How to become vulnerable
Reddit shut down the gender critical group today.
Let’s look at that page:
Promoting Hate Based on Identity or Vulnerability
Interesting choice of words. We are told often and relentlessly that trans women are “vulnerable,” including (or indeed especially) vulnerable to women. If trans women are vulnerable to women…well naturally feminist women can’t be permitted to dispute the claims of trans women to one, be women, and two, be vulnerable to women. That would be most unfair, because trans women are vulnerable to women, which we know because they keep saying so.
And we can’t reply that no they’re not because they are men, not women, and men are not vulnerable to women. Why can’t we? Because that would be promoting hate based on identity. They identify as women, so that makes them women, and it also makes them vulnerable to “cis” women.
While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority or who promote such attacks of hate.
See? That’s women. There are more women than there are trans women, so trans women get to win every time. Hahaha, go home bitches, you’ve lost.
And so their vulnerability makes them invulnerable. Funny how that works.
Have recently recommended Rowling’s essay to someone who was only recently introduced to “TERF” by a rabidly anti-TERF man (who I otherwise seem to get along with fine) in our group in the hope that he won’t get poisoned by the current trans dogma. Having to loudly denounce the use of the term and that position has not been helpful to my mental health so I am hoping that will soon stop.
I never joined Reddit, but used to regularly look in at r/gendercritical to discover new articles, ideas, and arguments (good and bad.) It seemed to be a pretty tight community, and many women expressed gratitude for help and support not just regarding trans issues, but misogyny and abuse. It was also very active.
I opened it up this morning. Damn.
They only make us more determined.
But that isn’t how it works. In the US, there are slightly more women than men (leaving trans people completely out of this for now). And yet, women are definitely the oppressed group in that binary dynamic.
There were more Indians in India than Brits under the Raj. Wanna argue that the Brits were oppressed?
There are more murderers than not-murderers, that doesn’t make murderers oppressed. I could play this game all day.
What reddit seemed to have missed is that oppression is about power and majority =/= power. Most of us are not billionaires but for sure we’re all oppressed by what that tiny number of people want. Same here, trans people have the microphone (or at least a certain subset do) and they have warped social justice to their own ends. When they added tools of oppression – fear, denunciation, othering, gaslighting, and redefining language – somehow this is being embraced by people who would never have thought themselves so illiberal.
Claire – there are 3 million more Hillary voters than Trump voters in the country, and we sure as hell are not oppressing the Trumpistas.
Spinster is now full of freaked-out angry cancelled women–more than 500 new accounts in a couple of hours. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there once things settle down.
Wow. Reddit just green-lit misogyny in plain english.
Claire, you’re right on. I think you missed one: there were more Blacks in Apartheid South Africa than Whites, but it’s not that the Whites were oppressed.
Wait, am I dating myself?
Seriously, that parsing of “majority” is truly horrendous. Reddit just declared open season on women. MRAs, TRAs, incels, HAVE AT IT!
Holms, #7. Yes they did, and PZ has a post up celebrating it.
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/06/29/cleanup-in-progress/
AoS, I decided not to read that post. The name on the link is chilling. Clean up. That’s…oh, my god. That’s horrific. I imagine he wishes it were more than just a Reddit ban; perhaps if we could be deleted everywhere.
PZ Myers is a piece of misogynistic human garbage (with a platform!)…
Is it acceptable to use that description now? It’s certainly true…
I used to really like PZ. I visited Pharyngula at least once a day. I saw him speak here in Seattle. Now I think he’s ridiculous.
@AoS #9, he also has a post celebrating Graham Linehan being banned from Twitter.
IMHO, Mano Singham and Marcus Rannum are the only sane bloggers left there, particularly the way Mano has just let a push back against TRAs flow. Mano took one sip from the TRA cup when he asked Crip Dyke for more info on trans* issues, but that must have been in private, as it hasn’t sullied his blog. Marcus may have had half a glass, but again, it is minor – his writing on computer security and military industrial complex stupidity is well worth the price.
PZ has become everything he despises in preachers – a dogmatic fundamentalist who will brook no dissent from the approved line. As a Biology educator I enjoyed him, but as a Biologist he doesn’t have a clue. Banned me (under another Nym) for asking how he knew the gender of his spiders. :-)
He blocked me for pointing out that he was being at best disingenuous in his ridicule of the term “biological woman” which he said was incoherent and I said was used because the waters had been so muddied. I charged that he knew that and he blocked me. I didn’t even break The Central Dogma.
I’ve known PZ was a poor scientist for a long time – I had a “discussion” with him about sharing of human genetic resources where he didn’t seem to understand why such collections tend to be siloed a) because building such collections takes years, sometimes decades of building secure relationships based on trust and respect. b) Building and maintaining those cohorts is wildly expensive c) most importantly, you have to have participant consent. In older cohorts that have not been actively maintained (i.e. no contact or further data collection is occurring), this may be impossible.
In the end I gave up. This was years ago, when B&W was still at FTB. His insistence on arguing the same point over and over again without addressing anything I said became too much.
I foolishly tried another time, arguing with him that phenotypic variation does not mean that a particular trait is a spectrum. To wit – we do not nor should not argue that a human who does not have the full complement of typical physical characteristics and traits means that humanity is a spectrum.
Claire – exactly. I have had the same sense whenever he gets involved in my field (Ecology). He has a superficial knowledge and that gives him the leave to expound on things he doesn’t understand.
#13 Roj
Did you see Morales’ pathetic new approach? He actually promised to shitpost that thread indefinitely, content free, purely to have the last word. He openly admitted it.
Yeah, pathetic troll.