Guest post: Constant reminders
Originally a comment by Sastra on Merfinks.
Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were indeed suicide threats or attempts when Rowling came out as gender critical. Such wailing and gnashing of teeth, fan clubs panicking, and breathless article after article expressing shock and concern over the effect on the most vulnerable, most marginalized, most suicidal group in the world.
There’s not a teenager out there who isn’t well aware that transgender people routinely kill themselves if not accepted as “who they know they are.” They’re reminded of that over and over, it’s drummed into their heads by Tumblr and Twitter and Tavistock and all the handwringing social media and organizations throwing out statistics because this is a real, live possibility for every … single … one of them.
Mental health professionals think that’s a very wise thing to do. Young adults aren’t susceptible to suggestion, or social contagion. Psychologists and therapists agree. Warn teenagers about the sorts of things that are likely to make them throw their life away. Keep them on their toes. It’s good.
No. Not really. Doing that is bad. If there really were suicide attempts not just following, but because of Rowling’s statements, I wouldn’t blame Rowling. She didn’t set them up.
Also, it’s plain old emotional blackmail.
Yes.
As is much of what is said to “TERFs,” actually.
It doesn’t help when Rowling’s thoughtful, heartfelt, and empathetic comments are maliciously, deliberately mischaracterized as “hateful” and “transphobic,” when they are nothing of the sort. (I recall reading somewhere that the trans supportive parts of her essay, when attributed to her “Robert Galbraith” pen-name, were being retweeted approvingly (and unwittingly) by trans activists.) Being told “This famous, rich, powerful woman wants you to die!” is not likely to help anyone who is already in precarious mental health, but the chance that someone who actually read what she wrote (as opposed to what others claimed she wrote), would be pushed to suicide is very low. Just as unlikely as the idea that violent men attack trans identified males because they all read essays written by gender critical women.
Exactly so. Mermaids might as well be telling young people that if they don’t want to kill themselves because of JKR then there’s something wrong with them. Maybe they aren’t trans enough, or something.
Publishing low bars is frowned upon for this reason. It’s why pro-anorexia sites and communities get into hot water when their members post about their lowest weight.
The irresponsibility of Mermaids, masquerading as piety, continues to sicken me.
It sure seems as if an organization like Mermaids could further explain how JKR is NOT transphobic or anything like it, enlist her support, and make her involvement a positive thing, even if JKR does nothing except via twitter and her own website. How the misrepresentation and twisting of her views got to be the ongoing narrative is bizarre. Instead they pile on, and assume the opinions of the worst of the trans activists without even a small amount of investigation. Looking at their homepage shows that they feature this engagement with JKR prominently, as if using her fame for their own nefarious purposes. Why they don’t solicit her as a powerful ally, which she would probably welcome, rather than an adversary, says a lot about what’s wrong with the trans cult.
I also think it’s important to recognize how social media and other cultural factors have often turned “being a fan” into “being an identity.” The line between fantasy and reality can get blurred. Kids can join communities where the themes of various fictional works are used to define a personal philosophy. We’ve always done that, of course — been inspired by characters or plots which resonate with our personalities or lives. But, like anything else, it can get obsessive.
Reading the testimonies of the “former fans” of the Harry Potter series impressed me in several ways. There was of course the angry insistence that JKR’s “bigotry and hate” had ruined the books for them. But I could also discern a theme that, for at least some of them, in some way it had also ruined their lives. Harry Potter had meant something to them — changed them, defined who they were and wanted to be. Super-fandom was more than just a pleasant and fun pastime. It was their community of support; it was the role they assumed. Rowling’s seeming betrayal had ripped a part of their selves away. Now what?
Combine that mindset with the message that “not being accepted for who they are” is so destructive to the self that trans people become suicidal and I think we’ve got a dangerous situation.
@1 and 2,
This “you can’t say that because it will make some people sad” tactic reminds me of the “Grandma Gambit” from the Gnu Atheist Wars.
I know you two haven’t forgotten, but anyone who has or just wasn’t around for those days, the GG went like this:
“[My/someone else’s] poor old dying Grandma [it’s always Grandma, because women are so emotionally weak you know], whose faith in an afterlife is the only thing sustaining her, would be devastated to hear someone say that there is no god and the afterlife is bullshit, therefore you mustn’t say it.” Which is a reasonable enough thing to say to someone who was proposing to barge into Grandma’s hospital room and demand a theological debate, but the Gambit was being used to explain why Gnu Atheists should shut up in general. Like, Dawkins isn’t allowed to write a book, or Hitchens an op-ed, or Benson a blog post, because… a copy of The God Delusion might magically appear on her bedside table and force itself into her hands? That part was never quite clear.
