Compare and contrast
The people of Twitter are disputing and/or reproaching John Cleese for signing the letter, but they’re not shouting or threatening or hurling sexual insults and fantasies about violence. Funny, that.
Sarcasm. Oh no not sarcasm!
Tip Jar
Does @containseggs really think that we can discuss gender and sex at an entirely general and simple level in a meaningful way? Let’s give it a go. “Men are not women.” Alright, seems they were right about that.
“specific and complicated example”? They demand evidence, they demand cases, and when cases are provided, they are deemed isolated incidents, convoluted stories. Laurel Hubbard won a place on a women’s weightlifting squad, thereby denying a woman a place on that squad; doesn’t seem complicated to me.
Either womens’ weightlifting yields to men claiming to be women and disappears, or a special new competition for men claiming to be women is opened up. Better the latter IMHO.
Yes but the men claiming to be women wouldn’t like that, you see, because then they might lose.
Yes, that is interesting. JK Rowling and John Cleese are equally unlikely to cause harm to someone that gets nasty with them on Twitter, so why the stark difference? Spillover threat from the notion that in real life speaking that way to a man is more likely to end badly? Or just general disrespect for women?
Probably some combination of both, I would think.
With well-known and beloved men, it’s taken as a matter of course that they’re simply mistaken, that if the magic words of victimization and oppression are trotted out, they will quickly apologize and take up the appropriate doctrinal recitations. That is itself a form of misandry, namely the misandry of low expectations. (Like homophobia, this is also an offshoot of misogyny, but that is an altogether more complicated topic to get into.)
Funny how it doesn’t work the other way.
Well, you heard it here first folks. You are no longer allowed to care about something unless you’ve had a longstanding interest in it. And if you’ve had a longstanding interest in it, like for example you’ve been a woman all your life, well it’s still none of your business* because reasons.
*Self-appointed Twitter commissars excepted.
This is such a stupid criticism. To dismiss people for being freshly arrived in a particular topic of discussion is to dismiss all people that have ever discussed any topic ever. This is because whatever the topic is, there is a point in time when a person transitions from ‘not commenting on this topic’ to ‘commenting on this topic’, at which point the person can be considered a fresh arrival to that topic.