A cultural imperative enforced with menaces
Another Do it to Julia.
Fantastic Beasts star Eddie Redmayne has joined Harry Potter lead actor Daniel Radcliffe in criticising JK Rowling’s recent comments about trans people.
In a statement to Variety magazine, Redmayne said: “Respect for transgender people remains a cultural imperative, and over the years I have been trying to constantly educate myself.”
Why is it a cultural imperative? And what does he mean by “respect” anyway? And why is he implying that JK Rowling is disrespecting trans people?
Redmayne, who in 2015 starred in The Danish Girl, a biopic of Lili Elbe, one of the first known recipients of sex reassignment surgery, added: “As someone who has worked with both JK Rowling and members of the trans community, I wanted to make it absolutely clear where I stand. I disagree with Jo’s comments. Trans women are women, trans men are men and nonbinary identities are valid.”
Well thank fuck he’s spent years educating himself so that he can come up with that deeply thoughtful and incisive formula which we’ve only heard a billion times before. Also, the first two are false and the third is meaningless.
Anyway, thanks for ticking the box, movie guy.
Well, without the menace, all they’ve got is crap deepities, so there’s that.
I wish these people would (or could!) say, “I disagree with Rowling’s statement that _____.”
Because I don’t think they disagree with anything she actually said. They disagree with a lot of what “everyone” claims she said.
Some people accused her of being ‘transphobic’, so the pilers-on piled on with further accusations of transphobia and/or utterly vile misogynistic insults.
When people pointed out that all she had said was that sex is real, another bunch (or the same bunch) claimed that no-one had said it isn’t. If that were the case, why is saying that “sex is real” in any way ‘transphobic’?
We have half of them denying what the other half are saying, and the other half contradicting the first half, and all of them behaving like sharks who have smelled potential prey; but J.K. Rowling is in a shark cage and they are getting frantic.
The uniformity of the language in these things is genuinely creepy. It really is formulaic cult-talk.
“I’ve been trying to constantly educate myself.” “Trans [wo]men are [wo]men.” “Non-binary identities are valid.” They don’t even have their own words, only the phrases that they’ve been conditioned to repeat.
I know. It’s as if he had a gun to his head.
Didn’t certain elements of the trans community go apeshit when Redmayne was cast in The Danish Girl, on the grounds that they should have cast a trans person?
Yes.
Oh, here’s a brain teaser:
If believing you’re a woman makes you a woman, does believing that you’re someone who believes that they are a woman make you a woman?
Meaning, when Redmayne was pretending to be a trans woman, did he become a woman for those intervals between “action” and “cut”? If it matters, assume that Redmayne is an extreme method actor who “loses himself” in the role.
Ooh, good question. There must be a rider somewhere that rules that out – no wait, I know – there’s just a universal stipulation that the rule does not apply to cis people. They’re women if they say they are and we’re cis if they say we are. Them’s the rules!
So you’re saying I can’t identify as a man who identifies as a woman and get special snowflake status? I’m still just boring old cis?
Re #10, there was a recent kerfuffle about a woman who identified as a trans woman, and got all sorts of grief about it, as you might imagine. I read what she wrote, and I am not certain she was being genuine, but she sure sounded upset.
Screechy @ 8: oooh, second order transing. We can break that into fun formulations. Parentheses here are used for grouping like in arithmetic.
1) What if you’re a man who believes (he’s a man who believes he’s a woman)?
2a) What if you’re a man who believes (he’s a woman who believes she’s a man)?
2b) What if you’re a woman who believes (she’s a man who believes he’s a woman)?
3) What if you’re a man who believes (he’s a woman) and doesn’t believe (he’s a man who believes he’s a woman)?
(1) is simple belief-about-belief. For S to utter, “I believe that P,” requires that S believe that P (assuming S isn’t lying). Or rather, it would be but for the fact that P is internally contradictory. It is difficult to imagine that someone could be aware that they believe A & not-A without immediately coming to a crisis of cognitive dissonance. Perhaps this is why there’s such a push to deny substantive difference between “man” and “woman”. They are aware of the contradiction, and it causes discomfort, and dissonance reduction takes the path of redefinition. Alternatively, it could result in the belief’s transformation into (2).
But whatever, let’s look at method actors as though contradictions aren’t a problem. In this case, it’s difficult to draw a distinction between an “actual” transwoman and an extreme method actor who, arguendo, actually takes on the epistemic state of the portrayed character. For the duration of the portrayal, the actor would be an in-fact transwoman. Any objection to the casting would be hard to motivate on the grounds of not casting a transwoman, especially considering that the gender ideology allows for the existence of “part-time” trans people.
Of course, this hinges on the notion that the mental state of a method actor. If the method actor does not change mental state in that way, the question is moot.
(2a/b) These two represent a potential way for a trans person to avoid cognitive dissonance. Instead of believing a contradiction, they now believe that they hold a mistaken self-belief that indicates a need for transition. The dysphoric man—the transwoman—you see, actually is a woman, a woman who mistakenly believes that she is a man believing she’s a woman. She merely needs to realize and believe that she is a woman who believes she’s a woman.
(3) is painful, so I’ll leave it as an exercise for the masochistic reader.