And so I’m troubled by the implication that we mustn’t discuss trans issues in any public forum, because some vulnerable trans teenager might take offense and be emotionally hurt. In any other context, we would say “well, that sounds like a person who is a danger to him- or herself, and needs to be institutionalized and kept away from internet access until they are able to handle it.” And I don’t know, maybe that’s true of some trans kids — that they are really on the brink. But the solution to “a small number of people will react badly to speech on a certain topic” should not be “well, then we must shut down speech on that topic.” We can’t soften public discourse until it satisfies the most emotionally fragile member of society.
Sastra, it’s sort of like the Star Trek and Star Wars fandom, where large conventions and online sites and even simulations are popular. And what people claim for D&D, though in my own personal experience, I have only known of one person who does D&D (I’m sure there are more, but I don’t know it), and the obsessive behavior wasn’t there. But I have known people who got married because of start Trek based relationships, and had t continue the Start Trek personas to make it work, because they had nothing else in common. And at least one where the Star Trek obsessed couple had difficulties because one of them liked Star Wars, as well, and it was seen as a betrayal.
Yeah, this sort of obsession is not good.
Excellent observation. It helps explain so much.
I wish we could jettison this whole “who they are” framing. We are people; we are not our sexuality, our reading preferences, our political views, our jobs. People pull entirely too many attributes into their sense of self. I think they want to claim that these attributes are profound and immutable, but many of them do change over the course of a lifetime, at least in some people, and they are still the same people they were.
One of the “What Color Is Your Parachute” books (about finding new careers) I read talked about the inception of the series, when the bottom fell out of an engineering market and many engineers lost jobs. The engineers had invested so much of their assessment of self into being an engineer, and they couldn’t think of themselves as anything else. The author encouraged them to think of themselves not as “an engineer” but as “a person who does engineering for a job”. I imagine people being denied entry to certain events or places because of their jobs (can’t have any government officials or police officers or company executives) are not being rejected for “who they are”, but for the jobs they perform, regardless of whether they identify with their jobs.
Sackbutt:
Hm… I’m the other way round. I think of myself as a scientist and an engineer regardless of what job I do. Now I don’t know whether that’s more healthy or just more delusional.
Decades ago, I noticed that it was a ‘man thing’ to identify with the job they did. Men would say things like “I am a policeman”, “I am a clerk”, “I am a taxi driver”, etc; whereas women would say “I work for the police”, “I work for an insurance company”, “I drive a taxi” etc. Even newspapers would describe men as being their job description, but describe women in relationship to other people; ‘wife of…’, ‘mother of…’, ‘daughter of…’.
Boys were – and probably still are – asked what they want to be when they grow up; not what they want to do. Girls are assumed to want to be wives and mothers, and anything else they aspire to do will merely be a placeholder until they marry.
I’m with lastsot – I identify as an engineer, as I tend to take an engineering approach to most aspects of my life (has served me well in some areas, like cooking and other creative pursuits, but I’ve learned to dial it back for other areas, eg relationships).
@Screechy Monkey;
That’s an excellent point. In addition to the “Grandmother Gambit,” it also falls under “The Little People Argument,” that people who believe in God/ transgender people can’t handle the truth, can’t deal with dissent, because unlike the privileged atheist/ GC feminist, they’re fragile and incapable — and therefore we shouldn’t risk exposing them to pointless distress. In both cases, concern and compassion is covering up what’s really an insult.
@Sackbut;
What’s particularly galling about the “who they really are” framework here is that they could do everything exactly the same, live just as they are living now, love what they love, just Do Them — and simply identify as a gender-nonconforming person. Change nothing. But no. That would eliminate them. The distinction between being someone who does things society sees as women-like and being a woman is astronomical .
Like latsot and Theobromine, I usually think of myself as a scientist. I have invested a lot into being a scientist, and that’s how I think of who I am, though I work as a teacher of science; in a teaching, non-research setting, that is something different. In violation of what women are often taught (and I was taught in bucketfuls), I do not think of myself as a mother, though I am one. I do not think of myself as a wife, though I am one. I do not think of myself as a daughter, though I am one. I don’t even think of myself as a woman until that status is being used to keep me “in my place” or to demonstrate that I am “uppity”. It is only when my womanhood becomes a factor in discrimination that I “feel like a woman”.
This is something trans activists don’t get. Being a woman isn’t about a state of mind, it’s a state of body that leads to a reduction in rights and respect. They interpret that reduction in respect that occurs when they become a woman to anti-trans, without realizing that homophobia and transphobia are deeply rooted in the underlying, primal cause: misogyny.