — hardly a demographic tsunami.

And yet these fears exist. And they are powerful. Why? The explanation I find most compelling is this:

For a certain generation of women — women with long histories of struggle against exclusion, silencing, and patriarchal violence — the sudden public visibility of trans identities triggers not just anxiety, but something deeper.

A feeling of displacement. A symbolic loss of position.

In a flash, the identity they fought to legitimize — the position of the historically silenced, segregated, and oppressed — now seems contested by another group, also claiming vulnerability, also demanding space.

And this group is new. Its language is unfamiliar. Its pain, unrecognized. Its claim to womanhood — for some — feels unearned, even artificial. The instinctive reaction is not analytical. It is existential.

To be clear: this is not a defense of such fears. It is an attempt to understand where they come from — and how easily they can masquerade as principle when they are, in fact, a kind of epistemological panic. A panic triggered by the unbearable speed with which social meaning now moves — and the unbearable weight of all the meanings we thought we had secured.

And this brings me back to the question I began with:

Is there any way to resist this inertia of experience — this automatized trust in what we think we know?

Can we develop mental habits or internal ethics that help us stay awake — even as the world moves faster than our understanding? That, to me, is the real task.

So let me share my own “rules” — or at least the signposts I try to follow in my struggle against calcification, hardening, the slow turning to stone.

1. The Rule of Non-Resistance

First, and most important, is the rule of non-resistance.

This means remaining consciously open to new, unfamiliar, even threatening ideas — not only in theory, but in practice. It also means refusing to oppose their presence in the public sphere, even when they disturb our habits, irritate our convictions, or challenge our sense of control.

Of course, one need not become a prophet of chaos. Change does not need our blessing; it will happen regardless. But without some form of youthful energy, even change can decay into farce. For the truly older person, it may be enough to simply not become an opponent of everything new.

2. The Rule of Inclusion

Second is the rule of inclusion — not in the social sense, but in the cognitive one.

Never exclude yourself from the scope of what you’re analyzing. There is no path to genuine understanding without accepting our inescapable complicity in the world we’re trying to interpret. The stupidity, narrowness, and short-sightedness we so easily condemn are not out there somewhere. They live in us too. And if there is any hope of overcoming them — even a little — it begins with admitting that we are not, and must never consider ourselves, immune. Least of all on the basis of that hollow currency we like to call “life experience,” whose tragic weight I’ve tried to describe above.

3. The Rule of Resistance (to Fear)

Third and last: resist fear — especially the fear of abrupt, threatening shifts in life and circumstance.

Yes, it’s easier to write than to live. But if we maintain this readiness for change — if we consciously nourish it — it should bear fruit in our daily actions and attitudes. In my own experience, comfort and security have always led, sooner or later, to stagnation. I don’t mean to pose as some Nietzschean daredevil in the spirit of “what doesn’t kill me…” — nothing of the sort. But the logic, however unkind to our deepest longings, remains the same:

There is no way to avoid the slow descent into rigidity except by refusing to stay still.

And what those concrete refusals look like — that’s up to each of us to decide. Stagnation begins the moment we stop moving — not our feet, but our thinking.

What remains is hope. That we will stay capable of learning — again and again.

Of seeing — truly seeing — how vast the gap is between what we “know”… and everything else. The disproportion between the speck of our existence — and that of Existence.

Yes.

Hope.

Berlin, November 2021